Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic 9780271063171

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B e yond t h e A est hetic and t h e A n t i-A est h etic

The Ston e A rt Th eory Instit ut es

Edited by James Elkins

Vol. 1 Art and Globalization

Vol. 2 What Is an Image?

Vol. 3 What Do Artists Know?

Vol. 4 Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

The Stone Art Theory Institutes is a series of books on five of the principal unresolved problems in contemporary art theory. The series attempts to be as international, inclusive, and conversational as possible in order to give a comprehensive sense of the state of thinking on each issue. All together, the series involves more than three hundred scholars from more than sixty countries.

This series is dedicated to Howard and Donna Stone, longtime friends of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

T h e S t o n e A rt T h e o ry I n s t i t u t e s V o lu m e 4

Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic edited by james elkins and harper montgomery

The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Beyond the aesthetic and the anti-​ aesthetic / edited by James Elkins and Harper Montgomery.   p.  cm.—(The stone art theory institutes ; volume 4) Conversations from a series of seminars held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, July 18–24, 2010. Summary: “Gathers historians, philosophers, critics, curators, and artists to explore the divisions in teaching, practice, and theorization of art created by the choice between continuations of Modernism, with its aesthetic values, and the many kinds of postmodernism, which privilege issues outside aesthetics, including politics, gender, and identity”—​Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-271-06072-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Art—Philosophy—​Congresses. 2. Aesthetics—​Congresses. 3. Modernism (Aesthetics)—​ Congresses. 4. Postmodernism—​Congresses. I. Elkins, James, 1955–  , editor of compilation. II. Montgomery, Harper, editor of compilation. III. Art Institute of Chicago. School, host institution. IV. Series: Stone art theory institutes (Series) ; v. 4. N70.B4714 2013 701’.17—​dc23 2013015335

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.

This series is dedicated to

Howard and Donna Stone,

long-time friends of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

contents

Series Preface ix

Introduction James Elkins 1

Assessments

Robert Storr

Preface Harper Montgomery

184

William Mazzarella

Grant Kester

Luis Camnitzer

Alexander Dumbadze

Jon Simons

Geng Youzhuang

Angela Dimitrikaki

117

122 125

The Seminars 1 Introductory Seminar 23

2 The Anti-Aesthetic in the 1980s: Craig Owens’s “The Allegorical Impulse” 37

3 The Anti-Aesthetic in the 1990s: The Body 47

4 Theory and Criticism 57

5 Theoretical Positions: Critical Theory 67

129

Boris Groys

Afterword Gretchen Bakke

Eva Schürmann

Notes on the Contributors

Maria Filomena Molder

Index

139 143 145

Gary Peters 147

Andrew McNamara 151

Justin McKeown

8 Theoretical Positions: Affect Theory at Large

168

9 Things Missing from This Book

Rebecca Zorach

109

201

Gregory Sholette

135

7 Theoretical Positions: Affect Theory in Art History

99

198

132

Gordon Hughes

91

195

Cary Levine

6 Theoretical Positions: Rancière, Deleuze, Relational Aesthetics 77

190

155

Toni Ross 159

164

Timotheus Vermeulen Noah Simblist 171

175

Carrie Noland 179

205 221

227

s e r i e s p r e fa c e

In the usual course of things, art theory happens invisibly, without attracting attention. Concepts like picture, visual art, and realism circulate in newspapers, galleries, and museums as if they were as obvious and natural as words like dog, cat, and goldfish. Art theory is the air the art world breathes, and it is breathed carelessly, without thought. It is the formless stuff out of which so many justifications are conjured. Art theory also happens in universities and art schools, where it is studied and nurtured like a rare orchid. And art theory happens in innumerable academic conferences, which are sometimes studded with insights but are more often provisional and inconclusive. In those academic settings, words like picture, visual art, and realism are treated like impossibly complicated machines whose workings can hardly be understood. Sometimes, then, what counts as art theory is simple and normal, and other times it seems to be the most difficult subject in visual art. A similarity links these different ways of using theory. In the art world as in academia, it often feels right just to allude to an concept like picture, and let its flavor seep into the surrounding conversation. That is strange because picture is so important to so many people, and it leads to wayward conversations. The books in this series are intended to push hard on that strangeness, by spending as much time as necessary on individual concepts and the texts that exemplify them. Some books are more or less dedicated to particular words: volume 1 focuses on globalization, translation, governmentality, and hybridity; volume 2 explores image, picture, and icon. Volume 3 is concerned with the idea that art is research, which produces knowledge. Volume 4 is about the aesthetic, the antiaesthetic, and the political; and volume 5 concentrates on visual studies, visual culture, and visuality. This series is like an interminable conversation around a dictionary—or like the world’s most prolix glossary of art. That isn’t to say that the purposes of these conversations is to fix meanings: on the contrary, the idea is to work hard enough so that what seemed obdurate and slippery, as Wittgenstein said, begins to fracture and crack. Each book in this series started as a week-long event, held in Chicago. No  papers were given (except as evening lectures, which are not recorded in these books). For a week, five faculty and a group of twenty-five scholars met in closed seminars. In preparation for the week they had read over eight hundred pages of assigned texts. The week opened with a three hour panel discussion among the faculty, continued with four and a half days of seminars (six hours

x

series preface

each day), and ended with a five hour panel discussion. All thirty-five hours of it was taped and edited, and the pertinent portions are presented here. This series is a refinement of a previous book series called The Art Seminar, which appeared from 2005 to 2008.1 Like The Art Seminar, the Stone Summer Theory Institutes are an attempt to record a new kind of art theory, one that is more inclusive and less coherent than some art theory produced in North America and western Europe since the advent of poststructuralism. The guiding idea is that theorizing on visual art has become increasingly formalized and narrow, even as art practices have become wildly diverse. Both of the book series are meant to capture a reasonable cross-section of thinking on a given topic, and both include people at the far ends of the spectrum of their subjects—so far from one another that in some cases they were reluctant even to sit together in the events, or participate in the books. Some conversations are genuinely dialectic, others are abrupt encounters, and still others are unaccountable misunderstandings. All those species of communication are recorded as faithfully as possible, because they are evidence of the state of understanding of each field.2 The Introduction to each volume is meant as a straightforward and clear review of the critical situation leading up to the seminars. The Art Seminar books then had a set of essays to help set the stage for the transcribed discussions. There are no essays in this series, because it is not possible to usefully condense the hundreds of pages of texts that informed these discussions. (References can be found in the transcripts.) The omission of essays makes this series more “difficult” than The Art Seminar, but the literature of art theory has grown beyond the point where it can be helpfully anthologized. The books in this series are not introductions to the various subjects they treat, but attempts to move forward given the current state of discourse in each field. In that they follow the lead of the sciences, where more advanced textbooks necessarily presuppose more introductory material. After each year’s week-long event, the editors selected excerpts from the thirty-five hours of audio tapes and and produced a rough-edited transcript. It was given to each of the participants, who were invited to edit their contributions and add references. After several rounds of editing the transcript was sent out to forty or fifty people who did not attend the event. They were asked to write assessments, which appear here in the order they were received. The assessors were asked to consider the conversation from a distance, noting its strengths 1. The topics of the seven volumes of The Art Seminar: Art History Versus Aesthetics (2006), Photography Theory (2007), Is Art History Global? (2007), The State of Art Criticism, coedited with Michael Newman (2008), Renaissance Theory, coedited with Robert Williams (2008), Landscape Theory, coedited with Rachael DeLue (2008), and Re-Enchantment, coedited with David Morgan (2008). All are published by Routledge (Taylor and Francis), New York. 2. One function of these two series is to demonstrate that different fields have different kinds of incoherence. The particular disunities

of art criticism are discussed in an exchange at the end of The State of Art Criticism. The incoherence of theorizing on the Renaissance is the subject of another exchange at the end of Renaissance Theory. My own thoughts about the very strange second volume of that series, Photography Theory, are in “Is Anyone Listening?,” Photofile 80 (Winter 2007): 80. And I have ended the Art Seminar series with a look back at the different incoherences of all seven subjects: “Envoi to the Art Seminar Series,” in Re-Enchantment, 305–10. (A similar Envoi will conclude this series.)

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and its blind spots, in any style and at any length. As the assessments came in, they were distributed to people who hadn’t yet completed theirs, so that later assessments often comment on earlier ones, building an intermittent conversation through the book. The Afterwords are intended principally to organize the ideas in the book, so they can resonate with future discussions. One of the central concerns of this series is making talk about art more difficult. For some readers, art theory may seem too abstruse and technical, but at heart it has a different problem: it is too easy. Both the intricate art theory practiced in academies, and the nearly invisible theory that suffuses galleries and art fairs, are reasonably easy to do reasonably well. As Wittgenstein knew, the hardest problems are the ones that are right in front of us: picture, visual art, realism. The purpose of the books in this series is to do some damage to our sense that we understand words like those. A Special Acknowledgment This is the kind of project that is not normally possible in academic life, because it requires an unusual outlay of time and effort: a month of preparatory reading, a concerted week without the distractions of papers being read or lectures that are off-topic. The originating events at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are called the Stone Summer Theory Institute, after Howard and Donna Stone, whose gift made this series possible. They are dedicated collectors of postminimal art, with an eye for the most ambitious and characteristic pieces by a wide range of artists, from John McCracken to Gerhard Richter, Steve McQueen, Janine Antoni, Luc Turmans, Michael Krebber, and Marlene Dumas. What is remarkable about their support is that it is directed to content and not infrastructure or display. In the art world, there is no end to the patronage of display: corporate sponsors can be found for most every art project, and galleries traditionally depend on individuals and corporations for much of their programming. In that ocean of public patronage there is virtually nothing directed at the question of what art means. The market plummets onward, sometimes—as in the case of contemporary Chinese painting—with very little serious critical consideration or interpretation. The Stones’ gift is extremely unusual. Their own collecting interests are in line with the subjects of this series: the theories addressed in these books are only important if it is granted that the history of art theory exerts a pressure on the dissipated present, just as postminimalism is crucial mainly, and possibly only, for those who experience the modernist past as a challenge and not merely an attractive backdrop. So this series is dedicated to Howard and Donna Stone: if more patrons supported art history, theory, and criticism, the art world might well make more sense.

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series preface

Special thanks, also, to Harper Montgomery, my coeditor on this book, especially for her excellent work conceptualizing, ordering, and introducing the Assessments. The Topics in This Series Volume 1, Art and Globalization, is about writing in the “biennale culture” that now determines much of the art market. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in politics, postcolonial theory, sociology, and anthropology. The volume is an experiment, to see what happens when the two discourses are brought together. Volume 2, What Is an Image?, asks how well we understand what we mean by picture and image. The art world depends on there being something special about the visual, but that something is seldom spelled out. The most interesting theorists of those fundamental words are not philosophers but art historians, and this book interrogates the major theories, including those with theological commitments, those based in phenomenology, and those concerned principally with social meanings. Volume 3, What Do Artists Know?, is about the education of artists. The MFA degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized, and now it is giving way to the PhD in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art continue to be bogged down by conflicting agendas. This book is about the theories that underwrite art education at all levels, the pertinent history of art education, and the most promising current conceptualizations. Volume 4, Beyond the Anti-Aesthetic, is about the fact that now, more than thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. Volume 5, Farewell to Visual Studies, is a forum on the state of the once-new discipline (inaugurated in the early 1990s) that promised to be the site for the study of visuality in all fields, inside and outside of art. Despite the increasing number of departments worldwide, visual studies remains a minority interest with in increasingly predictable set of interpretive agendas and subjects. Hence, our farewell.

introduction

James Elkins

The subject of this book is both concise and enormous. As a small subject, the anti-aesthetic is associated with Manhattan in the early 1980s, where it was crystallized by Hal Foster’s edited volume The AntiAesthetic. Practices later identified as anti-aesthetic had emerged in the 1970s, and were developed in the 1980s in various centers of the art world, including New  York, Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Berlin. By the late 1990s, it could be argued that theories of the antiaesthetic had given way to other conceptual formations, such as resistance and criticality, both of which are discussed in this book. The Anti-Aesthetic is still read in universities in North America and parts of Europe, where it is often proposed as a historical document, a moment in the history of reactions against Modernism. In those contexts it has become background reading in the way Heinrich Wölfflin or E. H. Gombrich has become in art-historical pedagogy. It is significant that in some parts of the world The Anti-Aesthetic is scarcely known, and the term “anti-aesthetic” has not passed through the sequence from a label for art practice, to a specific series of theoretical positions, to an element in the historiography of postmodernism. But the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic is also an enormous subject. Historically, the aesthetic has been used, problematically, as a near-synonym for Modernism itself, a way of signaling Modernism’s commitment to value. The anti-aesthetic has been expanded backward in time, to characterize the reaction of Modernism against academic art and against the political situation leading to the First World War: a context in which, as Arthur Danto has noted, beauty became anathema. From that perspective, anti-aesthetic practice has been a sine qua non of Modernism in its many forms up to the present. Currently the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic lurk largely unseen in the pedagogic structures of art schools, art departments, and art academies throughout the world. “Anti-aesthetic” has been a useful label for the activities of students and young artists engaging capitalism in its different forms, thinking about neoliberalism, working out how identities are constructed and represented, addressing the institutions that make art possible and give it value, trying to provide a voice that can be heard above the roar of multinational corporations and the militaryindustrial complex, addressing the assimilation of cultural differences, pondering the gradual degradation of the planet, and thinking about how art might contribute in disaster areas, in underprivileged neighborhoods, or in the everyday lives of

2

Introduction

people who do not ordinarily use art. Politics, society, institutions, power, privilege, and identity are among the concerns of such practices, which do not always even call themselves “art.” On the other hand, “aesthetic” is still a useful term for practices involving work in the studio, using traditional media such as painting, printmaking, ceramics, and sculpture. Such work may not be aimed at changing or even addressing society and wider culture. Its purpose, at least initially, might just be to achieve value as art. The students and young artists who make such work care, among other things, about the object they produce, and its capacity to amaze, enthrall, absorb, give pleasure. They may not choose to say or think so, but their practices result in aesthetic objects, which hopefully possess one of the many qualities associated with art, from beauty to the sublime. Those two positions are hard to describe, both because they overlap so much and so often and because a formidable array of theoretical arguments rushes in to demonstrate that every aesthetic object is also a political object, and every political object has its aesthetics. Many authors discussed in this book, from Gilles Deleuze to Jacques Rancière, from Jean-Luc Nancy to Arthur Danto, have arguments along those lines. Most any contemporary artistic practice can be shown to be a mixture of aesthetic and nonaesthetic interests, and most any young artist trained in an art school or art department knows how to talk about her work as a mixed engagement of politics and aesthetics. Still, the division holds, and it divides art instruction around the world. Every department of art, every academy, every art school of sufficient size, from Chongqing to Bogotà, from Vancouver to Ljubljana, has some classes, studios, and departments that are mainly dedicated to political and identity issues, and others where students attend to techniques and media. The division runs deep, and permeates the world of art instruction. This is not a well-studied subject. The pedagogic division between aesthetic and anti-aesthetic activities is discussed, if it is at all, at the level of bureaucracy, administration, and institutional organization and planning. In the absence of any concerted debate, the distinction is reinforced by a wide variety of teaching habits, institutional configurations, and lingering expectations regarding media. In other words, it persists without being analyzed. The central question of this book is whether or not we are free of this choice, in practice, in pedagogy, and in theory. The question is complicated by the gesture, now common, in which artists, critics, and historians decline to identify their practices as anti-aesthetic or aesthetic, partly on the grounds that the two are inevitably mixed, and partly because the terms, singly and as a pair, are said to be outdated, ill-formed, or otherwise inapplicable. Many contemporary artists, theorists, and historians who use the words “aesthetic” and “anti-aesthetic” do not have developed accounts of what the concepts might mean to them— indeed, their practices sometimes depend on not having such accounts. Let me illustrate this with an overly familiar example, which I intend to misuse in a particular way: Barnett Newman’s remark, at the Woodstock Art

3

Introduction

Conference in 1952, that aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for the birds. In context, Newman used his now-famous comparative analogy to make several points, not all of them compatible. His principal complaint was that aestheticians did not advocate for the value of American art, leaving the field open for museum directors and curators. Despite the remark about ornithology, he thought aesthetics could speak to art, and he used aesthetic concepts to describe what he thought it should be doing (engaging in “the moral struggle between notions of beauty . . . and sublimity”).1 I don’t want to explore any of those somewhat tangled motivations here. I want instead to draw out two inferences one could make from the assertion that ornithology “is for the birds”— that birds don’t give a damn about ornithology. First, it could mean birds don’t understand ornithology. In that case, in a perfect world, if they could learn ornithology, they might come to understand themselves better. In the comparative analogy, that means artists could benefit from aesthetics even if they think it has nothing to do with them. It  would describe the situation in which contemporary artists, critics, and historians might find that the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic actually do structure some of their practice. Second, it could mean birds aren’t well described by ornithology, that it is an insufficient explanation of birds, a deficient science. In the comparative analogy, that would imply that contemporary artistic practice and theory are essentially, perhaps deeply, independent of the terms of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. Even that minority of contemporary artists who feel they need to become clear about the historical precedents and conceptual foundations of their practice would not need to study the ideas discussed in this book. This, in brief, is the principal question of this book. I could put it most concisely this way: is any part of The Anti-Aesthetic still important for contemporary practice and theory? Here I will do two things: I will list, very briefly, some of the principal terms that articulate discussions of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. The idea here is just to signal how difficult the vocabulary is: the concepts involved are, as Wittgenstein said, both hard and slippery. Then I will list some of he principal critical positions around the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, in order to provide some guides to what happens in this book. Terms 1. Aesthetics itself has been shrunk to individual passages in Kant and to an identification with beauty; and it has been expanded into a synonym for anything nonverbal, or anything of the body. It can occur in art writing as a placeholder for whatever practices the author wishes to stigmatize or valorize. 1. I thank Harper Montgomery for a close reading and suggestions for this essay. Some of these points are made in Paul Mattick,

“Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics in the Visual Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (1991): 253–59.

4

Introduction

2. Kant is an object of ambivalence throughout this book. For much of the conversation he is sunk somewhere in the deep background, indispensable but unquoted. At other times he is crucial, but then it’s often a question of which Kant, or even which individual passages or words. For some critics what matters is Kant’s idea of the free play of faculties, imagination, and knowledge (freies Spiel der Erkenntniskräfte); for others it’s the claim of understanding beyond the conceptual (jenseits des begrifflichen Denkens), or the concept of disinterested interest (uninteressiertes Interesse) in judgments of quality, or just the tripartite schema of beauty, ugliness, and the ordinary. Diarmuid Costello, who co-organized the Chicago event with me, argues that a promising way out of the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic trap is a fuller reading of Kant, stressing the many things that are overlooked in the Modernist reading.2 A useful first step in some discussions would be to carefully specify which passages in Kant are taken to matter, and why. 3. The opposites of aesthetics have grown into an entire exotic fauna. There are anti-aesthetic, nonaesthetic, anaesthetic, technoaesthetic, postaesthetic, and inaesthetic positions, some of which have been posed as distinct from others. The anti-aesthetic itself has a sporadic existence before and after The Anti-Aesthetic; it was used, for example, by the historian Robert Thompson in 1968 in a context unrelated to its later development;3 and it was used, as Luis Camnitzer notes in his Assessment, in 1965 by Luis Felipe Noé to describe a mode of “bad painting” that had developed in Latin America.4 4. Art itself is difficult to pin down in relation to the difference between aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. Discourse that supports politically engaged, apparently non-aesthetic practices can involve problematic uses of the word “art,” as in the artists’ group called Critical Art Ensemble. In that title, the word “art” marks the institutional home of the artists and some, but not most, of their projects. What it signifies beyond institutional frames is difficult to say. 5. The sublime has also been put to work, supporting a wide range of artists, from Xu Bing to Olafur Eliasson, from Paul Chan to Bill Viola. The postmodern sublime has been subject of many texts, from Thomas Weiskel’s excellent monograph to Neil Hertz, Jean-François Lyotard, Peter De Bolla, Paul Crowther, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Griselda Pollock.5 2. See Costello, “Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (2007): 217–28. 3. Robert Farris Thompson coined the term “anti-aesthetic” to describe deliberately ugly Yoruba masks: an early example of the term, and also a typical instance of the reduction of aesthetics to the study of beauty. Thompson, “Aesthetics in Traditional Africa” (1968), in Art and Aesthetics in Primitive Societies: A Critical Anthology, edited by C. F. Jopling

(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), 374–81. For the “anaesthetic” and “technoaesthetic” see Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3–41. 4. Luis Felipe Noé, Antiestética (Buenos Aires: Van Riel, 1965). 5. All these are discussed in my “Against the Sublime,” in Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, edited by Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20–42, translated as Das Erhabene

5

Introduction

Positions There are also a certain number of nameable positions around the question of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. I list them here in no particular order, because most have overlapping chronologies and continue, in some form, to be pertinent. 1. Revivals of beauty have been much discussed in the art world, from the 1980s to the present. This subject is one of the quickest litmus tests of the difference between universities and art schools and academies. In the art school context, in North America, the putative revival of beauty is associated with Dave Hickey, Peter Schjeldahl, Peter Plagens, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Bill Beckley.6 Their work is seldom discussed in universities, where it is more common, either in North America or in Europe, to encounter the work of Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Alexander Nehamas, and Arthur Danto.7 There is virtually no serious scholarly discussion of the positions taken by Hickey and other popular critics and journalists.8 Danto is often misdescribed as a participant in the revival, but The Abuse of Beauty and his essay “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art” are pleas to extend aesthetics into the “dainty and dumpy” (as in John Austin), the “innocent, modest, and tender” (terms used by Kant), into the everyday (the Lebenswelt, Duchamp’s “anaesthetic,” Fluxus practices), the “silly” (Kant’s astonishing precritical proposal for the opposite of the sublime), and especially into the disgusting (which Kant says is immune to the beautiful).9 Danto observes that most artistic traditions have not been interested in beauty, and that the nineteenth century “narrowly identified” aesthetic with beauty and caused a rejection of aesthetics.10 Hence Danto’s position is neither a revival of beauty nor a rejection of aesthetic values. Twentieth-century art was “anti-aesthetic” only in the sense that it was often against beauty (and by association and reduction, aesthetics). 2. There are also revivals of beauty in the realm of Christian scholarship, although they have gone entirely unnoticed by the art world. The in Wissenschaft und Kunst: Über Vernunft und Einbildungskraft (Berlin: Surhkamp: 2010). 6. See, for example, Bill Beckley, “Introduction: Generosity and the Black Swan,” in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, edited by Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (New York: Allworth, 1998), ix–xix; Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues, 1993). 7. Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Nehamas, “Beauty Links Art History and Aesthetics,” in Art History Versus Aesthetics, The Art Seminar 1 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 141–54.

8. Hickey and Schjeldahl are slammed in the October round table on art criticism; that discussion is discussed in The State of Art Criticism, coedited with Michael Newman, The Art Seminar 4 (New York: Routledge, 2007). Alexander Alberro, “Beauty Knows No Pain,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004): 37, mentions several of these authors as a single group, with a few minor caveats, and he identifies Hickey’s aesthetic as “a diluted version” of Bataille’s—a strange judgment, but at least a serious one (39n8). 9. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2003); also “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004): 24–35. 10. Danto, Abuse of Beauty, 45, 59.

6

Introduction

Protestant theologian Karl Barth, for example, argued that beauty is the means by which people are persuaded or awakened to faith—a position that intrigued John Updike.11 Contemporary scholars also draw on Jacques Maritain and his interest in ways that beauty reveals the eternal, invisible dimension of objects.12 In philosophic terms, a principal question in these revivals of beauty is the medieval scholar’s question: What is the prime analogue, the principal model, of beauty? Is it divine or mundane, or (equivalently) theological or philosophic, Platonic or Aristotelian? In these discussions, Kant is barely mentioned, and Aristotle tends to stand for a definition of beauty as harmony of parts, interpreted through church doctrine in a long tradition including Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine.13 As far as I can tell, this enormous literature is unread in the arts, even—or especially—when Kant’s exclusion of theology is itself taken as a determining factor in the development of aesthetics.14 3. Relational aesthetics is one of the principal guides and inspirations for new art practices in the Americas and Europe. It presents an especially difficult problem for this book because of the disparity between its popularity among young artists and its often severe critique in academic circles. As of this writing, in spring 2012, the newest version of relational aesthetics is integrated into “altermodernity,” a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud for the Tate Triennial in 2009. Altermodernity is not argued so much as evoked in Bourriaud’s essay.15 Aesthetics is barely mentioned in Bourriaud’s essay, perhaps on account of the criticism he had received for earlier texts. Altermodern work, he says, deals “in the aesthetics of heterochrony”: it has no sense of contemporaneity, but is concerned with “intemporality.”16 It has been easy to argue that Bourriaud’s politics are understood as aesthetics: because all “nomadic” and “heterochronic” links take place within existing geopolitical structures, they remain ineffectual, ambiguous, or undefined as gestures of resistance, and so the 11. For Barth and Updike see Bernard Schopen, “Faith, Morality, and the Novels of John Updike,” Twentieth-Century Literature 24, no. 4 (1978): 523–35; Paul Casner, “Blessed Assurance? Reason and Certainty of Knowledge of God in Karl Barth and Hans Kueng,” PhD dissertation, Marquette University, available on Proquest Digital, paper AA19811380. 12. Desmond FitzGerald, “Maritain and Gilson on Painting,” in Beauty, Art, and the Polis, edited by Alice Ramos (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 190–99. 13. I draw these examples from a conference at Lipscomb University, Nashville, Tennessee, in June 2010, “Beauty in the Academy: Faith, Scholarship, and the Arts.” 14. An interesting counterexample is the work of Marie-José Mondzain; see her contribution to What Is an Image?, Stone Art Theory Institutes 2 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

15. It is described initially as a “synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism.” Postmodernism, he writes, is “a petrified kind of time advancing in loops”; altermodernity proposes instead a “positive experience of disorientation” based on the acceptance of “heterochronies.” Bourriaud rejects “post-colonial postmodernism” as “second-stage postmodernism,” leading to a “neurotic preoccupation with origins typical of the era of globalization.” Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” in Altermodern: Tate Triennial, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2009), 12, 13. 16. Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 20. Altermodernity’s principal tropes are nomadism “in space, in time, and among the ‘signs’ ” and a perspective “simultaneously geographical . . . and historical.” What matters is the “network” or “archipelago” of new relations, the “relational aesthetics” produced by the work. Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 22, 23.

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criteria of interest in new relations are aesthetic. A more difficult question is how to read relational aesthetics texts in such a way as to do justice to their continuing influence. It is clear that Bourriaud’s text aims to resist the kind of linear reading that could elucidate its relation to aesthetics or anti-aesthetics; it is less clear how the text is used by artists and curators who find it enabling, or what the relation might be between such a use and what might be called a careful or close reading. 4. Jacques Rancière has also been read as being “beyond” the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. An initial problem in assessing Rancière’s theories is to see how he positions himself in relation to accounts he means to critique, including anti-aesthetic theories. He provides two different genealogies of the anti-aesthetic in Aesthetics and Its Discontents; the first is in the preface, and the second follows immediately in the introduction. Both have two parts, and operate by dividing aesthetic positions into two opposing camps. In the preface, he first argues that “aesthetics has been charged with being the captious discourse by which philosophy . . . hijacks the meaning of artworks.” He names Pierre Bourdieu, for whom “aesthetic distance” serves “to conceal a social reality”; T. J. Clark, who holds that “behind pure art’s illusion . . . there exists a reality of economic, political, and ideological constraints”; and Hal Foster, who is said to hail “the advent of the postmodern as inaugurating a break with the illusions of avant-gardism.”17 Rancière then concludes, somewhat abruptly, that “this form of critique has almost totally gone out of fashion.” The preface then continues with a second genealogy, in which “aesthetics has come to be seen as the perverse discourse which bars . . . the pure encounter with the unconditioned event of the work.” Here Rancière names Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s Adieu à l’esthétique (2000), Alain Badiou’s Petit Manuel d’inesthétique (1998), and the work of JeanFrançois Lyotard, concluding that all three want “to extract the glorious presence of art out from under the suffocating discourse on art.”18 In the introduction, he offers two more genealogies, different from the first, with a differing cast of characters. In art history and philosophy, Rancière says, there is an attitude that “aims to extricate artistic pursuits” from social and utopian goals, and to demonstrate art’s “singular power of presence,” often using the sublime. He names Thierry de  Duve’s Look! (2001), which sees art’s power as “the founding of a being-incommon, anterior . . . to politics” (p. 20), and Jean-François Lyotard, who “radicalizes the idea of the sublime,” so that modern art’s purpose is “to bear witness to the fact of the unrepresentable.” (Later Rancière says Lyotard’s philosophy is an “anti-aesthetics of the sublime” [p. 99].) 17. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, translated by Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 1–2. 18. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 1–2.

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That is the first genealogy; the second is the position “keenly asserted by artists and professionals working in artistic institutions,” namely that art is “a way of redisposing the objects and images that comprise the common world as it is already given.” Such “micro-situations . . . vary only slightly from those of ordinary life and are presented in an ironic and playful vein.” Here he names Pierre Huyghe, but Nicolas Bourriaud or Dominic Willsdon might have been better choices.19 These twin lineages in the preface and introduction, each of them doubled, set up Rancière’s argument in the book, permitting him to position himself outside the work of each of the authors.20 The question for the reception of Rancière in the art world—which is debated in this book—will depend in part on how plausible his sense of art writing is, and how plausible these genealogies are as framing moves, and as indications of his understanding of art history. 5. James Meyer and Toni Ross coedited a forum on the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic in the Art Journal.21 They take a certain relation between the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic as given, writing that the two “may not be reconciled” but “calibrated in a less polarized way” or brought into “closer proximity.” The duality is assumed, and a third term, or supervening discourse, is not theorized.22 Thus they describe one of their contributors, Alex Alberro, as arguing that “aesthetic pleasure and critical engagement are fundamentally irreconcilable.” They implicitly disagree, but characterize the irreconcilability as an “anti-aesthetic claim”: that is, a claim made from one of the two positions, which then appropriates criticality.23 In general, theorizing about the relation between the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic is a project of, or in the wake of, the antiaesthetic. They observe that is necessary to avoid equating “aesthetics and conservative taste, or vested ideological interests,” as well as “appeals to visual pleasure . . . in the recent beauty revivalism,” but it is an “achievement” of the anti-aesthetic to show the “alignment” of aesthetics and conservatism. For this book, Meyer and Ross’s project highlights the common assumption—one that is especially difficult to shake—that theories and revivals of beauty or the aesthetic will not be able to assist reconceptualizations of the anti-aesthetic, unless of course those revisions are intended to overthrow, erase, or bypass the anti-aesthetic. 19. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 21, 457, respectively. 20. A third genealogy appears in The Aesthetic Unconscious, a book that argues Freud was trying to suppress an existing “aesthetic unconscious” characterized by a “nihilist entropy” and a belief in the “anonymous voice of an unconscious and meaningless life.” There the positions include Louis Marin, Georges Didi-Huberman, the Zola of Doctor Pascal, and Lyotard (reprising the role he played in Aesthetics and Its Discontents). Rancière, Aesthetic

Unconscious, translated by Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 54, 61. 21. Meyer and Ross, “Aesthetic/AntiAesthetic: An Introduction,” Art Journal 63 (2004): 20–23, first presented at the College Art Association meeting, 2003. 22. Meyer and Ross, “Aesthetic/AntiAesthetic,” 20. 23. Meyer and Ross, “Aesthetic/AntiAesthetic,” 21.

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6. The book Rediscovering Aesthetics (2009) is the delayed product of a conference held in Cork, Ireland, in 2004.24 There are at least three other texts that derive from the same conference.25 The editors’ position is that aesthetics should be recognized as implicated in history, and the principal model for that implication is Foucault. If “truth and falsity” in aesthetics “are recognized as involving contextual criteria,” they write, then aesthetics is “linked to, and part of, the beliefs and practices of particular ways of life, world-views, philosophical theories, traditions, and social systems.” This does not lead to “an unproductive relativism,” but to the inability to know whether Habermas’s idea of “the force of the better argument” can ever decide the issue “in a neutral way.” Deep “institutional and cultural preconditions . . . rule out, or at least challenge, canonical conceptions of art, beauty.”26 Rediscovering Aesthetics also records other viewpoints, but the editors’ contribution is a clear recent example of the possibility of dispersing aesthetic judgments by writing them into particular institutional structures. 7. Wilfried van Damme’s Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics (1996) takes a consistently anthropological approach, tempered by an interest in scientific verification.27 The book has almost no citations of Kant, Danto, or other aestheticians, and its sense of aesthetics is presented as entirely dependent on field research. Van Damme allows that some aesthetic qualities are universal (he names symmetry, balance, and clarity, and proposes that smoothness and brightness might be added to the list) but asserts that aesthetic preference is relative to a “community’s sociocultural values and ideals.”28 It is significant that anthropological approaches to aesthetics have almost no place in art criticism or theory, even though accounts like Van Damme’s exemplify a sort of cultural relativism common in the contemporary art market.29 8. Terry Eagleton has written succinctly but provocatively on aesthetics, especially in an essay called “The Ideology of the Aesthetic.”30 For him aesthetics is the “dense, swarming territory” outside systematic 24. Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor, eds., Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 25. Halsall, Jansen, and O’Connor, “Aesthetics and Its Object—Challenges from Art and Experience,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 3 (2006): 123–26, and a special issue, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Online 1–3 (2004). The final roundtable for the conference is the basis of the book Art History Versus Aesthetics, edited by James Elkins, The Art Seminar 1 (New York: Routledge, 2005), although Francis, Julia, and Tony were not involved with that roundtable. 26. These citations are from the version in Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics.

27. Van Damme, Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics (Leiden: Brill, 1996). 28. Van Damme, Beauty in Context, 134, 308. 29. There are many other anthropological studies; their diversity can be exemplified by Hans Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: W. Fink, 2001), which rewrites continental anthropology, and Crispin Sartwell’s Six Names of Beauty (New York: Routledge, 2004), which is a philosophic analysis of six aesthetic traditions. Van Damme’s is, I think, the most extensively researched and conceptually consistent. 30. Eagleton, “The Ideology of the Aesthetic,” Poetics Today 9, no. 2 (1988): 327–38.

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Enlightenment philosophy, “the first stirrings of primitive, incipient materialism, “ ‘experience,’ ” “the life of the body.” This capacious sense of aesthetics leads him to the somewhat surprising conclusion that “the major aesthetician of the twentieth century might thus be said to be the later Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenology will seek to disclose the formal, rational structures of the Lebenswelt in what he calls a new ‘universal science of subjectivity.’ ”31 Freedom, on the other hand, counts as an anti-aesthetic moment, because it is noumenal in Kant’s critique and therefore “cannot be represented and is thus at root anti-aesthetic.”32 The “two greatest aestheticians,” Eagleton argues, are Marx and Freud, philosophers of the “laboring body” and the “desiring one.”33 It is a concise Marxist reading, intended to provoke aesthetics into a much wider field, and as an abstract goal, that broadening is shared by a number of contributors to this book. 9. An undefined but growing literature studies the aesthetics of migration, exile, and diaspora. The literature here includes Patricia Pisters’s work on “nomadic aesthetics,” Mieke Bal’s essay on “migratory aesthetics,” and T. J. Demos’s essay on the “aesthetics of exile” for the Tate Triennial in 2009.34 This literature draws on Deleuze and many other authors to help define the expressive, and often optimistic, content of migratory experience, both in the art world and beyond it. In some measure the literature is continuous with relational aesthetics, but it also has the potential to become a separate field. 10. Affect theory. I think it would be fair to say the participants were often surprised at how affect theory continued to resurface as a promising way “beyond” the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. The difficulty was in saying exactly what affect theory was, and what work it would do in the academy or in art practice. During the event I made notes on the sources people mentioned under the rubric of affect theory. A bewilderingly diverse bibliography was invoked. As I write this, it has been nearly two years since the event, and I have a growing collection of possible sources for affect theory. The list has grown so much that it may be helpful here if I present it as a list within my listing. The entries are in no particular order. (i)

Trauma theory. Some people take affect theory to be about intense, traumatic experience, forming a link to the literature on trauma and psychoanalysis; examples include Jane Bennett’s Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art and James Thompson’s Performance Affects.35

31. Eagleton, “Ideology,” 328. 32. Eagleton, “Ideology,” 334. 33. Eagleton, “Ideology,” 337. 34. Bal, “Three-Way Mis-Reading,” diacritics 30, no. 1 (2000): 2–24, and Bal, “Heterochronotopia,” in Migratory Settings, edited by Murat Aydemir and Alex Rotas (Amsterdam: Rodopi,

2008), 35–56 (thanks to Maureen Burns for this and for reporting on Pisters’s unpublished papers); Demos, “The Ends of Exile: Towards a Coming of Universality?,” in Bourriaud, Altermodern, 75–88. 35. James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (London:

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(ii)

The biomediated body. Others, such as Patricia Clough, emphasize the effect of information, technology, capital, and race on the current sense of the body, creating what Clough calls the “biomediated body.”36 There is also some affinity between the “biopolitics” and “biomediated body” that Clough advocates and the “object-oriented ontology” coined by Graham Harman.37 (iii) Neurobiology and neuroaesthetics. Affect is a current interest in brain science, and there have been several writers on art who have tried to use the new research.38 (iv) Animal affect. An  important recent trend in science, which is apparently still not part of art discourse, is the affective neuroscience of animals, whose central figure is the Estonian scholar Jaak Panksepp.39 He considers neural correlates to human affective states, and his work has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the neural nature of free will and the relation between animal and human consciousness. The neural correlates Panksepp studies also resonate with work done about the humananimal relationship by authors from Derrida to Peter Singer. (v) Massumi’s position. Other theories, such as Brian Massumi’s, stress the nonverbal, uncognized aspects of affect.40 It appears that Massumi will emerge as the principal source cited for theories of affect in the arts, and so it is worth saying briefly that art-world citations misuse his theories, reading affect as a matter of emotion, feeling, or mood. Massumi is explicitly against this; from his point of view affective states can never be cognized: they represent a richness that is structurally, differentially Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 36. Clough, “The Affective Turn,” Theory, Culture, and Society 25, no. 1 (2008): 1–22; Clough, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Clough and Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 207; see also Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (1995); Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect,” Geografiska Annaler ser. B, Human Geography 86, no. 1 (2004): 57–78. 37. Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002); see also Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” in The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 206–25. 38. Anthony Jack, Abigail Dawson, Katelyn Begany, Regina Leckie, Kevin Barry, Angela Ciccia, and Abraham Snyder, “fMRI Reveals Reciprocal Inhibition Between Social and Physical Cognitive Domains,” NeuroImage (2012),

http://​www​.sciencedirect​.com/​science/​article/​ pii/​S1053811912010646 (paywall). See also David Freedberg and V. Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007): 197–203. I thank Ellen Rogers for bringing the essay by Jack et al. to my attention. In general, there has been a turn in the humanities and related sciences toward the study of emotions; see, for example, Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect,” Body and Society 16, no. 1 (2010): 29–56; and Wie sich Gefühle Ausdruck verschaffen: Emotionen in Nahsicht, edited by Klaus Herding and Antje Krause-Wahl (Berlin: Taunusstein, 2007). 39. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 40. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Lee Spinks, “Thinking the Post-Human: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Style,” Textual Practice 15, no. 1 (2001): 23–46.

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(vi)

(vii)

(viii)

(ix)

disjunct from the states we call emotions. “Intensity,” he writes, is “a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder,” and its relation to language is one of “interference, amplification or dampening.” In  his account “there is no correspondence or conformity between qualities and intensity.”41 This is an extralinguistic, antisemiotic position, distinct from the uses to which his work is sometimes put. Deleuze and Guattari. Massumi’s principal source, Deleuze, and Deleuze’s frequent collaborator Félix Guattari, are also pertinent in contemporary affect theory. (Both are dependent on Spinoza, but in my reading, Spinoza is more an enabling text than a necessary source.) Among the more interesting possibilities here is bypassing Deleuze in favor of Guattari’s Chaosmosis.42 Synesthesia. Some directions in contemporary art theory stress ideas such as synesthesic and immersive environments and Neoromanticism, which are compatible with strands of affect theory. An example in this book is Timothy Vermeulen’s Assessment; he has been active in the theorization of “metamodernism,” a theory of contemporary art that emphasizes affective values. Political theory. Among the many sources for affect theory that weren’t mentioned during the week are a number of books in and around political theory that have things to say about affect and culture, for example Jane Bennett’s ecological theory text Vibrant Matter; William Connolly’s books, such as A World of Becoming and Neuropolitics; and of course some essays in The Affect Theory Reader.43 Clinical psychiatry. There is also affect theory in clinical psychiatry, not only in Silvan Tomkins, whose work has entered art theory through Eve Sedgwick, but also in an extensive clinical literature.44 Central in this field is the Mental Status Examination, in which affect has a disputed but central role.45

41. Parables for the Virtual, 24–26. 42. See, for example, Elvind Røssaak, “Affects and Medium: Re-Imagining Media Differences Through Bill Viola’s The Quintet of the Astonished,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 3 (2009): 339–54, citing Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), arguing that affects are “modes of existential apprehension” (Guattari, 95; Røssaak, 341). 43. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Gregg and Seigworth, Affect Theory Reader. For

a review of the Reader see Todd Cronan, http://​ nonsite​.org​, no. 5, 2012. In addition see Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22 (2004): 117–39; and Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 44. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, vol. 1, The Positive Affects, and vol. 2, The Negative Affects (New York: Springer, 1962 and 1963). 45. Paula Trzepacz and Robert Baker, The Psychiatric Mental Status Examination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); see also Andrew Sims, Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to Descriptive Psychopathology, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1995). A related study is Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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(x)

Anthropology. Affect theory is also a current interest in anthropology, where the readings include a variety of disparate texts, including “nonrepresentational theory,” proposed by Nigel Thrift.46 An excellent review essay by William Mazzarella—to my mind the best overview of affect theory to date—proposes a cultural and anthropological reading, associating affect with a “depolitical” dream of immediacy.47 (xi) Geography. There is at least some interest in affect in the field of geography, including “nonrepresentational theory” and several studies of “affective geography”—the spatially articulated meanings of culture, materialities, and diaspora.48 (xii) Presence. And finally, any accounting of affect theory would have to include the history of the rediscovery of presence. After the poststructural critiques of unmediated presence, there has been an accelerating awareness of the necessity of rethinking presence: first in the outlier George Steiner; and then in authors like Hans Gumbrecht; and most recently, in new work by Keith Moxey and Michael Ann Holly.49 Presence—plenary experience, immersive or immediate experience—is re-emerging as an object of theory. It isn’t easy to know which of these will emerge as affect spreads through the humanities, but I would guess that for most writers what matters is the newly found permission to speak about feeling, mood, emotion, and other unsystematic, inarticulate, embodied, subjective experiences. The slightly technical term “affect” is generally taken as a contrast to what is imagined as the cold, disaffected, systematic, intellectual poststructuralism that dominated art writing from the 1960s to the 1990s. In that sense, affect theory denotes a gesture away from an imagined intellectualism and toward an open-ended acknowledgment of the embodied nature of experience, rather than a determinate theory of uncognized “intensities,” as Deleuze would say. 46. Thrift, Nonrepresentational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (New York: Routledge, 2007); for a use of “nonrepresentational theory” see Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 445–53. See also Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 754–80. I thank Joe Masco for telling me about Stewart and the sources in the next two notes. 47. Mazzarella, “Affect: What Is It Good For?,” in Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, edited by Saurabh Dube (New York: Routledge, 2009), 291–309, available at http://​www​.academia​.edu/​366261/​ Affect​_What​_is​_it​_Good​_For. See also Joseph Masco, “ ‘Survival Is Your Business’: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 361–98.

48. Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-War Polity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); the book is a study of the projected and constructed meanings of Turkish Cyprus. I thank Zhanara Nauruzbayeva for bringing this to my attention. See also Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space, and Society (2009), available at http://​www​.journals​.elsevier​.com/​ emotion​-space​-and​-society. “Atmosphere” is a leading trope for several authors; see also Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements.” 49. Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Moxey, Interrupted Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

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In the Seminars transcribed here, Eve Meltzer proposed a new understanding of affect as the necessary, structural effect of systematizing, anti-aesthetic projects of the 1970s like Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document.50 For Meltzer, such conceptual projects show “affective interest in disaffected mastery.” So far, hers is the most art-historically specific account of affect, and it has the interesting consequence of locating affect in the very time and place that gave rise, in the current account, to cold, mathematized, schematized, intellectual art—the kinds of art against which contemporary affect-laden art is said to have rebelled. 11. Other positions. Beyond these ten there are any number of others. Among the texts that helped frame this book are Antoon Van den Braembussche’s Intercultural Aesthetics: A  Worldview Perspective, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, and Joaquín Barriendos’s work on geo-aesthetics.51 Kelly and Barriendos are among the Fellows in the Seminars transcribed here. Theories continue to multiply: just a few days before the event in Chicago, the sociologist Tony Bennett presented his critique of Rancière’s critique of Pierre Bourdieu at a conference at the Tate Britain.52 Bennett’s argument was that Bourdieu’s association of the aesthetic with class was insufficient, and it should be considered instead as “a form of cultural practice” or “a culturally specific form of processual ethics,” alongside bureaucracy, which “emerges, as in Weber, as a parallel form of ethics, involving a sense of responsibility and liberty.” He listed several “versions of the relations between aesthetics and critique,” including Adorno, Said, Eagleton, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Rancière, and noted those positions all neglect the “kinds of tutelage” and “priestly authority” that actually govern the processual workings of critique. The talk made it possible to begin thinking of a sociology even further divorced from Bourdieu’s conclusions, even if it would be even more indebted to Foucault. Bennett’s is just one of an uncountable number of other positions that could be added to a list like this one. Envoi There is little hope that any book on the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic can have the coherence, not to mention the impact, of The Anti-Aesthetic, because practices and positions have multiplied so drastically. And even aside from the entirely bewildering profusion of texts, there is the fact that debate on these issues is intense but sporadic, so that it is not clear how to go about comparing 50. She discussed parts of what is now her book Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 51. Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective, edited by Antoon Van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle, and Nicole Note (New York: Springer, 2009); Michael

Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), with an expanded six-volume edition in preparation; Barriendos, in Art and Globalization, Stone Art Theory Institutes 1 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 52. Bennett, Guided Freedom: Aesthetics, Tutelage, Expertise, Tate Britain, July 2010.

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positions. It is helpful, I think, to distinguish first-order from second-order problems. If I ask whether a given art practice can be usefully called “anti-aesthetic,” or if I try to find weaknesses in Rancière’s critique of conventional aesthetics, then I am working on first-order problems. Second-order problems are matters of how to compare theories, practices, and concepts. After I decide that it is not rewarding to read Bourriaud’s texts for the arguments they might contain, I may begin to wonder how his texts have been understood as useful or inspirational, or what happens when they are read alongside other sorts of texts. If my question is what the participants in the Critical Art Ensemble mean by the word “art,” then my problem is a first-order one. If I ask how to compare elisions of the word “art” in statements by the Critical Art Ensemble or the Yes Men with uses of “art” in, say, Danto or Rancière, then my question is a second-order one. Such second-order problems can be illuminated by paying attention to the language we use. There were times during the event in Chicago when it seemed the conversation was articulated, and even guided, by a small set of relatively unexamined metaphors, which were being used to explain how contemporary practices were related to Modernisms, aesthetics, anti-aesthetics, and other historical moments. Among our recurrent metaphors four, perhaps, stood out: Drifting: at one point we were talking about a Modernist position and a contemporary position that seemed unrelated. They could just drift apart, someone said. What kind of drifting would that be? A contemporary artist, let’s say, might spurn some of the theoretical positions we were exploring because they seemed wrong, or she might refuse them as irrelevant. The two kinds of drifting could be usefully distinguished: there’s a passive drifting, in which practices and positions are carried naturally apart; and there’s an intentional drifting, in which a practice or position avoids another one by presenting itself as moving “naturally” away. Writing against: at some moments writers articulating the anti-aesthetic conceived of their project as writing against the aesthetic. But what, exactly, did that mean? Was it substantial reconceptualization, or a simpler process of reversing values or terms? In our discussions, this came up in the assessment of the literature around the informe in the 1990s. From the beginning, writers engaged in that project were concerned about the degree to which they were inverting aesthetic terms into anti-aesthetic terms, rather than reconceptualizing. Given that that issue is still unresolved, it might be useful to look instead at what could be meant, in any given context, by “writing against” another body of writing. Refusal: there are various refusals in the week’s Seminars: refusal to read, refusal to theorize, refusal to understand, to consider, to see. Some contemporary practices are enabled by refusing to engage the pertinence of the theoretical and historical formations that attempt to account for them. Such refusals should be considered alongside implicit refusals, on the part of some theorists, to engage some contemporary practices. This is not to say either side stands in

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need of correction: it is to say that the gesture of refusal is central, in many ways, to this subject, which is unevenly encountered by all sides. Beyond: the metaphor of this book’s title suggests two things: that the participants hoped to find a third term, either by achieving a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung or by deconstructing the dualism of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic; and that the participants wanted to move away from the debates that have structured politics and aesthetics in art from the 1970s to the present. Moving away (drifting? refusing?) is different in kind from synthesizing or deconstructing. We decided to keep the original title, Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, as a reminder of this most fundamental of all differences. The subject of this book is hard enough given the explosion of the art world and art theory in the last thirty years, but it becomes especially challenging once it becomes clear that the work of conceptualizing practices is so discontinuous, so fragmented, that there is often no helpful precedent for how to compare and interpret the many positions. Nevertheless, I hope this book, which brings together philosophers, historians, and practitioners, can help elucidate the current condition of the problem and begin to think about what might be beyond it.

The Seminars

The participants: The 2010 Stone Summer Theory Institute had five Faculty, thirteen Fellows, and ten graduate students from the School of the Art Institute. They are shown on the panorama on the following pages.

The Faculty: Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Eve Meltzer (New York University), Hal Foster (Princeton University), Jay Bernstein (New School for Social Research), and James Elkins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago).

The Fellows: Gustav Frank (University of Nottingham and Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität München), Michael Kelly (University of North Carolina), Sven Spieker (University of California at Santa Barbara), Joaquín Barriendos (University of Barcelona), Sunil Manghani (York St. John University), Karen Busk-Jepsen (PhD candidate, University of Copenhagen), Harper Montgomery (PhD candidate, University of Chicago), Joana Cunha Leal (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal), Nadja Millner-Larsen (PhD candidate, New York University), Martin Sundberg (Postdoctoral Fellow, Eikones, Basel), Gretchen Bakke (Wesleyan University), Stéphanie Benzaquen (PhD candidate, Erasmus University, Rotterdam), and Beáta Hock (Central European University, Budapest).

The School of the Art Institute graduate class: Abigail Wilson Lauren Ross, Aaron Richmond, Omair Hussain, Meredith Kooi, Brandon Evans, Abraham Ritchie, Rebecca Hernandez, Walker Thisted, Elise Goldstein.

Auditors: Katherine Desjardins (University of Chicago), Dakota Brown, Esther Sanchez-Pardo (Complutense University, Madrid), Andrew Blackley.

The panorama was taken by Dakota Brown and James Elkins. People in the panorama: (left page, at the table) Joana Cunha Leal, Gretchen Bakke, James Elkins, Beáta Hock, Sunil Manghani, Jay Bernstein, Michael Kelly, Joaquín Barriendos, Andrew Blackley, Karen Busk-Jepsen, Martin Sundberg, Harper Montgomery, Dakota Brown, (seated behind) Brandon Evans, Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Meredith Kooi, Lauren Ross, (right page, at the table) Omair Hussain, Hal Foster, Nadja Millner-Larsen, Stéphanie Benzaquen, Diarmuid Costello, Eve Meltzer, Walker Thisted, Rebecca Hernandez, Abraham Ritchie, Elise Goldstein, Sven Spieker, Aaron Richmond, (seated at window) Gustav Frank, (seated in corner, with crutches) Justin B. Williams.

The following conversations were recorded during the week of July 18–24, 2010, at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.

1. i n t r o d u c t o r y s e m i n a r

The opening seminar was an informal attempt to sketch positions in relation to the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. The five faculty, Hal Foster, Jay Bernstein, Eve Meltzer, James Elkins, and Diarmuid Costello, introduce some of their interests in the theme. Diarmuid Costello and James Elkins were co-organizers of the week’s events. James Elkins: Welcome, everyone. Diarmuid and I thought we’d begin in a simple way, by speaking first about some senses of the aesthetic, and then some senses of the anti-aesthetic. Diarmuid Costello: Let me start by saying something about Kant, because he is perhaps both the last person you’d expect to hear about in this context, and the first. Both depend on senses of the word “formal.” Kant is the last person you might need in the context of the problems we’re concerned with because Kant’s aesthetics, more than any other, is far removed from art. His project is essentially to inquire into the grounds of justification for a certain kind of judgment. He has very little to say about our subject, art, and his project is properly formal because it is about the forms of such judgment, and the formal conditions of such judgment. With respect to the second possibility, that Kant is the first person to whom we should look given our concerns, Kant’s account may be formal in the sense that term takes on in formalist art criticism. Indeed, Kant was read in this way, notoriously, by Clement Greenberg. I would say, and here I am in accord with Thierry de Duve, that Greenberg’s formalist reading of Kant has had a huge effect on modern and contemporary discussions. One way to get at the difference I have in mind would be to distinguish between the formal grounds of a certain kind of judgment being the kind of judgment that it is (such that these grounds are a necessary condition of all judgments of that kind) and the empirical forms of the objects of such judgments (such that some objects may have the form in question—“good form,” for want of a better term—but whether they do is an empirical question, not something that can be settled a priori). The former would be the first sense of formal I have in mind, the latter would be the second. These are the two respects in which Kant’s account might be read as formal or formalist. There is a question in my mind as to whether the anti-aesthetic is fundamentally a reaction to that second sense in which Kant’s aesthetics might be labeled In these seminars, the notes have been added by the speakers, except in the italicized introduction to each seminar, where the notes are the editor’s, or where otherwise indicated.

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formal or formalist. This reception history has been mediated by art critics, art historians, cultural theorists, and not predominantly by philosophers: if you include broader philosophical traditions, then a first question is, Why not include Hegel? Jay, you’ve worked on this post-Kantian tradition. Would you like to come in at this point? Jay Bernstein: I’ve been interested in this debate, and I have a certain anxiety about it, because I’m afraid the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater. I’d like to say a little about what the bathwater is. James Elkins: You care about the bathwater? Jay Bernstein: Well, okay, the baby. I think of aesthetics as part of a debate about modernity in general. Kant wrote three critiques; on just about everyone’s view, the three critiques together sketch out a theory of modernity in conceptual terms. If you are Jürgen Habermas or Clement Greenberg, you will consider this a progressive understanding of the modern world in which science, morality, and art are purified and shown to be autonomous from one another. If you are Schiller or Adorno, you are going to consider the separating of knowing, morality, and art a form of destructive fragmentation, a rending of the fabric of subjectivity and society under the governance of a deformed conception of reason. So the obvious question is, Why three critiques? The first is notoriously about a theory of knowledge. It asks the question, What is it to be a modern subject who is both a knower of and inhabitant in a world whose true contours are given by Newtonian physics? Kant’s modernity begins with his emphatic acceptance of the truth of the Newtonian system, and so his account has nothing to do with God or gods or social practices. For Kant the world is radically disenchanted and emptied of meaning because it is taken to be solely causal and mechanical in its operations. The second critique is about morality. It says something like, modern morality is about—in my language, not in Kant’s— universalism: because every human being must be regarded as a self-determining agent, as autonomous, it follows that each must be regarded as possessed of inviolable dignity. Out of that Kantian insight come the discourses of individual liberty, human rights, and the idea that the individual has a claim and standing apart from society. Hence the first critique tells us what is, and the second tells us what we ought to do; the first comprises the grounds of all of knowledge, the second gives the framework for all of morality. For Kant, theoretical reason and moral reason together exhaust reason. If what is and what ought to be are already taken care of, what remains for the third critique? It seems nothing is left over. The third critique therefore arises as a puzzle. It is the puzzle character of the third critique that the Habermas-Greenberg understanding fails to see; for them, the third critique just is the story about what beauty and taste now are for us moderns. But if you are baffled by what beauty and taste could be about, the way Schiller

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and Adorno are, then you are going to suppose that something significant for human experience has been left out of the story of the world given by the first two critiques, that some abiding aspect of the human has been repressed. What is missing, broadly speaking, is the world as it appears to us, the world of sensuous particulars, and, what is nearly the same, the way individuals appear as individuals. On this account, aesthetics is the spaceholder for something that gets left out of these new authoritative practices of reason. Therefore, from the very beginning, aesthetics is about our dissatisfaction with modernity, with this now disenchanted world, with an account of the meaning of the world that leaves no space for loving it. Each artwork is unique, and yet each artwork lays a claim on us. Art is the interrogation of a possibility of how ordinary items, just things, can be demanding in themselves; how something merely factual, just this complexion of paint on canvas, can not only be meaningful, but lodge a claim. Artworks interrupt our merely instrumental engagement with objects, and further, demand a form of knowing that is also a feeling, a knowing by feeling, and feeling that is already a matter of knowing. If this account is anything like right, there is no distinction between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic: there are merely different ways of elaborating the autonomy of modern art. I therefore disagree radically with Jim’s picture, which he drew yesterday, that Modernism is about aesthetic claims, and anti-aesthetics is about politics.1 Whatever politics are involved, there is still the question, What kind of art-thing is it? What features are constitutive of our experience of modern, autonomous works of art? I think the question of the aesthetic—and this is present in Rancière and in Deleuze—is about the kind of experience such works provide, and so I do not see there is much difference between works that are overtly political and those that are not, nor between those aesthetic theories that are explicitly political like Rancière’s and those that are more epistemological or phenomenological like Deleuze’s. Michael Kelly: Jay, if the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic are different ways to respond to art’s claims on us, and if they implicate rather than cancel one another out, there is some important distinction between them for you, which you rightly say is not politics (as if politics were only on the side of the anti-aesthetic, as is sometimes said or assumed). Jay Bernstein: I don’t have a big theory about this, nor do I want to claim that with respect to the phenomena, the artworks, that there is a difference. I think the best way to handle the difference between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic is to think of them as two opposing ways of construing the same artistic stuff: the conservative way of late Greenberg, art purifying itself and discovering its true essence and all that, versus the radical Schiller-Adorno way, where art is the return of the repressed. Of course, taking those different stances matters

1. See the introduction for a summary.

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enormously both aesthetically and practically, but both concern autonomous modern art, whose radicality or significance depends on its categorial relation to modern knowing and morality. And in that guise I am minded, perversely, to say that every achievement of the aesthetic bears within itself the anti-aesthetic: the excessive, the interruptive, the more, the return. Eve Meltzer: Most of my formulations of the aesthetic are arrived at by way of the antiaesthetic, so I’ll have more to say when we come to that. But Jay, a lot of what you talk about in terms of the puzzle, and the gap between the two critiques, and what might exist in it—sensuous particulars, love, appearances—all that could be thought of in terms of affect. That is a category or term that people like Brian Massumi, Rei Terada, Lauren Berlant are thinking of after structuralism and poststructuralism. James Elkins: In historical terms, the turn to affect is recent. Jay Bernstein: Happiness is an affect. James Elkins: Yes, but you couldn’t get a university job teaching about affect until the 1980s. There’s a distinction to be made between a philosophic lineage and an art-historical plausibility. Eve Meltzer: That must be due to the claim that the affective doesn’t exist or isn’t available after poststructuralism, that it—as Jameson pronounced—“has waned.”2 Much of the artwork that gets categorized under the term “anti-aesthetic” could be said to reflect, refract, consider, or contest this claim. Perhaps the academy’s recent turn towards affect is something of the same gesture: a questioning of its suppression or repression within available discourses. Hal Foster: Can we back up for a moment? Diarmuid, in the formulation of “the anti-aesthetic” thirty years ago, we weren’t so stupid as to conflate Kant with Anglo-American formalism. In our superficial reading (we were young then and not widely read), what bothered us about aesthetic discourse à la Kant was this: as you suggest, Jay, it did seem to be a space of mediation, but one that was concerned above all with reconciliation—of judgments of fact and judgments of value, in the first instance, but soon enough of other kinds of conflicts and contradictions, too. That’s what bothered us: we construed the aesthetic as a space of resolution—of subjective integration and social consensus—and we wanted to question this conciliatory dimension. Certainly the art practices that had come to interest us were pledged against this kind of reconciliation. There was also a redemptive imperative in such definitions of the aesthetic (“art to heal art,” as Schiller says somewhere), and, like Leo Bersani, we felt that this was to cast our everyday experience as always already fallen, as just not worth a damn. 2. Frederic Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 1–54.

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Jay Bernstein: I just don’t see the difference between taking experience to be fallen and to be pledged against social consensus. To me those are two sides of the same coin. How not? I’m interested then in understanding the worry about consensus or redemption. Traditionally, aesthetic art has either mourned some lost past, or it’s been utopian. Both those moves deny the possibility of reconciliation now. Hal Foster: What examples do you have in mind concerning mourning or utopia? Jay Bernstein: I’m thinking of Schiller on aesthetic education, or of Yve-Alain Bois’s reading of Mondrian. It’s both redemptive and antiredemptive. It has a notion of reconciliation, just not for the present. Hal Foster: Right, as a figure of potential reconciliation, a given Mondrian painting might actually speak to the impossibility of that reconciliation in the present. I agree with you about the imbrication of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. I also have to admit that we totalized the aesthetic and reified it as a bad object for our own purposes. Mea culpa! But we were critics, not philosophers, in a very contested field of discourse and politics (which might be hard to imagine now). Jay Bernstein: Modernism, with its idea of the new, has consistently been the history of the repudiation of its own past objects as too easily reconciled, too redemptive. Was the anti-aesthetic thought of as a continuation of that? If the logical form of Modernism is, by being an achievement, already a reconciliation, and therefore requiring a break, and therefore dynamic— Hal Foster: Right— Jay Bernstein: Then what you say about the anti-aesthetic would be perfectly continuous with the history of Modernism. Hal Foster: It’s true: the version of postmodernism presented by the nefarious October group was an attempt to break with one model of Modernism, that associated with Greenberg above all others, but also to recover other models, ones displaced by the prestige of Greenberg. You need to say exactly what Modernism you mean there. The moment of The Anti-Aesthetic was also the moment of Reagan, and it was hard not to dissociate the cultural manifestations we opposed—neoexpressionist painting, postmodern architecture, etc.—from that political reaction. Unidentified speaker [question from the audience]: I’m interested in Jay’s characterization of the idea of carving out a separate sphere of art, distinct from science and natural history. Eve, I thought when you mentioned affect, you might be questioning that separation in a polite way, because if the aesthetic and morality are parts of the realm of affect, and if science also can’t escape it (after all, we’re all human), then perhaps the separation isn’t possible. Eve, maybe you didn’t mean that, but I’m interested in whether you think the distinction will hold.

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Eve Meltzer: Actually, I was thinking less about a way to question the distinctions drawn between art, science, and natural history and more about a way to reframe the questions and debates that have organized our thinking about the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic—as paired, opposing terms. How might we get “beyond the dichotomy,” as Jim has called us here to try to do? Even if some of us don’t think the dichotomy exists in the first place, recent discussions of affect certainly situate us to approach the matter from a fresh vantage. Jay Bernstein: A wonderful question. Everyone who has written about Kant after Kant has been taken up with exactly that worry. That’s what Schiller, the Schlegels, and Nietzsche are all worried about. Let me just make the worry worse. I cannot imagine a moment, in a foreseeable future, in which natural science is not authoritative about human knowing. Nietzsche is, I think, overly optimistic: he doesn’t get why modern science is so remarkable, and how intransigent its achievements are. I can also make the worry worse in the case of morality. Even if we agree that morality cannot simply be a set of rules and laws, the notion of equality under the law (a simple translation of Kant into social practice) is the condition of any modern society, the structuring principle for any imaginable modern society. So whatever it is art is banging its head against, modernity has deep commitments that are very formal, that go along with the growth of technology, and with a bureaucratic society, and that depend on these distinctions. We don’t know quite how to effectively challenge those frameworks—although a theory of pleasure might be a start. Art, where knowing and feeling, or appreciating and feeling, absolutely go together, is thus one of the places where that kind of critical thinking seems to happen. Gustav Frank: Jay, you’re avoiding the question of affect here, probably for the sake of the sublime. I think it’s important to understand that Kant’s critical project is a reaction to what he might have felt to be a provocation of the Enlightenment and its program of a far-reaching rehabilitation of sensuality and emotion. The problem with taking Kant to be the instigator of the aesthetic is that he’s afraid of the senses and the body taking command over reason and understanding. To get beyond the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic means to go back before Kant’s critiques. Jay Bernstein: Ugh. I have fudged a little. You are right about Kant. Danto chides Kant’s notion of disinterested pleasure by calling it “tepid gratification” and, even worse, “narcoleptic pleasure”! However, I am not sure how moving backward or forward will help much. After all, the issue, which Kant highlights perfectly even if he squirms while doing it, is how pleasure is related to cognition, how pleasure provides a form of encountering things, how a pleasurable response to them that is not merely causal—the pleasure of the taste of a ripe strawberry—is possible. If affect is part of the story of the return of the repressed, then it is that notion of affect that is at stake.

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Omair Hussain: I’d like to return to the exchange between Hal and Jay on the aesthetic as redemptive, or as a placeholder. I want to raise the thought-figure that reappears in Adorno of the aesthetic not as carving out or securing an autonomous space, but as marking an attempt to do so in the face of a recognition of its failure to do so under modern capitalism. It’s not about art being a “pure” sensual experience, but it’s an attempt to insist on such an experience denied by the instrumental and oppressive character of modern society, to attempt to assert an autonomy that does not exist as such. So rather than art being the realm of reconciliation, for Adorno it is precisely the arena where antagonisms are raised, where the impossibility of reconciliation is made apparent. The idea that all modern art is an interesting failure could find some resonance, I would think, with the anti-aesthetic. Jay Bernstein: That’s a nice place to mark the difference between my sense of the aesthetic and Greenberg’s. For me, for Schiller and Adorno, the notion of autonomy in art is a disaster—art losing its place in the world, being excluded from its role in the reproducing of everyday life. Modernist art is the kind of art that both fully acknowledges that it is constituted by this exclusion and, at the same time, rebels against it. So I agree that all Modernist works fail: they can only attain their worldly place, insinuating what a non-disenchanted thing would be, by acknowledging their autonomous existence. Artworks want to be things in the world, but they can only have their explosive power, their claim to authority, by being semblances. Art that is just art and nothing else thus begins in a calamity, namely its autonomy. Greenberg has always been unintelligible for me in that respect. I understood that autonomy belongs to the strength of art; but the thought that autonomy should be celebrated, rather than being a refuge, is incomprehensible to me. Hal Foster: Here again we encounter the difference between a philosopher and a historian (not that Jay has to represent all philosophers, or I can speak for all historians!). Jay, just then you supposed that autonomy was a given; for me it had (has) to be achieved: the autonomy of art, good or calamitous, was (is) a long struggle. Frank Stella says somewhere that the patron saint of painters in the West was the mason who figured out how to support windows in cathedrals to the point where light could penetrate the interiors, thus permitting painting to be to distinguished from the architectural ensemble, and so (we’re skipping a few steps here) to become an art in its own right. So even if we agree that autonomy was a disaster, it had to be achieved first, and then undergo a long period of critique, which is the fundamental project of the historical avant-garde according to Peter Bürger. (I still want to use the term “avant-garde” to distinguish that critical project from the autonomy project of Modernism.) Omair, to respond to your point about Adorno: he never ceases to be attractive despite his difficulty (or maybe because of it). Thirty years ago, however, he was not so attractive: the subtleties of the critical dimension of autonomy as

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Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

such seemed overwhelmed by the brute realities of Reaganite reaction, the AIDS epidemic (especially ferocious in the art world), the first moves of neoliberal economics, and so on. As Lukàcs once said, nastily enough, of Adorno, it didn’t seem like a good time to hole up in “Hotel Abyss.” Jay Bernstein: So Hal, you say Adorno’s move was not good enough. I take it the reason is that it simply makes that position of exile sufficient for political significance. If you’re just thinking that what makes art political is that it’s been thrown out of the political, then that is a wholly formalist move, without any particular social content. Adorno’s insistence that that is the only way modern art can be political is certainly something that is deeply insufficient. Gustav Frank: I see a lot of confusion in these traditions about the autonomy of art. To play the role of the historian here, I’d say we should go back to the mideighteenth century. That is when autonomy emerged as a logical consequence of the rehabilitation of the sensual world. Art was the place of this emancipation. It offered the space where intellectuals could experiment with what it meant that the hierarchy of senses, bodies, and reason was inverted. Under these auspices art as an activity responsible for the empirical everyday world and as itself appealing to the senses became a dominant sort of discourse, questioning the predominance of theology and philosophy. Autonomy therefore means art is no longer mere illustration of these dominant discourses, but free to deal with them in whatsoever way or even ignore them, mix them up, or reverse their relations. This sort of autonomy is not l’art pour l’art, though it is only completely political when it works together with such discourses. Levi Smith [question from the audience]: We’ve been mentioning Greenberg, but we haven’t been mentioning the other side, which is kitsch. The notion of autonomy needs to be continuously rehistoricized in relation to all the other products of culture that don’t get treated in aesthetic terms. Hal Foster: “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” is a place where Greenberg is not so far from Adorno. Just a few years before, Adorno writes to Benjamin that art and mass culture “are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.”3 In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” though, Greenberg talks less about autonomy than about keeping advanced culture alive and moving, in the face of the automatisms of kitsch (whether academic or political). “To keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion”: I think that’s the line. It’s not entirely clear what he meant, but it’s a more open proposal than a total commitment to autonomy. A year later, it’s true, with “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940), he does talk about autonomy, so the hardening happens fast. Diarmuid Costello: That’s right, Greenberg does talk about the avant-garde in 1939. The early account asks a social question: Why does the avant-garde arise? But that quickly calcifies into a more formal question: How does Modernism perpetuate

3. Letter to Benjamin, March 18, 1936.

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Introductory Seminar

itself?4 But even in the earlier account, what’s lacking is any recognition that this is not a one-way process. Tom Crow’s account seems more nuanced to me, because it recognizes a feedback loop between the avant-garde and the terrain vague of kitsch. For Crow, the avant-garde perpetually reinvigorates itself precisely by drawing on the terrain of kitsch, popular culture.5 But at this point I’d like to move us on to our second topic, the anti-aesthetic. I’d like to introduce it by way of a series of questions. First: What kind of concept of the aesthetic was in play in the conceptualization of the anti-aesthetic? Was it an antipathy for what might be called the most general, underlying claim of the aesthetic, the separation of art from social and political projects? Or was it something more specific, an antipathy for the most recent manifestations of the aesthetic in the art world? If it’s the latter, what kind of critique of that previous conception of the aesthetic was entailed? If you read October in the late 1970s and 1980s, there is talk about the deconstruction of Modernism, of strict separation of media, of distinctions between art and non-art, art and kitsch, high and low art—there are attacks on those kinds of oppositions. But was that a deconstructive operation—an opening of those discourses on their own internal contradictions—or was it more an inversion of the aesthetic? A second question: To what extent is the anti-aesthetic one thing? Is it a set of loosely allied tendencies, predicated on different targets? Third, and more generally: What is the relation between the anti-aesthetic and more general historical or critical terms like Modernism, postmodernism, and the historical and neo-avant-gardes? Is the anti-aesthetic an inheritance of Modernisms? (In which case it might be the shadow of the avant-gardes.) Fourth: What, specifically, is the relation between the anti-aesthetic and postmodernism? In 1981, Hal set up a now-famous opposition between a “postmodernism of reaction” and a “postmodernism of resistance.”6 Is the anti-aesthetic one expression of postmodernism in art, or is it, conversely, a theoretical discourse or set of discourses that take issue with various forms of postmodernism in art, for example, those captured in Jameson’s formulation? Finally, and most generally: Does the anti-aesthetic leave open any possibility that aesthetics and criticality might not be opposed? What are the prospects, if any, for thinking that one might not have to choose between the two? Hal Foster: I don’t really want to be the anti-aesthetic answer man here; I feel distant from the kid who proposed that opposition, and I was just one of many critics. But I’ll say a few things nonetheless. I don’t think we simply ran together the aesthetic and the Modernist. There were conflations, to be sure, some of which were stupidities, but some were strategic, too, in a polemical way. And it wasn’t just autonomy that concerned us 4. For more on the “how” and “why” of Greenberg’s Modernism, see Thierry de Duve, “Silences in the Doctrine,” in Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

5. See “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” reprinted in Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 6. Discussed in Section 3 of the Seminars.

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about Kantian aesthetics, however reified it had become for us. There was also its tendency to hypostatize one idea of art (that has run through our discussion this morning, and I imagine it will carry on through the week: the tension between the imperative to hypostatize and the imperative to historicize concepts of art), in particular to hypostatize art as disinterested, as “purposiveness without purpose.” That just didn’t fly with work of the time (think of Barbara Kruger and Hans Haacke, for example) that was explicitly feminist and interventionist. Diarmuid, you’re right that at times we inverted the aesthetic and the Modernist more than we deconstructed them. The rigidity of a Modernist notion of medium-specificity did prompt the laxity of a postmodernist medium-hybridity, and often that was simply a banal reversal, a mirror image. This is a claim that Michael Fried has made many times: that Modernist “objecthood” was confirmed by random acts of postmodernist “theatricality.” Critics involved in October were aware of the problem, and aimed to be as deconstructive as possible, but, again, the situation was polemical, and that often favors rhetorical oppositions. I don’t think the anti-aesthetic was (is) a coherent project. My title The AntiAesthetic was not deeply thought through (I was twenty-seven). It wasn’t like “I will now rally the forces of the anti-aesthetic and make war on the empire of the aesthetic.” Most importantly, the positions in the book aren’t coherent as a group; that’s what makes the book still interesting, at least for me. Finally, postmodernism was in part an effort to recover Modernisms, not to foreclose them, an effort to open up this reified category. Here some of us (Benjamin Buchloh in particular) did come to use the Bürger model of a historical avant-garde that emerges to challenge aesthetic autonomy. But we were also critical of his dismissal of the postwar neo-avant-garde as mere farcical repetition of that initial project. It dissed so much of the work that interested us— Rauschenberg and Johns, Manzoni and Fontana, Fluxus, Happenings, Oldenburg, Minimalism, Postminimalism . . . Equally important, at least to some, as such precedents of this work as Dada and surrealism were avant-gardes like Constructivism and the Bauhaus. I was formed above all by the Minimalists, and they recovered a Constructivism that Greenberg and others had made marginal or banal. We have already seen that most of us want to hedge a little on this old opposition of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic: certainly I do at this point. Diarmuid Costello: Do you think that even talking about these discourses in terms of the anti-aesthetic gets the conversation off on the wrong foot? When I reread the original texts for our seminars by Crimp, Owens, and others, I was struck by how often they used terms such as “aesthetic practices.” They’re not just talking about aesthetic practices that could have been understood in medium-specific or formalist terms. Retrospectively, it seems apparent that they were still concerned

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with the aesthetic, just not the aesthetic as understood as its then most recent and influential—i.e., Modernist—art-world expression. Do you think that labeling a set of practices too quickly as “anti-aesthetic” falsifies them? Hal Foster: No. Yet, again, it was reductive at times because it was polemical at times; you can’t revise that now—and certainly I wouldn’t want to. Plus, I think there are still stakes in this argument. Eve Meltzer: In relation to your question, Diarmuid: what does the anti-aesthetic do in relation to the thing called postmodernism? We need the terms “poststructuralism” and “structuralism” to elaborate the meaning of postmodernism in the context of your query. After all, structuralism is really what theoretically underpins the claims and polemics put forth in The Anti-Aesthetic. In my work I have been trying to think about the discourse of systems, specifically in conceptual art of the late 1960s and 1970s, sort of in a way that parallels Pamela Lee’s attempts to think about systems and structures—though she does it in relation to cybernetics, systems theory, and information theory.7 But it seems to me we haven’t really thought about how the figure of the system became so important for both structuralism as well as so-called anti-aesthetic art practices. Such practices had a particular relation to postmodernism and by extension to structuralism and poststructuralism: they represented a kind of phantasmatic field, we might say. That is to say that one could view the work of Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, or Mary Kelly, for example, as variable expressions of anxiety, celebration, fantasy, embrace, rejection, etc. of poststructuralist claims—the very claims worked through in Hal Foster’s volume. I am thinking of Owens’s essay, in particular, or Krauss on the expanded field. So we can’t just say that anti-aesthetic practices represent the claims of postmodernism. The relationship, I think, is much more fraught than that. Take, for example, Post-Partum Document, a work often offered up as exemplary of the anti-aesthetic. In large part what the work shows us is Kelly’s affection for structuralist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic discourses—well, really for discursivity itself and the kind of affects that those discourses were often couched within. Thus her affection, I would argue, is in fact for the aesthetic of disaffection (another way of characterizing the anti-aesthetic). That is what I mean when I say that the relation between the anti-aesthetic and postmodern discourses is fraught. Michael Kelly: Eve, would this be an example of an aesthetic, in this case Kelly’s, that is “arrived at by way of the anti-aesthetic,” as you put it earlier? And how do you see the rise of affect connected to the aesthetic determined by the antiaesthetic—say, affect in the form of disaffection, though combined with affection, as you’ve suggested? 7. Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

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Eve Meltzer: You mean precisely because we are still talking about attachment, cathexis, love—right? Even as we are caught up in the disavowal of such things. It is something like the return of the repressed, I guess, or at least the copresence of seemingly conflicting positions, which in fact are both of a piece. It is like Barthes said: the dream of structuralism, the fantasy of a masterful, disaffected scientism, was in fact “euphoric.”8 We were affectively attached to the promise of disaffection. So yes, affect doesn’t go away. James Elkins: Just a comment about our positions, as they are beginning to appear in this conversation. I mentioned yesterday the James Meyer and Toni Ross intervention in the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic question.9 They briefly acknowledge that their position is itself a development of the anti-aesthetic, that the problem they pose is made possible by developments within and after the anti-aesthetic. This is true, I think, of other texts. Why is it that criticality seems to inhere only in the anti-aesthetic, or is enabled by the anti-aesthetic, or needs to proceed from the anti-aesthetic? The few instances of authors who work on critical judgment from versions of the aesthetic—for example Thierry de Duve—often fail to figure in these discussions. I don’t mean their accounts are to be preferred; I am just noting that we are speaking of two traditions from a point of qualified allegiance to just one of them. So I wonder if some of the questions we mean to pose about criticality might be unanswerable. I am also concerned that we keep the reception of the anti-aesthetic as broad as possible. The Anti-Aesthetic is also read opportunistically, as a license to resist whatever forms of capitalism, or instrumentalized art practices, might be around. Eve Meltzer: I don’t think it’s a resistance to whatever is around. It’s the idea that meaning is contextual to an extreme; it’s resistance to particular humanist ideals about the subject, the productions of the subject, how we should think of them, and how we should make them intelligible. And I use that word thinking of Rosalind Krauss, for whom the intelligibility of something that seems unintelligible— in 1970s sculpture—was the central issue. So there were fairly specific things that the anti-aesthetic was working against. James Elkins: Yes. I was talking about the later reception, up to the present, and the wider readership and uses of the book. Diarmuid Costello: What do you mean by saying that if you pose the question of aesthetics and criticality in that form, they’re unanswerable? James Elkins: Whatever we mean by criticality seems to require some identification with positions we are thinking of as anti-aesthetic or postmodern. Meyer and Ross, for example, assign critical successes to people working in the field of the anti-aesthetic. 8. Barthes, “Réponses,” Tel Quel 47 (Autumn 1971): 97. 9. See the introduction.

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Hal Foster: This might not be helpful, but let me sketch a historical typology of some terms privileged in Modernist and postmodernist criticism. Put super-rapidly, for Greenberg and others “quality” was the key value; among other things it meant that a work in the present had to stand the test of the best work in the past. It thus involved an aesthetic judgment referred to tradition; a model of Modernism that privileged quality was not a break with history at all: it was an attempt to preserve it. Then people like Donald Judd came along and claimed that a work need only be “interesting,” and interest displaced quality as the favored criterion. Interest does not necessarily refer to tradition or even to aesthetic judgment proper; often just the contrary. It was an avant-gardist term, a provocation, but it still had to refer to other paradigms it wanted to challenge. (Come to think of it, this might be when talk about “paradigms” kicks in, a borrowing in from Thomas Kuhn on the history of transformations in science.) In a third moment, the anti-aesthetic or postmodernist one, interest is displaced by “criticality” as the central value. No one is exactly sure what that is, but, like pornography, we know it when we see it, right? That now seems to be displaced by various pretenders—“beauty,” “affect,” “celebration,” or some other opiate of the art-world masses. James Elkins: In the studio, “interest” is one of the code words for aesthetic appreciation, and “critical” would often be a code for things other than aesthetic. If you’re a student and your work is said to be interesting, and if the faculty member who says that isn’t just being lazy, it might mean is that your work has qualities other than verbal, conceptual ones. Hal Foster: That’s not how Judd meant it really, although there was more room in the aesthetic for interest than we thought at the time. James Elkins: I still don’t hear “beautiful” except in academic events like this one, and I haven’t heard “sublime” except in heavily modified forms. “Interest,” in the wider but possibly aesthetic sense, is very common. But anyway, in your schema and in the one I’ve experienced, aesthetic judgment gives way to several non- or anti-aesthetic criteria (Judd’s “interest,” “criticality”), and then to a wider field that might include returns of the aesthetic. Diarmuid Costello: Regarding this move from quality to interest to criticality to its various inheritors, a couple of questions arise. Would you make any distinction between “quality” and “conviction,” the former being Greenberg’s preferred term, the latter being Fried’s? Though both clearly require an evaluative judgment of the critic, the latter is arguably much more explicit about the historical location of the judgment at stake, namely, that a given work “compels conviction” in its ability to rival the highest achievements of past painting, sculpture, etc., now. And would you want to make a distinction between “criticality” and “complicity”? I’m thinking of the attempts made, in the mid-1980s, to float socalled Neo-Geo or Simulation artists on a kind of crypto-criticality, according

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to which they worked within existing structures with which their work seemed complicit, but with some residual claim to criticality. Hal Foster: Well, the term “conviction” is an important one for Fried, who is much less categorical than Greenberg about medium and indeed art. He often said that the test of quality is that a work compels conviction as art. That doesn’t presume a set definition; that needs to be posed and posed again. I took issue with “compel conviction” at one point because the art that interested me then was not at all about conviction: it was about skepticism and doubt. In a long introduction to his essays of the 1960s, Michael revisits this little argument we had, and says in effect that doubt and skepticism are weak moments of thought and feeling, and what really matters is conviction. He dismisses our concerns as trivial—and they’re not.10 But to your second point: the lines between deconstruction and complicity were blurred, in part because of that Derridean shibboleth that one can only work within a language to deconstruct it. That allowed all kinds of complicit work to pass (or to pretend to pass) as critical.

10. Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

2. t h e a n t i - a e s t h e t i c i n t h e 1 9 8 0 s craig owens’s “the allegorical impulse”

This seminar was led by Hal Foster. It centers on Craig Owens’s essay “The Allegorical Impulse” from The Anti-Aesthetic. The seminar took Owens’s essay as an exemplary moment in the original anti-aesthetic, and asked how it had been read in the 1980s and how it might be read today. Hal Foster: I take it as my brief to represent the anti-aesthetic position of thirty years ago. That’s hard: I no longer have a dog in that fight. I also feel somewhat distant from the speculative nature, even the wild theorizing, of these texts. I’m interested to know where they hold up and where they fall apart for you. I asked you to reread three texts in particular: Craig Owens’s, Douglas Crimp’s, and my own introduction, because they are the ones that relate most clearly to the anti-aesthetic. Owens and Crimp are also the most ambitious in terms of the reordering implicit in postmodernism, and in terms of the crisis of institutions we felt at the time. Let’s begin with Owens’s “The Allegorical Impulse.”1 This was a signal text in the theory of postmodernism, and its antiaesthetic allegiances are clear. I’m especially interested here in the differences and commonalities between the postmodern and the anti-aesthetic. I think the extremism of the rhetoric is difficult to understand without a sense of the first moment of Reaganism, the cultural politics of which was pitted against “the 1960s.” This had effects in the art world, too, which soon divided between those who wanted to stay loyal to the advances of that time and those who wanted to overturn them. The debate got strident, the rhetoric strained. This was also the moment of the American importation of principally French theory, which we were getting drunk on. Rosalind Krauss wrote a text in the late 1970s called “The Paraliterary” in which she argues that the great writers of that moment were not novelists or poets but critical theorists.2 So, too, if there was still an avant-garde, then, weirdly, it was not so much in art as in critical theory. If you were in graduate school at that point, the theory battles were intense and sectarian; whether you were a this, a that, or the other thing really seemed to matter. In “Three American Painters” (1965) Michael notes a displacement from politics to art in the avant-garde after the war—that the Trotskyite idea of “permanent revolution” had moved from the one the other.3 According to his lights 1. Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” pt. 1, October 12 (1980): 67–86, pt. 2, October 13 (1980): 58–80. 2. Rosalind Krauss, “Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary” (1981), in The Originality of the

Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994): 291–95. 3. Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella” (1965), in Art and Objecthood: (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 213–65.

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the project of radical innovation had stalled in politics but not in art. (In a way, it’s a version of the “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” argument, in which the avantgarde keeps culture moving.) Well, if this is true at all, there was a further displacement, in terms of radicality for my generation, from art to theory. Without a sense of that (deluded) avant-gardism, it is also difficult to understand the rhetorical heat of the texts in the Anti-Aesthetic. I haven’t reread these texts myself in a long time, and I’m a little unsure about how to approach them. Eve Meltzer said she doesn’t like to use the word “postmodernism”; that resistance might be interesting to explore. These texts might also have a bit of anti-aphrodisiac effect of the just-past. They seemed like catnip at one point; they may seem like cat poop now. So, to begin: the first thing that struck me is the ultra-leftism of the Owens text, right away, in the first sentence, where Owens presents Robert Smithson as the “liquidation” of an aesthetic tradition.4 James Elkins: It’s the liquidation of a ruin: two disasters in one sentence. Hal Foster: Yes, but on the next page he speaks about the allegorical as a mode of rescue.5 This seems very different from the Benjaminian idea of the allegorical as always already ruined. Another way in which this text is indicative of its moment is the way it moves through various theoretical universes, as if one could move with ease from Benjamin to Derrida and De Man and onward from there. Different approaches are confused, sometimes productively, sometimes not. James Elkins: What struck me reading was the question of his awareness of those jumps. The margins of my copy are annotated “illegitimate conclusion” (when he asserts that “the paradigm for the allegorical work is thus the palimpsest”), “unnecessary move” (the idea that “allegory becomes the model for all commentary”), “wildly unconnected” (the move from allegory as appropriation to appropriations in contemporary art).6 Some of these discontinuities are willed or hypothetical. Others, it seems to me, are not proposed as such, and I can’t distinguish the two. On page 71, for example, Owens says that the impermanence of site-specific work “suggests” photography has “allegorical potential.” That “suggestion” excludes the reader, and so at that moment the essay declares either a logic that readers won’t be sharing, or an obliviousness to connections that is itself baffling. Hal Foster: Those texts that concern Owens came to him, came to most of us, without context and simultaneously. They were put in play together, not processed, and connected to artistic practices, which were often also various. Sometimes it made for a killer punch, sometimes for a witches’ brew. But it did get lots 4. “In a review of Robert Smithson’s collected writings, published in this journal in Fall 1979, I proposed that Smithson’s ‘genius’ was an allegorical one, involved in the liquidation of an aesthetic tradition which he perceived as more or less ruined.” Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” 67.

5. Owens writes that what is “most proper” to allegory is “its capacity to rescue from historical oblivion that which threatens to disappear.” “Allegorical Impulse,” 68. 6. Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” 69.

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of people—artists, critics, curators, students—thinking. This is a typical early October essay in the sense that it moves less by argumentation than by juxtaposition. In a way it performs its object: it is an allegorical text, too. From start to finish the text is read through other texts. James Elkins: What would have been the models for that kind of text? Benjamin would have been another kind of model for an assembled text, but— Hal Foster: Not at that point; at least the Arcades Project was not well-known. You also have to remember how young these people were. Craig was twenty-nine when he wrote this amazing text, as a sometime graduate student but also as a public critic. Jay Bernstein: The original site of these arguments is the field between Romanticism and literature. I take it that the strategy is to see if the notion of the aesthetic can be treated the way in which Benjamin, De Man, and others treated Romanticism, especially the notion of the Romantic symbol: that was the dominant ideology that needed undoing in the literary world. The use of allegory just made obvious sense. I take it the structure of the argument is just “Let’s see if we can.” James Elkins: That’s interesting, because if the object of critique is Romanticism as it was understood by De Man and others, then this essay might have had other models in romantic literature itself. I’m just unsure about the idea of saying this is just the way graduate students built papers. Hal Foster: Jay, that sounds right. In a way, the money shot comes right at the end, with the quotation from Barthes about the need to challenge the symbolic.7 That was the mandate—to challenge a tradition, Romantic and Modernist, whose ideal was symbolic totality. In De Man, though, the symbolic is always already allegorical. Beáta Hock: Hal, maybe this is just the practice of the text, as you and Jim are implying. The task of the reader is the same as the task of the viewer of the artwork. Sven Spieker: Maybe the divisions are not that sharp. There is a performative aspect to the text. And it’s interesting that the author does not see what he discusses as being theoretical: he sees it as purely practical. In fact, he accuses traditional critics of excessive theorizing. On page 79 he writes, “These examples suggest that, in practice at least, Modernism and allegory are not antithetical, that it is in theory alone that the allegorical impulse has been repressed.” I think he is talking about the way we perceive theory as something abstract and decoupled from practice. The opposite is the case here: being theoretical is being, on the contrary, very practical and hands-on. 7. The quotation that ends Owens’s essay is “It is no longer the myths which need to be unmasked (the doxa now takes care of that), it is the sign itself which must be shaken; the problem is not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but

to fissure the very representation of meaning, is not to change or purify the symbols, but to challenge the symbolic itself.” Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” 80, quoting Barthes from Image, Music, Text.

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There is in Owens’s essay a rather simplistic understanding of the opposition between Modernism and historicism, which appears to be the organizing principle of the text. Historicism is not the same as traditionalism. With its insistence on presence and present, historicism is in a sense the opposite of the fixation on the past that we commonly associate with traditionalism. And in this capacity, historicism is in many ways the organizing matrix for Modernism and its obsession with presence. But Hal, given your contextualization of this essay, it appears that at the time historicism implied little more than traditionalism. Hal Foster: I don’t know. We took the Benjaminian theses on the philosophy of history quite literally: historicism was bad, and there had to be another way to do history (Nietzsche on “the uses and abuses of history” was also read furiously at the time). In The Anti-Aesthetic and in October generally, historicism was the bad object. Rosalind Krauss says so, emphatically, in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” One critique of the Owens essay was that it led Craig, in his attempt to theorize postmodernism, back to the origins of Modernism; he gives us a Modernist genealogy of the allegorical impulse. Here again we should remember that this postmodernism was also concerned to recover a different sense of Modernism. For me that was a merit, not a fault, of the text. Joana Cunha Leal: But you can’t help feeling that he ends up showing the exact contrary of his argument. Hal Foster: Not if you understand postmodernism less as a post than as a revision that allows artists and critics and others to move forward. That was really the project, and that may be where the project is different from the rhetoric. The rhetoric is all about rupture. Joana Cunha Leal: His references go back to the emergence of Modernism. He brings in Baudelaire, Courbet, Manet, and even collage, mentioning the possibility of an alternate reading of Modernist works, one that would fully acknowledge their allegorical dimension. Sven Spieker: But why should the difference between postmodernism and Modernism be absolute? Hal Foster: Yes, the text comes across as both/and, but not the author, oddly enough. That is especially the case at the very end, when Craig gives his influential exposition of Modernist critique versus postmodernist deconstruction. James Elkins: I wonder if we’re developing a reading of this text that does not permit us to say exactly how it positions itself between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic: I mean we have a sense of how some claims work to distinguish and relate the two, but we don’t have a sense of how the rhetoric supports that. The text is “practical” and perhaps “performative,” but I’m assuming we wouldn’t want to

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say that is an optional illustration of ideas in the text. I worry that if we can’t find a way to think about that, but at the same time we take the rhetoric and narrative as indispensably part of the text, then we’re effectively saying that we cannot locate the position of the argument. Harper Montgomery: As an undergraduate during the early nineties, I read this text repeatedly. It opened up an incredible number of ways to analyze works. It was not so much a matter of argument as of providing us with the rhetorical resources we needed to reposition artistic practices that had been considered marginal. The terms Owens groups under allegory—especially “appropriation” and “hybridization”8—opened up entirely new possibilities for arguing for the importance of works that had been devalued by the cultural politics of the 1980s. James Elkins: And that is why it’s so important to ask about what models—even peripheral ones—enabled this particular constellation, palimpsest, accumulation, juxtaposition of theoretical sources, applications, and assertions. It is, in many ways, a central model for the possibilities of serious academic art-historical writing, even, especially, by scholars who would never identify themselves as inheritors of that moment, or of October. Michael Kelly: But this is a curious model for critics or theorists interested in critique, for argumentation is said to give way to rhetoric or performance, and normative concepts are used descriptively and strategically without any sense of accountability. Not that we cannot juxtapose concepts (for example, the anti-aesthetic itself ), but we can’t lose sight of their normativity when we do, especially because we juxtapose them strategically in order, among other aims, to generate new norms or destabilize old ones. James Elkins: But you’re assuming art history and theory aren’t always losing sight of what you call “normativity”: they do; they don’t even know the word. Hal Foster: Normative? I don’t know if these texts are still part of any normativity. And at the time, in 1980, this one was just a musket shot in downtown Manhattan. James Elkins: I am also curious about the ways texts like this are currently read in seminars, and how they have been read over the last thirty years. This may be another inappropriately slow reading on my part, but in my experience some students read this opportunistically, by which I mean paragraph by paragraph, usually skipping paragraphs. In my experience, in graduate seminars, it is read carefully at first, but then larger issues emerge, as they have for us, and there is no longer much citation of individual passages and transitions. The passages on page 71 that I was mentioning, for example, are openly, declaratively, associative, and that gives readers the license to read accordingly. (Are photographs allegorical 8. “Appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hyridization— these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its modernist predecessors.” Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” 75.

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“because what they offer is only a fragment”? That seems almost a dare to the reader to float above the text rather than plowing through it claim by claim.) Hal Foster: Yes, the text is associative. A chief problem in art for a number of critics then was its randomness. In this text, Craig wanted to find a term that might provisionally hold together a wide range of practices. It seemed that the allegorical might be a great metatheoretical concept, but in fact it didn’t have much effect—not in the way that the indexical did vis-à-vis photography, for example. A key moment for me is when Craig writes of a text as an allegorical doubling of another text.9 That suggested that textuality was spatial, which was a helpful way to think about any number of art practices of the period as they moved into questions of discourse and institution. Also, this is the first text that uses the concept of appropriation as a way to think the relation between propriety and property; that, too, was key. James Elkins: So perhaps there are two forms of reception. One is an intermittent reading, which is itself intermittently performed; the other is the question of the text as a whole, which licenses certain discussions about Modernism and other terms. The relation between those two levels is itself not thought of. Jay Bernstein: That is actually part of the text. It is a polemic, an intervention, and so it is unsurprising if it is that. Gretchen Bakke: The structure of the text is very similar to the Rauschenberg Allegory that Owens analyzes. I forgave him a lot when I found that similarity. When you’re inside a complicated system, it’s easy to reproduce yourself in that system— There is a way in which the stitching in the text and in the image is very unLacanian. It isn’t finding just one quilting point; it’s stitching. I am glad to hear that allegory wasn’t taken up from this text, because I came out having no idea what allegory is, except that it’s the one colored thread by which we can compile a world. The question is, What kind of world can be built out of this? Hal Foster: That’s brilliant, although I am not sure how reflexive it was. This is one of the vicissitudes of the textual. On the one hand, it can be just assemblage; on the other hand, it can be a new performative space where new voices are put into play. The Barthes quotation about the text was a Rosetta Stone for many of us. Sven Spieker: This is a reading of collage through Saussure. Owens quotes Benjamin selectively: on page 84, he says, “allegory . . . proceeds from the perception that ‘any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.’ ” That’s a very Saussurean claim. 9. Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” 69: “as Northrop Frye indicates, the allegorical work tends to prescribe the direction of its own commentary. It is this metatextual aspect that is invoked whenever allegory is attacked as interpretation merely appended post facto to a work, a rhetorical ornament or flourish. Still, as Frye contends, ‘genuine allegory is a structural

element in literature; it has to be there, and cannot be added by critical interpretation alone.’ In allegorical structure, then, one text is read through another, however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may be; the paradigm for the allegorical work is thus the palimpsest.”

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James Elkins: But I would still be concerned that a Rauschenberg collage, or metaphors of stitching, or the notion (which I think is more recent than Owens’s text) of the text as performative, or the idea that we can’t help mimicking what we represent, doesn’t explain this text too much. If it were simply those things, if those metaphors were adequate to account for the text, then “The Allegorical Impulse” would be a text where arguments and form have a determined relation. I think it matters that we don’t have a model that accounts for the relation between argument and rhetoric in texts like “The Allegorical Impulse,” because large swaths of art history are modeled on something generically similar— successions of theory sources, abrupt transitions, suppositional connections with practice, putatively self-evident connections with practice . . . it may have been a model for practice and theory, or even theory as art, but it has become a model for academic art-historical practice, so I think we need more work on exactly how the text has been read, from its inception to the present. Sorry to insist on this: it seems to me the lack of connection between talk about theory in the text, and the forms of that theory, are part of the reason our subject this week is so difficult. Gustav Frank: Jim, I think you are right to decipher the textual architecture of Owens as a sort of forerunner that has legitimized the design of theory ever since. The text is influential above its own shattered intentions, and it’s the text’s momentum that deserves our attention. Hal was quite right when he quoted Rosalind Krauss from the “The Paraliterary” earlier—she demanded that the great artists of that moment be critical theorists. What was new around 1980 was this strategic acceptance of the Schlegelian claim on the part of the theorists: theory not only as art but as the only possible art practice. Thus, the blind spot in Owens is probably the anxiety that the empire of art may strike back and theorize about all that artful theory. Doesn’t the Post-Partum Document to some extent embody that anxiety? Sunil Manghani: I think a lot of people now feel an affinity with Owens’s kind of writing, but they don’t know exactly how to place it. There is a tendency to write (and think) as Owens does, but still it is difficult to place it in terms of scholarly status, and also quite literally in terms of where such writing gets published. Books such as Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe,10 for example, which offers rigorous enquiry, yet bravely refuses to close down its arguments (which are often highly visual at times), seem extremely rare. Personally, I feel Barthes’s line at the end has remained really enigmatic. Culturally we get it, we have assimilated its logic (that was Barthes’s point, that “myth today” had become part of the doxa). But professionally and critically we’ve yet to fully grasp or articulate an operative mode. It is easy to read Barthes’s line “the sign itself . . . must be shaken” as a battle cry, but I think it is as much a plea simply to catch up with what is already going on. Owens captures 10. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

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something valuable in this sense, yet it reads as distantly now as Barthes’s line itself. Gustav Frank: I want to add an extrinsic perspective to that logic Hal reconstructs. When postmodernism came to Germany, in 1982 or 1983, an experience summarized in Wolfgang Welsch’s Anästhetik, it was the first time that we tried to catch up with American sources and thought.11 By and by they replaced French grand theory as the usual corpus of reference. Basically, we used examples from the Anglo-American context. Later it was new historicism, and now it’s visual culture. Hal, do you think this visual episteme is a particularly American comingof-age in theory? If you think of literature from France from the period, Régis Debray or others—they are weak in theory. You have mentioned political developments: but can the change we are discussing also be located on an epistemological basis? For example, how it might be possible to deal with European traditions? Was the moment we are considering a provocation? Hal Foster: The celebration of the epistemological break was a French disease that many of us contracted. It is rife in “The Allegorical Impulse” and other texts. This celebration of rupture now seems long ago and far away; many of us seem more interested in narratives of persistence and survival. Gustav, earlier you said Kant should be considered to be the end of a tradition, rather than the beginning of the modern subject of the aesthetic. One thing that has puzzled readers of “The Allegorical Impulse” is its insistence on the melancholic, on a very bleak picture of the postmodern. One critique of this text concerned the passivity of this melancholia: even as Craig gives us marching orders for postmodernism, he also enjoins us to contemplate the ruins of modernity. Sven Spieker: The melancholic aspect might be the part that is most difficult to assimilate to the American context. Gustav Frank: Sven, the motivation for my claim was not melancholy, it was polemic. Kant, more than anyone else, felt the threat that the alliance between sensuality and the arts put on philosophical discourse from the 1770s onward. He wanted to regain and secure control over this alliance. So there is no puzzle, as Jay assumes. Kant systematically, throughout his three critiques, dismissed all attempts to construct an independent art. James Elkins: In this context, I think it may be worth noting that the quotation from Benjamin that introduces melancholy, on page 70, presents it as something that 11. Jean-François Lyotard was translated in 1982 as Das postmoderne Wissen: Ein Bericht (Bremen: Verlag Impuls, 1982). Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken (Stuttgart: Reclam 1990). I think Jonathan Culler’s reception in Germany is a good indicator here. While his Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1975) was seen as just another contribution to a well-known field, his On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) was received as something fresh and original; it was translated and published in paperback as Dekonstruktion (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988).

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generates allegory. The line is “the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy.” But in Owens’s text, allegory is a strategy, a response to pre-existing conditions. In my reading, that misuse speaks for an intense desire on Owens’s part to have something happen. Hal Foster: He resists this melancholic mode at moments. But it is hard for me to hold those two modes together. Another odd thing about the text is that Craig is able to talk about the allegorical without mentioning capital. This is a situation where the poststructuralist in Owens could not abide the Marxist.

3. t h e a n t i - a e s t h e t i c i n t h e 1 9 9 0 s the body

This seminar was led by Hal Foster. The participants read Foster’s preface to The Anti-Aesthetic; an essay by Yve-Alain Bois on the informe, published before the book Formless: A User’s Guide (1996); and Foster’s essay “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” which was an early study for his book The Return of the Real (1996).1 The subject of the seminar is the development of the anti-aesthetic from its initial form in the 1980s into a theory centered on Bataille, the informe, and representations of the body and materiality. Hal Foster: I used age as a defense for Craig, who was twenty-nine when he wrote his text; I was twenty-seven when I wrote my introduction, so you could say I didn’t know better. In my text, too, there is a slippage between ideas of Modernism and ideas of modernity, and there is no reference to the relation between Modernism and modernization, even though I argue for periodization in the preface. Those are just two of the problems that leap out at me now. Regarding the opposition between resistant and reactionary postmodernisms, which had a little life of its own: two years after this preface, I wrote a text that argued that both sides demonstrated the same logic of reification and fetishization, that they were not so dissimilar after all. (That was typical of the ultra-leftism of theory then—to denounce a position one moment that you held the moment before.) As much as I shared many of the same theoretical references with Owens and Crimp—the smattering of Benjamin and others—there was a Jamesonian dimension in my thinking, evident here, that they did not have. I suppose for us today the interest of the preface is the last bit, where I stumble on the term “anti-aesthetic.” I already mentioned that the title was not thought through, and yet, though some of the things in this passage are clichés of postmodernism now, they weren’t then—they seemed very important. Diarmuid Costello: When I was at art school in the late 1980s—at least during the time I spent at NSCAD,2 a remarkably cosmopolitan and clued-up art school on Canada’s isolated Eastern Seaboard—the prominent book on reading lists was not The Anti-Aesthetic so much as Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, fondly referred to by students as “the Bible.”3 In the context of a 1. The participants read Bois, “To Introduce a User’s Guide,” in the grouping of texts “Formless: A User’s Guide: Excerpts,” October 78 (1996): 21–37, which is slightly different from the text in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (1996): 106–24; and Foster,

The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 2. Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. 3. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, edited and with an introduction by Brian Wallis (New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). In this volume, see Hal Foster,

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conversation about shifting theoretical allegiances, it’s interesting to recall Hal’s contribution to that collection, reprinted from a 1982 issue of Parachute (but according to a note written in winter 1980), titled “Re. Post.” In other words, prior to the publication of The Anti-Aesthetic, right? In that paper Hal is already taking issue—referring to Owens’ “The Allegorical Impulse” in particular—with what he calls the “orthodoxy of the purloined image.” So as early as 1982, or even 1980, the critical discourse surrounding appropriation and postmodernism, the so-called “postmodernism of resistance,” was being internally critiqued in turn. Joaquín Barriendos: Concerning the dissemination of the book in Spanish, it is interesting to note the translation, done in 1985, is simply La Posmodernidad.4 Despite its early publication (in Barcelona, in 1985) and generalized reception, in the academic circles of cities such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Barcelona, the “postmodern” debate and the critique of the “grands récits” of Western philosophy of art ran pretty much independently of the political agenda of the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic debate as it was sketched in the States during the early 1980s. So in Spanish, the debate concerned postmodernity, rather than the anti-aesthetic.5 It was only very recently, after the translation of diverse texts related to the October group by the Spanish publishing house Akal, that the poststructuralist Anglo-American anti-aesthetic debate was incorporated as such into the agenda of Spanish-speaking critical theory.6 This makes me think we should reconsider the concept of rupture in the longue durée. Postmodernity, in Latin America in the 1980s, had to do with modernity, from the sixteenth century onward: colonial domination, proto-racisms, the epistemic inferiorization of the non-Western world, the transatlantic capitalist/ mercantile order, and uneven development among other issues. Thus, the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic debate has two different forms: a long account and a short one. That’s why it requires a geocultural as well as a decolonial analysis.7 Maybe these are terms in which we could consider the anti-aesthetic debate today. Hal Foster: Thanks for those important differences. I didn’t track the dissemination of The Anti-Aesthetic too closely, but it did disturb me when the English publisher retitled it Postmodern Culture, because it wasn’t about that primarily: it was about a particular idea of postmodernist practice. Even though I sometimes “Re-Post,” 189–201, reprinted from Parachute 26 (Spring 1982): 11–15. According to a postscript added for its republication in this volume, it was drafted in New York in winter 1980, that is, shortly after “The Allegorical Impulse” first appeared. 4. La Posmodernidad, edited by Hal Foster (Barcelona: Kairós, 1985). 5. Beyond the editorial reasons and marketological impulses which motivated the elimination of the idea of the anti-aesthetic in the title, we have to acknowledge that the election of the term “postmodernity” when the original elaborates on the idea of the “postmodern culture” suggests a very different point of departure.

While postmodernism is usually perceived as a reaction against a series of aesthetic, literary, political, and social Western traditions derived from the European Enlightenment, “postmodernity” tends to be understood rather as a global historical condition, that is, as the overcoming of modernity as a “longue durée” period and expanded cultural geography. 6. Krauss, Pasajes de la escultura moderna (Madrid: Akal, 2002); Foster, El Retorno de lo real: La vanguardia a finales de siglo (Madrid: Akal, 2001); Arte desde 1900: Modernidad, antimodernidad, posmodernidad, edited by Foster (Madrid: Akal, 2006); Douglas Crimp, Posiciones críticas: Ensayos sobre las políticas de arte y

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regret The Anti-Aesthetic as a title, it did capture the antisymbolic imperative in such practices. There was a particular model of Modernism in the book—as noted, a Greenbergian one—which we might have made more central than it was through our sustained opposition to it. And that understanding of Modernism didn’t make sense in Spain and Portugal, to be sure, but even in France, Germany, and elsewhere (it is not, for example, what modernismo means at all). Lyotard published his book on postmodernity in France in 1979, and you see its effects, for example, in the Owens text “The Discourse of Others”: he  wanted to put the critique of grand narratives in play in his advocacy of feminist art. But the longue durée of modernity was not really on our minds; the twinned fates of Modernism and postmodernism were. In retrospect The AntiAesthetic is a parochial book. Habermas appears, and Baudrillard and Said, but it is Manhattan-heavy. James Elkins: The dissemination of The Anti-Aesthetic can be traced, in part, by the later dissemination of Greenberg worldwide, because interest in Greenberg has followed interest in Anglo-American postmodernism.8 Joana Cunha Leal: There is no Portuguese translation of The Anti-Aesthetic— Hal Foster: It is not in French, or German either— Joana Cunha Leal: I therefore had to read the Spanish translation. Today it is wellknown; everyone cites it. But where I come from, apart from very rare exceptions, nobody knew who Greenberg was at least until the early nineties. It was through the reading of October criticism that Greenberg became an issue in Portugal. He didn’t exist before in Portuguese accounts of Modernism. It was through October’s writing that Greenberg became reified. James Elkins: That is excellent! Hal Foster: For you, maybe; it makes me want to jump out the window. But on to the informe, our second topic for this afternoon. Bataille began to appear in the theoretical mix in the mid-1980s, as I recall. Rosalind Krauss staged her exhibition of surrealist photography in 1984–85, which, despite its title (L’Amour fou), was Bataillean in spirit. October published a special Bataille la identidad (Madrid: Akal, 2005); Benjamin Buchloh, Formalismo e historicidad: Modelos y métodos en el arte del siglo XX (Madrid: Akal, 2004), among others. 7. On the decolonial critique of the aesthetic thinking see Arte y estética en la encrucijada descolonial, edited by Walter Mignolo and Zulma Palermo (Buenos Aires: Del Signo, 2009); Walter Mignolo, “Decolonial Aesthesis,” Calle 14 4, no. 4 (2010): 10–25; Joaquín Barriendos, Geoestètica i transculturalitat: Polítiques de representació, globalització de la diversitat cultural i internacionalització de l’art contemporani (Geoaesthetics and transculturality: Global

cultural diversity, politics of representation, and the new internationalism in contemporary art) (Girona: Fundació Espais d’Art Contemporani, 2006); Joaquín Barriendos, “The Coloniality of Seen: Visuality, Capitalism and Epistemic Racism,” in Arte, Estética y Decolonialidad (Quito: OEI, 2010). 8. Some examples are discussed in my Master Narratives and Their Discontents, with an introduction by Anna Arnar, Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts 1 (Cork, Ireland: University College Cork Press; New York: Routledge, 2005).

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issue, and Denis Hollier’s crucial book on his thought was translated.9 As the philosopher of the informe, Bataille was the final nail in the formalist coffin (or so we thought); he also provided one way to come to terms with the turn to the body in art and theory alike (Bakhtin offered another). This may seem like ancient history, so I’m interested to know what remains of this fascination with Bataille for you all. James Elkins: I found that when Formless: A User’s Guide first appeared, it had an enormous impact on student arts, young artists, in art schools and art departments. That appeal has somewhat declined, but the book continues to be used. I find that artists do not always make a distinction between the informe and the abject, even though Formless of course contains a trenchant critique of the abject. Hal Foster: The abject, for Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, was on the side of meaning, of the semantic; that was the problem, from a Bataillean point of view, for them. The informe, on the other hand, was an operation, not a meaning; in fact it was an operation of un-meaning, of unmaking meaning. Sven Spieker: I am interested in Bois’s linkage of violence with indifference, and the idea that there may be such a thing as “violent indifference.” This reminds me of Deleuze’s interpretation of Bacon, which makes a similar claim.10 This is part of the deconstruction of the form/content distinction that Formless is partly about. Bois calls Manet’s indifference literally an “attack”: “Manet’s indifference is not a simple retreat into the ivory tower of ‘purely formal experiment’; it’s an attack.”11 Hal Foster: I think he means that the draining away of meaning from a historical event, like the execution of Maximilian in the hands of Manet, can be construed as an act of violence. Eve Meltzer: Interesting that you should bring up indifference, because of course “indifference” as well as “difference” are key terms throughout the essays that comprise The Anti-Aesthetic. With respect to “difference”: there is the notion of sexual difference, the difference that constitutes the so-called “other,” all of which derives from the fundamental, linguistic concept of difference that Saussure brought to light. We can’t have the “postmodern” without difference. So what is worth thinking about here is how we might conceptualize “difference” when it appears over and against the less stable figure of “indifference.” They form a strange sort of binary, one which I hesitate to even call a binary. Sven, you pointed us to “indifference” in certain contexts; in Owens’s essay, he writes about it in this way: “Pluralism, however, reduces us to being an other among others; it is not a recognition, but a reduction of difference to absolute indifference.” What’s interesting to me is the way the meaning of indifference vacillates between the idea of 9. “Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing,” special issue, October 36 (Spring 1986); Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Krauss, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York:

Abbeville Press, 1985); Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 10. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), translated by Daniel Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 11. Bois, “To Introduce a User’s Guide,” 17.

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“equivalence, interchangeability,” as Owens says, as well as the affective state of indifference, whereby all things are equal, interchangeable, equivalent, amounting to a lack of affective investment. To me, this term, then, reopens discussions of difference in interesting ways. Michael Kelly: Eve, can you say more about the links between difference, indifference, and the anti-aesthetic? Eve Meltzer: The anti-aesthetic seems to me—at least in its conceptualist iterations— to be all about the experience and/or image of “indifference,” even as difference, as I defined it above, is in play. Think about Hans Haacke’s aesthetic strategies from this period—his quasi-documentary mode—or Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems. One could describe them as the intertwining of notions and images of indifference (i.e., disaffection), indifference (i.e., interchangeability), and difference. Hal Foster: The complication of difference was one reason why Bataille became important—though for some feminists all he did was collapse difference. A key Bataillean notion is altération, by which he intends an operation of oscillation rather than inversion that renders unstable all terms involved. Think of Giacometti’s Suspended Ball: a ball form is suspended on a string, and cannot touch a wedge form that it seems to want to glide along, but the ball is also cleft and the wedge form is also like a banana. It renders signifiers of sexual difference unstable. Rosalind Krauss used that work as an example of this idea of altération in action, and it’s neither difference nor indifference. Sven Spieker: More simply, if Manet is the beginning of Modernism, then to say Manet isn’t only purely ornamental isn’t to say that he is, on the other hand, expressive. He is neither the one nor the other: but that doesn’t make him nothing. Hal Foster: That’s right. It might be useful for us to consider the four major examples in the informe, which Bois and Krauss go on to pressure. They are posed as “debasements” of Modernist tenets: “horizontality against the primacy of the visual (and the verticality of its field); base materiality against the tyranny of form and idea (high) over matter (low); pulse against the exclusion of materiality as permeated by desire; entropy against structure and totality.”12 At the time some of us were interested in the nature of that against. Was it opposition, deconstruction, sublimation, desublimation, or some form of declassification? What kind of operation was it, and was it different in each instance? We were especially concerned because we did not want this against to be simple oppositions. I don’t think that was ever resolved, but logic takes you only so far with material like this. James Elkins: I think logical analyses of these terms run into very confused moments, when Rosalind Krauss has necessarily to use connected argument to propose 12. Bois, “To Introduce a User’s Guide,” 32, in italics following the body of the text.

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nonlogical concepts.13 But in reference to this passage, I wonder if asking what kinds of operations these are doesn’t reconceptualize the text, because if the informe is an operation, the against is an operation of the operation. Hal Foster: Simply put, my concern was that Yve-Alain and Rosalind were mining the underside of Modernism and, weirdly, elevating it, even resublimating it, in the process, even though the watchword then (and still now, in some quarters) was “desublimation.” Omair Hussain: Following on Jim’s point, I wonder how much of a distinction there is between these “operations” and similar notions of art as rhetorical that were popular in the early moments of the anti-aesthetic. It seems that though the informe talks about “visual” work, it’s not really about the aesthetic or visual experience of the work itself, but about a rhetorical inversion the work is understood to be embodying. You could understand the “operation” at play in the work without needing to even see it. Hal Foster: I think I disagree: in part the informe grew out of a fatigue with the rhetorical model or at least the textual model. It was all about the actuality of the material and the corporeal. Omair Hussain: But how far does the informe actually move from the textual? The visual or the bodily is treated as merely the objectification of a rhetorical intention. Call it an operation, foil, maneuver . . . all these terms suggest the work’s criticality is located in the fact that the work is against something, treating the work as reducible to a conceptual ploy. Despite using a variety of “visual” artwork as examples, this essay is an example of how the anti-aesthetic has had a tight grip on how we can understand works of art to be critical. This model of criticality is fundamentally textual. Jay Bernstein: I see this as a very modest essay. Bois wants a more capacious Modernism, one that can effectively acknowledge whatever one takes Pollock or de  Kooning or Cindy Sherman’s horror pictures to be doing.14 Whatever the informe was, Bois gave it an emphatic visual sense, which is one I resonate with. So a broader kind of visual Modernism. Hal Foster: That’s right, and this advocacy is by nature polemical and so, at least in part, rhetorical. Krauss, for example, is a very agonistic thinker, and her reading of Pollock, say, through the Bataillean notion of a base materialism does not purport to be a total reading. Her insistence on the messy horizontality of the drip paintings is made against the Greenbergian account of those works as pure 13. I argue this about the attempt to define “pulse” using Lyotard and Freud in On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14. Bois, “To Introduce a User’s Guide,” 29: “For us it is thus a matter of redealing modernism’s cards—not of burying it and conducting the manic mourning to which, for many years

now, a certain type of ‘postmodernism’ has devoted itself, but of seeing to it that the unity of modernism, such as it had been constituted through the opposition of formalism and iconology, is fissured from within and that certain works can no longer be read as they were before (one will not forget the fried egg when faced with a Pollock, for example).”

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optical mirages, set perfectly in front of you. The theory is a way to be as true as possible to the experience of the work; it is not simply imposed, Omair. (If I had a dollar for every time I have heard that criticism, I could retire.) Diarmuid Costello: So what’s wanted is just to retrieve what’s missing? Hal Foster: Yes, to retrieve, not necessarily to substitute, but also not merely to fill in. I wish Krauss and Bois had borne down a little more on the concept of altération, which is not substitution, inversion, or opposition. Gretchen Bakke: Yes, and there is a motion, an emotion, to altération, that substitution, inversion, or opposition lack. James Elkins: In terms of thinking about where this text is today, there’s something necessarily insufficient about talking about the text in terms of what works as criticism, theory, or argument. That’s because the text, Formless, has presented itself as a set of operations, a “user’s guide,” and artists perform the entries in a literal sense. The Nachleben of the text is also played out in studios, where the enlarged “Dictionary” is used “against” any number of practices. Diarmuid Costello: So what started out as a text about a supposedly desublimatory impulse in art has ironically now degenerated into a kind of School of Desublimation. Jay Bernstein: Realism was experienced, in the past, as fully uncoded, as the world set free of any kind of order. The text is a theory of the continuation of modern art. Hal Foster: Everything’s modern art to you! Jay Bernstein: I mean Modernism as self-conscious; this text is a set of moves that has little to do with Bataille. For me, Bataille is about mistakenly thinking Kojève was right about the end of history, and that there had to be more to life than Japanese tea ceremonies.15 Bois doesn’t seem to be a crazy Bataillean, but someone searching for a sense of Modernism that goes back to Manet. When I read this text, I didn’t think it was radical. James Elkins: Do you think Matisse would have liked Formless? Jay Bernstein: I think he would have loved it. I do. I just don’t see the edginess. Hal Foster: Jay, according to your idea of Modernism, it’s all edge . . . and so no edge at all. Jay Bernstein: No, not theoretically. But practically, in art, the edge is always being blunted, so it has to be continuously reproduced. It is not an easy operation, I agree. I’m not devaluing it: I’m wondering what is the right way to embrace it, a nonagonistic way. The notion of the anti-aesthetic is too agonistic in its rhetoric, and this book strikes me as what we, having gone through this history, think 15. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, translated by James H. Nichols (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 159–62n6.

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of as having permeated Modernism. So it is not a moment of rupture, but of a new capacity to understand what was there in the first place. Hal Foster: I don’t think Yve-Alain would disagree. Bois and Krauss are committed Modernists, after all. Omair Hussain: I want to follow up Jim’s comment about how the book plays out in art school contexts now. It is used as a manual, often as a way of making visual work, and justifying the work’s criticality. An artist may be visually interested in an object, but then leans it against the wall so that it fits the contemporary understanding of underplay as rhetorically critical. This text has supplied a default understanding of “critical” for contemporary art . . . theatrically celebrated modesty as pitted against hegemonic ambitions of the past. I’m thinking of the Unmonumental show put on at the New Museum,16 or more recently, (Lean) at Nicole Klagsbrun.17 James Elkins: I also want to ask about Formless as a book. It is a very strange book in terms of disciplines: it is written by people who identify themselves as art historians, and it proposes itself as radically, impeccably scholarly. That beginning, on Manet, is dense with footnotes and scholarly references. And yet, at a certain point, they say, We are not going to follow Bataille: we need to correct certain things, we need to enlarge and add things. That scene, as a self-reflexive operation of criticism on art history, is not repeated in the rest of the book. Hal Foster: Well, the first version of the book was a catalogue, and the four operations were stations in a show. James Elkins: Yes, but as a book, in its life as a book, it’s strange. Hal Foster: That “operation of criticism on art history” was never a problem for anyone in the October group. Its project was to hold criticism and history together in a manner that might cut both ways. The whole point was to think about what the present calls up from the past and how the past can be summoned to clarify the present. James Elkins: Yes, but this is a very extended example of that, with a very clear distinction between historical research and critical intervention which is then permitted to dissolve. It’s not the same, in that respect, as any number of shorter essays in which criticality and what Rosalind Krauss called “method” are continuously suspended, or mixed. It bears on how we take terms like “against,” and “operation.” Hal Foster: Shall we move on to the abject? This text of mine, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” was a first version of material that became The Return of the Real. In part it was an attempt to think contemporary art via realism, but a realism thought 16. Unmonumental: The Object in the TwentyFirst Century, newmuseum​.org/​exhibitions/​4​ #artists​_panel (accessed August 27, 2010).

17. (Lean) at Nicole Klagsbrun, as featured by the Contemporary Art Daily, contemporaryartdaily​.com/​2010/​03/​lean​-at​-nicole​-klagsbrun/​ (accessed August 27, 2010).

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in the Lacanian register of the Real. In the final version, I pulled it back towards Warhol, rethinking his Death and Disaster silkscreen in terms of a traumatic realism. Jay Bernstein: One worry about Lacan’s Real is that it is totalizing: it leaves nothing in its wake. (Apart from that, I have deep anxieties about Lacan. In his early work, he did think of the Oedipal structure as historical and contingent. I think a lot of what is going on in Lacan’s making the Oedipal structure transcendental in the 1950s is an attack on Simone de Beauvoir, on her idea that female sexuality is a historical construction.) The issue here, for me, is the relation to history. This seems like a traumatized end of history, and therefore a version of a notion of the sublime outside of history. So I guess my interest here is that there are more historical ways of reading Cindy Sherman and other artists. Hal Foster: Well, I used Lacan, perversely, to track a trajectory in art. Perhaps it could be described in other terms, but this helped me to understand the marked turn not only from language toward the body, but also from the complexities of desire to the vicissitudes of the drives (I have in mind the moment too quickly and too completely dubbed “abject art”). James Elkins: I wonder about the afterlife of that moment of the body. Like any number of people, I contributed to that theorizing, but my own book, Pictures of the Body, came later and didn’t, as far as I know, find a public among artists.18 (It  doesn’t engage yours or Bersani’s work; my interest was connections with premodern practices and ideas.) Current theorizing about the body seems to me to be divided between an unquestioned general phenomenological understanding of the body and a sense that digital, posthuman, informational, and genetic representations of the body have decisively atomized previous conceptualizations. In a way, psychoanalysis has been lost: it’s either been diluted to homeopathic strengths in the phenomenological frames of current discourse, or it’s been cut into tiny unrecognizable shreds (tiny bits of part-objects) in the new technological interests. That isn’t to say the theme of the anti-aesthetic has been lost: I think that the current writing is just as determinedly non-aesthetic, but the chances of persuading people engaged in this new work that their projects owe anything to discussions of the anti-aesthetic, let alone the Lacanian senses of the body current in the 1990s, are vanishing.

18. Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

4. t h e o r y a n d c r i t i c i s m

Here the subject was what counts, in this problematic, as theory and criticism. The discussion was led by Diarmuid Costello; he aimed to bring out certain features of the philosophic claims of anti-aesthetic texts, with the objective of determining what kind of conceptual relation they had to the Modernism against which they reacted. This seminar and the next one are discussions of the relation of theory to contemporary practice: here, the question regards philosophic criticism in general; in the next seminar, the subject is more specifically Adornian critical theory. Diarmuid Costello: To get things going I want to pose the question, Is critical postmodernism a deconstruction, as was routinely claimed by anti-aesthetic theorists, or is it an inversion of Modernism? That is, does it bring out Modernism’s internal contradiction or insufficiency or reinstate its negative after-image? To get at this, I want to open with two examples: the essay “The Use Value of ‘Formless’ ”1 and Douglas Crimp’s response to Michael Fried in “Pictures.”2 Take l’informe first. What is the relation of the formless, as theorized by Bois and Krauss, to what they want to use it to oppose, namely the “foundational myths” of Modernism? Although it is said to desublimate or lower various central tenets of Modernism, in practice it tends to result in the valorization of whatever Modernist theory denigrates: the horizontal (together with its associations of the animal) is celebrated over the vertical (with its associations of humanity); base matter or material (the tactile or unformed) is valorized over the optical (with its suggestion of transcending the body); pulse or repetition is held up against the instantaneous (and other Modernist exclusions of temporality); and against all systems and structure, the entropic is proposed as the great leveler. I want to suggest that insofar as this set of revaluations inverts a previous set of positive terms, it remains trapped within the conceptual space marked out by the terms against which it is pitched. This brings me to my second question. What does a text like “The Informe” do? Is it doing art criticism, or is it making a certain theoretical or conceptual move? It seems to me that as criticism, it is quite brilliant. Krauss’s reading of Pollock is compelling.3 But how would you advance debates conceptually, if that is what you were interested in doing? You would need to show that rather than merely replacing a given term, such as opticality, with its antithesis, you were 1. Yve-Alain Bois, “The Use Value of ‘Formless,’ ” in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1997). 2. The participants also read Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88, and

“The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 91–101. 3. In addition to the section “Horizontality” in Formless: A User’s Guide, see also Rosalind Krauss, chap. 6 of The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

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unpacking the exclusions of opticality itself. You would need to show that writers who propose a theory of opticality, without doing justice to vision’s substrate in the body and embodiment, say, have yet to secure their account of the former. That would be what I mean by an internal or immanent, rather than an external, criticism. James Elkins: It might be useful to correlate your position on the informe text with other similar ones, from 1996 to the present. Formless, the book, was widely criticized for simply inverting Modernism: that’s an argument that was there, as Hal noted, even in October.4 Diarmuid Costello: Okay, that may be, but I want to use the example to flush out what I take to be some deeper differences around this table about the relation between criticism and theory. Let me propose, somewhat polemically, a strong distinction between criticism and theory. On this understanding, theory should be well in the background. It will ultimately, if at a remove, underpin all claims about specific works, but it will not illuminate any particular work or set of works. And that is so for a very simple reason: if a theory is true, it is true in general. If Freud and Klein, say, are right about the structure of the mind, they are right about everyone’s mind all of the time, not about some people’s minds some of the time. So if either theory has implications for artistic production, say, those implications will generalize necessarily. On this account, competing theories will have different implications for all works of art, not for some local set of works that seem to best illustrate them. If art in general is reparation, rooted in guilt for aggression acted out in fantasy, then this will be as true of Chardin as it is of Bourgeois. That’s the test case. This, I take it, is akin to Jay’s project with respect to Deleuze and Matisse, but would be one difference between myself and Hal, because that is not how you would use theoretical terms. Hal Foster: If kept to your criterion, not much theory could be produced, let alone used. Philosophy might be supposed to be true in general, but that might be one reason not many people read it anymore. James Elkins: I understand where you’re going with this—I can see the importance, even the necessity, of reading the texts for their arguments. After all, the texts are what is given, and they do imply certain positions. I am also on board with the idea of distinguishing criticism and theory in these texts, although I am not sure I would do it as you’re doing it at the moment. But what bothers me is that by saying things like “if a theory is true, it is true in general,” you are straying so far from the self-understanding of art historians that you might not be able to develop your argument. Wouldn’t it be possible to say, in this case, “the informe texts are dependent on a figure of theory that does not appear in them.” In other 4. A less widely known source is Formless: Ways In and Out of Form, edited by Patrick Crowley and Paul Hegarty, European Connections 11 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).

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words, why not be agnostic, here, about the existence of theories and their relation to truth? Diarmuid Costello: Well, I guess my sense is that these texts often want it both ways. They trade on the authority of various thinkers or theories, both to motivate their claims about various stretches of artistic practice and to give those claims weight, whilst refusing to take on board the full implications of the positions they depend upon. I’m not persuaded you can have one without the other. Here’s my second example. Douglas Crimp’s “Pictures” is generally remembered today for its invocation of Benjamin; but the prehistory of Crimp’s position is an engagement with Fried’s notion of theatricality. There are two aspects to the latter. One is the argument from theater, to the effect that what falls between specific media cannot be art. The other is the argument from theatricality, which is, among other things, a critique of the temporality and mode of address of Minimalist works. I do not claim that Crimp simply inverts Fried’s position: Crimp traces a certain legacy of temporality from Minimalism, which he sees as a literal temporality (which is consistent with Fried’s view), and brings it through performance (which would be theatrical with a vengeance on Fried’s view) into a certain psychological temporality that Crimp proposes as a way of staging pictures.5 But these pictures—Crimp uses the word tableaux, which is loaded in relation to Fried’s arguments—are conceived in non-medium-specific terms. So, against an account that locates value exclusively in terms of mediumspecific categories, Crimp champions a non- or anti-medium-specific conception of the tableau. In both these examples, Bois’s “The Informe” and Crimp’s “Pictures,” I suggest that antimodernism does not break with Modernism just as, more generally, the anti-aesthetic does not break with the aesthetic. Each is the negative afterimage of its precursor. The more it is predicated on overturning its precursor’s terms, the more closely it is constrained by what it contests. In my view, arguments that break with, or at least complicate, Modernist theory are to be found elsewhere, where the relation between their terms and those against which they are pitched is less overdetermined. I am thinking of Thierry de Duve and Steve Melville in particular.6 But my interest in all these cases is less in their specific claims than in the relation of their claims to the objects of their critique. My claim that anti-aestheticism cashes out as an inverted Modernism is a claim about the relation between certain conceptual moves in these texts, and moves in the texts that they take issue with. My goal is simply to disturb received wisdom about some of these relations.

5. Diarmuid Costello, “Pictures, Again,” in “Post-Medium,” special issue, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 8, no. 1 (2007): 11–41. 6. Thierry de Duve, “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” chap. 4 of Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) (also

published in Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990]); Melville, “On Modernism,” in Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

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Gretchen Bakke: So your interest is in relational aesthetics, just of a very different sort than that we have come to expect with the sorts of gallery-based, convivial projects described by Bourriaud.7 The relationality you describe is that of texts with their objects (and vice versa) as a sort of careful aesthetics of critique.8 James Elkins: That ambition is itself interesting in relation to your theme of distinguishing theory and criticism. You provide theory by rereading Kant, Benjamin, Cavell, Fried, and others; but until those accounts are developed, I would read your texts more as criticism—and as such, by your own terms, they occlude their theoretical content. I wonder, too, how mutable, how capacious, “theory” and “criticism” are in this account. After all, both terms were in play in the original moments of the anti-aesthetic, as Hal noted, and their terms have been contested in the literature you’re looking at ever since. Diarmuid Costello: I doubt this will satisfy you, Jim, but let me conclude by saying something positive about what I take an immanent critique to be, using my own critique of Fried as an example.9 It bears directly on how I understand the relation between theory and criticism. My goal was to show that Fried has two distinct, but entangled, arguments— the argument from theater and the argument from theatricality—and that one undermines the other. The argument from theater expresses the theoretical commitment that artistic value can only be located in relation to specific media. The argument from theatricality expresses a critical judgment about Minimalism’s address to its intended audience. Whereas the latter rejects Minimalism critically, for having, in Fried’s view, a meretricious relation to its beholder, the former looks like a theoretically motivated refusal to make that very judgment. It says that no work located between media could be in candidacy for such a judgment in the first place. In the paper I try to show that the reformulations of Greenberg that ground Fried’s version of Modernism preclude making the latter move according to his own theory. I argue that, given Fried’s revisions of Greenberg, there is no reason not to count Jeff Wall as a painter and Gerhard Richter as a photographer. If according to the theory at issue one can make photographs by painting, and paintings photographically, then there are no longer any substantive empirical constraints on what may count as a work in a given medium. At that point, the argument from theater unravels—I say—on Friedian grounds. This is what I mean by an immanent critique. 7. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002). 8. Žižek writes, “A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network— faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning,” and asks, “Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading?” Žižek, introduction to The Parallax View (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 2006), ix–x; and the Short Circuits series, edited by Žižek (MIT Press). 9. Costello, “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific Medium’: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 274–312, in response to Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

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Joana Cunha Leal: It would fail completely in terms of an essentialist account of the media, but it would hold up in terms of an historical appreciation of what has been counting as work in that specific media, wouldn’t it? Diarmuid Costello: I think the best defense of Fried has to be along those lines— James Elkins: This comes back to the senses of theory that are at work in your reading. I also think it is easily possible to demonstrate that Fried’s account is compatible with interests far beyond his own, ones that would end up contradicting his own values.10 But I would tend to question any sense of argument that begins to require more solidity and coherence of “theory” than the text itself proposes. Dakota Brown: Can you say more about the relation between deconstruction and what you’re calling inner or immanent critique? Diarmuid Costello: I think deconstruction has to be a form of immanent critique. A thoroughgoing deconstructionist would no doubt want to resist the opposition of internal and external critique on which I’m trading, but in my understanding deconstruction has to open a text to something internal that prevents the text from making certain claims that it wants to make. Harper Montgomery: And along those lines, can you say more about how you would understand rupture? How does that figure in discussions of immanent and external critique? Rupture strikes me as something that must necessarily assert pressure from outside the text. How can the alliance between rupture and deconstruction be accounted for? Diarmuid Costello: But exerting pressure from without doesn’t preclude exerting it on some fault line within a text. Texts typically don’t do this for themselves, after all! In this (trivial) sense my critique of “Art and Objecthood” is external, but it at least aspires to ground itself on internal features and arguments of the text. An external critique, by contrast, might begin by dismissing the kind of work Fried champions out of hand. But that need not worry Fried—it doesn’t even begin to engage with his arguments. More generally, I don’t have strong intuitions about this, other than that various claims for rupture tend to be overblown in academic discourse. Arguably, what happens in the informe texts is not some dramatic rupture or break, but the rejection of certain kinds of art or at least of certain grounds for valuing those kinds of art, in favor of valorizing other kinds of art or other grounds for valuing the same art. (I’m thinking of Krauss’s reading of Pollock here.) So the deflationary response might be: all the Bois and the Crimp texts finally show is that critical sensibilities have changed, and this is what Crimp is 10. I argued this about the openness of Fried’s sense of Barthes’s punctum to the study of kinds of non-art images that don’t interest Fried, but raise many questions about medium, spectatorship and beholding, and other criteria.

See Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 539–74, and my response, “What Do We Want Photography to Be?,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 938–56.

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trying to capture when he writes about “Pictures” generation artists. The question for me is how you try to ground or account for those changes theoretically. I guess my thought is a really simple one: if a term is so thoroughly determined by what it is opposing, then it won’t succeed in what it’s trying to do. Sunil Manghani: I sense a slight slippage. Your position is very logical, but when you ask about the consequences of Fried’s arguments, you say it undermines the concept of the medium. Are you then holding on to the idea of what painting is, or shifting the sense of medium? Diarmuid Costello: I would like to arrive at a theoretically justified position according to which judgments of value need not be grounded on media categories. If I can show, by pushing hard on this conception of a medium, that it cannot lay down substantive claims about what constitutes a work in a given medium, then it follows that Fried himself should not be making claims about what falls between media. Precisely what differentiates him from Greenberg deprives him of the basis to make such claims. I want to get away from claims that tie value to media. This is not to say that I want to do away with claims about artistic value—on the contrary—just with grounding such claims on medium categories. Sunil Manghani: But then you say, “The consequence is that you’ve lost the medium,” and I’m not sure you have. Structuralism, as you know, has no positive terms. If one were to feel uncomfortable with Richter being a photographer, then that discomfort identifies a subject position, an ideology of practice. I’m wondering whether those positions might still be signs of subject positions. When you say, “The consequence is . . . , ” then you’re revealing a position, an ideology; you’re doing it in a very neutral way, but it feels like something’s gone wrong there. Diarmuid Costello: I’m not sure I fully follow you, Sunil: all I’m trying to say is that it’s an entailment of this account of a medium, if you take the argument seriously, that such-and-such follows. Fried is not happy with the paper we’re talking about, I can tell you.11 But though he is not embracing it with open arms, if what I say is correct, he can’t rule out the consequence. Sunil Manghani: See, that’s not on an ontological basis, but an ideological basis. Diarmuid Costello: Okay, but is that more than trivially true? Sunil Manghani: That gets to the heart of the problem of the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic debate. It makes a lot of your case absolutely right: you’re undoing the position between the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. It is useful, because it reveals an ideological basis in the whole. Eve Meltzer: Let me go back to a question you posed yesterday, regarding philosophy and history. You said something like, “Can they be friends?” 11. Costello, “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific Medium.’ ”

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Diarmuid Costello: I said one of the challenges is getting them to speak to one another. Eve Meltzer: It is hard for me to even begin this conversation, because I do not understand why one would want to prove, say, that a theory holds up to a test. That would seem to presuppose the rightness or usefulness of a theory, that theory needs to be from the outset “right” or “useful,” that that is its purpose. I am not accustomed to reading theory in that way. Why does one have to be committed to the sense that something has to be true all the time? Gustav Frank: I think this has to do with method. You have outlined a paradox, and I think that is where you are going. You claim you are doing immanent critique. Fair enough. You show, in Kantian terms, that there are categorial mistakes in the existing texts. But the question is, Why do they only occur to you? And not to the people who write the theory? What makes your understanding superior to their own sense of themselves? Diarmuid Costello: That’s what every theorist does to every other. It’s just the normal way to perpetuate the discipline. Eve Meltzer: I meant that if art history is going to be a friend of philosophy, then we may have to start this friendship by questioning how they are going to address or see one another, according to what modes of engagement. The arguments you have mobilized don’t seem to even make thinkable some of the things I think art history is concerned with—for one thing: particularly expansive and exploratory ways of reading images, objects, texts. You privilege a mode of thinking that is predicated on a reified notion of truth and logical procedure. Diarmuid Costello: You’re surely not saying that the claims of art historians are not even open to question! Eve Meltzer: No, absolutely not. Diarmuid Costello: So if I had not made any remarks at all— [Laughter] Jay Bernstein: When I think of doing philosophical criticism of the arts, I would be horrified if my philosophical position gave me an immediate access to the object. I think that would be the worst possible case. I think of philosophy as being way up here. [Gesturing at the ceiling.] [Laughter] But as absolutely dependent on art history— Hal Foster: Really? A  major philosopher in this debate, Arthur Danto, would seem first to rectify it and then to subsume it: having achieved philosophical selfconsciousness, art doesn’t need art history anymore; maybe it doesn’t even need art because it’s now . . . philosophy!

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Jay Bernstein: Well, for me the way to test an account is not against criticism, but against another theory. I always assume a relative theoretical autonomy. The relation to the object is massively mediated. For me the thought that a theory could explain an object is horrendous, because criticism cannot be gotten out of theories. Theories should be able to acknowledge criticism, and make it intelligible, but not explain it, reduce it, or give an algorithm. In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, there is no art criticism. That, for him, would be just crazy: to think that from a meta-theoretical claim you could derive deep insight into a particular work of art. You get orientation— Hal Foster: “Orientation”: how different is that from “truth in general”? Jay Bernstein: A theory of art is always part of a broader philosophical outlook that includes epistemological, moral, and metaphysical aspects. Philosophical thought is not strategic. If you have one theory in your life, that’s good. If you have two, great. If you have three, you’re probably a tramp. You’re being opportunistic. Philosophers have a different relationship to the apparatus, and therefore a much more distant relation to the object. Hal Foster: That’s very helpful, but it also suggests why Barnett Newman once said, “Aesthetics is for artists is what ornithology is for birds.” James Elkins: This is the opening to a much longer discussion, an entire field of thinking. Eve, I think that a helpful next step would be to acknowledge the degree to which logical argument in art history is stressed, and the moments it is bypassed in favor of other sources of meaning. What Diarmuid is doing is reading “as a philosopher,” which here, to him, means reading for logical argument, and drawing inferences. In fact art history is deeply inimical to that sort of reading, but the ways in which art history resists purely logical readings are themselves not theorized in the discipline.12 Notice that when we read “The Allegorical Impulse” we shifted back and forth from locating local arguments to describing the overall form of the text, and we did not theorize those moves except with overall metaphors like weaving and collage. From my point of view, Diarmuid, if you want your readers to include art historians of the sort who do not read consistently for argument—the kind who supposedly don’t read philosophy, or don’t read philosophy as philosophy—then you need to also watch the moments where Fried isn’t arguing, where he isn’t watching that he isn’t arguing. And of course that is much easier in other art historians, where the argument can seem, from a philosophical standpoint, nothing more than an accumulation. Michael Kelly: Yet the difficult issue here is not the role of logic, which I don’t see as a source of meaning but as a set of formal constraints on the articulation and understanding of meaning, whether in theory or criticism. Rather, the issue is 12. My book Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), paperback edition, with new preface (New York: Routledge, 2000), is devoted to this question.

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the role of theory, as we saw earlier, or rather the type of normative theory that art historians engage in, if only indirectly, when they adopt conceptual resources from Benjamin and others—such as aura—that continue to have normative force, even outside their original historical contexts. Sunil Manghani: Diarmuid, there is the possibility, for example, that two positions can be right at once. As in particle physics, your engagement in the experiment can get in the way of seeing things clearly. Philosophy and art have different ways of getting used to that. Jay Bernstein: Adorno thinks philosophy cannot deliver what art delivers. When I go to the Art Institute, I am not going there to get a bit of philosophy. Gustav Frank: But finally, that implies philosophy doesn’t matter. Jay Bernstein: It’s the opposite: art is the one thing worth living or dying for. Gustav Frank: I find in this discussion a replay of the eighteenth century, and that is probably why we have been intermittently wondering about Kant, and why Diarmuid has written a paper proposing Kant can be reread for current debates.13 Theory is outside and above: that is the Kantian position. Michael Kelly: Diarmuid didn’t put Kant on the table. The anti-aesthetic did. The question is, what reading of Kant has enabled the anti-aesthetic? There are other things in Kant we may want to appeal to: not to rescue Kant, but to do serious work on the entire anti-aesthetic debate. Gustav Frank: I completely agree, Michael, we should ask why the sublime was the focus of the anti-aesthetic, and not beauty or ugliness, which mesmerized postHegelian aesthetic. If it’s pathetic—in the etymological sense—to talk about beauty again, and if there is an obvious consensus in our seminar against recent accounts like Elaine Scarry’s, then what does it mean to reassess the sublime? James Elkins: In terms of this discussion, a discussion of the inheritance of Kant, the Schlegels, and others would be a good way to proceed. I can think of three other things that might help. First, we might return to uses of theory, criticism, and Krauss’s word, method, in the literature of the anti-aesthetic, because they have been vexed from the very beginning.14 Second, we could look at some recent texts about anti-aesthetic moments in art—for example Eve’s—and see how, and where, they argue, and what they do when they are not arguing, and how those nonlogical moments are understood in the discipline. Third, we could look at philosophic attempts to rethink the relation between logical argument and art, 13. Costello, “Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (2007): 217–28. See also “Retrieving Kant’s Aesthetics for Art Theory After Greenberg: Some Remarks on Arthur C. Danto and Thierry de Duve,” in Rediscovering Aesthetics, edited by Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’ Connor

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 117–32. [—D.C.] 14. “Method” in Krauss, as a word for criticism that sees as its purpose the meditation on the conditions of judgment, is discussed in The State of Art Criticism, edited by James Elkins and Michael Newman, The Art Seminar 4 (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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for example Alain Badiou’s “inaesthetics,” which has been so well critiqued by Jacques Rancière.15 I think it is significant that we have not explored Diarmuid’s claims. We have been more interested in the idea of reading to extract claims. I don’t think this has anything to do with the anti-aesthetic specifically, but it has a lot to do with poststructuralism, and the differing reading habits in the humanities. Whatever theory and criticism are in texts around the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic, they are not only the ways Diarmuid has described them, but also often their opposites.

15. Rancière, “Alain Badiou’s Inaesthetics: The Torsions of Modernism,” in Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents (2004), translated by Steven Corcoran (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 63–87.

5. t h e o r e t i c a l p o s i t i o n s critical theory

In this seminar, Jay Bernstein developed his own account of Adornian Modernism, and was challenged by several other participants, who felt that the perspective he presented didn’t speak to contemporary concerns. The seminar developed into a discussion of the relevance or irrelevance of critical theory for current practice. Jay Bernstein: As Stanley Cavell said, it is in the nature of modern art that there are no criteria that tell us when something is a work of art or not. Therefore the possibility of fraudulence is endemic in modern art. I take it that Bill Viola, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flavin, and others may be frauds in that particular sense. My intuition is that, apart from Flavin, they probably are. What I want to do is register some comments out of the readings, which might show how a theory of Modernism might address that situation.1 So I— Michael Kelly: Before you continue, isn’t Cavell’s point that there are no essential criteria determining what is or is not a work of art, not that there are no criteria at all? And isn’t the claim of fraudulence immanent to modern works of art because of this issue of criteria, so it’s not a claim made by an external critic or theorist of such art? If so, being fraudulent (as distinct from being a fraud) is a good thing, since fraudulence is endemic in all modern art. Diarmuid Costello: Michael, I agree with you about the absence of essential (a priori) criteria, rather than the absence of criteria per se—such that each work has to seek out those criteria that will enable it to count as a meaningful extension of the tradition at a given moment. But it can’t be right, on Cavell’s account, that fraudulence is a good thing. Cavell’s point, I take it, is that it is the standing fate of modern art to run the risk of fraudulence, given the absence of binding conventions or essential criteria. Under such conditions, the work puts the critic in question as much as the critic does the work: for the sincerity or fraudulence of the critic’s own judgment is just as much at stake as the claim of the work to be taken seriously. So fraudulence certainly cannot be a term of approbation 1. Jay Bernstein set the seminar the following readings: Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 79–100; Bernstein, “Significant Stone: Medium and Sense in Schiller,” International Yearbook of German Idealism 6 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 162–82; Gregg Horowitz, chap. 2 of Sustaining Loss (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Bernstein, “In Praise of Pure Violence (Matisse’s War),” in The Life and Death of Images, edited by Diarmuid Costello

and Dominic Willsdon (London: Tate, 2008), 37–55; Arthur C. Danto, chap. 2 of The Abuse of Beauty (Chicago: Open Court, 2003); Deleuze, chaps. 6–9 and 12 of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, translated by Steven Corcoran (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2009), especially chap. 1, “Aesthetics as Politics.”

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for Cavell. All modern works run this risk: but it is only the modernizing as opposed to Modernist—avant-gardist as opposed to genuinely avant-garde— works, those that are meretriciously innovative, that succumb to it. Jay Bernstein: Michael, you are certainly right about the question of criteria, but I would state the inference more indirectly: because we lack essential criteria, then Modernist art is the kind of art for which the question of fraudulence is intrinsic. It is not an accident that when not being lauded, Modernism is being despised as the kind of art “my child could make.” However, from the fact that question of fraudulence can always arise, it doesn’t follow that being fraudulent is a good thing; on the contrary, it is the worst thing since it trades on the look of the modern and its actuality can be conflated. Keeping these kinds of worries in mind, I want to defend three theses: first, that works of art are necessary failures; second, that the anti-aesthetic belongs to the aesthetic, is essential to it and not external; and third, that art has a redemptive moment. (I will distinguish two notions of redemption, one of which I will repudiate.) I think these three theses are coordinated. They might even jointly define the aesthetic. In response to the question, Is Modernism alive? I would say, No, it isn’t. Adorno thought it was dead or at least dying when he wrote his Aesthetic Theory. But we keep open the possibility or potential of a future for it, by drawing these distinctions. Let me begin with the question of the return of the repressed. On page 23 of the informe discussion, Yve-Alain Bois says Olympia “refused the various ideological and formal codes regulating the depiction of the nude.” All the writers who are part of what I am calling the aesthetic agree in one way or another with this thought: they all think that tearing away materials from ideologies, languages, and formalisms is the primary gesture of modern art. In the beginning, in Dutch realism or in Caravaggio, this tearing away is emancipatory, a freeing of art from religious and related frames of reference, of letting representations become immanent in gesture rather than exemplifying some presumptively eternal idea. In this respect, modern art was a part of the secularizing of the world. However, those critical gestures become increasingly harassed and defensive as modernity itself became an ideology, a series of forms of closure and domination. At that moment, conventionally located in 1848 with the failure of the bourgeois revolutions, modernity itself becomes the problem. Of course, for some, like Rousseau and Schiller, modernity had become a significant problem much earlier. Nonetheless, the notion of decoding as Bois depicts it is, broadly, what Rancière means by the shift from the representational régime to the aesthetic régime; it is what Adorno means by the retreat of form in the face of the materials that are to be in-formed; it is what Deleuze means by the shift from representation to sensation. All of these are rifts, variations, on the Kantian notions of disinterestedness, of unity without a concept, of purposefulness without purpose.

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For an exemplary version of decoding, consider the shift from Caravaggio’s 1599 Sacrifice of Isaac to his 1603 treatment of the same event. In the first painting the way in which Isaac is being sacrificed to God is the way the painting as a whole is, formally, being sacrificed to the idea of holy sacrifice. The painted figures are for the sake of idea. In the later painting, Caravaggio brings both the religious notion of sacrifice and the painterly one, the sacrifice of reality to idea, into crisis. The fierce image of the terrified Isaac, looking at you the spectator in horror, not only ruins the picture as representation, transforming the viewer from spectator to witness, it ruins the religious ideology that made the picture possible in the first place. The shift from Isaac as pacific victim of a sacred rite to Isaac as horrified boy is the return of the repressed, while blowing the whistle on the very idea of the sacrifice of the sensuously particular individual to the abstract universal. Not for nothing did Poussin claim that Caravaggio had come to destroy painting.2 Allegorically, it is tempting for me to think of each and every moment of Modernism as the equivalent of the movement from the 1599 Sacrifice of Isaac, call it the moment of the aesthetic, to the 1603 Sacrifice, with its affective charge, its destruction of representational order, its naturalism or realism or materialism, its wild anti-aesthetic. Contemporary critical theory, then, is trying to provide a general account of what the stakes of that movement are, how it matters, how it continues to matter and happen. Gretchen Bakke: You started by asking, Is Modernism alive? And you answered, No. So maybe you’re talking about Modernism and we’re talking about what’s alive. Elise Goldstein: If you’re saying Modernism isn’t alive, then I’d like to know why you want to bring it back. Dakota Brown: But why would that matter to you? If we’re all so alive, why would the dead concern us? It seems like there’s a tension here between a dismissal of Jay’s position as anachronistic and a desire for it to be more inclusive. Elise Goldstein: I’m just trying to bring some of the concerns I have heard from the other students into the discussion. Omair Hussain: It seems some of the argument is stemming from different understandings of the term “semblance.” Jay, could you discuss your understanding of semblance, and its relationship to emphasis on the particular, as against the conceptual and universal? Jay Bernstein: Omair, too many different questions there. Pressing a little harder on the second part of your question, the issue is how modern rationality—the rationality of mathematical physics and universalist morality and bureaucratic rationality and technology and the domination of use value by exchange value—how all those social forms create a reified social reality, a world that does not live. For me, 2. See the wonderful book by Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, translated by Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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the wild Isaac moments of Modernism, its anti-aesthetic, are a rebellion against all that, a return of repressed life against a dominating rationalization of everyday life. Now, the claim is not that stretches of sensuous aliveness and particularity do not happen all over the place in everyday life; they do. Although it matters for this telling of the aesthetic, of Modernism, that it presumes a far darker, more repressed, more deformed picture of the everyday than seems to be had by those in this room. That said, the claim about art is not that it’s the only place where life lives; rather, it is the thought that it is the only systematic and ongoing practice in the modern world that is opposed to the rationality of other types of practices. So the investment in it is an investment in the validity of a claim for the possibility of a different form of rationality, and hence in the possibility of a form of living that would contest those reified forms of practice that dominate late capitalist modernity. Because art promises a different form of practical reason and so a different form of life, it is, inevitably, redemptive in its structure. Brandon Evans: If art is a placeholder for the promise of redemption––and this seems like a gratuitous and precarious level of remove––then why do we keep delaying our redemption by continuing to make artworks? Or rather, what is the value for human life in limiting art by saying it is the only field to lay claim uniquely to a certain kind of sensuousness? Why not seek to codedicate other spheres to this aliveness as well? Jay Bernstein: That is where critical theory began: it started because there was no revolution, no way to escape, no way to transform everyday life into a fully human one. As Schiller said, the interest in art is nostalgia for a certain form of life. He was thinking of ancient Greece; we might be thinking of something futural, something more emphatically democratic and less exploitative of people and things than our form of life now is. James Elkins: There’s a truce developing here, between your account, Jay, of critical theory, as you’re reading it through Adorno, and a kind of consensus of students and some Fellows, who are registering various kinds of disengagement. But I wonder if this can be a lasting truce, because the terms must be different on the two sides. On your side, the claim—again, through Adorno—has to be that these issues continue to matter, coupled with a difficulty in demonstrating that necessity. On their side, there’s a nonchalance, an insouciance. This is an instance of one of the central questions of the week, whether the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic are connected to contemporary concerns or not. Gretchen Bakke: I am very happy with the conflict. I don’t have a problem with that. But for a lot of people around this table, there’s a sense of being torn apart by the difference between practice—contemporary art practice—and theory. If the theory is actively doing the tearing, leaving practice in this kind of vibrating, gelatinous state, then it behooves us to think about what sorts of theories might not allow that to happen. That isn’t to say it’s not a delight to spend time with the tearing, ripping theories.

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If we were to just use Dewey, for example, to talk about semblance coming out of experience, we’d get a different and far less antagonistic sense of what counts as art.3 James Elkins: Is that what it is, just a different accounting? Or is one normative, and the other marginal? Gretchen Bakke: I was trying to be peaceful about it. Elise Goldstein: I would be happy to say that what we’re asking for would be a different discussion altogether. On the other hand, it would be good to clarify some of the underlying assumptions and claims having to do with the function of art. Jay Bernstein: That is right. Elise Goldstein: You started out by saying Eliasson and Turrell were frauds. But what is being asked of them that they are not fulfilling? Jay Bernstein: The project of Modernism began with the idea of a series of practices, with dispositifs, a language of criticism, and stakes. I think the interest of art is the preservation of a rationality, about sensuous particulars as having a standing claim that we can address in their particularity, and not sacrifice them to the universal. In our experience of that, in artworks, we feel a moment of release. It can be felt as disgust, or beauty . . . Omair Hussain: Jay, how would you respond to practices, popular within contemporary art, that seek to find and frame the sensuous and particular in the everyday? How can such practices be understood as symptomatic of modernity? It seems that efforts to insert art into the everyday can be traced back to the beginnings of Modernism, despite the insistence today on understanding such practices as existing apart from that history. Jay Bernstein: That, again, is one version of the classic avant-garde as opposed to Modernism. At least in this bit of the world, I am always surprised by those efforts because they are always such hopeless failures. Less even than not interesting. But that is irrelevant: people not only have a right to experiment, I think it is healthy that there be ongoing experiments in art and living, even if they all fail. I’m with Mill on that. My objection to avant-garde practices is that they focus on the wrong issues: what are needed are practices dedicated to elaborating an alternative rationality of the ordinary that would make a truly different form of life possible. I take it that the problem of the everyday has been the project of modernity. My students often ask me, What do you think Adorno’s aesthetic theory is about? Is it about art? Not really. It’s about critical epistemology, about an alternative form of reasoning, making, and knowing the world, of which art is our only ongoing practice. 3. Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Penguin, 2005).

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James Elkins: I am still puzzled by the terms of this truce. I have no problem understanding why you don’t need to be concerned about the terms of the contemporary practices the students are describing, because I can see the ongoing force of the project of critical theory. But I have a harder time understanding why Elise, or the other students, do not worry that they might need to have an account of their position in relation to your terms. How do they know the contemporary practices they’re engaged in are outside the terms of the Adornian critique, no matter how jellylike it might make them feel? Jay Bernstein: Let me introduce a new distinction that might be helpful: the difference between the anti-aesthetic and anti-art. I understand the anti-aesthetic pretty much as Bois does: as those things that are excluded by particular art practices, but turn out to be essential for them. So the anti-aesthetic is the return of the repressed within art, its own materials coming back to haunt it. Anti-art is concerned with the fact that art practices don’t want to produce mere artworks, semblances; art wants to be world: it wants to be the thing in the world that is living. Art cannot exist, in my reading, without the continual temptation to take its inner practice and see it as part of the world. Therefore anti-art, which is art repudiating its own institutional frame, is part of Modernist practice. (This is really Peter Bürger on the avant-garde, but I think Bürger is just hatching out a bit of Adorno here.) James Elkins: So in that case, the contemporary practices we’re associating with Elise really do speak a language they are not aware of speaking. Jay Bernstein: Yeah, I do think this is the classic avant-garde returning; and I do think of that as being a perpetual temptation that is intrinsic to modern art: the rebellion against autonomy and formalism and emptiness. There is a lot there to despise and rebel against! Diarmuid Costello: I’ll give you an example of an anti-art practice in Jay’s sense of that term. A young artist at my undergraduate college made a piece consisting of perfect facsimiles of the line diagram you find posted in the London Underground, except that he removed all the stops and transfers on his daily journey between home to college, giving himself a clear run. He then installed (without permission, obviously) the same number of maps as the stops he had removed on different trains and sent them on their way. I take it this practice is anti-art in Jay’s terms: it seeks to function outside art’s institutional frame, in and as the world itself, but it was probably all but invisible—nothing more than an inexplicable anomaly in an otherwise seamless system of public information—to everyone apart from those viewing it from within that frame. Hal Foster: At this point the burden might be on the artists to tell us how anti-art and other practices count, and not simply charge us with exclusion or repression. (This is another claim I’ve heard a thousand times.)

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Diarmuid Costello: What claim? Hal Foster: That what we do as critics or philosophers doesn’t speak to art practice. You might not find what you want or need in what I say, or what Jay or Diarmuid says. But we can reverse the demand, and say, Tell us how your work counts. Elise Goldstein: I’m not looking for that. Hal Foster: Really? When we all introduced ourselves at the beginning of the week, all the artists who spoke were looking for connections or complaining about the lack thereof: “I feel excluded here, I feel silenced.” So speak, and tell us why your practice matters. James Elkins: Or, to be neutral about it, you could also speak and say why the discourses Jay is asking us to read don’t matter to you: why you’re content to drift. Elise Goldstein: What I’ve seen in art academies tells me the kinds of practices that interest us have gone beyond being anti-aesthetic. They are institutionalized, they have their own language, they have rules for reception and documentation, they are part of the aesthetic: they are old hat. My view of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic is as a thing that presents itself and then becomes part of history. It is only an aesthetic issue. So talk about semblance and fraudulence don’t make sense to me, because they seem like they are something from the Modernist past being artificially extended to the present. Jay Bernstein: But doesn’t fraudulence matter to you? Would a logic of fraudulence matter to you? Elise Goldstein: Well, I can’t feel alive in the face of rationality as you do. So at that point I don’t know, I’m not sure. Aaron Richmond: My practice is committed to semblance, which I understand as a matter of putting all your energy into something finite, that calls for a kind of speech that doesn’t happen in this world (as Barthes put it), but through the Modernist inheritance of the work as semblance. So when I leave art school, I feel like my button is up, and I feel like this . . . nineteenth-century . . . thing. [Laughter] But the space that is involved is a lived space, and in that sense I wonder if the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic is not as important as the category of performance. Elise Goldstein: I think performance is a part of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. James Elkins: That is true if you look at texts from the 1980s, but it is paradoxically not true if you look at recent texts by Irit Rogoff, Peggy Phelan, Amelia Jones, and others, who are not directly engaged in the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. You could use your point to further your claim of isolation from anti-modernist concerns.

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Dakota Brown: I’d like to know why it seems Jay doesn’t want anyone to experience pleasure. [Laughter] Joana Cunha Leal: The pleasure you describe in relation to art, Jay, seems very far from Adorno’s negativity. Jay Bernstein: For Adorno there are two notions of experience. The thick notion of experience, Erfahrung, means the experience itself is the articulation of your orientation in the world. Your undergoing of that experience becomes a new way of encountering the world. An example would be falling in love. Sven Spieker: Adorno didn’t know much about the experience of falling in love. Jay Bernstein: I don’t think there’s anything else in Adorno. Adorno’s deepest thought is about love of the world: how the rationalization of lifeworld practices eviscerates it, how the world appears under its disappearance, how it might be renewed. That is what I think he is thinking in his talk about identity thinking versus mimetic rationality—it’s all about love. But let me return to the problem of experience. In opposition to the thick notion of experience, there is ordinary experience, Ereignis, just our ordinary sensory engagements with the world: seeing, touching, tasting as we ordinarily do. What Benjamin and Adorno are worried about is the thick notion of experience. The rationalization of the lifeworld just means the loss of experience as the central means for the transmission of human meaning and orientation. Hence, their question is, What are the possibilities of thick experience now? Is experience still possible? Parenthetically: both Benjamin and Adorno think affect is important only as it is bound with thick experience, Erfahrung; not just raw feelings, but feeling laced with cognition is what they want to defend. And art, of course, for both, is the central bearer of experience in late modernity. And what Modernist artworks routinely do is to provide us with an emphatic experience about the absence of experience in everyday life; that is plainly Benjamin’s story about Baudelaire and Adorno’s about Proust. Beauty was important to art because it was a bearer of experience: an entwining of form, meaning, and value. One could argue that beauty just is that entwining, which is how it has mattered to us. Now Adorno says we gave up beauty because it seemed like a lie or a deceit. An art of beauty in a fervidly ugly world, say the world just after World War I, doesn’t even rise to the level of critique; it becomes fantasy and escape. That’s what Adorno meant by his obscure saying that it is for the sake of the beautiful that there is no longer beauty: because it is no longer beautiful. Beauty became questionable as an ideal or value. Artists had to construct other ideas—disgust, negativity, the sublime— that would do the same thing, namely deliver the experience of the work that allows us to understand the absence of experience in everyday life. I hope I have not lost the negativity of Adorno.

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And why the return of beauty? I have no clear idea about the revival of beauty, although as a wild guess it could be thought of as a rebellion against an art world that has championed ugliness, disgust, the abject. Maybe they are now the clichés and acting on the beautiful feels like a courageous critical stance. Or maybe it has something to do with giving up on the very idea of art as having a critical relation to the world. I truly don’t know. Hal Foster: Jay, your views on everyday life are so dire that they can only position art as redemptive or at least compensatory. Jay Bernstein: I mean for my views on everyday life to sound dire. In part, I think such views are truer than the opposite, and in part it is an Adornian conceit: only the exaggerations are true. Redemption, for me, is about modes of caring. I am trying to understand why art might be the sort of thing about which one thinks that it matters absolutely for the fate of culture. Whether or not there is a next move is not a parochial matter, but a question of whether or not we can keep culture moving at all. If these aren’t the stakes, then I am not sure what they might ever be. Diarmuid Costello: We have had two different readings of Benjamin this week. One has validated substantive, emphatic, distinct experience, distinct from everyday experience. The other had supported a positive nihilism, a destruction of part of the cultural tradition. We might then ask whether either of those are substantive demands to be made of art, and whether they are reasonable demands. Joana Cunha Leal: It might be clear if we think what we do not want from art. We don’t want spectacle, and subjection to ordinary politics. Diarmuid Costello: So we can only ask what we want of art by asking what we do not want? Joana Cunha Leal: This connects to the importance of the historical avant-garde, which showed that anything can be art. Some of the events that have occurred within relational aesthetics may be outside the field of art, but I recognize it’s impossible to assume that as an all-inclusive statement. Gretchen Bakke: But who are “we” to want or not want something from art? We follow art; we come after. If artists embrace spectacle, then who are “we” to not want this? Diarmuid Costello: I just meant the kind of demands that I have heard entertained around this table. I don’t say we are all making the same demand. Indeed, I don’t think it’s at all clear between us what we do or don’t want from art, if anything. Is it even clear that we don’t want spectacle, for example? Joana Cunha Leal: Well, there is the formative distinction between reactive and resistant postmodernism—

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Diarmuid Costello: But  I think we’ve also said that setting up the debate in that way makes it unresponsive to contemporary concerns. Conversations we’ve been having about criticality—whether it’s a live notion, whether it makes sense to use the term—suggest the issue is not at all clear. Hal, earlier you expressed some internal frustration with the way of setting up spectacle as a single, negative term. Joana Cunha Leal: If only we could know what resistance looks like. Diarmuid Costello: But is resistance what some people are asking for? Hal Foster: It seems the philosophers here talk about demands artworks place on us, but often that philosophy places a demand on art, too—that it be, for example, an expression of normative authority. It seems the historians and practitioners here don’t work with that assumption (maybe that’s naïve, but it’s the case); I think in terms of different paradigms myself. And I don’t share your confusion about what art wants from us because I don’t presume that it always wants the same thing. It’s important to return to the disciplinary difference between philosophers and art historians, and not to confuse, as Jay said at the beginning, discourses of art, anti-art, aesthetics, and anti-aesthetics. Michael Kelly: But there’s a sense in which it’s not only philosophers who assume works make normative claims on us. Why else write about art? There’s a normative dimension even in insisting on writing about art in a descriptive way. We differ as to how we unpack the kinds of claims we make. Mary Flanagan’s book on video games, Critical Play, argues that computer scientists need to know about how play has worked in art, and in Modernism, in order to be in a position to create immersive experiences. Flanagan thinks artists are the best source for the information they seek.4 James Elkins: The distinction between asking for resistance and wondering whether resistance is still an operative word is a conventional form of the difference between the anti-aesthetic and the aesthetic. I suspect the distinction between art that makes demands, or seems to contain normative claims requiring philosophic investigation, and art that is understood differently, is also a version of the difference between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic: not because it needs to be, necessarily, but because in effect what we’re asking about is a difference between art that seems to have propositional structure and art that seems not to. So as I see it, we have once again made a wide circle and ended near our starting point.

4. Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

6. t h e o r e t i c a l p o s i t i o n s r a n c i è r e , d e l e u z e , r e l at i o n a l a e s t h e t i c s

Although affect theory emerged as the principal possibility for describing art outside the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, the Seminars ranged over a number of other possible texts, concepts, and disciplines. Here the participants discussed the unexpected absence of Rancière from the week’s discussions; the reasons that most participants did not want to discuss relational aesthetics; and the possibility of expanding Deleuze’s reading of Bacon beyond its application to Bacon’s paintings. James Elkins: I wonder if we might spend a few minutes on the question of Jacques Rancière. He is, I’d say, the theorist du jour, but I am unconvinced of the use of his arguments. When he writes “art is not . . . political because of the messages . . . it conveys,” nor “because of the ways it represents society,” but that “it is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to those functions,” then he is in a position that does not correspond to the self-description of politically engaged artists, for whom political meanings constitute the agency and the legible content of political art.1 At the same time he doesn’t speak for artists who don’t think of their art as especially political, because his position entails a political content equal to other art. Jay Bernstein: For Rancière, politics is not the same as governmentality. Ordinary politics, for him, is the police, which is the absence of politics. For Rancière, politics only happens when there is a dissensus, a disagreement about the distribution of the sensible world. When people who have been made invisible become visible—only at such moments is there politics. Politics proper concerns making count what has not counted in the past by making visible what has not been emphatically visible in the past. Politics cannot happen unless the world begins to appear differently. Think of this as occurring in accordance with what Wittgenstein calls aspect-blindness and aspect dawning. You see only the duck but can’t see the rabbit; that is the same drawing seen differently. Politics occurs through the dawning of sensible aspects: At one moment what appears is the duck of white middle-class contentment; at the next moment what appears is the rabbit of black working-class suffering. Politics is therefore essentially aesthetic. Conversely, art is equally about dissensus, about reconfiguring the sensible world so it appears differently: instead of Abraham’s faith we perceive Isaac’s terror. Rancière sees aesthetic art as, precisely, a contestation over the distribution of the sensible, letting the everyday, the mundane, the material stuff of the world into art essentially. The aesthetic 1. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004) (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 23.

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artwork is more democratic, more egalitarian, than everyday life; it is the becoming of everyday life as the locus of human meaningfulness. I have many disagreements with Rancière, but the great picture here is that art and politics are two different practices targeted at the same problem. There is a politics of the aesthetic, and an aesthetics of politics, and they have to be seen as mirror images of one another. Two very different practices, with different means and different concrete ambitions; but both are fundamentally concerned with redistributing the sensible, making the sensible world appear differently, appear more democratically and equally. James Elkins: I understand his claim that politics and art aren’t “separate realities,” but “two forms of the distribution of the sensible.”2 But what are the conditions under which you might find this to be a plausible solution to the perennial problem of the distance between aesthetic artistic practices and politics? What are the circumstances under which artists read Rancière and say, Great, now I don’t need to worry about aesthetics and politics? Jay Bernstein: In one way he is like Adorno: his engagements with visual art are sporadic and mostly bad; he is more convincing with film. But he does not think theory replaces criticism. You aren’t going to get a satisfactory accounting of artworks without criticism. Sven Spieker: To me, Rancière is a bizarre concoction of eighteenth-century aesthetics, Russian Constructivism, and 1950s Brechtian Verfremdung. You’re absolutely right: he is weak when it comes to exact examples. At one point he claims, essentially, that there is something inevitable about the confluence of abstract painting and revolution during the October Revolution in Russia. As if the kind of abstraction practiced by members of the prerevolutionary Russian avant-garde inexorably ended up sublating the difference between art and politics.3 That’s rather naïve, although admittedly some artists at the time did see it that way. But this ended in 1921 at the latest, when many of them noted that abstract painting and revolutionary practice were drifting apart. James Elkins: In the Seminars for volume 2 of this series, What Is an Image?, the art historian Jacqueline Lichtenstein more or less dismissed Rancière, saying just that he isn’t interested in images. Jay Bernstein: I wouldn’t disagree. He is a terrible critic. But he is a wonderful philosophic critic. I think his readings of Lyotard and Badiou are spot on.4 And  I think that Disagreement is a powerful book of political thought.5 And there is a larger aesthetic context here. 2. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 26; Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). 3. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 32–33.

4. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents. 5. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, translated by Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010).

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Rancière says that representation has four constitutive conventions. Following the model in his book on literature, he says representation involves the imitation of action, a series of genres that refer to a hierarchy of character and subject matter, the appropriateness of actions that characters can commit, and the production of a world in which social standing and rhetorical ability are allied. Rancière’s general way of expressing these four conditions is to say that art is composed of two features: a mimesis, which is a story, a legislation, a form of doing; and an aisthesis, a form of affection, of experience. What holds the form of action and the form of experience together is a picture of human nature. So the whole of premodern art is held together by an understanding of human nature as, say, damned and in need of redemption; but also as naturally stratified into classes: the noble and the base. The aesthetic regime, for Rancière, is the loss or destruction of that hierarchy. You can no longer say which characters can speak, and which cannot (the fourth convention); which subject matters are acceptable; what forms of language are appropriate. All those traditional hierarchies disappear, and the question becomes, How are aisthesis and poesis (form and content) connected in the aesthetic regime? His answer is, Without a concept. One way of thinking about this is to say that every modern work of art in its egalitarian assumption and democratic reach has about it an element of improvisation. It doesn’t follow a set of rules or criteria, and thus each work has to engineer for itself, in its own terms, the relation of form and content. Modern art is therefore, in this sense, groundless. Because art makes a claim on you, because it compels you, there must be a connection between form and content—and yet there is no concept, no way to name the connection. This is what Rancière means by saying art makes a promise: it promises there is a form of life, another picture of human nature, in which that new relation can be conceptualized: perhaps not in the artwork, but in the world, in living practices. James Elkins: I prefer this theme in Tim Clark’s Farewell to an Idea, in the first chapter, where “contingency” names an analogous condition, but without “promise,” without the lugubrious language of “living practices” and “groundlessness.” Hal Foster: I agree Rancière is not a very good critic, but he is still attractive to many artists, and one reason, put cynically, is that he sprinkles some of his texts with references to some of their work. The notion of “the redistribution of the sensible” strikes me as wish-fulfillment: would that artists were in a position to do as much! It sounds like a way to reconnect art to politics, but it’s mostly a fantasy, a mirage. Jay Bernstein: Yes, it’s very abstract— Hal Foster: Artists make a far too quick, nonmediated closure. To me it’s not redemptive. It’s a promise that is a mirage.

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Beáta Hock: The dearth of any tangible social content in Rancière is also perplexing because his project echoes, at least in my ears, Nancy Fraser’s essay “From Redistribution to Recognition.”6 Fraser notes a rueful shift in the grammar of political claims at a time of the exhaustion of leftist utopian energies. The shift is from claims for social equality and the goal of winning redistribution, to the desire to win recognition for culturally defined group differences. The result is a decoupling of cultural politics from social politics. Jay Bernstein: Of course, what Fraser means by redistribution is different; she really is thinking about the redistribution of money and wealth. Katherine Desjardins: People also read Rancière in art academies as a way of flipping over hierarchies. In academies in Italy, Rancière was behind such movements, as a way of giving power to students. Hal Foster: His work on pedagogy is extraordinary, and so is much of his work as an historian. I am less convinced by his cultural criticism. Joaquín Barriendos: I pretty much agree that the way in which art practitioners, art critics, and curators have been using and capitalizing this sort of political “promise” inherent in Rancière’s critique of the anti-aesthetics obscures a broader understanding of aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible. For Rancière, aesthetics is not a negative outcome derived from the distribution of the sensible, but the distribution as such. James Elkins: It seems clear to me that Rancière is so attractive in the art world because he offers a way to claim that politics and aesthetics are no longer problematically different. But you have to be both desperate for a solution and unreflective about it to accept a theory whose vocabulary, whose conceptual structure, is so distant from the art world, so much a deus ex machina. Joaquín Barriendos: That’s right. But we can’t refuse to acknowledge that Rancière rejects any kind of consensual identification between politics and aesthetics. This means that politics and aesthetics might be considered together as a conflict or as mutually constitutive, rather than solely interchangeable elements. If we overlook this point, then the ethical dimension of the political art arises as a new regime, as a new partition. Nadja Millner-Larsen: Rancière is one of the few philosophers out there who insists on operating from the point of view of “emancipation” rather than social cohesion.7 I think this is something practitioners are starved for, whether or not the popular adherence to the “distribution of the sensible” ultimately serves as a massive wish fulfillment (as Hal has suggested). The understanding of emancipation as the freedom to steal aesthetic pleasure from the holding cell of the bourgeoisie 6. Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist Age,’ ” in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 11–39.

7. As Hal pointed out, this is most apparent and most successfully theorized in Rancière’s work on history and pedagogy. The two main texts I’m thinking of are The Nights of Labor and The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

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is perhaps too readily adaptable. This radical antifunctionalism is not necessarily problematic, but it seems to me that Rancière’s schema lacks an account of how one actually moves to break with the distribution of the sensible—and this lack may be a place affect could be operative. Joana Cunha Leal: I must say that as an art historian I find Rancière’s account of the aesthetic regime of arts rather captivating. At least in the sense that he forces us to reconsider the formalist bedrock of Modernism, as T. J. Clark’s work also does. For instance, Rancière’s claim that the leap outside of mimesis performed by Modernism was by no means a refusal of figurative representation allows us to discuss the Modernist ground of almost all the historical approaches to Modernism.8 James Elkins: You know, I wouldn’t disagree with those sorts of assessments. But what, exactly, do they solve? I don’t think it’s possible to realign several centuries of art theory by proposing abstract redefinitions. Anyway, I wanted to be sure to mention another potential theory source, which we have all been assigned to read: Deleuze, and specifically the book on Francis Bacon. Jay, I wonder if you could say something about how that book might work in our context. Jay Bernstein: Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon is an example of the subtending theory of affect.9 He is interested in the fact that when we encounter a representation, of which we are aware, the condition of the possibility of that encounter is what he calls sensation. He claims a certain kind of Modernist painting is about this. Deleuze says “sensation is in the object,” which means that a painter like Bacon is trying to get at a kind of imaging that passes through representation, or makes it oblique, and reveals the invisible structures of sensory affectation that are operating on the image, in order to make it possible that they can operate on us. For Deleuze, that sensory stuff is forces and energies. One of the ways Deleuze thinks about his own book is to urge that we read painting in terms of music. Just as rhythm bypasses our capacities for sensory control, and gets us moving—foot tapping, head bobbing—so the project of Modernist painting is to turn the object into rhythm. Matisse’s great dance paintings do this idea to death. Pushing this idea is, for me, the fascination of the Bacon book. In order to do that, Deleuze says, a lot of violence is required: painting has to release our relationship to the sensory. (All of that, although I won’t go into it now, is pure Kant; all that business of beauty being without a concept, and purposive wholes but without a worldly purpose.) People are surprised when I say I take Deleuze to be a high Modernist. One way of getting at that is to see how he uses the abject. He uses it in a way that is not like the way in which the abject appears in anti-aesthetic literature. In the 8. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics. 9. This was discussed at several points during the week. See, for example, Diarmuid Costello’s remark at the end of Section 8 of the Seminars: “If, on the ‘subtending’ model, affect

is presymbolic, and hence presubjective, it is not strictly speaking something that can be predicated of the subject at all: it predates the subject’s emergence as such.”

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Deleuze book, he says, “with painting, hysteria becomes art. What the hysteric is incapable of doing (a little art) is accomplished in painting. It must also be said that the painter is not hysterical, in the sense of a negation in negative theology.” And here’s the giveaway sentence: “Abjection becomes splendor. The horror of life becomes a very pure, and very intense life. ‘Life is frightening,’ said Cézanne, but in this cry he had already given voice to all the joys of lines and color. Painting transmutes this cerebral pessimism into nervous optimism.”10 This seems to me very classically aesthetic, and it is one of the ways affect comes to be a replacement for pleasure or the aesthetic. But I would also argue that Deleuze gives us very few tools to think about the anti-aesthetic: it’s actually a classic exposition of the aesthetic. Hal Foster: That’s very helpful. May I ask just one question? Does it matter if you think (as I do) that Bacon is a secondary painter—that, more, his work is manipulative, a manipulation of the affective? Jay Bernstein: My intuitions are the same as yours vis-à-vis Bacon. There are moments in Bacon that I like, but they’re when he is imitating Degas’s pastels. So  I note that Deleuze cannot make the separation he wants to make. Deleuze says again and again there is a difference between the violence of painting and the violence and horror of the represented—and yet he chooses an artist who meretriciously uses the most violent imagery, in order, I think, to be manipulative. Hence I choose Matisse, because he is an opposite. I am sure the Bacon book wanted to be about Cézanne: it’s a book whose deepest interest, philosophically, is in Merleau-Ponty. Deleuze is trying to outMerleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty about what lies underneath representation. It’s only because Merleau-Ponty had taken over Cézanne that he chose the worst possible artist to make his case. Martin Sundberg: Jay, I don’t understand why you chose Matisse as opposed to Bacon, since Matisse is obviously also about struggle. Why not something completely different, such as Morandi? What would happen to the concept of violence there, in your opinion? Jay Bernstein: Huh. Well, while one aspect of Morandi is about contemplation and an eerie quiet, don’t you think there is also something intense, disquieting, claustrophobic about a lot of those pictures? That in them mood overwhelms object? So even their quiet becomes pure feeling? That would be my opening gambit in what would need to be a longer conversation. Sven Spieker: In his Analysis of Sensations, published in 1897, Ernst Mach claimed that there are no objects, only sensations. The book can be read as a treatise on some of the foundational arguments Modernism makes about the autonomous nature 10. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), translated by Daniel Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 52.

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of seeing (or sensing, in Mach’s broader terms), especially its opposition to narrative. I am not sure that Deleuze has Mach in mind here, but he does make some strikingly similar claims about sensation as an antidote to storytelling. Jay Bernstein: In my understanding of Deleuze, it’s about levels, strata, of experience. He doesn’t want to deny the existence of narrative or representational structures; he just thinks they are reifications of more vital things. The entire “body without organs” idea is a way of getting away from the thought that our fundamental relation to ourselves is as a mind controlling a body. Hence he often says he wants to get rid of the notion of organism. That sounds like he wants to get rid of life, but what he really wants to avoid is the idea of organizations, functions organized for purposes. It is a stratum theory rather than an ontology. James Elkins: A third principal source for conceptualizing contemporary art outside the anti-aesthetic is relational aesthetics. We’ve avoided this all week, and none of us assigned readings in relational aesthetics. Yet if we were to take a survey of art schools and young artists, I think we’d find enormous interest in the subject. I wonder if we might spend a few minutes situating that disparity. Gretchen Bakke: The misunderstanding in regard to relational aesthetics seems to be that it is trying to make a revolution, and that what it is actually doing is giving up on the Modernist revolution. It is a theorized aesthetic practice, one that steps outside of the ambition to change the world, which ran the twentieth century into the ground. In relational aesthetics people try to make small changes, which can be important changes; they are interested in opening spaces in a fairly rigid social system that is late Modernism, or late capitalism or what have you; they are interested in shifting the terms of the debate.11 Jay Bernstein: Is it a consequence of that position that you have to accept that you are moving away from the aesthetic tradition, that you’re giving up or repudiating the Modernist tradition? Gretchen Bakke: There was aesthetics before Modernism, so no. It’s giving up on Modernism, but not on aesthetics. Diarmuid Costello: Here are two unrelated reasons why people around the table here may worry about relational aesthetics. One has to do with whom its spokespeople happen to have been to date. Bourriaud doesn’t strike me, at least, as an especially compelling thinker; his work tends to play fast and loose with its sources, which it uses opportunistically, and is peppered with contentious assertions and sweeping claims where one might hope for arguments instead. Gretchen Bakke: But Owens was also less than compelling as a philosopher; that doesn’t lessen the impact of the work.12 11. See especially Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002). 12. See the discussion of Owens’s essay in The Anti-Aesthetic in Section 2 of the Seminars.

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Diarmuid Costello: Okay, here’s the second reason: people aren’t persuaded by the practice because they think it is essentially affirmative. To transform the relation between the gallery and the world through having the gallery exhibit a mock-up of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s apartment, in which visitors can then have self-conscious conversations in his kitchen, seems to some like the most pointless dilettantism.13 Gretchen Bakke: I have to say that’s also my own criticism of relational aesthetics. It changes relationality, but it’s not clear for whom. But I also come from the ex-Communist world, where having conversations in apartments was extremely important. So within capitalism, it’s difficult to say it’s meaningful to have soup in a gallery. Most people know one another anyway; the people having the soup all know what they’re doing—but that doesn’t mean the work doesn’t have an impact. It simply doesn’t take the standard—and I would add modern—form of resistance, revolution, or revolt. But just because it doesn’t look like the kind of politics art ought to have, according to one set of estimations, doesn’t mean that it ought to be written off wholesale. After all this is the sort of art a lot of people are doing. Diarmuid Costello: So do you think there’s a better defense of relational aesthetics available than the one Bourriaud has given? Because I think quite a few people aren’t persuaded by that. Gretchen Bakke: But who are “people”? I think artists are persuaded. In Slovenia, people love Bourriaud’s theories because they allowed them to drink wine in galleries. But seriously, there is a link to de Certeau, to inhabiting a world that is normally occupied and built by other people without pretense of revolution. That sticks to people of my generation, and people younger than me, because these days a hundred thousand people can go out on the streets in Montreal and it’s not covered by the newspaper. Justin  B. Williams: To me, relational aesthetics signifies an impoverishment of our social reality. Why do we need the spectacle of the gallery to have soup and talk? Why is it so popular? Lauren Ross: I think relational aesthetics, DIY culture, and the slow food movement are all contemporary reactions to feeling alienated. Relational aesthetics is a critical response to this disconnectedness: it asks the viewer to take part and to reexamine. It is also a way that artists can create outside of the system. It doesn’t need galleries and it isn’t collectible. I think it is a rebellion against the exclusiveness of the art world and an attempt to reclaim the importance of real life. James Elkins: In my experience, de  Certeau, concepts of the “everyday,” Marc Augé and notions of “non-place,” theories of site, and practices ostensibly based on Bourriaud have a strong and wide appeal for young artists here and in western 13. See also Tiravanija’s 1997’s Untitled (Tomorrow Is Another Day), in which he recreated his New York apartment at the Cologne Kunstverein. [—J.E.]

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Europe. Elsewhere, and in universities, their effect is minimal. So what we need to consider is how to think about the disparity between serious critical thought on these subjects and everyday implementation. Diarmuid, you coedited a book with Dominic Willsdon, who I’ve heard making passionate defenses of small, natural, everyday, ephemeral, non-gallerybased aesthetic gestures.14  I wonder if you have any thoughts on the distance between academic critiques of relational aesthetics, like the one in October, and the many practices Dominic has wanted to defend? Diarmuid Costello: I think you’ll find my response disappointing. I can’t speak for Dominic, or what he may or may not want to defend, but I think something analogous may hold here to Hal’s view of artists’ investment in Rancière’s idea of a “distribution of the sensible” as a kind of wish-fulfillment. Artists, perhaps especially young artists, have a highly motivated interest in a theory that proposes the creation of “microtopias”—models of social relations enacted or precipitated by works or art, often in convivial art-world settings, as the closest we can hope to come to transformed social relations in an age of postutopian thought. But I say this with one important caveat: even if there is some justice in this charge, it is nonetheless important that artists believe this. What else would get you out of bed in the morning to do something so stupid—at least from an instrumental point of view of getting on in the world—as making art? Artists have to believe in the social effectivity of art! Even if it’s an illusion, it is perhaps a necessary illusion. In that sense relational aesthetics might be thought to fall within a well-established aesthetic tradition of conceiving art as placeholder for what does not obtain here and now. Also, on the positive side: as a curator, Bourriaud is much closer to artists and contemporary practice than many of those unpersuaded by his rhetoric. So it’s hardly surprising that he would appeal to young artists. Joaquín Barriendos: One other thing about relational aesthetics: in my view, the fact that Bourriaud came to prominence as “global” curator hand in hand with a certain idea of what relational aesthetics and criticality could mean in the postcolonial age obscures other perspectives of relationality in aesthetic, artistic, and political practices nowadays. Some of them contradict Bourriaud’s claims even when he comes to elaborate on the idea of altermodernity as a critique of the postmodern condition. As an example of those alternative artistic relationalities, I would like to mention Lygia Clark’s projects in the 1970s, which were described at the time by the own artist as Objetos Relacionais (Relational Objects).15 Michael Kelly: The notion of moral, social, political critique underlies many of our discussions, but I am not sure we’re clear, or agree, about what it means when it takes forms different from what it has meant in the aesthetic or anti-aesthetic 14. The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, edited by Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 15. On this topic see Suely Rolnik, “The Body’s Contagious Memory: Lygia

Clark’s Return to the Museum,” Transversal: Extradisciplinaire, EIPCP, January 2007, eipcp​ .net/​transversal/​0507/​rolnik/​en (accessed August 27, 2010); and Suely Rolnik, ¿El arte cura? (Barcelona: MACBA, 2006).

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traditions. Many people engaged in artistic practices tied to relational aesthetics are critical in some way(s), at least of the anti-aesthetic, even if (or because) their focus is on different kinds of experience. Commitment to critique means being open to these practices. Hal Foster: I’m not sure criticality is the criterion anymore. That’s what I meant to imply with my little genealogy of recent values in art.16 For a long time, criticality was the default value; but the critical is often just the reactive or the resentful. Its opposite is not always the affirmative. Some artists that interest me today want a different relationship to those terms; they see criticality as an old fetish. Beáta Hock: An exhibition I curated last year might offer agency as a potential next element in Hal’s genealogy.17 The show highlighted instances when artists do not merely criticize or point to disturbing issues, but act, mobilizing their agency. The concept of agency has purchase both in postsocialist societies and other political contexts with a longer history of liberal democracy. Michael Kelly: Part of what I am suggesting is that criticality is up for grabs. I don’t mean there needs to be a new concept reappropriated from the past. Its marker of failure might no longer be affirmation. Brandon Evans: I know many people here whose work is not concerned with criticality in any way. A friend of mine, for example, is concerned only about his ability to draw a scary monster. Scary monsters make him happy. Michael Kelly: Fine, but critique here means, among other things (besides criticality), self-understanding, so your friend’s self-understanding, on your account, is  that he’s concerned about only what makes him happy. In short, critique keeps emerging in our discussion, above and below, not just because philosophers bring it up, but because artists do too. James Elkins: As I said when the genealogy first came up, I don’t hear the word “criticality” in the studio at all; I hear it only in contexts like this one.18 Dakota Brown: Assuming artists are after some kind of satisfaction intrinsic to the work, what sort of responsibility for “criticality” falls on interpretation? Is the point of theory and criticism simply to describe what makes people happy, whatever that might be? Aaron Richmond: For me, the concept of relation falls flat, or is vague, or seems easily adaptable. That is why I felt a great deal of sympathy for Eve Meltzer’s project in relation to Post-Partum Document and her emphasis on the term “transaction,” which has a concreteness lacking in the concept of relation. Just this morning, at Starbuck’s, I witnessed numerous transactions, which had a reality and boundaries that were very different from the relations of relational aesthetics. 16. This is discussed at the end of Section 1 of the Seminars. 17. Agents and Provocateurs, cocurated with Franciska Zólyom,

2009–10; agentsandprovocateurs​.net (accessed August 22, 2010). 18. See the end of Section 1 of the Seminars.

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Hal Foster: The strongest critique of relational aesthetics is that its understanding of relation is innocent of antagonism or even difficulty. The automatism of the transactions in your anecdote, for example—that’s dropped out. Karen Busk-Jepsen: I think that critique hits the mark with regard to some of Bourriaud’s examples, but there are others that have a critical edge. When Jens Haaning plays tapes with Turkish jokes in Copenhagen, it is about making people happy, but at another level it also about the problem of relating to each other. Gretchen Bakke: Again, Hal, I have to disagree. Bourriaud’s second English publication, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay, is about exactly the ways in which transactions and scripts can be tweaked or reworked both to change them in vivo but also to call the sort of attention to their ubiquity that should make people uncomfortable. And he doesn’t limit himself to the “do you want fries with that?” sort of transaction, but refers to a not insubstantial number of what he calls “scenarios.”19 Joana Cunha Leal: Questions of relation remind me of Hal’s preface to The AntiAesthetic, and the founding distinction between the postmodernism of reaction and resistance. I think this word, “resistance,” is very important, but we have no idea how to define it today; clearly it also contains something of relations or transactions. Jay Bernstein: In my reading of the history of art, artists have only occasionally been concerned with criticality. They have been mostly concerned with making terrific art. Part of the reason for the disconnect we’re noting is that, for a long stretch of about a hundred years, the entire business of making art turned out to entail a certain type of resistance. If the New, or making artworks unlike commodities or unlike photographs or in touch with the unconscious or modern and progressive, are the slogans orienting art making, then art in being its best self as art will also be critical and a form of resistance. Postmodernism was the death knell of that tradition, although the waning of that tradition preceded postmodernism. I take it that all serious artists interrogate their practice. Some of them will have political ideas, and some won’t. It is, however, a complicated matter of history to figure out how those reflections relate to the surrounding social world. It is not obvious that what allowed artistic achievement and criticality to come together in the era of high Modernism is replicable. Indeed, the assumption that it is not is what lies behind Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Harper Montgomery: What’s interesting to me about relational aesthetics is that works like Félix González-Torres’s reclaim aesthetic experience. He made relational aesthetics possible, and yet the criticality of his works almost always hinges on an aesthetic experience. This is how politics inhabits a work like “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.).20 19. “The division of labor is the dominant employment scenario; the heterosexual married couple, the dominant sexual scenario; television and tourism, the favored leisure scenario.” Bourriaud, Postproduction, 39.

20. This work, dated 1991, was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago during the Seminars in an installation of the Donna and Howard Stone Collection.

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Lauren Ross: I agree with Harper’s idea about reclaiming aesthetic experience for the viewer. When you take a piece of wrapped candy from the pile, you are implicated in the work, and the work is changed. For me, it is the dialogic relationship between the viewer and the artwork that makes relational aesthetics so compelling. James Elkins: For me, those are incremental distances from the everyday, in which minimal disturbance in the ordinary forms of life count as maximally effective aesthetic statements. They aren’t uncanny except in a homeopathic sense, but they are at the affective limits of the “relations” posited in relational aesthetics. Gretchen Bakke: I was thinking about Brandon’s friend who draws the scary monsters. A few days ago Jay invoked zombies. I was struck by the fact that scary monsters make Brandon’s friend happy. There is a recurrence of the living deadness that art supposedly dispels, and so in a way I feel zombies make Jay happy. How is the object regarding us, changing us, structuring our entire lives? And how do we move beyond those ideas? James Elkins: For those of you who weren’t there, Jay mentioned zombie movies early on, in the context of a description of how artworks have the power to make us feel alive, to bring us to life. In that context, zombies were reminders of what we don’t want ourselves to be. Later, in a taxi, I tried to persuade him that zombies are not things to be avoided: we all love zombies, and in fact we want to be zombies, and that’s why there are so many zombie movies! I was adducing Day of the Dead, where zombies remember they want to shop, and Shaun of the Dead, where the entire middle class is basically unaware of their colorful lives as zombies. Gretchen Bakke: Add to that the fact that zombies are interesting because they are the only New World monster.21 James Elkins: Interesting. And wouldn’t life be simple if all you had to do was eat people? So I think you’re right, it isn’t chance that monsters and zombies have been parts of our conversation, not because we want art to help us avoid them, but because art gets in the way of our becoming them. Jay Bernstein: You can’t stop there. Now you have to say what is meant by saying zombies are objects of desire. James Elkins: This would be a clear sign that a large number of people don’t want art to be critical, to wake them up. Hal Foster: Art is there to enliven us: who wants to disagree (even though it seems, once again, too redemptive to me)? I side with Brecht against Benjamin when 21. Lots of stuff is being written on zombies these days, in serious ways. See Lars Bang Larsen, “Zombies of Immaterial Labor: The Modern Monster and the Death of Death,” e-flux journal 15 (April 2010), http://​www​.e​-flux​

.com/​journal/​view/​131; and my own “Dead White Men: An Essay on the Changing Dynamics of Race in US Action Cinema,” Anthropological Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2010): 400–428.

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he called aura “creepy mysticism”; I’m still enough of an Enlightenment person to believe that we shouldn’t confuse subjects and objects, that we shouldn’t give over human agency to inanimate things. The critique of fetishism, which is crucial to the Enlightenment project from Kant through Marx to the Frankfurt School, lives on—at least in me. And that’s why I feel alien to discourses in visual studies that treat images as people, as in The Power of Images, What Do Pictures Want?, and so on.22 Here I want to hold on to criticality. James Elkins: Three points to that. First, I am, I have been, guilty of a version of that in The Object Stares Back, but it was more in reference to experience than art.23 Second, the conceit of loving zombies was meant as a way of doubting the redemptive moment in some of our conversation, and especially of suggesting that sometimes contemporary artists want art that doesn’t enliven, that deadens. And third, regarding What Do Pictures Want?—my own difficulty with accounts like Tom Mitchell’s is that they are part of a spectrum, all wavelengths of which have to be present simultaneously in critical discourse. The spectrum runs from the sense that artworks or images provoke thought, to the idea that they contain thought, to the notion that they have voice, to the notion that they have agency, to the conviction that they are alive. Each position, whether it is anthropological or is part of visual studies, needs to gesture to all the others in order for critical discourse to make sense. Hal Foster: Maybe relational aesthetics wants to recover animation for people and not give it over to the artwork. I’d drink to that. James Elkins: Does anyone mind if I point out that this conversation about zombies and fetishes is turning around and repeating the pairing of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic? Anti-aesthetic as critical resistance to fetishism; aesthetic as unexpected expressive purpose of a desire for the dead. It’s a supremely difficult dualism to escape from.

22. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

23. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), paperback edition (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997).

7. t h e o r e t i c a l p o s i t i o n s affect theory in art history

Theories of affect have emerged in several fields, and have been taken up by a wide range of practitioners. Here they are introduced first in relation to Mary Kelly’s PostPartum Document and works by Candice Breitz. The seminar was led by Eve Meltzer, and the participants had read, and heard, drafts of chapters of her book Systems We Have Loved.1 This discussion also presupposes Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon.2 The subject of affect, as a possible “beyond” of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, continues in the next seminar. Eve Meltzer: We have been focusing on Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document. I suggested it as a starting point because there Kelly employs precisely the maneuver I think we need to make in order to better understand conceptual art: she recovers the discourse of antihumanism for our understanding of conceptualism and, for our purposes, the anti-aesthetic. Regarding affect in general: to be perfectly honest, I came to affect theory as a way to shift my project away from the framework with which I began. That framework focused on the widespread appearance of language in art in the late 1960s and early ’70s. As I am sure you all know, the “language and/in art” problematic has been mobilized by many and, to my mind, has become a rather tired. In addition to affect, antihumanism is important to my project because it was—as a set of discourses and as a term—used by a number of the artists I examine, and because it comes to stand in for another set of ideas that shaped both the academy and, as I argue, art practices of this period: structuralism.3 In light of all the structuralist talk of the subject as a mere “effect” of this or that pre-existing system, “affect” emerged as a sort of counterpart or hinge to this notion of “effect,” and so I have sought to plumb that pairing. So let’s consider for a moment how this pairing works in Post-Partum Document. Mary Kelly knows that she is discursively produced as a mother, artist, activist, etc., she conveys a sense that her child, too, is in the process of being “thrown,” as they say, into the symbolic order, and she reveals herself as having been “thrown”—these conditions go along with the condition of being an effect. Yet what is interesting and important about the Document is how it registers the ways in which that experience gets played out affectively. 1. Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). The book was unpublished at the time of the Seminars. 2. The seminar had read chapters from Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), translated by Daniel Smith, afterword

by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 3. Antihumanism marked, once and for all, the end of the humanist understanding of the subject as in command of himself, the humanist understanding of a consciousness fully transparent to itself, and the humanist understanding of the historical process.

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Diarmuid Costello: Could you say what affect is for you, for this project? Eve Meltzer: I should say that, although I have assigned their work, I don’t directly use Brian Massumi or Rei Terada to theorize affect for this project.4 Well, what I mean is I don’t follow one or the other. I am certainly not with Deleuze in my thinking, and, more generally, I look to Massumi, Terada, Ngai, among others, to help me read the works of art under examination. I suppose if I have to align myself with a theory of affect, I would say I am most indebted to Freud, which would have to do with my intellectual formation as a student of Kaja Silverman’s, who also has written about the significance of affect for the world, as it were.5 As far as Freud goes: I am interested in affect as it appears, for example, in The Interpretation of Dreams and Freud’s early work on hysteria. I am less concerned with following up on the distinctions that Massumi and Terada make, such as that between affect and emotion. But I think the ways in which they frame the question of affect are important and helpful. That said, in my project my understanding or theorization of affect shifts from context to context—meaning it is the artwork in question that allows me to theorize affect and its significance at a particular historical moment in the history of art in the United States. Affect does not appear in the same way for Kelly as it does for Robert Morris, for example, whose neo-Dada work and drawing practices I also examine. In Morris’s work of the early sixties—consider Card File or any of the self-portraits he did in the early sixties—affect works in the service of making visible the relationship between the antihumanist subject and the “system,” the way in which he or she affectively manages the experience of alienation, belatedness, and so forth, specifically by positing a place beyond the “nightmare” of the system where more pleasurable affects can be made available. I say “pleasure,” because if one looks across these early works, there is always a kind of sinister pleasure at work. Apropos of antihumanism, many years later, Morris wrote somewhere that “if there was a constant” in his art making, “the ‘rotting sack of Humanism’ . . . has always provided a target.”6 So it is the work of art, or works of art, that suggest how we understand the nature and function of affect. Gustav Frank: I don’t understand yet. What is the “beyond”? Eve Meltzer: This is what Massumi foregrounds so well. Affect doesn’t appear within or on the grid, as it were; it doesn’t show up, we might say, within the structural field (or poststructural one, for those of you for whom structuralism feels too remote an ism to grasp at this point). Systematically, affect has been relegated to, as Massumi says, “the gaps between positions on the grid.” It has been relegated 4. The participants had been asked to read Massumi, introduction and chap. 1 of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 1–21 and 23–45; and Terada, “Introduction: Emotion After the ‘Death of the Subject,’ ” in Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject”

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1–15. 5. Kaja Silverman, World Spectator (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 6. Robert Morris, introduction to Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), ix.

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to the spaces that our discourses don’t attend to, “a theoretical no-body’s land.”7 Affect appears, he says, “in the space of the crossing.” In one sense, then, affect is “beyond” because it exceeds the discourses that we have grown so comfortable with—and by this I mean the discourses that both shaped and saturate the anti-aesthetic. Gustav Frank: So you want to say that this affect is a “beyond” in relation to the anti-aesthetic. Eve Meltzer: No, I am saying that despite all claims to the contrary, despite the appearance of disaffection that so many artists took up, affect is there all along. It is only “beyond” with respect to our way of thinking and theorizing; it is beyond the limits of our current discourse, but it is very much a part of the anti-aesthetic. Gustav Frank: The anti-aesthetic itself comes in some years after the works you are studying, so I wonder if it is on the repressive side in relation to your themes. Or perhaps it opens and enlarges your themes? Criticism or theory taking the lead again? Eve Meltzer: I’m not sure what you mean. Several of the texts in the volume are precisely about the 1970s—Krauss, Owens . . . Martin Sundberg: Eve, I really would like you to be more specific when it comes to the site of the anti-aesthetic historically speaking. All your examples are located in the sixties and seventies—that is, before postmodernism. How would you describe the relationship between postmodernism and the anti-aesthetic? Eve Meltzer: Do you have a date for the beginning of postmodernism? I’m not sure I do—again, another reason why I am not comfortable with the term. I tend to associate—as many if not all of the writers in Hal’s volume do—the anti-aesthetic with poststructuralism and, well, really structuralism: Barthes, Lacan, Saussure, Althusser, Foucault, etc. If you look back to the Balibar essay I assigned, there he makes the case that poststructuralism is still really structuralism at work, that they have their distinctions, but it is structuralism that is the lasting movement of the twentieth century. So, in that view, if you consider the theoretical underpinnings for what we generally think the postmodern is, then postmodernism might be traced back to a much earlier date than you suggest. So as I see it, the sixties and seventies are completely within the relevant historical scope. Jay Bernstein: Eve, given that affect usually exceeds something, and given that affect is here imagined as exceeding certain theoretical diagrams, how would you relate it to the way Louise Bourgeois figures what is left out of the aesthetic? Or to put it differently: what is the role of affect in your understanding of the artwork? Bois’s terms, in regard to the informe, are very carefully posed so they change the way we view the work: the work would have to be reinscribed.8 Does your use of affect have an analogous effect?

7. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 4. 8. See Section 3 of the Seminars.

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Eve Meltzer: That’s a big question, and again, we’d want to answer it case by case. For Kelly, her intervention into the discourses she mobilizes in the Document—and there are many there; after all, that is her point: to summon a vast archive of discourses, many of which are, as you say, diagrammatic, scientific, or at least scientistic—she shows us how intertwined our understanding of and affection for discursivity is with affect, even as the whole thing threatens to look so dry, calculating, informational. Indeed, my aim is to change our understanding of the artworks in question, and, more broadly, the aesthetic strategies associated with the period. But also, I think of my book as an effort to change how we understand our own indebtedness and embeddedness in structuralist discourse, which, along with conceptualism, was arguably one of the most transformative movements of the twentieth century. James Elkins: Could you say a bit more about what you mean when you say you’re not using Massumi and Terada directly? Because your critique would go in very different directions if you used Massumi, and yet he seems important to, or for, the work. Eve Meltzer: Sure, but Massumi is only one amongst many. He is significant to me because he frames his intervention specifically in terms of the poststructuralist figure of the grid, which is also a central motif in conceptual art. And in the end I have aimed to write a history of the figures that comprise the discourse and aesthetic of conceptualism and structuralism, those that they shared, borrowed from one another, mutually inscribed. But I am also thinking with Freud, specifically his Interpretation of Dreams, where he is interested in what affect does in the unconscious, in the dreamwork, how it migrates, they way in which affectivity creates a unique and particular kind of signification, etc. Hal Foster: But is “affect” an important Freudian term? What does he write in the original? Sven Spieker: The German is Affekt, but I don’t recall it in the text. Eve Meltzer: Of course Freud talks about affect! The thing is that he didn’t publish, as far as I know, a definitive statement; his theory evolved piecemeal over time. But it is already there in the early works. Hal Foster: He talks about energies. Elise Goldstein: I’d like to add some points of reference. First, about Freud: he talks a lot about affect in The Interpretation of Dreams, first when he mentions handing his daughter an apple; she doesn’t want to eat it, and she makes a face as though she had bitten into it, and it was bitter. James Elkins: I’m just thinking that the relation between any pre-existing theoretical discourse (Massumi, Terada, Ngai, Freud) and your material is something less than schematic: possibly it’s emblematic. I’m interested in whether that relation between theories and art-historical practice is specific to the subject, affect.

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Eve Meltzer: That’s a really interesting idea. Could be. I haven’t considered that. Sven Spieker: Affect always seemed to take me back to the eighteenth century and the sublime, and I didn’t find it especially interesting. But when I read Deleuze on Bacon, I did begin to feel there was something there. But I am not sure that what Deleuze calls “sensation” and affect really can be conflated.9 Do you see any relation between Deleuze’s understanding of sensation and the concept of affect, given that “sensation” is a nonexpressive, nonrepresentational way of inscribing (affective?) “intensities”? Jay Bernstein: They cannot be the same. Eve, as I understand it, “affect” in your work names a way of registering something that is going on in the external world, but that remains especially unresolved. It’s about an enjambment in the external world. Our affective response is the site of the irresolution that’s out there. Morris’s practice doesn’t let that element in, but without it, his practice is unintelligible: that’s how I understand your project. I read your use of affect as a deconstructive term: it’s like différance, the thing that’s excluded but keeps coming up. (Although it’s experiential rather than merely formal.) Omair Hussain: In the early moments of 1960s conceptualism, the critical force of the project was understood to be its negation of previous modes of art making. If, as Hal had mentioned, the visual and the aesthetic came to be understood as a place of reconciliation, the nonvisual, the dry, the indifferent, the systemized, was understood as a critical force of resistance. Reading conceptualism through the lens of affect challenges this understanding. I’m reminded of the book Romantic Conceptualism.10 Projects like that, and the returns of emotion and beauty, appear as attempts to continue the project of conceptualism in the face of a real weariness toward the cold intellectualism of the sixties. This space of affect, however, appears very similar to the kind of reconciliation the aesthetic was once accused of. If the negative moment in conceptualism is pushed away in favor of affect and the experiential, or the beautiful and the romantic, then what is the critical space of conceptualism now? Eve Meltzer: I disagree. You presume that affectivity and criticality are at odds. And your rendering of conceptualism mirrors precisely the kind of misreading I am trying to remedy. “Affect” does not necessarily mean “beauty” or “the romantic.” Part of what I am trying to point out is that affect is there even where we see the nonvisual, the dry, the indifferent, the systematized. Affect is completely of a piece with resistance, it is not contrary to it. I think part of the works’ critical force is their affective force, and that has been overlooked in the scholarship. 9. For these terms see Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 31–38. 10. Romantischer Konzeptualismus / Romantic Conceptualism, edited by Jörg Heiser et al. (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2007).

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Remember affect is what enables ideological relations to be internalized and naturalized. It is affect that underwrites, as Lawrence Grossberg once wrote, “the power of the articulation which bonds particular representations and realities,” without which no ideological system—including the interpretive—can hold.11 So affect must be part of the project of resistance, not its antidote. Hal Foster: There is a sense today in which affect is a primary tool of social control, and in a way that cuts across old social lines. There are videos by Candice Breitz, for example, in which people are asked to sing popular songs—Jamaicans sing Bob Marley, folks in Manchester sing “Working Class Hero” by John Lennon, and so on. The songs seem connected to these people, to these locales, but they’re not, or not only. The affective identification with these songs, with their stories, is intense for us, too; we all feel it. Anne Wagner has talked about how this affect floats almost globally, interpellating people here, there, and everywhere. As Jay said, social integration isn’t needed as long as there’s system integration, and one of those systems is integration through affect. I, too, wept for Princess Di! Well, no, I didn’t, but affect does make our American Idol world go around. This may be too idiosyncratic, but for me the prestige of this category goes back to Camera Lucida. Affect discourse, trauma discourse: Barthes has a lot to answer for. Nadja Millner-Larsen: Affect might still help us locate the place where the capacity to reorient ourselves against complete and utter ideological cohesion could persist. [At this point the seminar watched several videos by Candice Breitz.] Jay Bernstein: To me the image of those isolated folk who are nonetheless simultaneously hooked onto the same popular song, captured in the same way by the music, is terrifying. It shows what fascism would look like if it happened now. If fascism ever returns, it won’t look like it did in the 1930s. It will look like a catchy, irresistible Coca-Cola video with everybody singing and bouncing along. Eve Meltzer: Jay, I can see that explanation; it works in an Althusserian sense. But there is some other possibility there. As Nadja says, it gives us the capacity for a kind of reorientation as much as anything else. Dakota Brown: Adorno characterized Hitler’s self-presentation as “a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber”12—you go along with it, in part, because you actually feel a little superior to it. So fascism means something more, here, than crushing authoritarianism; it signifies a response to all sorts of affective needs in people, a recognition of them. It even offers a sort of empowerment. Hal Foster: Part of the charge of the Breitz videos, it seems to me, is to ask us what other ways might affect be tapped or directed. 11. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservativism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 83. 12. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Culture Industry, edited by Jay Bernstein (New York: Routledge,

1991), 141. Adorno continues, “The people who obey the dictators also sense that the latter are superfluous. They reconcile this contradiction through the assumption that they are themselves the ruthless oppressor.”

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Sunil Manghani: You can think about those things, but that’s not in the work. The people in her videos are in grids, in a system: it doesn’t leave much room to think outside the system. Elise Goldstein: I’m having trouble because when I look at that piece, I think of nostalgia, not fascism. Sunil Manghani: It strikes me “fascism” is far too loaded a term to use in this case, but do you see this as a critique, or as an entertainment? Elise Goldstein: I don’t feel uncomfortable about fascism. I’m interested in it, in what it does from a Brechtian perspective. But I’m not about to leave the room. There’s something entertaining about Breitz’s video, and I’d much rather watch it than leave the room. Sunil Manghani: But if it’s entertainment, is it art? By which I mean whether we are critical or complicit. Or indeed both.13 Elise Goldstein: I don’t know, but I’m not often worried about drawing a line between art and spectacle. James Elkins: The large range of reactions to Breitz’s videos is, I think, characteristic of a distance between the theorizations of affect and a more tidal, less conceptualized sense of affect that I have seen in young artists, including Breitz herself. I wonder if any other students might have thoughts along these lines. Meredith Kooi: I wonder if we could look at the YouTube video “Double Rainbow,” and the revisiting of that in the video of the Drive-Thru KFC/Taco Bell Doublicious Double Down Sandwich? Jay Bernstein: That was a whole bunch of cultural references that some of us have no idea what you’re talking about! James Elkins: Jay, you don’t know KFC? Diarmuid Costello: Double Down? [The seminar watched the YouTube “Double Rainbow” video, in which a man gives a nearly hysterically ecstatic voiceover narration of a double rainbow, practically weeping and saying things like “What does it mean?” and “Oh my God, oh my God.” Then they watched a video response, in which someone drives around the Drive-Thru of a KFC/Taco Bell, rehearsing the same ecstasies about the KFC/Taco Bell “Doublicious” Double Down Sandwich.14 Then everyone went to lunch.]

13. My phrasing echoes Hal Foster’s formulation of the “old question” asked of pop: “critical or complicit?—the answer given by [Richard] Hamilton . . . is both and intensely so.” Foster, “Citizen Hamilton,” in Richard Hamilton, edited by Hal Foster and Alex Bacon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 145.

14. “Crazy Double Rainbow Guy—ORIGINAL” and “Double Rainbow Guy Gets Ecstatic over Double Down at KFC” can both be found on YouTube.

8. t h e o r e t i c a l p o s i t i o n s a f f e c t t h e o r y at l a r g e

Later in the week, the seminar returned to affect theory, considering it from a more general standpoint. The participants considered a wide range of possible sources for theorizing affect in the arts, from general cultural theories to theories specific to the arts. A general model, in which affect is at once a product of systems and language, and also something that underlies them, is woven throughout the conversation. James Elkins: Let me change direction a little, and introduce some thoughts that might be helpful in exploring affect theory. It seems to me affect has attracted widespread interest in the art world, and that it is the principal contender for a reconceptualization of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic at a “deeper structural level.” The difficulty is that it hasn’t congealed into a coherent body of theories. Affect has been related to ongoing interests in multisensory artworks, immersive environments, the theorization of disabilities, the articulation of identity in queer theory, the adoption of notions of “animism,” the pertinence for some practices of fetishism and totemism. Let me propose three locations of affect theory, which I think can help triangulate it: First, there are explicit theorizations of affect in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other fields. I would list them this way: (a)  a putatively Freudian form, perhaps best found in The Interpretation of Dreams; (b) an anticonceptual form, which we have emblematized in our seminars with the phrase “a-signifying nonsign”; (c)  Brian Massumi’s Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002); (d) Rei Terada’s Feeling in Theory (2001); and (e) the related exposition in Deleuze’s book on Bacon, regarding “sensation.” These five are theorizations we have discussed. In addition I know of at least two more sources for affect theory: Second, there’s affect in art history and criticism. This second location of affect theory is in and for art history, and specifically the art history of the late 1960s and 1970s. In this kind of work, which Eve has done in relation to Robert Morris’s “withdrawal” from aesthetics, affect appears in scholarship as an enlargement or correction of previous interpretations: it acknowledges what was omitted and makes it continuous with meanings that were in place. Third, there is affect in artworks. There are many possible examples. I think over the course of the week we’ve mentioned Candice Breitz, Olafur Eliasson, Bill Viola, and James Turrell, but the phenomenon is much wider than fine art. Meredith Kooi had us watching the “Double Rainbow” video and its video response, and just this morning, in the New  York Times, there was an article

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about kitten and puppy videos on the Internet. One of the most-watched videos of all time is a kitten being tickled, and there’s a video response, in which someone tickles their dog and gets no response. They are fabulous videos, pure affect, distilled to a dangerous degree, all the content boiled away. This third location of affect is the one I’ve associated with our students, and with some young artists: I think it’s significantly different from the first two, and quite possibly disjunct from our theme. The first and second locations of affect theory are definitely beholden to historical formulations of the anti-aesthetic, but the third is something different, and to the extent that it prevails, it sweeps everything before it. Diarmuid Costello: I think there are two ways of thinking about affect in play. One would see affect as the emergence of something that subtends symbolic regimes. There are numerous examples of this structural relation between affect and symbolic regime: the relation between primary and secondary process in Freud or semiotic and symbolic in Kristeva, between gesture and language in MerleauPonty or figure and discourse in Lyotard. There is the same broad structural relation between the two terms in each, something that can be traced all the way back to the relation between nature and taste (or culture) in Kant’s theory of genius. All those metaphors have in common a sense of an eruption, into the symbolic, of what subtends symbolic orders. They refer to a break or hiatus in signifying practices. The other concept of affect, which came out of Eve’s papers, sees affect emerging not from below symbolic structures, but as a product of symbolic structures. The expression “a-signifying non-sign” only arises to describe affect as the product of the structure against which it is posed, and which is a condition of it showing up as such. Eve uses the expression to speak of the affect of representing administration; it allows her to demonstrate that works like Robert Morris’s Card File do not need to be read solely as acts of administration without a surplus of pleasure. (Although “pleasure” might not be the right word. “Corrosive irony” might be better.) Eve Meltzer: I think it is important to remember what Sianne Ngai says about affect with respect to the notion of the “a-signifying non-sign.” She argues that affect “renders visible different registers of a problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) [and] conjoins these problems in a distinctive manner.”1 This is to say something about how it emerges, the fact that it is the conjoining of valences in a new way that is revelatory of something otherwise not registered. James Elkins: Diarmuid, I would just say that as affect emerges as an effect of the clarity of representing systems, in works like Robert Morris’s that have supposedly “withdrawn” from aesthetics, it is still necessary somehow to gesture toward the other, more disruptive sense of affect. I’m not sure why: I think it provides a promise of something deeper, “beneath” systems. 1. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3.

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Hal Foster: I think there is a third option, too, which is affect as administration. That’s what I meant by affect as ideological state apparatus.2 Eve Meltzer: Yes—after all, if we think about that idea alongside or with Lacan, we are reminded that the imaginary is deeply affective, it functions as much by way of the visual and imagistic as it does by affect. Althusser’s notion of the state apparatus is predicated on the imaginary. Joaquín Barriendos: I think this third option is quite important. In more than one way this point has to be confronted with Boltansky and Chiapello’s thesis on the decline of the artistic critique as it is presented in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism.3 In spite of their controversial argument, we have to acknowledge that affectivity is managed and perceived today as an asset in the corporate world; it’s common corporate practice these days to encourage a creative mentality and to introduce the criticality of the so-called artistic spirit within the workplace. Be creative, with conviction and autonomy! seems to be the new capitalist imperative. Stéphanie Benzaquen: Affect plays different roles in the reception of images of corpses and mass graves, which is my research interest. When you see such images day after day, there’s a need to check to make sure you are still reacting to the image—if you still keep some balance between empathetic reception and the distance needed for its analysis. James Elkins: I have also done research on strong images, especially on the Chinese photographs of the “death of a thousand cuts.”4 The French-Chinese research group that was doing this work needed to constrain affect very strongly in order to get on with their work. That became a problem, I think, when it limited the historical relevance of affective responses to the generation of Bataille: no one after him, explicitly including the researchers, needed to be interrogated for the possible effects of affect. Stéphanie Benzaquen: Then there’s the issue of the mediation of affect. When I react to an image, is it because I have been trained to react in that way? For me, this is an important question because it bears on the cultural context of our reactions. Third, there is the image as affect. In that sense, images are more productive than representational. I think medieval notions such as imago agens are very useful in this regard. James Elkins: The theme of images, or art, as affect, is one I would like to connect with the current art practices and popular culture images we’ve been considering; a link to medieval studies could be provided by Georges Didi-Huberman’s work. 2. See, in this connection, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). [—J.E.] 3. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2007). 4. Representations of Pain, coedited with Maria Pia Di Bella (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011); “The Very Theory of

Transgression: Bataille, Lingchi, and Surrealism,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 5, no. 2 (2004): 5–19; revised version, “The Most Intolerable Photographs Ever Taken,” in The Ethics and Aesthetics of Torture: Its Comparative History in China, Islam, and Europe, edited by Timothy Brook and Jérôme Bourgon (London: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming).

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Stéphanie Benzaquen: I wonder whether this “medieval turn,” at least in discussions on images of atrocity, is a way to bypass the Enlightenment: it has problematic connections with violence done in the name of progress and civilization, and it hopes to restore some of the supposed innocence of the eye in pre-Enlightenment culture. Dakota Brown: An  idea that seems to lurk in the background of conversations on affect—especially as it’s picked up in art schools—is that one can sweep aside acculturation, administration, and commodification, and arrive at something more authentically human, more “natural.” Jim, at one point you compared this sense of affect to Hurricane Katrina, and I think you’re onto something. I think the apparent newness of affect can blur a continuity with Romantic ideas of a return to the state of nature. Jay, I wonder if you could respond to this—in part because the distinctions you’ve drawn between these ideas and your own position (aesthetics as the return of repressed nature) have sometimes been too subtle for me to understand. Elise Goldstein: I have some experience with affect in a clinical setting. Affect there is used to gain entry into someone’s interior experience, so it’s about display. For example, when I am working with patients, I am given a number of options to check off under the heading “affect,” and some are descriptive, such as “Elated affect,” “Depressive affect,” “Anxious affect.” But there are also options such as “Restricted affect” and “Blunted affect.” That last one is especially important, because when someone has a blunted effect, it looks like the absence of affect, but it’s still considered affect. Hal Foster: Blasé means “blunted.” Maybe there’s an historical connection to old takes on the blasé subject of modernity, as understood by Simmel in “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Diarmuid Costello: Elise, what do you think that observation should do when we’re talking about affect in art? On that taxonomy, it’s a risk we’ll always fail to perceive blunted affect. What should that do to our theorizing? Eve Meltzer: Yes, it is a risk—a risk that was run and to which we fell prey with conceptual art in its earliest iteration. That was my point when we talked about “disaffection” in Mary Kelly. The failure to perceive is at the same time a suppression of “display,” to use Elise’s word—or, to think the matter in the terms that Charles Harrison once used in reference to conceptualism: “the suppression of the beholder.”5 The point was to resist the idea that art viewership relied on spectation and, by extension, to contest the conventional ideology of visibility by refusing its aspects: formalism, objecthood, the art market, and related notions of style, quality, permanence, and authorship. So I suppose for a theory of affect, 5. Charles Harrison, “Conceptual Art and the Suppression of the Beholder,” in Essays on Art and Language (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 45.

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one could think about an ideology of visibility with respect to affectivity, beyond art and art history as much as within it. Elise Goldstein: I think the most interesting way to employ it is to think about its relation to theories of animism, which we were talking about in relation to W. J. T. Mitchell and others. There’s a clinical relation between someone having an affect, and being affected, or having an affectation. The affect is talked about as a display without conscious recognition of the display, while affectation is a conscious choice to display something that may have no connection to the patient’s inner state. A fixed affect is one that is nonresponsive and unchanging, and in that sense most art has a fixed affect, which makes it, in clinical terms, an affectation. Jay Bernstein: Even when blunted, right? Elise Goldstein: Yes. Jay Bernstein: Makes me think of Donald Judd. Joaquín Barriendos: In my case this makes me think again of Lygia Clark. Her project Structuring of the Self has a lot to do with the clinical, political, and poetical dimension of producing an affect in someone else and of being affected by others by means of “relational objects.” For her this kind of aesthetic experience entails a sort of political and therapeutic resistance. Thus the work has to do with perceiving affectivity as a relation or transaction between diverse resonant bodies (corpos vibrátiles). Michael Kelly: There are at least three more sources for understanding the rise and role of affect today. First, in art history, Jill Bennett’s book Empathic Vision involves Deleuze’s concept of sensation but moves away from Bacon and shifts instead to Doris Salcedo, William Kentridge, and several other artists dealing with what she calls “affective transaction.”6 Second, in philosophy, Judith Butler introduces the concept of “apprehension” in Frames of War, in large part to capture the role of affect in connection with recognition. Many of her examples of apprehension come from art, or from the more general realm of representation (for instance nonartistic images), where she locates critique today.7 Third, in literary theory, Carrie Noland’s Agency and Embodiment analyzes the notion of gesture to make sense of current discussions of embodiment (from Merleau-Ponty and others) in relation to the problem of agency, which is crucial because embodiment, like affect, is often thought to elide or undermine agency.8 Jay Bernstein: Regarding Butler, it’s important to think about why she does what she does and what she thinks the stakes are. The thought is that there are some 6. Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 7. Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).

8. Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 

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psychological phenomena that are not merely descriptive, but that give structure to human life. Think of the way that Kierkegaard and Heidegger use Angst. In  this sense, Butler wants to follow Freud and “depsychologize psychology”: to take merely psychological terms and show they have structural force for our self-understanding. She also thinks language and discursivity come late, too late, in the sense that it is through our affective responses that we discover who we already are, what we are positioned to do and not do; in affect we discover our commitments and attachments. The ability to grieve is a central example: who we grieve is equivalent to whose life we think counts and matters, whose life if lost would tear me up. But to agree to this thought is equally to agree that we do not decide, as a matter of choice or reflection, which lives count and which do not. Rather, in finding myself grief-stricken over that death in a far-off land of someone who I did not know personally, I discover in ways I had been unaware of previously that that life matters utterly to me. So the idea of the aesthetic as what can make an end run around reflective thought and language, as what comes under the conceptual radar, beneath or beyond social practice, is the thought of what can put us in touch with attachments and fundamental commitments that we would, in a cool moment, deny existing. That is, I think, how Butler uses aesthetics and art examples in her writing: as things that reveal these pre-existing, stronger commitments and attachments. Michael Kelly: In her book Frames of War, the argument is that to recognize the prisoners in the photographs in Abu Ghraib as prisoners, we have to recognize them as grievable. But to do that, there is a sense in which we have to apprehend them as grievable, and it turns out the images we received from Abu Ghraib required apprehension, so images—not art—played a role. James Elkins: This has been an interesting discussion in the last thirty minutes or so, because we have a dozen or more theories that might develop affect theory, both in art and in experience in general. Some accounts, such as Butler’s and Deleuze’s, have intermittent stakes in art, although they are more about experience. Others, like the clinical theories Elise described, seem ready to by applied to the arts. I have been wondering how they might be related, and it occurs to me that the theory that is the outlier here is not Butler’s or Deleuze, but the idea Hal had of affect as administration. I say that because it seems that if the idea were to be developed, it might want to say something about all the other accounts. Hal Foster: Affect might be a way to connect with what it is to be human, through our common state as sufferers. That way Butler’s way becomes ethical and political very (too) quickly. But what does one do when you have Butler on one side, and Breitz on the other? As much as you might identify with the victims in Abu Ghraib, you identify immediately with Madonna in the moment of “Material

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Girl” in the Breitz video. The Breitz video has that moment of “That’s me!”—but of course it’s not you. It’s not authentic; you are interpellated. Dakota Brown: The Abu Ghraib identification is more authentic because it’s more ethical? Hal Foster: How did Eve put it—“affect” is an “a-signifying non-sign”? It seems to me weirdly a-subjectifying, too. I mean; you have the feeling, it seems like a subjective experience, but it is not necessarily a personal one. Our feelings for Bin Laden or Princess Di, Sarah Palin or Obama—they register deeply in us, sometimes crazily so, but are they “our” feelings? They are already felt for us somehow; we are already affected; and we share them with millions of others. It’s as Althusser said about state apparatuses: affect could be both site and stake of contestation now, and maybe of creativity, too. Michael Kelly: That worry is very much part of the debate around Butler’s work. It is a question about where the space of opposition or possibility of agency come in, which links Butler with Noland. Affects—or in her case, apprehension—alone do not automatically enable opposition or agency, but they are part of the picture. The appeal to apprehension as shared by all humans is a way of preventing theory from collapsing into the merely individual, subjective, or Neoromantic. But the “Doublicious” video is a different challenge. Hal Foster: I took the “Doublicious” video seriously. For me it was a beautiful example of an interest of mine, the mimesis of the hardened.9 It’s not just a parody: it  does everything we’re asked to do in those commercials—to cathect wildly with this or that product—and flips it. James Elkins: I wonder what desire those desubjectifying practices answer to. The video distributes subjectivity— Hal Foster: Yes, it registers in the subject and elsewhere, in many other subjects, at the same time. Dakota Brown: There’s a notion that there can be some sort of shared affect, or administered affect, but that we also want to get away from subjectless terms like “spectacle,” which can seem like nothing more than conspiracy theories after a certain point. I wonder if some form of return to the aesthetic, with the understanding that the aesthetic no longer solely resides in art, might be a way of getting at the explosion of fragments of aesthetic experience throughout advertising like KFC or Taco Bell. There is something in a shared, modern subjectivity, even in what we would like to consider absolutely administered and flat— James Elkins: I don’t quite get that yet. Why can’t that be described without the concept of the aesthetic? 9. Foster, “Bathetic, Brutal, Banal: Strategies of Survival in 20th-Century Art” (manuscript in progress).

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Dakota Brown: Maybe we don’t need the aesthetic. I’m just trying to get at something that might be in advertising and popular culture, without going back into culture theory. Diarmuid Costello: Listening to the way our conversation has been going, I think it may help to mark some basic distinctions between affects, feelings, moods, and sentiments. It’s common currency in recent philosophy that feelings and emotions have an intentional structure. Put simply, they take an object: you are angry at something or someone, afraid of something of someone, anxious about some possibility or other, that you feel cheated or misused is entirely understandable given the circumstances, and so on. If you were just plain angry or anxious or indignant as a matter of course, without some intentional object that would make your being so in some sense rationally explicable, that would be a mood rather than an emotion. Moods color everything in life; everything you experience is experienced through the optic of some always present mood, depression being perhaps the most obvious example. So it looks like feelings and emotions will be locatable in the individual, and rationally retrievable, while moods may characterize individuals, yet without being explicable in the same way. (It’s not always clear why someone is depressed, though it pervades their experience of the world.) But what about affects? It’s not at all clear that affects can be explained along the same lines. If you take seriously the thought that affects are presymbolic, it follows that they have to be impersonal, because interpolation in the symbolic order is on such accounts typically a constitutive condition of the subject appearing as subject. This immediately distinguishes affects from emotions and feelings. If, on the “subtending” model, affect is presymbolic, and hence presubjective, it is not strictly speaking something that can be predicated of the subject at all: it predates the subject’s emergence as such. (The fourth term, “sentiments,” would on this taxonomy name a kind of debased or secondhand feeling. For this reason, Hal, the example of Lady Di that you gave doesn’t register for me as affect, but as sentiment.) Nadja Millner-Larsen: The decoupling of emotion and affect is quite important to many theorists who want to resist the idea that feeling belongs to a subject. Teresa Brennan, for example, argues that the very idea of an emotionally contained subject is a surviving bastion of Eurocentricism.10 Affect then can become a placeholder for that undertheorized space before subjectivization. James Elkins: For me, this vacillation about the location of affect shows that we want it to have both the forms you gave it earlier—subtending and critical. It isn’t a choice, it’s a matter of not wanting to be clear about the immiscibility of the two forms we want. Hal Foster: Diarmuid, where are the passions in that set of four terms? Thomas Hirschhorn takes the shrine as one of his formats; they are modeled on the 10. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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shrines that appeared to commemorate Princess Di.11 The works are about passion; instead of decrying spectacle and imagining you might be outside it, his move is to work within it, and use what binds us, which in this case is sentiment. Diarmuid Costello: Regarding the passions, Hal, I don’t have clear intuitions about Thomas Hirschhorn, but I do about Bill Viola, another artist who takes the passions as his subject matter. Viola’s work generally strikes me as incredibly manipulative of its viewer’s feelings. The videos are a sentimental assault. As to where the passions stand on this taxonomy, I don’t have an immediate response. In one respect they seem akin to moods: a life can be consumed by a passion, as it can be pervaded by a mood. But in another respect they seem akin to emotions: one can be in the sway of an emotion just as one can be gripped by a passion. In terms of the taxonomy I offered I guess it would have to depend on whether passion is conceived as taking an object. But beyond that I don’t feel qualified to pronounce. Hal Foster: Hirschhorn wants to motivate his passion for different figures through vernacular forms such as shrines and monuments, but for people like Mondrian rather than Di. He suggests that, pace Rancière, we are not in an aesthetic regime but in an affective regime, this is our medium, and it’s up to us to see what we can do with its energies. Viola, for me, is merely manipulative. He doesn’t reflect on the medium, but uses old media to deliver the old investments. Omair Hussain: But to constantly attempt to “draw attention to our condition” seems like a concession to the present. It’s feels like an admission of defeat, that our present condition is all we have, let’s make the most of it. It reifies the present and evades the task of challenging it. I’m skeptical of the ways affect can be affirmative of the present. Affect exists within the ideological apparatus—what we were calling administrative affect—and when we see its use as a way of dissolving potential conflict, we recognize a conservative impulse, a way to liquidate political dissent. Yet it’s celebrated in the contemporary art world, and functions similarly. Affect is a perfect platform for contemporary art to affirm plurality, eclecticism, and commonality, without working through potential conflicting positions and stances. One of the difficulties I have with the idea of finding a “beyond” to the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic debate is that it be used to simply come to terms with what already exists. I think it would be a real loss to let an appeal to affect, passion, or emotion wash over real differences, real stakes, real positions. It seems typical of the contemporary to find ways of reconciling potential debates that could be productive. Anecdotally, in a class critique, it’s really difficult to critique a work about pathos. If you’re critical, you’re pegged as the heartless asshole. Eve Meltzer: Yes, but again, that is the misreading at work. Heartless equals blunted, after all. Also, you are misguided to think that affect is on the other side of all things “real.” 11. See, for example, Benjamin Buchloh, interview with Thomas Hirschhorn, October 113 (Summer 2005): 77–100.

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Jay Bernstein: Right, Omair, that’s the danger. Expressivity makes a kind of appeal, so that judgment seems like insult. If the only appeal is affect, it is the wrong sort of appeal. Gretchen Bakke: I think Hal has just said something sort of amazing, given the whole conversation we’ve been having this week. You said, We are not in an aesthetic regime, we are in an affective regime. That seems like it answers our question. I want to link it to Dakota’s idea of fragmented aesthetic values scattered throughout experience. It makes sense that if we’re in an affective regime, there are fragments of aesthetics suspended throughout the regime. Omair Hussain: What happened to our allergy to regimes? We say the Modernist regime is elitist, normative, and oppressive. We’re against paradigms, unless they encompass everyone. That’s much more conservative than arguing for particular paradigms, because it gives the false impression that we’re all on the same page. When Jay makes emphatic, normative claims, we push back. But at least he is honest in stating what his normative claims are, and what he is against, what he’s critical of. Hal, I want to push you on this: you evade the question of critical judgments by insisting on your own impartiality to debates. That is its own normativity, its own paradigm. You have assumed a step away from the debates, saying you don’t have opinions on normative claims, or that you won’t make them, but that is a normative claim on your part. Mere description is normative. It is the norm that governs art criticism today. Contemporary art sees itself as existing outside of totalizing paradigms, yet its continual uncritical celebration of pluralism as an end in itself is its own totalizing paradigm. “Anything goes” is its mantra. “Mere description” is its normative practice. This regime of inclusion has actively worked to exclude one essential thing: self-criticism. James Elkins: What would you do with the affect as administration model? Omair Hussain: I think it’s a perfect parallel. The state uses affect as a way of appealing to a “collective humanity.” Pathos is used to appeal to localized communities. Collective celebrations of “difference” only affirm an unflinching status quo. Rhetoric of “unity” and “inclusion” is used to maintain ideological consensus, to stifle criticism. The Obama administration is the application of affect at its most effective. Hal Foster: I like your paranoia, dude! But I didn’t hear Gretchen say that this affective regime subsumes all others; that’s your projection. To say that there are shards of aesthetic experience in the affective regime isn’t to subsume aesthetics. Maybe there is no one regime, but only a mix of residual and emergent ones. Omair Hussain: Maybe it’s an exaggeration of projection, but the excitement for the compromise it presents is my platform of paranoia. Sven Spieker: Hal, I don’t think that was a fair rejoinder to Omair’s question. What I heard Omair say was that there was a hidden claim to normativity in your position, which has not made itself explicit but that nevertheless did make itself felt.

9. t h i n g s m i s s i n g f r o m t h i s b o o k

Here the subject was all the things that had been excluded from the week’s conversations, either by chance or because the Faculty or Fellows weren’t interested. The idea of the seminar was to think about reasons why certain topics had been omitted, and to distinguish political and philosophic reasons from contingent ones. James Elkins: I thought we should end with an open session, in the spirit of the entire event, on things we have omitted or underrepresented throughout the week. It has been suggested to me that the optimal subject here is the linguistic, political, institutional, geographic conditions under which a conversation like ours can take place at all. I want to begin with that, but first I’ll offer an abbreviated list of things we haven’t discussed. I’ll divide these provisionally into authors and subjects whose work is clearly continuous with our subject, but who were nevertheless omitted for one reason or another; and authors and subjects that might be discontinuous with our subject, where the reasons for omission might be easier to locate. First there are omitted subjects that are continuous with our theme. There are individual authors, such as Alain Badiou and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, whom people might expect in this discussion.1 Aside from that potentially endless list, there is the question of the revivals of beauty. When Diarmuid and I planned the week’s seminars, the entire subject of the re-emergence of beauty, as in Dave Hickey, Peter Schjeldahl, Bill Beckley, and Elaine Scarry, and others associated with it, such as Wendy Steiner and Arthur Danto, gradually dropped out. The faculty just weren’t interested in addressing them. Then there are omitted subjects that might not be discontinuous with our subject. In my introductory lecture I mentioned Christian hermeneutics of beauty in relation to art such as Karl Barth and Jacques Maritain—an enormous tradition stretching back to the Church Fathers.2 Closer at hand there is postcolonial studies, area studies, de-colonial studies, and other initiatives. Several of the Fellows, including Joaquín Barriendos, are deeply engaged with those subjects, but in that case it is not difficult to see the reasons their contributions 1. Schaeffer’s argument is against the “speculative theory of art,” which includes Modernism. Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, translated by Steven Rendall, introduction by Arthur Danto (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. The content of the “speculative theory” is “philosophical,” “the same as

that of philosophy and religion” (13, 141). All share the Idea, and “the truth of Being” (141). What is needed, Schaeffer argues, is something outside of all that; Danto’s introduction to the English edition notes that the argument might not be convincing, but the reasons for trying are apparent. 2. See the introduction.

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seemed difficult to fit: there is a general lack of conceptualization of the relation between postcolonial studies and art history, which makes the bridge to Western aesthetics especially difficult to cross.3 Beáta Hock: That may be true in well-circumscribed academic traditions. When it comes to other settings, there is much talk about parallel and multiple modernities as opposed to a singular modernity.4 In peripherally Western regions like east-central Europe, the concept and practice of “self-colonization” is often discussed. The term was introduced by Alexander Kiossev to describe a kind of intellectual attitude that imports foreign values and models of civilization, and willingly contributes to the appropriation or colonization of its own authenticity through these imported models.5 Self-colonization, according to Kiossev, is typically practiced in regions that are not sufficiently distant (and their cultures distinguishable) from the “great nations.” In recent years, attempts have been made to formulate another paradigm by shifting the terms and adjusting the focus of art-historical inquiry. The point is to move away from persistently totalizing analytical frameworks and thus bring out the meanings of cultures located in various geographies. Piotr Piotrowski’s texts form an important part of this work. James Elkins: Yes, those writers and many more are the principal subjects of the first book in this series, Art and Globalization. It’s a larger subject: but my claim would be that even in those projects, there is a fundamental lack of discourse connecting art historical to other values. Piotrowski, for example, does work on these issues, but within an art-historical frame. Another neighboring discipline we have not talked about is visual studies. There, an endemic presentism and an eccentric bibliography can slow an awareness of the pertinence of other discourses, especially older art history and theory, again making contributions to aesthetics very difficult.6 And there’s anthropology, an interest of several of our Fellows. It is a traditional “other” of art history and theory, ritually invoked as a source of parallel phenomena that do not need to be incorporated into whatever histories are at hand. And finally, there are artistic practices, another traditional “other” of art history and theory. This is a longtime interest of mine, very hard to integrate into history and theory for a number of reasons. 3. This is developed in “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America,” in Compression vs. Expansion: Containing the World’s Art, edited by John Onians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 188–214. 4. See the “Multiple Modernities” issue of Daedalus, 129, no. 1 (2000), or Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For work more immediately invested in pluralising the tradition of writing art and cultural history, see Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and

the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1991): 336–57. 5. Alexander Kiossev, “Notes on SelfColonising Cultures,” in After The Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, edited by Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), 114–18. 6. This is discussed in my Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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That’s a provisional listing of absences, but let’s begin with the political and institutional context of this event itself, and explore some of the conditions that have enabled a conversation like this one to take place at all. Stéphanie Benzaquen: I have felt excluded throughout this week, on all the subjects we have discussed, because we have not touched on the social and economic conditions of theories of art. We have been living in the abstract. There is a precarious class of intellectual workers throughout the world: people who try to get jobs, find voices, continue to do what they want. And to do that, they have sometimes to censor themselves, to limit what they say, to choose topics that will be of current interest. That seems to me especially relevant in the academic world. I wonder what this precariousness has to do with the production of theory. I might be stretching it too far, but I had the feeling that Edward Said’s text in The Anti-Aesthetic was, at least in part, about that: mechanisms of exclusion and preservation in knowledge production. I also don’t understand how we can talk about radical theory in the year 2010. I think it would be interesting to talk about aesthetics and anti-aesthetics from the point of view of compromise. Hal Foster: It could be that those practices you may or may not want to call precarious, that want to map social and economic conditions, are both different but also complementary to relational aesthetics. The spectacle of soup in a gallery can seem like a gratuitous aesthetic gesture, but if you flip it, it can show how tenuous relationality is out there in the world. It is precisely not a critical gesture, but an aesthetic one, to make small, ephemeral communities. You don’t really need relationality when relations are strong and robust elsewhere. Does this help? Stéphanie Benzaquen: Not really. Hal Foster: I’ve failed again. Eve Meltzer: Stéphanie, I think what Hal is intimating is that there is this sense “out there,” so to speak, one that in fact goes back to the historical moment of the anti-aesthetic, that the political should be the irreducible ground of all things, or  better put—is the irreducible ground. “Let’s get back to real conditions,” as you say. This is along the lines of something Omair said earlier this week; that affect is just exceed or distraction, what about “real” stakes. It is critical to realize that part of the intervention of practices like those associated with relational aesthetics is precisely to show that although the signifiers “social” and “political” often come to supplant or supersede, say, “the world,” there is in fact more rudimentary terrain—of which things like relationality and affectivity form part. Brandon Evans: Stéphanie, your concern relates to one of my hesitations from earlier in the week when I asked Jay about art as a delay of the promise of redemption. I think the sense of compromise you mention has more to do with assessing the

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use value of so-called relational practices for social engagement, whether critical or uncritical—rather than limiting their use value only to the fields of philosophy and art criticism. Gretchen Bakke: Stéphanie, I have been thinking about the economics of presence: not just our presence here, but the presence of certain artworks in our conversation, of certain theorists in our minds. I’d like to pay some attention to the particularity of all that, in light of the precariousness of the current situation: not just the U.S. economy, or the academy, or art. Hal, regarding Hirschhorn, you said that it makes sense not to pretend to be outside spectacle, but to remain inside it, and work with what is given. That is a lot of what we’ve been doing here, and it would be good for the last hour of our week to be inside our spectacle, and think about how many of us are here precariously. Jay Bernstein: One reason why the anti-aesthetic may feel urgent at the moment is because the historical anti-aesthetic arose at a moment of cultural crisis. There was a sense that the high art of Modernism had lost its vigor, that it had lost its critical energies, that it was an outmoded vocabulary, that the language of the aesthetic no longer had power. I take it that crisis occurred on a number of fronts, but one could optimistically view it as internal to culture itself. I think the anti-aesthetic is on the cards because there is a general crisis in the humanities. It is no longer clear that the economy wants culture, that it is an integral part of economic production. The comfortable relation between bourgeois society and its critics—how happy they once were to feed the mouth that bit them—is coming to an end. The question arises, therefore, for the humanities: what is our form of address? People who are interested in the anti-aesthetic might be concerned with its reproduction in art academies, as Jim has said. But I think there is a larger issue, and it’s one of the reasons I agreed to come. I feel that the question of how any of this can matter, under these economic conditions, has become difficult. That said, I don’t know how to put together the internal conversation—the one we’ve been having—and my own sense, which I have in my own work, of the politics. For me they are both intimately connected and falling apart. Gustav Frank: Gretchen, I appreciate your intervention also as a matter of method. Jim, earlier you were very critical of Tom Mitchell’s approach. But I think there is something methodologically interesting in that book. Without losing his appeal to sophisticated readers, he is attempting to find a more empathetic approach. He says, I don’t want to step back and make theory from above. I think that approach corresponds very closely to what artists want us to know about current practices, and to theoretical approaches such as relational aesthetics. From this perspective, Stéphanie and Gretchen are asking us to change our methodology, to something more empathetic. Empathy is probably theory’s compromise to affect in and of the artwork.

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Beáta Hock: For me criticality, an earlier point of contention among us, is not so difficult to comprehend, and I locate it in methodology and epistemology. I’d like to offer interdisciplinarity as a key to criticality. Rather than relying on an arbitrary compartmentalization of knowledge and a strict separation between art and non-art, interdisciplinarity proposes to think through discourses produced in various areas of intellectual life. From this perspective, Said’s writing is the most ambitiously postmodern in The Anti-Aesthetic.7 He talks about the willingness of experts in the humanities to be left alone within the boundaries of their own immediate disciplines, and how they leave the administration of their lives to supposedly responsible decision makers. James Elkins: This event, and the entire book series, is wholly funded by the Chicago collectors Howard and Donna Stone: that’s the immediate institutional context. They are interested in having an annual series of international events, hosted at the School of the Art Institute, and a resulting book series. They have no interest in controlling the content. That freedom should be noted because it doesn’t always, or often, happen with private patronage. For me the challenge of the series is to address especially difficult ongoing problems in art by bringing together people who might not ordinarily talk. In this case, the theme might have called for a more focused group of people, perhaps all of them conversant with October, Zone Books, or related publications. Most of the people in such a gathering would be trained in the States or the U.K. But for this series, international participation is crucial, and in addition I thought it would be good to have people who have come upon this theme from the outside, belatedly, or through fields such as postcolonial studies. That made it difficult to choose the Fellows for this event, because awareness of the anti-aesthetic is not at all uniform around the world.8 So the feelings of exclusion voiced by some Fellows at this event are especially telling. Martin Sundberg: One explanation for our exclusions might be a lack of consensus regarding the basic terms we have been using. For me, it never really became clear how aesthetics and anti-aesthetics were linked to Modernism and postmodernism—and why we were afraid of using these terms in relation to each other. Also, as Joana and Joaquín have pointed out, the examples were taken from a very limited, normative range, always excluding that which didn’t fit. This didn’t exactly make the discussions relevant or constructive when regarded from another, non-American perspective.

7. Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983),135–51. 8. The problem is not symmetric. In the first event in this series, Art and Globalization, Susan Buck-Morss, Fredric Jameson, and others had

no great difficulty in returning from political and area studies to questions of the aesthetic, just because they appeared safely contained as economic and historical matters. Art and Globalization, edited by James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, Stone Art Theory Institutes 1 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).

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Stéphanie Benzaquen: Isn’t there a methodological issue here? If we address art history and postcoloniality, how do we make the canon interact with other ideas? I think about what Damisch says regarding the code that both regulates and deregulates the system.9 Can we perhaps push the canon into a permanent crisis? Joaquín Barriendos: Jim, as you mentioned, there are many connections between the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic question and the postcolonial/decolonial debate. I pretty much agree with your explanation of why all these issues have been omitted from our seminar. In my view, the beyond of the anti-aesthetic has to do with decolonizing diverse epistemic hierarchies that aesthetics itself helped and still helps to edify; that is why affect appears to be relevant. Since Kant, aesthetics and racism have developed a relation of mutual connivance. Therefore, we have to argue for a non-Eurocentric rehistorization of aesthetics. For me, that is the challenge that the postphilosophical reinvigoration of aesthetics faces today. There are several writers who acknowledge the need of a more accurate understanding of what they call transcultural aesthetics (I am thinking of Marchiano and Milani), intercultural aesthetics (Van den Braembussche), or exotic aesthetics (David Carrier).10 In very different ways, these authors recognize the “cultural turn” of current aesthetics; claim a different perspective on the interplay between art, autonomy and philosophy; and question the Eurocentric epistemic matrix and the universalistic aspirations associated with the discipline. However, in spite of these new approaches, it seems to me that the academic arena has a persistent lack of interest in aesthetic issues, which is directly connected to the dissemination of the three imperial disciplines: geography, anthropology, and art history. In my view, new cross-pollinations between current aesthetics and issues such as area studies, Western) progressive development, racialization, geopolitics, visual modernizing impetus, and world art history could be useful for promoting the decolonization of the Western aesthetic thinking. Hal Foster: On the one hand, there is a crisis, as Jay describes, but on the other there is an enormous inflation of the cultural sphere. In the long run, and I am not sure how this plays into questions of aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, we might be in the last days of the culture wars, which have gone on for a few decades now. Thirty years ago, in The Anti-Aesthetic, Said said that the task of humanities was to represent “humane marginality.” Forget about the humane; maybe now it’s simply human marginality.

9. Damisch, Théorie du Nuage: Pour une Histoire de la Peinture (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 178–87. 10. Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics, edited by Grazia Marchiano and Raffaele Milani (Turin: Trauben, 2001);

Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective, edited by Antoon van den Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle, and Nicole Note (Amsterdam: Springer, 2009); David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

p r e fa c e

Harper Montgomery

This preface attempts to bring order to a veritable minefield of disagreement over fundamental questions about art’s relationship with life. While threads of consensus—more often formed around shared complaints than agreements— link many of the authors’ texts, their areas of concern are, as a rule, profoundly diverse and often isolated from each other by differences as insurmountable as geography, academic discipline, and generation. Impassioned and irreverent forms of address are the only commonalities universally shared by the assessors. And, in fact, it is hardly surprising that the stakes involved in questions of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic have inspired assessors to voice their concerns in prose that is often polemical, highly personal, and, on occasion, even breathtakingly poetic. Because the twenty-two assessors whose texts appear in this section respond to the Seminars with such varied approaches, instead of trying to relate what they have written to the topics covered in the nine Seminars preceding it, I will stress the areas of concern the assessors produced in the process of responding to the conversations. Sometimes these concerns neatly track the Seminars’. Often they do not. By summarizing where respondents adhered to the Seminars’ topics and where they did not, my aim is not only to emphasize which topics were most compelling to assessors, but also to show how the conversations generated new areas of concern. Quite often these concerns explore questions raised but not sufficiently addressed and theories forwarded but not adequately developed. This is especially the case for seminars 6 on Rancière and 7 and 8 on affect theory in art history and at large. The discussions on Kant in seminar 1 inspired many assessors to revisit aesthetic experience’s critical potential. Lastly, seminar 9 solicited strong responses by asking what was absent from the week’s conversations, the most pressing of which was many of the seminar participants’ seeming lack of interest in analyzing the economic and social conditions that made the Stone Summer Theory Institute possible. The discussion of Kant in seminar 1 strikes many as useful for thinking through problems raised by contemporary artistic production and its discourses. Alexander Dumbadze defends aesthetic experience as a space of critique, locating within it that key tenant of religious faith, doubt. At a moment when “the presence of the world in the sphere of art” has never been as pronounced, “the issue of experience is absolutely central to the continual importance of contemporary art.” Continuing to seek faith and doubt in aesthetic experience is how he

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proposes resisting the deadening professionalization threatening the production of art and criticism. Filomena Molder hunts relational aesthetics to Kantian roots in her meditation on the work art must do to distinguish itself from the world. Considering the paradoxical natures of images and the obfuscating presence of the artist allows Molder to trace a line of inquiry that ends with her declaration “I see works of art as one of these artificial shelters.” (She also responds to a question articulated mostly offstage during the Seminars: could discourses around animism, the “power of images,” and the question “what do pictures want?” have helped address the divisions of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic—or of art and life?) Timotheus Vermeulen draws on Eva Schaper’s analysis of Kant’s Third Critique to posit an “alternative modernity” that can contains both the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. This he terms “metamodernism.” Boris Groys proposes turning away from aesthetic experience and instead towards Kant’s contention that the artist’s task is to reproduce the self which stems from notions of artistic creation as poeisis. Groys argues that the production of “purely autopoetic work” dominates contemporary life and art in the form of electronic media, where the self is perpetually and simultaneously emptied and reproduced. Many address art and politics and its variations (i.e., politics and art, politics as art, art as politics, etc.) (seminars 1, 2, 6, and 9). Rebecca Zorach is dismayed that the political stakes of the current moment seem not to be as pressing for the seminar participants as they were in the 1980s for Foster when he theorized the anti-aesthetic. “Occupation, privatization, precarity, extraordinary rendition, anti-globalization movement, Afghanistan, war without end, national security state, carceral democracy, neoliberalism, neoconservativism, racism” are the current political contexts she names. The most relevant artworks produced by these contexts take the form of protests and interventions. And Zorach produces ample evidence that art actions can produce “affective and relational” effects. Luis Camnitzer locates art’s politics in its capacity to provide models for problem solving to any and all viewers, irrespective of education or social class. When its consumerist status is denied, “the art object becomes a conduit through which artist and viewer communicate,” and “[i]t provides a basis on which taste can be bypassed and the focus can be places instead on the way art expands knowledge.” Postmodernism is defended as neither irrelevant nor useless (seminars 1, 2, and 3). Gordon Hughes defends the “political imperative” of postmodernism as it was deployed during the 1980s, arguing that parsing the historical differences between Conceptualism during the 1960s and ’70s and Jenny Holzer foregrounds important changes enacted by the move “from the anti-esthetic to The Anti-Aesthetic.” Geng Youzhuang tells us that The Anti-Aesthetic was widely read when it was belatedly published in China in 1998, partly because postmodernism had enjoyed sustained popularity following a series of lectures there by Fredric Jameson in 1985. Andrew McNamara values the recovery of Modernisms that was prompted by Foster’s postmodernism. He contends that in the

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Seminars it is “modernism [that] emerges as the ultimate point of oscillation and vacillation, the division behind all the other oppositions” and that, despite seminar participants’ desire to eschew Modernism, the entire discourse occurred within parameters established by it. The culture wars and identity politics are addressed with a force that suggests not only that their relevance persists, but also that the responses to the October group’s enterprise continue to produce productive polemic (seminar 2). Cary Levine presents Mike Kelley’s anti-aesthetics as a contentious counterpoint that compels us to ask questions not only about class and gender but also about the hierarchies that determine the production and interpretation of works of art. Gender, sexuality, and race are also concerns of Gregory Sholette’s, Robert Storr’s, and Grant Kester’s essays, all of which take different approaches to assessing the historical circumstances that produced The Anti-Aesthetic and the ascent of theory. Considering how the class concerns of Craig Owens’s critical position (and Foster’s in a supporting role) have been evacuated from theory, Sholette wonders how their incorporation into artistic production enabled art’s “détente with capital.” “Perhaps,” he asks, “at a moment of slouching ideological collaboration it is the figure of the overlooked remainder or internal exile that functions as a pivotal space holder for whatever criticality is still possible within contemporary art discourse?” Storr warns against the complicity of theory and taste. (That the anti-aesthetic can appeal to taste as much as the aesthetic is also a point observed by Boris Groys.) When The Anti-Aesthetic was published, Storr contends, there was a great deal of work being made whose subversive politics far exceeded the cold irony the work forwarded with postmodernism. For Storr, the sensual, or what Baudelaire calls “some spontaneous, unexpected product of universal vitality,” should exceed theoretical frameworks by existing only in the realm of feeling. (An argument that curiously evokes affect without naming it.) Grant Kester also suspects that dependence on theory hinders our ability to analyze works of art so much so that “theory, not art, is what explains the world to us.” He calls for a “more reflective, dialogical, occasionally even skeptical, relationship to theoretical texts, in the hope that we may gain greater confidence in our ability to draw new insight from the art practices we study.” Rancière (seminar 6) is defended on various fronts. Justin McKeown questions the institutional frameworks that allowed seminar participants to unduly dismiss him. Jon Simons reminds us that what political theorists find so useful in Rancière is that he theorizes politics in aesthetic terms, as “the interruption of any given regime of the sensible by a democratic movement, by something that exceeds or is denied by its limitations.” Thus, Simons sees Rancière and Foster as seeking the same type of intervention. Toni Ross argues that Rancière “offer[s] a productive reconfiguration of the structural dynamic of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic.” And she traces the concerns of the anti-aesthetic—of the relationship between the everyday and art—to Kant and Schiller. Her argument that Rancière eschews the German Romanticist Schiller in favor of the Schiller

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who believed art “a locus of contentiousness from which established perceptual coordinates of social life might be challenged” is evidence of Rancière’s uses for locating the “interconnected emancipatory impulses” of the aesthetic and antiaesthetic. Rebecca Zorach similarly cites Rancière’s helpfulness in recognizing the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic as “two sides of the same coin.” Adorno is defended in a pair of spirited responses arguing for his centrality to theorizing affect (seminars 5, 7, and 8). William Mazzarella and Carrie Noland seize on his “sensual particulars” as key to theorizing a critical affect. Mazzarella deploys Adorno and the Walter Benjamin of the Arcades Project to overcome the pairing in the Seminars of affect as either “that which invests us sensuously in our ideological commitments” or affect that “escapes all ideological inscriptions.” Linking Adorno’s critique of “sensuous corporality” with affect theory as a “parallax view”—a pairing that shifts perspective between two points never seeking synthesis nor resolution—offers a route out of the impasse and a means with which to relate criticality to affective experience. In her essay on Adorno’s theorization of affect in Aesthetic Theory, Noland explains that “Erfahrung” or “ ‘thick’ experience” marks an affective experience that is epistemologically oriented, a “feeling that is a type of knowing.” For Adorno, she explains, art can preserve the “shudder”—the exemplary moment of affective experience, and “but it is not equivalent to it.” Nor does it transcend history or context. Affective experience is always “mediated for us, given to us, as historical subjects and by historical means.” Noland’s point is that “culture and affect, symbols and sensations, are co-constructed, and it is only through a dialectical theory of transduction that we will come to know why symbols convey sensations as they incontestably do.” Several assessors posit new terms altogether. Eva Schürmann notes a discourse on the modern that is distinct from the North American–accented Modernism that dominated the Seminars. Schürmann contends “we have never been modern” because the distinctions between nature and culture, among many other things, do not, in practice, actually exist. Language’s limitations are partly to blame because they separate “sign and thing” and “discourse and matter” and impose sequential thinking. Citing Bruno Latour and William Kentridge, she urges readers to instead consider a hybridity that embraces the productive nature of contradiction and indeterminacy. Irony is Gary Peters’s solution for the perpetually stalled state in which the seminar participants found themselves. He declares, “if the Kantians have aestheticized the world, then it is time (putting Heidegger in Benjamin’s shoes) to ontologize it!” and “what I’m talking about is precisely a desire to get over Kant not as part of yet another philosophical squabble . . . but as the ironic distanciation from the whole chiasmic caboodle.” For Peters, the participants most capable of interjecting irony into the Seminars were the artists, who were far more likely to recognize than the theorists and historians “that beyond the beyond-ing is just more of the same, and then more of that.”

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In the final seminar, Stéphanie Benzaquen asked Hal Foster about the precarious position of art workers and the need for the Seminars to address the “social and economic conditions of theories of art” (seminar 9). The perception that this query was left unanswered prompted several assessors to ask how art is made and circulated in contexts marked by globalization and conflict. Noah Simblist responds to Benzaquen by considering how artists in the Middle East such as Walid Raad and Emily Jacir have exceeded categories of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic in the process of employing conceptual strategies to make works about the Lebanon Civil War and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, among other conflicts. Rancière helps him by providing an escape from the aesthetic–anti-aesthetic binary he finds still divides art departments. Angela Dimitrakaki forwards “biopolitics” as more relevant frameworks for thinking current production than relational aesthetics or anti-aesthetics. To move beyond the anti-aesthetic, politics, she contends, must be decoupled from representation and instead posited in a “political economy of art” rather than producers and objects. (Zorach, Camnitzer, and Sholette’s essays also address Benzaquen’s query.) With Benzaquen’s unanswered question, the conversation ends but is not resolved. The assessors brilliantly and doggedly propel the discourse forward by responding to a double movement that, on the one hand, seeks to expand globally, and, on the other, to contract to an individual’s affective experience.

the october revolution

Grant Kester

I think Hal Foster can be forgiven a little false modesty when he wonders whether the “ancient history”1 of The Anti-Aesthetic has any relevance today. He must have felt a bit like Mick Jones being harangued by aging Clash fans to play “Rock the Casbah” one last time as the seminar participants pored over every paragraph of an essay he wrote when he was in his late twenties. However, I would argue that these “musket shots”2 from downtown Manhattan continue to affect the discourse around contemporary art in profound ways. The Anti-Aesthetic and the coterie of New York–based critics associated with Bay Press and October (Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Benjamin Buchloh, and others) did much to establish the particular relationship between art criticism and critical theory that continues to define much academic writing on contemporary art in the United States to the present day.3 It’s less a question of specific influences (although these have remained remarkably consistent) than the broader sense of a discipline in crisis and dependent on the insights provided by continental philosophy for new inspiration. Krauss captures this emblematic moment in her 1980 October essay on the “Paraliterary,” in which she defends Barthes and Derrida against the uncomprehending conservatism of Morris Dickstein and other cranky guardians of traditional literary criticism. The new paradigm of postmodern literature, in Krauss’s words, “is the critical text wrought into a paraliterary form,” dedicated not to revealing layers of meaning but to opening up the play of interpretation (“drama without the Play, voices without the Author, criticism without the Argument”).4 The key transposition here, of course, was from the paraliterary as a form of hermeneutic un-doing onto the work of art itself, which would constitute a kind of physical embodiment of the poetic/theoretical text (laying bare the apparatus, making strange, and generally confounding closure, stasis, and fixity in all their guises). It was in many ways a profoundly empowering moment, bringing a much-needed infusion of intellectual rigor and energy to art criticism. The criticism of the 1980s exhibited a capacity to grasp the complex imbrication of the cultural and the political, which came as a refreshing contrast to the ad hominem appeals to “quality” typical of Greenbergian criticism. But what happens now, three decades on, when the generation of thinkers that stormed the Sorbonne is now taught with near-catechistic devotion at 1. Section 3 of the Seminars. 2. Section 2 of the Seminars. 3. For a fascinating, albeit brief, history of Bay Press see Charles Mudede, “The Mysterious Disappearance of Bay Press,” The Stranger (January 24–30, 2002). http://​www​.thestranger​

.com/​seattle/​the​-mysterious​-disappearance​-of​ -bay​-press/​Content​?oid​=​9829 (accessed March 2011). 4. Rosalind Krauss, “Poststructuralism and the ‘Paraliterary,’ ” October 13 (Summer 1980): 40.

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the most privileged institutions of higher learning in the United States, Latin America, and Europe? Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze (and we might now add Agamben and Nancy) are ubiquitous not only in the academy but also, perhaps especially, in the art world, their names regularly invoked in catalog essays, artist’s statements, reviews, and dissertations. In fact, what is most striking is how little has actually changed in the thirty years since The Anti-Aesthetic was published; how much the same figures continue to occupy the same reading lists in PhD programs across the country. There’s been a bit of updating here and there as Rancière replaces Lyotard or Badiou nudges aside Baudrillard, but by and large art history continues to be written under the gaze (benign or otherwise) of continental philosophy. In fact, the frame of reference for “theory” has only contracted further. By the late-1990s the relatively inchoate mélange of critical theory that emerged during the eighties (radical pedagogy, semiotics, cultural anthropology, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, queer theory, Western Marxism, and various forms of feminist theory) had been largely winnowed down to the familiar patrimony of Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault and, more recently, the quartet of Agamben, Badiou, Nancy, and Rancière (Benjamin and Adorno, although German, are honorary members). My use of the term “patrimony” is deliberate. One of the most troubling aspects of the homogenizing of art theory over the past twenty years has been the gradual recession of feminist approaches and the literal disappearance of women theorists. Figures such as Hannah Arendt, Hélène Cixous, Simone de Beauvoir, Teresa de Lauretis, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Juliet Mitchell, Eve Sedgwick, and Michele Wallace, who were widely read and cited in art and media criticism during the 1980s, are rarely encountered in contemporary art writing or scholarly research. We can’t blame Hal Foster, or October, for this. In fact, the extent to which a model of art criticism rooted in a particular rapprochement with critical theory has become canonical is a tribute to the originality of their vision and their perspicacity in pursing it. But this success, this consolidation, came at a price. It created a habitual dependence on theory, in which theory, not art, is what explains the world to us. Perhaps the very strength, the intellectual depth, of this material led to a certain atrophy in our capacity to closely analyze works of art, especially when the only other model on offer, formalism, was itself a symbol of the regressive, apolitical nature of traditional art criticism. While Adorno or Derrida certainly trump Greenberg’s grasp of aesthetic philosophy, they are considerably less helpful in developing a nuanced reading of individual works of art. The situation has not been made any easier by the fact that many of the theorists who have emerged as art-world favorites are strikingly tone deaf when it comes to writing about actual artworks (consider Deleuze’s inexplicable embrace of Francis Bacon, Adorno’s distaste for jazz, or Rancière’s oddly out-of-touch references to contemporary visual art). By the 1990s art practice and critical theory enjoyed an increasingly interdependent and even circular relationship: artists read, recited, and invoked the

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same theoretical sources as their critics, sources which were called upon, in turn, by the critics to analyze artists’ work. Essays originally written to explicate the early modern judicial system, the textual poetics of Balzac, or the epistemology of scientific discourse were pressed into service to illuminate artistic projects operating in wildly different moments and contexts. It saddens me to see scholarship by younger critics and historians today who are entirely at ease paraphrasing the insights of Agamben, Nancy, or Badiou, but who are incapable of describing and analyzing a single work of art at length, in a manner that opens up its meaning rather than closing it down. It saddens me as well to see younger critics and historians who doubt their own insights, their own voices, unless they can first identify a proper theoretical authority to legitimate them (“As Bataille argues . . .”), or who feel it necessary to obtain theoretical permission in order to make the most basic and commonplace assertions in the analysis of a given work. This isn’t another cranky jeremiad against theory, as much as it may sound like one. Consider it a call, thirty years on, to recalibrate the ways in which art history and criticism learn from theory. It’s a call for a more reflective, dialogical, occasionally even skeptical, relationship to theoretical texts, in the hope that we may gain greater confidence in our ability to draw new insight from the art practices we study, as well as from the books we read.

“this” Alexander Dumbadze

In the final seminar, a chance for participants to address what was left out during the week of discussions, Jay Bernstein said, “I think the anti-aesthetic is in the cards because there is a general crisis in the humanities. . . . What is our form of address? . . . I feel that the question of how any of this can matter, under these economic conditions, has become difficult.”1 The “this” in the last sentence covers a lot of ground, referring to the seminar’s conversations, critical theory, and art. Bernstein describes the sentiment I had reading these discussions, a belief that at the root of most sustained reflections on contemporary art and its discourse is doubt in the efficacy of these twinned means of expression. At stake is whether or not “this”—to invoke Bernstein—is intellectually, emotionally, even economically worth it; whether “this” has an impact on the world; whether “this” escapes mere professionalism. Little of the Seminars focused on specific works of art. Art floated in the margins, as reference points in analyses, as the unspecified glue to ideas and thoughts that hedged toward the abstract. Participants instead evaluated the legacy of the anti-aesthetic, a concept made famous by Hal Foster’s edited collection from 1983.2 As he says in reference to Craig Owens’s 1980 essay “The Allegorical Impulse,”3 but his remark also pertains to The Anti-Aesthetic, it “was just a musket shot in downtown Manhattan.”4 The polemics of Owens and Foster as well as those of others like Douglas Crimp were full of fervor, drunk with the possibilities of critical theory. They defined postmodernism in New York and emphasized notions of criticality and resistance. The Anti-Aesthetic helped usher in a transformation that was already taking place in art criticism: the eschewal of judgments of taste for judgments of politics. The conjunction of art and theoretically inflected criticism was intense, and has not, in the United States at least, been replicated since. The implications of this intellectual revolution were mostly felt in the academy, where a younger generation of scholars found a style of analysis that compellingly brought together art and politics, whatever this latter term might mean. Politics has tremendous currency in art-historical writing about contemporary art. It is related to the idea of criticality, and in my mind the two concepts are semantically the same. Criticality, as with politics, has been conceived broadly, since “no one,” Foster explains, “is exactly sure what that [criticality] is, but, like pornography, we know it when we see it, right?”5 The flexibility in meaning of 1. Section 9 of the Seminars. 2. Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983).

3. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 67–80. 4. Section 2 of the Seminars. 5. Section 2 of the Seminars.

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both terms always leads me to ask what kind of politics is being invoked when used in discussions of contemporary art. Obviously, the sentiments are clearly on the left, but it is not always apparent if the politics articulated is universal in orientation, or limited to case-by-case circumstances. The ambiguity has only intensified with the ever-expanding nature of the global art world, making the conception of politics as mutable as the subject matter it tries to understand. In recent years, the discourse of contemporary art has emphasized two major models of politics. The first is activist in bent, linked to a particular issue, interpreting art in the service of or the advocacy for a specific cause. The second is more abstract, often associated with claims of subverting dominant systems like late capitalism. The generality of this politics is due to the amorphous qualities of the opposition: globalization, the culture industry, things without a definable subjectivity. In a schematic sense it is possible to see the first model as a politics of action and the second as that of the mind, but never are these categories mutually exclusive. As a rule, they almost always bleed into one another, creating a kind of stasis that is difficult to alter. But why did criticality become such an important stance in the early 1980s? Why has politics been a central trope in art writing ever since? There are many reasons for the methodological shift, but the most significant is the art of Minimalism, Pop, Fluxus, Happenings, Conceptualism, and all that came in its wake. By the early 1970s, this work made it plain that art could be absolutely anything, and that criticism as it had been practiced up to that point was inadequate to its task. The writing of Crimp, Foster, Owens, and others demarcated what they thought was good and bad, seeing criticism as an active pursuit, not a journalistic description of events. Their anti-aesthetic polemics were successful in New York and the academy, but beyond this context the increased expansion of the art world enveloped the logic of their arguments. The pluralism lamented in the Anti-Aesthetic and the pages of October thrived, which only intensified the call for politics in the ensuing years. If any critical criterion still functioned as a way of establishing boundaries in the contemporary art world, it was that of politics, and these judgments—invariably a hybridization of the activist and theoretical models of politics—paradoxically brought the aesthetic and antiaesthetic together. Politics, however, possesses an even more fundamental role now. With the fact that there is nothing that cannot be art taken as a given, the only thing tethering the infinite variation of gestures from being absorbed into the fabric of everyday life is an institutional network that literally acts as a frame. Never has the presence of the world in the sphere of art been so great. Contemporary art can now not just represent politics but actually be politics. However, in so doing, it risks being overwhelmed by the billions of images made each year, forgotten in the midst of things and commodities that compete for our attention. When considering a work of art in the face of this opposition, when trying to understand the significance of a piece while coming to terms with the fact

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that it is engrained in the cultural industry, it is easy to doubt art’s place in the world, to suppress the sinking feeling that one’s engagement with this material is only out of professional obligation, not some deeper calling. It is in the claims of politics that meaning can be found in art, a use value that saves art from the superfluous. This is not to say, however, that politics is not a key factor in many works of art, and that its consideration has not opened a number of new ways to think about artworks. It has, significantly and for the better. But in making these declarations for politics, criticism also, at least implicitly, can mask the fear that contemporary art on its own—without an institutional armature and links to the political—is something without affect. Bernstein says in the introductory seminar, “I think the question of the aesthetic—and this is present in Rancière and in Deleuze—is about the kind of experience such works provide, and so I do not see there is much difference between works that are overtly political and those that are not, nor between those aesthetic theories that are explicitly political like Rancière’s and those that are more epistemological or phenomenological like Deleuze’s.”6 I could not agree more, as the issue of experience is absolutely central to the continual importance of contemporary art. We live in a society that prizes experience. The constant thrill of the here and now places focus on being in the moment. The secularism of the art world only intensifies the power of presentness. Deliverance is something one searches for in the now, whether through the accumulation of goods, exotic travel, or yearning nostalgically for the past. The cult of experience has led many to document the most mundane of activities, sharing their images and videos electronically and taking advantage of social networking websites and digital repositories like YouTube. The ability to store a remarkable amount of information has made it difficult to judge what should and should not be saved for posterity. We no longer trust our memory, fearing perversely that some experiences will be lost forever.7 I worry about art’s survival in a world that does not prioritize experiences. How does it compete? How can it distract us long enough to make its point? In these questions is the doubt I discussed, and this doubt is why so many claims for the political are against the spectacle, mass media, and the socially constructed nature of representations—all things thought to nullify authentic experience.8 But if the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic are conjoined, one must add to this relationship another bond of opposites: faith and doubt in the efficacy of contemporary art. The experience before a work of art can be unbelievably 6. Section 1 of the Seminars. 7. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, under the direction of Pierre Nora, Englishlanguage edition edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1–20. 8. Guy Debord voices this doubt in the opening lines of The Society of the Spectacle: “The whole of life of those societies in which

modern conditions of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representations.” Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. For more on authentic experience in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and the ramifications in the contemporary art world see my “Spectacle and Death” in September 11, edited by Peter Eleey (New York: MoMA PS1, 2011), 114–31.

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profound. An occurrence like this is rare, and it is hard to know if one has actually willed this experience rather than felt it passively. It is always a game of give and take, the interaction between one’s desires and those of the artwork. Nonetheless, it is encounters like these (with all their variables and contingencies) that give one faith in art. I believe in the possibility of these kinds of experiences (even if I am deluding myself ) because without this conviction none of “this” matters.

the chinese reception

Geng Youzhuang

First, I would like to say something about the dissemination of The Anti-Aesthetic. It is very interesting to learn that the book was simply entitled La Posmodernidad when it was translated into Spanish in 1985, because, as Joaquín Barriendos said, the debate over the Western philosophy of art in Spanish in the 1980s “concerned postmodernity, rather than the anti-aesthetic.” Meanwhile, Hal Foster informed us that “it did disturb me when the English publisher retitled it Postmodern Culture, because it wasn’t about that primarily.” This means that, on the one hand, you cannot make a clear-cut distinction between postmodernity and anti-aesthetic, between European postmodernism and Anglo-American postmodernism, or even between modern and postmodern or aesthetic and antiaesthetic, and, on the other, that the same terms may have different connotations in various cultural contexts. The Chinese translation of The Anti-Aesthetic came out much later. The only version was published in Taiwan in 1998. Moreover, it is, in fact, incomplete. Two essays by the October people, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” by Rosalind Krauss and “On the Museum’s Ruins” by Douglas Crimp, were deleted as a result of copyright concerns. Because of such deletions, the Chinese version of The Anti-Aesthetic does not appear to be very “parochial.” As a matter of fact, the translator was trying to relate it to the postmodern scene in Taiwan. As mentioned in the translator’s preface, the so-called first wave of postmodernism in Taiwan followed the 1987 visits of Ihab Hassan and Fredric Jameson to Taiwan and the 1989 publication of Postmodernism and Culture Theory in Taiwan, based on the 1985 series of lectures given by Jameson at Peking University. There was, then, a second wave of postmodernism in Taiwan after 1995 with the appearance of “Postmodern Fictions,” a special issue of Chinese and Foreign Literature, and the translation and introduction of several theoretical books on postmodernism. The Anti-Aesthetic was one of these books. With such a background, the Chinese translation of The Anti-Aesthetic immediately became very popular in Taiwan when it appeared in 1998. The situation in mainland China, however, has been different. Even now, there is no translation of The Anti-Aesthetic with simplified Chinese characters, despite the great number of Western texts in the humanities and social sciences that have been translated in the past several decades. Hence, it is worth noticing that although it was not very difficult to get a Chinese version of The AntiAesthetic published in Taiwan with complex characters, the book has not seemed

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to attract much attention in mainland China, and few scholars and critics cite it. One of the reasons might be that postmodernism became a cliché in Chinese academic and artistic circles in the 1990s, soon after Fredric Jameson brought it to China with his influential 1985 lecture series at Peking University. Of course, this does not mean that postmodernism is no longer a theoretical issue in mainland China, but rather that the term has been overused and abused as a result of the overwhelming changes in theory, art, and social life experienced in the country. This is indeed surprising if we remember that Modernism used to be a sensitive topic, even taboo in China during the 1970s. An indication of this phenomenon can be perceived by the title of a book published in 2002 by a brilliant art critic: Post-Modernism/Stepmotherism.1 With the coinage “stepmotherism,” the author clearly tries to express his discontent with the superficial understanding of postmodernism among Chinese scholars and critics and the blind following of Western art by Chinese artists. Ironically, a book published by a Chinese scholar in 1995 with exactly the same title—Anti-Aesthetic—can be seen as an example of the superficial understanding of the Western theory of postmodernism.2 There is, in fact, a citation of Hal Foster’s preface to The Anti-Aesthetic in a note on page 55 of this book, one of the very few citations of Foster’s book I am aware of in a Chinese publication. This suggests that the uses of the anti-aesthetic, as a concept or theory closely related to October and Anglo-American postmodernism, have never been clear in mainland China, where a synchronism of the premodern, modern, and postmodern stages seems to be occurring within a short time period. This background indicates the various forms of understanding that can occur under different cultural contexts. Moreover, Rancière and Deleuze, discussed in seminar 6, are good examples because their reception in China shows again that the cultural context may play an important role in understanding a book or a theory. In fact, with regard to Rancière, I feel that he is not necessarily “naïve” when he claims, as Sven Spieker puts it, that “there is something inevitable about the confluence of abstract painting and revolution during the October Revolution in Russia.” It may be true that he is not an expert in the analysis of visual artworks, but he is quite sharp in grasping the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Thus, in my opinion, he is more like Zîzêk in this manner. As readers may know, there has been a “sudden rise” of Chinese modern or postmodern art in the past three decades. Of the different styles and forms “stolen” from the West, the political Pop of the 1980s and 1990s and the cynical realism after the late 1990s are among the most influential. In my view, these two styles are nothing but a reflection of two tendencies in modern Chinese society, that is, the politicization of aesthetics in the 1980s and ’90s and the aestheticization of politics after the late 1990s. 1. Yin Jinan, Post-Modernism/Stepmotherism: A Close Look at Contemporary Chinese Culture and Art (Beijing: Sanlian, 2002).

2. Pan Zhichang, 《反美学：在阐释中理解当 代审美文化》，上海：学林出版社 (Anti-Aesthetic: Understanding contemporary aesthetic culture) (Shanghai: Xuelin, 1995).

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Deleuze is a different story in illuminating how cultural contexts affect understandings. It is well-known that Deleuze is rather difficult to read and interpret. However, his ideas seem to be very acceptable to Chinese scholars, with several of his books being translated into Chinese, including the one on Francis Bacon. The reason, I believe, is that his theory, or at least some of his concepts, can be understood with the help of traditional Chinese thought or concepts (this is also true of Heidegger, though there may still be some misunderstandings in both instances). For example, as Jay Bernstein says, “for Deleuze, that sensory stuff is forces and energies. One of the ways Deleuze thinks about his own book is to urge that we read painting in terms of music. . . . So the project of Modernist painting is to turn the object into rhythm.”3 Those concepts such as forces, energies, and rhythm used by Deleuze to discuss painting are not very strange to Chinese scholars, because they frequently appear in traditional Chinese theories of painting. In the so-called Six Canons, there is one called qiyun shengdong, based upon the key concept of qi in classical Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, which is usually translated into English as “force” or “energy.” As a matter of fact, some early Sinologists and Western art historians, like Laurence Binyon, Herbert Giles, Roger Fry, and Ernest Fenollosa, understood qiyun shengdong in exactly this way. Roger Fry says clearly that “[t]he first thing, I think, that strikes one is the immense part played in Chinese art by linear rhythm. The contour is always the most important feature of the form. . . . [This] rhythm is almost always of a flowing, continuous character . . . [with] the linear rhythm as the main method of expression. . . . A painting was always conceived as the visible record of a rhythm gesture.”4 In a certain way, Fry’s last sentence reveals one of the most evident and important connections between traditional Chinese theories of painting and Western Modernist theory in general, and Deleuze’s theory in particular. That is to say, they all understand the painted mark as the rendition of the artist’s gesture rather than the represented object. That is why Norman Bryson noted that in the Six Canons “ ‘animation through spirit consonance,’ is said to be ‘the building of structure through brushwork.’ ” Thus, in the Chinese art tradition, “Chinese painting has always selected forms that permit a maximum of integrity and visibility to the constitutive strokes of the brush.” Moreover, as much as the presented object is the subject of the painting, “equally the subject is the work of the brush in ‘real time’ and an extension of the painter’s own body.”5 In this sense, we may agree with the idea that “[Deleuze’s theory is] actually a classic exposition of the aesthetic.”6 Does it, then, become true that we may have a better understanding of Modernist art theories and practices through a revisiting of classical aesthetic ideas? Is this also a facet of “beyond the anti-aesthetic”?

3. See Section 6 of the Seminars. 4. Roger Fry, “The Significance of Chinese Art,” in Chinese Art (London: B. T. Batsford, 1935), 2–3.

5. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 89. 6. Jay Bernstein in Section 6 of the Seminars.

a gaping hole

Cary Levine

A new, more inclusive kind of art theory is indeed long overdue, and the Stone Theory Institute should be commended for working to make that objective a reality. The seminar discussions compiled in these volumes reveal a wide diversity of opinions, points of view, and methodologies. As James Elkins acknowledges, this diversity will surely lead to more discord and contradiction than consensus and resolution, but together such results are a powerful retort to the theoretical absolutism that has long hindered contemporary art discourse. Elkins is right that, while art theory can come off as abstruse and overly technical, the more profound problem is that it is often “too easy.” The multiplicity of voices and positions represented here certainly make things more difficult. Ideas are forced to bump up against each other, and the ensuing friction is both enlightening and refreshing. Given that agenda and the subject of this particular volume, however, it is striking that one essential group was virtually excluded from the Seminars: the artists themselves. From what I can tell, a few of the graduate students getting MA’s in visual and critical studies are also practicing artists, but their voices pop up only briefly and quite late in the proceedings, and they are always overshadowed by the academics—philosophers, art historians, critical theorists—who dominate the discussion. Of course, The Anti-Aesthetic is first and foremost an academic text. But one of the core claims for its historical significance is that it had a tangible and widespread impact on working artists—that it left its mark on practice as well as thought. Its reach beyond academia into artists’ studios is taken as a given by the discussants and is surely part of the impetus for making the book the centerpiece of these Seminars. That reach was at least partially responsible for what Elkins identifies in his preface as the “hegemony of anti-aesthetics.” Yet, in an era of prolific artist writing, the more than eight hundred pages of assigned readings for the Seminars apparently included none of it. A key part of the picture was therefore missing from these discussions, impairing the stated desire to, as Elkins puts it in his preface, “capture a reasonable cross-section of thinking on a given topic.” I was left with a series of basic questions that, while not definitively answerable, still require asking: How many artists actually read Foster’s book at the time? If, as presumed, many did, then how did they read it? In what ways were its texts used, and what is their relationship to the work of artists often aligned with them? What exactly is The Anti-Aesthetic’s place in the history of art making? This omission replicates a hierarchy insisted upon by certain academics over the past thirty years, in which theory is not only prioritized over art, but

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considered a kind of Platonic ideal—art’s pure essence. Hal Foster acknowledges that The Anti-Aesthetic heralded this shift, explaining in seminar 2 that at the time of its publication “if there was still an avant-garde, then, weirdly, it was not so much in art as in critical theory. If you were in graduate school at that point, the theory battles were intense and sectarian; whether you were a this, a that, or the other thing really seemed to matter.” Foster seems somewhat ambivalent about that “weird” early-eighties moment, but that ambivalence is not explored, and no one appears to consider the costs of this categorical reorganization and its ensuing sectarianism. Moreover, Foster’s historical account of the “displacement, in terms of radicality for my generation, from art to theory” is left uncontested, when in fact the scope and relevance of that displacement remain open to debate. (For starters, is the small cadre of New York–based academics grouped around October magazine representative of an entire generation?) Such a debate is crucial, for the exaltation of theory has had very real consequences—the limiting of art discourse and the marginalization of certain art forms and styles among them. It affected the very ways in which art is talked and thought about, as evidenced by Elkins’s unqualified opening remark that “art theory is the air the art world breathes.” Later in seminar 2, Gustav Frank characterizes the promotion of theory over art as “strategic,” but again the fundamental questions that might have followed that remark were left unasked. What were the stakes of this strategy? What were its goals and tactics? What, ultimately, have been its positive and negative results? There has always been a gap between art theory and actual art practice, and those interstitial spaces can be not only fascinating, but fertile. By overlooking them, the Seminars disregarded the often convoluted ways in which ideas manifest themselves in art. This was a missed opportunity to hear from those for whom theory is more of a tool—and one of many—than an end product, and to possibly unearth essential complexities and contradictions of art making that rarely fit into neat theoretical packages. The additional friction caused by forcing the two sides of this binary to rub up against each other would have been particularly productive in addressing the stated subject of this volume: the problematic but enduring dichotomy between aesthetics and anti-aesthetics. A more inclusive approach would also have provided some rich counterpoints from artists whose work complicates that very dichotomy. Take, for instance, Mike Kelley. Though often held up as an example of antiaesthetic theory put into practice—and treated as such in Formless: A User’s Guide, as well as in the Art Since 1900 textbook—Kelley mainly resists such readings of his work. He sees the “October group” as engaged in a kind of academic ownership that is often historically inaccurate, overly simplified, and condescending towards art and those who make it.1 His use of “the structural operations of the 1. Conversation with the author, August 24, 2010. In a 1992 essay on Paul Thek, Kelley similarly discusses the limitations of contemporary American art criticism and art history, whose exclusivity and hierarchical approaches he sees

as “spookily aligned with Reagan/Bush ideology.” Mike Kelley, “Death and Transfiguration,” reprinted in Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, edited by John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 138–49.

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lower-than-low,” as Krauss and Bois put it,2 may indeed recall Bataille, but it also derives from a range of less reputable, and largely overlooked, sources—B-movies, cheap pornography, Christian Modernism, noise music, parapsychology, Saturday morning cartoons, grandmotherly handcrafts—some of which are specific to his Midwest blue-collar background. Moreover, the cultural connotations (i.e., symbolism) of the materials and techniques foregrounded in his work, particularly in terms of gender and class, are deliberate, unavoidable, and central. (His work may indeed be “formless,” but it is also quite form-full.) Kelley has written extensively on such subjects, and his substantial body of writings provides alternative ways of thinking about some of the primary issues addressed by the present Seminars.3 How might participants have responded had they been assigned some of those writings alongside Krauss and Bois’s “guide”? What would they make of the fact that Kelley drew much more influence from psychologist R. D. Laing than he did from Bataille? (So, by the way, did Paul McCarthy, anti-aesthetician par excellence, though one largely absent from October-group analyses.) Of course, we should never limit ourselves to what artists say about their work and the influences they cite. But giving the makers themselves a seat at the round table would have further realized the objectives of this book—to open up the discussion, to make things difficult rather than easy. It would have not only augmented the historical account of the assigned texts and their influences, but kept current generalizations about artists and artistic practice in check. In seminar 3, for example, Omair Hussain claims that Formless: A User’s Guide is currently used in art schools “as a manual, often as a way of making visual work, and justifying the work’s criticality.” Now, I’ve taught in art schools both in and outside of New York, and I’ve never seen anything to substantiate such a claim. And we should all hope it is inaccurate, since Hussain’s comment is as precise a formula for academic art as can be. My point here is not simply to rehearse familiar criticisms of the October school, but rather to wonder out loud why those criticisms were barely acknowledged, let alone addressed substantively. As portrayed by the present volume, art is either an illustration of theory or a springboard for theoretical reflection. Either way, artists and their work are subordinated. Such a silencing is no small part of the legacy under consideration here, and the exclusion of artists must be considered no less “strategic” than the claim that theory somehow displaced art in the 1980s. In seminar 5, Foster admonishes artists who complain about not having a voice: “So speak, and tell us why your practice matters,” he demands. This imperative is not only unfair, since the terms and parameters of the debate—what “matters” and what does not—have already been set, but patently false, since artists have spoken, spoken often, and continue to speak. The real issue is whether or not we choose to listen. 2. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 248–51. 3. See Kelley’s essays in Foul Perfection, in particular “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on

Caricature” (20–39), “Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny” (70–99), and “Cross-Gender/ Cross-Genre” (100–120).

not aesthetics or anti-aesthetics but poetics

Boris Groys

Let me choose as a starting point for my reaction the way in which Jay Bernstein situates Kant’s third critique in relation to the first and second critiques.1 I agree with his analysis when he speaks about a role that aesthetics as a specific disposition of the subject toward the world plays in the general economy of Kant’s discourse. But continuing to speak about the aesthetic attitude, Bernstein suddenly and without any additional explanations substitutes for the word “world” the word “artwork,” so that aesthetics begins to be related to art, instead of the world. However, the aesthetic attitude, as it is understood by Kant, does not need art—being, besides science and ethics, a specific mode of our relation to reality. It is an old truism that all the wonders of art pale in comparison with the wonders of nature. In terms of aesthetic experience, no work of art can stand comparison with a sunset of even average beauty. And, of course, the sublime side of nature and politics can be fully experienced only through witnessing a natural catastrophe, revolution, or war—not by reading a novel or looking at a picture. That was the shared opinion of Kant and the Romantic poets and artists who launched the first influential aesthetic discourses: the real world, not art, is the legitimate object of the aesthetic attitude (as well as of scientific and ethical attitudes). According to Kant, the artwork can become a legitimate object of aesthetic contemplation only as a work of genius, that is, only as a kind of natural force. The profession of art can serve only as a means of education in taste and aesthetic judgment. After this education is completed, art can and should be, like Wittgenstein’s ladder, thrown away and the subject confronted with the aesthetic experience of life itself. Seen from the aesthetic perspective, art reveals itself as something that can and should be overcome. All things can be seen from the aesthetic perspective; all things can serve as sources of aesthetic experience and become objects of aesthetic judgment. From the perspective of aesthetics, art has no privileged position. Rather, art is something that posits itself between the subject of the aesthetic attitude and the world. However, the grown-up, mature subject does not need the aesthetic tutelage of art, being able to rely on his or her own sensibility and taste. The aesthetic discourse, if it is used to legitimize art, de facto undermines it. But then how to explain the fact that the discourse of aesthetics gained such a dominant position in art matters during the period of modernity? The main reason for this is a statistical one. When aesthetic reflection on art began and developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists were in the minority and spectators were in the majority. The question of why to do art seemed to

1. Section 1 of the Seminars.

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be irrelevant. Artists did art to earn their living. That was a sufficient explanation for the existence of arts; the problem was why other people should look at art. The answer was, to form their taste and develop their aesthetic sensibility. Art was a school for the gaze and other senses. The division between artists and spectators seemed to be clear-cut and socially firmly established. Spectators were subjects of an aesthetic attitude—the artworks produced by the artists were objects of aesthetic contemplation, or rather, of the aesthetic consumer. The spectator expects from art the so-called aesthetic experience. This can be an experience of sensual pleasure, but it can also be an anti-aesthetic experience of displeasure, of frustration provoked by an artwork that lacks all the qualities that an affirmative aesthetics expects it to have. It can be an aesthetic experience of a utopian vision that will lead humankind out of its present condition to a new society in which beauty reigns, or an experience of redistribution of the sensible, one that refigures the spectator’s field of vision by showing certain things and giving access to certain voices that were earlier concealed or obscured. But it can be also an anti-aesthetic demonstration of the impossibility of positive aesthetic experience within a society based on oppression and exploitation due to a total commercialization and commodification of art that undermines, from the beginning, any possible utopian perspective. As we know, these seemingly contradictory aesthetic experiences can be equally enjoyed. However, to be able to experience aesthetic enjoyment of any kind, the spectator has to be aesthetically educated. This education necessarily reflects the social and cultural milieus into which the spectator was born and in which he or she lives. In other words, the aesthetic attitude presupposes the subordination of art production under art consumption, and, accordingly, the subordination of art theory to sociology. Indeed, from the aesthetic point of view, the artist is a supplier of aesthetic experiences, including those that are produced with the goal of frustrating or modifying the viewer’s aesthetic sensibility. The subject of the aesthetic attitude is the master; the artist is the servant. Of course, the servant can and does manipulate the master, as Hegel convincingly demonstrated in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Nevertheless, the servant remains the servant. This situation did not change essentially when the artist became a servant of the greater public instead of a servant under Church patronage or traditional autocratic powers. At that time the artist was obliged to present the “contents”—subjects, motives, narratives, and so on—that were dictated by religious faith or the interests of political powers. Today the artist is required to treat the topics of public interest. Just as the church or the autocratic powers of yesterday wanted their beliefs and interests to be represented by the artist, so today’s democratic public wants to find in art representations of the issues, topics, political controversies, and social aspirations by which it is moved in its everyday life. The politicization of art is often seen as an antidote to the purely aesthetic attitude that allegedly requires art to be merely beautiful. But, in fact, the politicization of art can be easily combined with its aestheticization, so far as both are seen to form the perspective of spectator, of consumer.

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Clement Greenberg remarked that the artist is capable of demonstrating his or her mastery and taste precisely when the content of the artwork is prescribed to the artist by an external authority. Liberated from the question “What to do?,” the artist can concentrate on the purely formal side of art, on the question “How to do it?” This means asking how to do it in such a way that certain contents become attractive and appealing (or maybe unattractive and repulsive) to the aesthetic sensibility of the public. If the politicization of art is interpreted as making certain political attitudes attractive (or maybe unattractive) for the public—as is usually the case—then the politicization of art is completely subjected to aesthetic attitude. At the end the goal becomes to package certain political contents in an aesthetically attractive form. But, of course, through an act of real political engagement the aesthetic form loses its relevance—and can be discarded in the name of direct political practice. Art then functions as political advertisement that becomes superfluous once it has achieved its goal. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century the statistical relation between the numbers of art consumers and art producers began to change dramatically. The emergence and rapid development of visual media during the twentieth century made a constantly increasing number of human beings become objects of surveillance, observation, and contemplation to a degree that was unthinkable at any earlier period of history. At the same time, these visual media became a new agora for the international public and, especially, political discussions, thus turning the vast masses of the population into artists. Political discussions in the ancient Greek agora presupposed the immediate living presence and visibility of the participants. Now everybody has to establish one’s own image, one’s own visible persona in the context of visual media. In the popular game Second Life one has to create a virtual “avatar,” an artificial double, to begin to communicate and to act. The “First Life” of contemporary media functions in the same way. Everybody who wants to go public, to begin to act in today’s international political agora, has to create an individualized public persona. And it is not only for the political and cultural elites that this requirement is relevant. The easy availability of digital photo and video cameras plus the possibility of global distribution of still and video images through the Internet changed the traditional statistical relation between image producers and image consumers. Today more people are interested in image production than in image contemplation. Under these new conditions the aesthetic attitude loses its former social relevance. Kant saw aesthetic contemplation as a disinterested contemplation, in the sense that its subject was not interested in the existence of the object of contemplation. In fact, as it has already been said, the aesthetic attitude not only accepts the nonexistence of its object but, if this object is an artwork, actually presupposes its eventual disappearance. However, the producer of his or her own individualized public persona is obviously interested in its existence—and in its ability to further substitute this producer’s “natural,” biological body. Today, not only professional artists but all of us learn to live in a state of media exposure and

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to deal with it by producing artificial personas, doubles, or avatars with a double purpose—to situate ourselves in the visual media and to conceal our biological bodies form the media’s gaze. Obviously, the creation of such a public persona cannot be a work of unconscious, quasi-natural forces in man, as in the case of Kantian genius. Rather, it has to do with certain technical and political decisions for which their subjects can be made ethically and politically responsible. The political dimension of art thus precedes its production. The politics of art has to do not so much with its impact on the spectator as with the decisions that lead to its emergence in the first place. That means that contemporary art should be analyzed in terms not of aesthetics but of poetics; from the perspective not of the art consumer but of the art producer. In fact, the understanding of art as poiesis, or as techne has a much longer tradition than its treatment in terms of aisthesis or hermeneutics. The shift a from poetical, technical understanding of art to an aesthetic or hermeneutical analysis is relatively recent. It is now time to reverse this change of perspective. In fact, this reversal was already initiated by the historical avant-garde—by such artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Hugo Ball, and Marcel Duchamp, who created media narratives in which they acted as public personas using press articles, teaching, writing, performance, and image production at the same level of relevance. Seen and judged from the aesthetic perspective, their work was mostly interpreted as an artistic reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the political turmoil of the time. While this interpretation is legitimate. it seems even more legitimate to me to see in their artistic practice a radical turn from aesthetics to poetics—more specifically, to autopoetics, to the production of one’s own public self. These artists did not want to please the public, to satisfy its aesthetic desires. But that does not mean they wanted to shock the public, to produce the unpleasant, anti-aesthetic images of the sublime. The notion of shock is connected in our culture primarily to images of sexuality and violence. But neither Malevich’s Black Square nor Ball’s sound poetry nor Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema presents violence or sexuality in any explicit way. These avant-garde artists did not break any taboos, because there never was a taboo against displaying squares or monotonously turning disks. They did not surprise, because squares and disks are unsurprising. Instead, they demonstrated the minimal conditions for producing an effect of visibility based on the almost zero level of form and meaning. Their works are visible embodiments of nothingness, or, the same thing, pure subjectivity. In this sense these are purely autopoietic works, works that give a visible form to a subjectivity that is emptied out, purified of any specific content. The avant-garde’s thematization of nothingness and negativity is therefore neither a sign of its “nihilism” nor a manifestation of its protest against the “nullification” of life under the conditions of industrial capitalism. Rather, it is simply a sign of a new start—of an artistic metanoia that leads the artist from an interest in the external world to the autopoietic construction of his or her own self.

ellipses and détente

Gregory Sholette

I have felt excluded throughout this week, on all the subjects we have discussed, because we have not touched on the social and economic conditions of theories of art. We have been living in the abstract. There is a precarious class of intellectual workers throughout the world: people who try to get jobs, find voices, continue to do what they want. And to do that, they have sometimes to censor themselves, to limit what they say, to choose topics that will be of current interest.

. . . I think it would be interesting to talk about aesthetics and anti-aesthetics from

the point of view of compromise. —Stéphanie Benzaquen (seminar 9)

By the time Hal Foster’s Anti-Aesthetic was published in 1983, the still-unnamed AIDS epidemic had prematurely taken the lives of many in New York’s art and intellectual circles. The crisis swiftly provoked forms of direct cultural militancy even amongst artists and critics previously indifferent to overt activism. One of the Anti-Aesthetic contributors who became interested in this shift was Craig Owens. Though I never met Owens, his writings were an important influence on me as a young artist and also later as I became a writer, just as he appears to have resurfaced as a key figure in this seminar. Six years after The Anti-Aesthetic appeared, AIDS claimed Owens’s life, though not before his turn towards “engaged” art placed him at odds with many of his October colleagues. The reality of Owens’s subsequent exile is not the focus of this commentary (that history has yet to be written). Instead, if you can conjure up an image of internal displacement and keep this disembodied figure in mind, I will attempt my own response to Stéphanie Benzaquen’s scarcely answered comment on exclusion and compromise. In the early 1980s, when Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic appeared, I was a recently graduated art student from the Cooper Union. I had studied with the artist Hans Haacke and was earnestly seeking to reconcile my newly acquired artistic vocabulary with a lower-middle-class worldview. Craig Owens’s theorizing of postmodernism as an interrogatory practice was singularly attractive. In texts such as “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” the author posited an alternative to those contemporary art critics who championed the return of figurative painting, while opposing practices that Jameson described as postmodern pastiche, or “surrealism without the unconscious.” Most of all, to me and my youthful circle (including Tim Rollins and other members of Group Material), Owens was one of a handful of living critics

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overtly rejecting the cynical manufacturing of cultural goods for a sharply rising art market while simultaneously seeking to keep alive the idea of art as a form of social dissent. 1The year after The Anti-Aesthetic appeared, Owens penned a brief commentary entitled “The Problem with Puerilism.”2 The two-page text roundly denounced the gentrifying effects of the East Village art scene, then in full bloom on New York’s Lower East Side. Originally published in Art in America magazine (with Foster serving as editor), “The Problem with Puerilism” concludes with an unambiguous endorsement of artwork made by a now defunct artists’ collective: Political Art Documentation/Distribution, or PAD/D. I had been involved with the group since its inception at Printed Matter Books in February of 1980, when Lucy R. Lippard asked for help organizing an archive of social and political art.3 By 1984 I was running the PAD/D Reading Group as well as co-coordinating antigentrification street projects targeting the rise of the East Village art scene. Owens’s brief Art in America editorial was in fact a barbed rejoinder to a far lengthier puff piece in the same issue that unabashedly eulogized the gritty, self-proclaimed Bohemianism of this new cultural market. At the center of the debate stood dozens of commercial art galleries that had sprung up in what was then one of the most ethnically diverse and working-class sections of Manhattan. The growing presence of these neo-Bohemian artists, dealers, and their posh clientele had begun pushing up rents and accelerating the exodus of low-income residents out of the neighborhood. Owens took to task the mannered affect of East Village art, but he also deftly focused on the symbiosis between art and real estate, probably becoming one of the first critics to link contemporary art with what we now call neoliberalism: the radical deregulation and privatization of the postwar Keynesian economy initiated by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and President Ronald Reagan in the United States.4 In a sense, “The Problem with Puerilism” offered an early description of what was to become a new urban lifestyle woven from equal parts entrepreneurship and avant-garde dissent, or better yet pseudo-dissent. One decade later and this simulated Bohemia would spread from New York City, to Chicago, London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Budapest, and beyond. Nevertheless, Owens’s essay did not end on a pessimistic note of resignation. Instead, in a gesture invoking Benjamin’s influential essay “The Author as Producer,” the author called upon artists to reject their own class outlook in order to work “within the community to call attention to, and mobilize the political and economic interests East Village art serves (as the artists affiliated with PAD/D, who are 1. The list of contemporary critics investigating art and politics was a short one and included, along with Owens and Jameson, Lucy R. Lippard, some of Benjamin Buchloh’s early work, and Hal Foster’s Recodings: Art Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985). 2. “The Problem with Puerilism,” Craig Owens, Art in America 72, no. 6 (1983): 162–63. 3. For a discussion of the newsletters, street art, programs, and archiving of PAD/D see

“The Grin of the Archive,” in Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 4. “The Problem with Puerilism” appeared a few months before Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan published their landmark essay “The Fine Art of Gentrification” in October Magazine 31 (Winter 1984): 91–111, which is also available on the website of the alternative space ABC No Rio at http://​www​.abcnorio​.org/​about/​ history/​fine​_art​.html.

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responsible for the illustrations accompanying this text, have done).”5 This parenthetical call to arms referred to several antigentrification graphics reproduced as illustrations alongside his commentary by Art in America. The images were part of PAD/D’s 1984 guerrilla poster campaign “Art for the Evicted.” By linking his essay with these agitational street graphics, Owens shifted the tenor of his text from that of a purely analytical tract to something approaching political pedagogy. In its originally published form, “The Problem with Puerilism” closely approached the tendentious style of Benjamin’s famous antifascist essay. It was also one of if not the only occasions when PAD/D appeared in any mainstream art-world publication. Flash forward to 2003. I was beginning research on my most recent book and purchased a collection of Owens’s essays posthumously published under the title Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture.6 I turned to the index and found an entry for PAD/D listed as page 266. But on page 266 the Art in America essay appeared quite differently. There were no reproductions of PAD/D’s images, and no parenthetical statement praising the group’s antigentrification stance. All that remained of the little-known art collective was the index entry “PAD/D 266.” Both Owens’s object lesson in artistic mobilization and PAD/D had been reduced to no more than a residuum that even an observant reader would likely overlook. No doubt Owens’s early criticism of the New York art world can be traced to the phenomenal rise of the commercial market in the 1980s, a boom that looks minor compared to that of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, but one that disarmingly linked remnants of avant-garde experimentation with the world of high fashion and celebrity culture. But in later years Owens’s disenchantment appears to have focused on a different phenomenon, the emergence of artists skilled in a type of sophisticated theoretical language that nevertheless eschewed the political and social dissent that critical theory was initially born out of. In a 1987 interview with Anders Stephanson, Owens disparaged the way so-called “Neo-Geo” painters used a complex critical language to describe their expressionless, abstract canvases as socially meaningful. It is very interesting and somewhat unsettling to see . . . how these artists in constituting themselves, have appropriated a certain figure of the artist who is someone who reads, who writes, who talks theory. The theory has lost any kind of critical edge. . . . It wasn’t supposed to prop up an art practice, it wasn’t used to infuse totally blank and empty canvases with some kind of social reference. . . . That seems to be an emptying-out of the reasons that artists began to speak, began to write, to occupy multiple positions, and not to be merely artists. The whole thing has lost its criticality.7 5. Owens, “Problem with Puerilism,” 163. 6. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, edited by Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

7. Anders Stephanson, “Interview with Craig Owens,” Social Text 27 (1990): 55–71, reprinted in Owens, Beyond Recognition, 298–316.

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Two decades after Owens’s withering comments, the loss of what he called “criticality” is ubiquitous in the academic art world. And just as he anticipated, this critical complacency emanates from within the very cadence of what passes for contemporary art’s theoretical discourse. Curatorial statements, biennial themes, art criticism, even the most abstract of artworks are simultaneously obliged to reference an assortment of relevant topics from cultural diversity and gender issues to urban politics (although the subject of class or economic inequality is seldom present), all the while strictly avoiding any confrontation with the political economy of the art market that so deeply marks the very practice of contemporary aesthetics. As Benzaquen perceptively points out, a workforce of ultra-precarious cultural specialists steers clear of confronting established power in an act of self-preservation that is also an act of self-censorship. Still, one can hardly lay blame entirely on these young people, any more than one cannot help but to fantasize about a parallel universe in which The Anti-Aesthetic and its well-deserved influence actually branched off into a very different genealogy of postmodernism, one more robust and politically resistant than ours, in which as Jim Elkins laments, “artists read Rancière, and say, Great, now I don’t need to worry about aesthetics and politics.”8 A final and difficult question, then: has the current age of privatized enterprise culture so deradicalized artists, critics, and curators that something approaching a historic compromise is now taking shape, in which creative workers gain improved social legitimacy within the neoliberal economy, even as capital in exchange gains a profitable cultural paradigm in which to promote its new work ethic of enforced creativity and personal risk taking? Far from merely an academic question, the possibility of artistic détente with capital is consequential for anyone who believes not only that cultural production must seek autonomy from the market, but that art also has a singularly historic mission to give voice to suffering. When it comes to art’s social value, even a skeptic like Adorno once insisted, “It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.”9 Perhaps at a moment of slouching ideological collaboration it is the figure of the overlooked remainder or internal exile that functions as a pivotal spaceholder for whatever criticality is still possible within contemporary art discourse?

8. Section 6 of the Seminars. 9. Adorno, “Commitment” (1965), English translation reprinted in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, translated by Francis McDonagh (London: Verso, 2007), 180–81.

w h at i f w e r e a l ly h av e n e v e r b e e n m o d e r n ?

Eva Schürmann

Looking from abroad at this debate on Modernist aesthetics and its adverse reactions, a salient feature to notice is that in art discourse nowadays the terms “modern” and “modernism” apparently evoke meanings quite different in continental Europe than in North America. In Europe, Clement Greenberg’s concept of Modernism and the master narrative of heroic abstract art is not generally what one refers to in talking about the modern, whether conceived of as an epoch, a problem, or a project (seminar 1). A more likely point of reference is French sociologist Bruno Latour’s diagnosis that we have never been modern,1 because our life forms and problems, our biological, economic, and cultural conditions, are hybrids to such a degree that the logic of modern and ontological orders is incapable of coping with them. Basic modern distinctions like those between nature and culture, the human and mechanical—but also between realism and social constructions in general—do not work. Thus, Latour’s main point follows that the chief concepts with which the modern believed it was be able to describe and understand itself truly do not apply. Modern thinking seeks to purify, and for exactly that reason misses what it tries to grasp. Paradoxically, we do not arrive at being ourselves if we think of our cultural, social, and political reality in terms of a modern vocabulary. We are strangely premodern: because we think in far too simplified categories and too often make use of reified oppositions, we are not enlightened enough. The language we use to analyze our reality does not fit with where we actually are, because we deal with strict separations of sign and thing, discourse and matter, when in fact they are deeply intertwined. Since we always already deal with hybridizations of natural and social matters, of science and politics, of economics and techniques, in thinking of them we should use terms other than those that the modern provides. To avoid the word “postmodernism,” with its associations of apolitical arbitrariness, Latour proposes his conception of the nonmodern, which he calls the “middle kingdom,” a realm neither antimodern nor postmodern, where modern presuppositions are not accepted. The nonmodern is an attitude that unfolds instead of unmasking, that fraternizes instead of denouncing. It is nonmodern to stress the transitions between subject and object, human and nonhuman, artificial and 1. Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); English edition, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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natural, because as soon as both sides enter into some sort of intercourse, they cease to remain the same. The transmissions transform them, so that something new is created. Thus, acting means, as it were, shifting emphases, and mediation means endowing objects and subjects with differences. Now, what new light does this point of view shed on our controversy? Maybe Hal Foster (despite distancing himself now from his early book) already summarized the problem best when he wrote that “if the modern project is to be saved at all, it must be exceeded.”2 Applied to the aesthetic field, all this means, it seems to me, is that oppositions like abstract versus figurative or media-specificity versus nonspecificity possess the same faulty logic as all systems of demarcation and hierarchization, including the construction of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. Such constructions have always been marked by the problem of being negatively determined by what they are opposed to. As a matter of fact, though, this seems to be more of a problem—if not solely a problem—for art theory than for the practice of art. If we think of an artist like William Kentridge, for instance, whose figures evolve from abstractions, or transform into them, we can see that theoretical description has other problems than art itself. The artwork can be narrative, but also performative, political, and media-specific. It reflects on itself by being critical toward society, and so on. Contemporary art in general is less required to decide between strict opposites, whereas abstract art was in a way a symptom of modern logic. If we take Latour’s diagnosis seriously, we have to view contemporary artworks in a broader context. The hybrid forms of art we have been confronted with since the age of Beuys occur as a consequence of nonmodernity. I suppose this not only allows us, but in fact forces us to think of things in a less polarized way. Another understanding of the times we live in moves us closer to a better conception of artworks that have said farewell to overcoming oppositions and have instead embraced hybrids, contradictions, ambiguities, and indeterminacy. It is very interesting, I think, to focus from that perspective on what we are doing in this book. New, and indeed indistinct, forms of theoretization with fuzzy contours, just like the form James Elkins provokes with this type of round table, seem to me a perfectly suitable answer to nonmodern demands. As he says, art theory happens; that means it is something that proceeds and occurs dynamically, a work in progress less coherent than one would expect. This book and its methodological and oral procedure are themselves expressions of this phenomenon.

2. Hal Foster, introduction to The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 2nd ed., edited by Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1998), x.

beyond aesthetic and anti-aesthetic t h r e e m i n i at u r e s

Maria Filomena Molder

Art cannot exist, in my reading, without the continual temptation to take its inner practice and see it as part of the world —Jay Bernstein (seminar 2)

Image, Simulacrum, and Combustion He that loves that which is visible, and believes that what he has seen is only an image of that which he has not yet seen, feels a desire growing within him, a desire born out of his love for the visible, to enjoy what he hasn’t seen: the origin of the image—he who loves seeing longs for it. In this admirable manner Gregory of Nyssa in The Life of Moses1 stressed the paradoxical nature of any image: in trying to preserve itself, it discovers its own promise of perishing, its combustion into that which has never been seen, into its original image. In fact, he who wishes to purify the simulacrum risks being turned to ashes. What, therefore, is an image? A natural effect and/or an (an)intentional presentation, which follows the light and is sensible to light: a shadow, a reflection in water, dust, a dream, a story we tell about our life. And if we set off in search of the shadow which obscures this particular shadow, in search of the dust which rests on all the settled dust, in search of that which remains to be said, which is about to be, which is imminent or which has been said and lost or which is trying to be said to us and we do not understand, in the whole story told about our life, we will then be in the field of influence of original imagery. From this comes the attractive force that unites the images, the shadows of all bodies, the grains of cosmic dust, as does the rainbow the colors. Artistic Intention and What Obscures the Art From the moment that art deliberately wanted to be avant-garde, it chose, as a project, to reject everything that, according to Robert Klein,2 obscures art: the model, the work, the image, the human process of fabrication, wit, and beauty. Even if it doesn’t follow this entire program, and even if it is in conflict with it, it is no longer possible for art to suspend the disturbance of one or more of those forms of obscuring, that is, that which is outside the sphere of 1. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). 2. See Klein, La forme et l’intelligible: Écrits sur la Renaissance et l’art moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

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conceptual communication. This disturbance may be summed up in the importance taken on by “what that an artist means,” his intention. It is difficult for the artist’s intention not to suit that which may receive it—whatever that may be—but above all it is difficult for it not to suit that which is in the state of being emptied of intentions. Some loss of magic is inherent to this emptiness, as is anything else. Artificial Shelters and Meteorology Let us start again in a different way. In one of the precious definitions by LeroiGourhan,3 the human being is the mammal that spends the most time in artificial shelters. Each of these artifices secrets its own meteorology; for each one there is a certain weather. I see works of art as one of these artificial shelters.

3. See André Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964–65).

get over it!

Gary Peters

But we know the beginning, the other one, we know it by questioning we stay in the leap ahead of any yes or no. —Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness

In recent months I have heard two highly respected philosophers (acknowledging that philosophers attract little respect) use the phrase “get over it” in debates with their “opponents”: “it” being (in these instances) “Badiou’s mysticism” and “dog-tired Kantianism.” I must say I find such borrowings from the hip argot of disaffected youth quite ghastly, but then again . . . What would it mean to get over the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic debate? I suspect it would be something quite different from attempting to get “beyond” it. To get over something—a doomed love affair, a painful insult (usually in the form of a peer review), a disappointing Christmas gift (the wrong translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology)—requires us to “snap out of it” and regain our senses, not through a process of dialogue, discussion, persuasion, or participation in a week-long summer school but instantaneously, like Benjamin’s revolutionary moment (Jetztzeit) “blasted out of the continuum of history.”1 A child of the sixties, I remember well a song by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates entitled “I’ll Never Get over You,”2 to which we kids added “so I’ll have to go under you,” something not worth remembering except for the fact that this little touch of protoirony is the “snap” moment where an apparently eternal affliction is suddenly cast off—irony is such a wonderful thing, and in spite of his name being mentioned once or twice, the Romantic ironist Friedrich Schlegel was, noticeably and sadly, absent from these deeply unironic conversations (the evident humor notwithstanding). To get beyond is precisely not to get over the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic dichotomy, or anything else for that matter. It’s Johnny Kidd without the kids, Johnny Depp without Keith Richards. Speaking of which, where were the pirates? You gave us zombies, just in case we forgot what the beyond really holds in store. You love zombies, you want to be zombies! Well, perhaps you need to get over that 1. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” translated by Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 295 2. Reaching number 2 in the UK charts in 1963.

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too. Think instead of Captain Jack Sparrow’s response to the unsightly buildup of zombie-sailors: a subtle blend of irony, impressive physical agility, and extreme violence: death to the undead, the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic—long live the pirates! One-eye, one-hand, one-leg—patch, hook, peg—no dialectics here: pirate logic,3 singularity incarnate! So, apart from his eye patch, what does Schlegel have to do with pirates? Okay, so he didn’t have an eye patch, but he did, like all ironists, only have one (evil, Hegel would say) eye.4 True, the ironic eye is always one of a pair (okay, so he had two eyes), but, having said that, it is essentially singular, and thus without a beyond. I hear you zombie-academics complain (intoning in deathly unison) that irony is the absolute epitome of duality, double-crossing duplicity and doubleliciousness. This is true, but it is only a half-truth which, mathematically at least, brings us back to singularity. And make no mistake, irony has a single-mindedness that is utterly at odds with its radically pluralistic public profile and promiscuous philosophical reputation. In fact, the real irony of irony is that it is absolutely committed to the suspension of all commitment. No thesis or antithesis here, no pro or contra, no yes or no; just the systematic suspension of all binary choices and a decisive, unwavering neutrality. If nothing else, irony allows you to get over things . . . everything and anything. As was acknowledged by some, the anti-aesthetic is really just one dimension of the aesthetic, and not because it is dialectically dependent on it as a contradictory thesis, as was suggested. Ontologically, the anti-aesthetic is utterly at one with the aesthetic: no contradiction. Thus, while the week’s beyond-ing was tied up with the historically specific and aesthetically localized lover’s quarrels associated with the rise of postmodernism, where the choices made between the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and their beyond (which seemed to boil down to “affect”)5 were rehearsed again and again, the decision to make such choices (recalling Heidegger’s differentiation of decision and choice)6 within an always already decided-upon aesthetic Weltanschauung never figured in the conversations. It is true that ignoring this did leave everyone free to engage in the socalled cut and thrust associated with all varieties of the academic dialectic, but the logic of beyond-ing is not a pirate logic: too virtuosic, too skilful, too technical, posture and pose, and yes, affect rather than effect—the épée rather than the cutlass, all transcendence, touch and (blunted) prodding rather than the bladed descent into the blood and bone: bring on the pirates! I hear another cry from the deathly theater of beyond-ing, a shriek of outrage at the very thought of mixing together the gravitas of Heidegger and the levitas7 of Schlegel in some witches’ brew of philosophical incompatibility: a monstrosity! 3. Yes, I am aware that in the argot of disaffected youth pirate logic refers to illegal downloading. 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 103. 5. I assume Deleuze is turning in his grave at the thought that he is now being called upon to

further the causes of dialectics and metaphysical beyond-ing! 6. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 69. 7. To coin a word.

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But is it? My conviction is that the proper (at any rate, my) response to the dark resonation of Heideggerian ontology is not more of the same, practiced within the grimly policed protectorate of Heideggerianism (a true monster!), but irony. What could be more ironic than Heidegger’s notion of truth as unconcealment/ concealment? So, in response to the question at the end of the week as to who’d been left out, I would start with Heidegger and Schlegel, in that order because, as I will claim but not have space to expand upon, the former creates my version of the latter. But to return to the epigraph, Heidegger counters the beyond-ing of metaphysics and dialectics with the “ahead of,” forgotten by both. To get ahead of the game is not to rush forward in a frenzy of overcoming but to go back to the origin prior to the pros and cons played out not only in Chicago but everywhere else we might care to look. Obviously I’m not, with Heidegger, suggesting that you all should have tried harder not to “forget Being” (that would have been silly!), but that at least some effort might have been made not to forget his writings on the “forgetting of Being,” the writings from the late 1920s onwards when he specifically turned to art in order to get over the aesthetic and “ahead of ” the aestheticization and humanization of the modern world-as-picture.8 For philosophers within the continental tradition this indeed was a decisive moment that continues to resonate within contemporary thought, whether Heideggerian or not. For art historians and art theorists (even those using continental philosophy as a constant reference) I guess it wasn’t so important, which perhaps explains why, for me, the summer school discussions too often seemed of another time. Not just a past time but of a time that, because it was strangely locked in upon itself (were you all locked in?), had no future/beyond—hence the difficulty of creating one: granted, a week isn’t very long. To get over the past and “ahead of ” the futility of infinite beyond-ing requires a return to the origin, but in defiance of all the Heidegger bashers who simply don’t (or don’t want to) get it, this does not require us all to don togas and become pre-Socratics (climatically inadvisable, anyway, from where I’m sitting) but, on the contrary, to become absolutely, indeed, impossibly contemporary. Along with Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, and Heidegger (and most recently Latour), the origin is always now, the return is exactly that: a re-turning, re-visioning, re-searching, and not the re-hashing which Heidegger is falsely accused of and which, to my mind, took up far too much of your time in Chicago. Re-turning has no beyond, it is (I used to work as a turner) the perpetual re-making of that which is always already there: not innovation (false originality) but renovation (the preservation of the origin and the work of origination). This is also the origin of irony. The Summer School kicked off with Kant, which was promising, but he was too quickly dropped. Pity, because his (rather than Greenberg’s!) Copernican 8. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977).

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revolution, by separating singular human experience not only from thingsin-themselves but also from the thinkable but unknowable common sense of things, is at the heart of both Kant’s aesthetics and Schlegel’s irony, which followed closely in its wake. In truth, the aesthetic now becomes, through the experience of pleasure, nothing more than a special case (because raised to consciousness) of the aestheticization of the world, which, if properly faced, can only lead to suicide (Kleist) or irony (Schlegel). Not being French, I recommend the second option. But, all joking aside, the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic/affect debate takes place within this aestheticized world of the post-Kantian all-conquering human: modernity, postmodernity, makes no difference.9 To end with the “other beginning”10 ahead of any yes or no: if the Kantians have aestheticized the world, then it is time (putting Heidegger in Benjamin’s shoes) to ontologize it! But let’s be clear, ontology is not exclusive to those lucky enough to have a (well-equipped) “hut” in the Black Forest; what I’m talking about (as are an increasing number of continentals missing from your discussion)11 is precisely a desire to get over Kant, not as part of yet another philosophical squabble (Kant will always win), but as the ironic distanciation from the whole chiasmic caboodle. Artists themselves did this a long, long time ago (ask Plato), with an “aristocratic” and “sophistical” irony that the clever-clever dialectics of Socratic irony could ridicule but never match. So it was interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that during the Seminars (and I might be wrong here) the art practitioners seemed to have a lot less to say than the aesthetes and anti-aesthetes that surrounded them and dominated the proceedings. They (the artists) should have spoken up more often and more loudly, and with an irony (a post-Heideggerian Schlegelianism) which recognized that beyond the beyond-ing is just more of the same, and then more of that. To my mind, art, in essence, has never been part of the aesthetic anyway, which is precisely why Heidegger re-turned to it. Nonetheless, artists, as human, are not only part of, but the creators and perpetrators of the aesthetic. That, annoyingly, is precisely the irony, an irony which only an ironic discourse can begin to articulate. “Get over it” is just the beginning of this disaffected ironic lingo. The pirates were just for fun.

9. This couldn’t have been made clearer than in James Elkins’s first words of the Seminars: “speaking first about some senses of the aesthetic, and then some senses of the antiaesthetic” (Section 1 of the Seminars). Already locked in.

10. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 40–41. 11. Alain Badiou, Bruno Latour, Quentin Meillessoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Ian Grant Findlay.

beyond

“beyondness”

Andrew McNamara

When the term “anti-aesthetic” emerged thirty years ago, it was presumed to stand in stark opposition to the “aesthetic.” Today the situation is less clear. While the Seminars aim to move beyond this dichotomy, many of the participants doubt whether the anti-aesthetic still holds as an absolute distinction from the aesthetic. Over the course of the conversations, other oppositions arise— such as art theory and criticism versus philosophical aesthetics, art history versus visual culture—but it is the debate over Modernism that most complicates moving beyond, to the next aesthetic paradigm. Hal Foster argues that the “anti-aesthetic” arose because the aesthetic functioned in a conservative, ameliorative role “as a space of resolution” or of symbolic unity—and thus unable to account for contemporary art’s vicissitudes.1 (On the other hand, Foster argues that Peter Bürger’s notion of the neo-avantgarde condemns all art in the wake of the historical avant-garde to “mere farcical repetition.”) Foster admits, however, that what was presumed to be merely onesided—a kind of Pollyanna discourse of the aesthetic—was far more complicated. While Diarmuid Costello’s heroic attempt to suggest that the anti-aesthetic might be implied or implicated in the aesthetic goes nowhere, the topic of Modernism provides the complicating factor. “Postmodernism,” Foster asserts, “was in part an effort to recover Modernisms, not to foreclose them, an effort to open up this reified category” (seminar 1). And further on, he adds that “postmodernism was also concerned to recover a different sense of Modernism” (seminar 2). Similarly, the informe (formless) is said to seek “a broader kind of visual Modernism,” or, as Yve-Alain Bois puts it, to reshuffle “modernism’s cards” (Bernstein, seminar 3). The surprise result is that the anti-aesthetic tells us much about Modernism, but in a dualistic form. On the one hand, we have the well-known idea of Modernism as medium-specific, historicist (in the Benjaminian sense as teleological and accumulative), constantly in search of presence, and understanding the aesthetic as a space of resolution. On the other hand, we confront a more slippery version of Modernism—allegorical, already postmodern à la Lyotard, textual, spatial, and perhaps formless. From these Seminars, Modernism emerges as the ultimate point of oscillation and vacillation, the division behind all the other oppositions. 1. It is possible to suggest that Paul de Man prepared the groundwork for this particular critique of the aesthetic, notably summed up in his Aesthetic Ideology, edited by Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Although largely criticized in the

Seminars, this point is also made in relation to the thought of Jacques Rancière, who is said to think aesthetics aside from a mode or surrogate of “social cohesion” (Millner-Larsen, in Section 6 of the Seminars).

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This dichotomy within a dichotomy necessarily informs the debate about the critical purpose of art. Jay Bernstein notes that “from the very beginning, aesthetics is about our dissatisfaction with modernity” (seminar 1). Later Bernstein explains: Modernism constitutes “a rebellion . . . a return of the oppressed against a dominating rationalization of everyday life” (seminar 5). Foster surmises that since the publication of The Anti-Aesthetic, the critical task has switched from representing “humane marginality” (Edward Said) to “simply human marginality” (Foster, seminar 9). Rather than offering a new conclusion, Foster’s comment reprises the pivotal, but inconclusive, debates over criticality in art discussed earlier in the Seminars. At one point in that debate, the conversation suddenly switches to zombies (seminar 6). Equating the critical role of art with the living dead hints at an interesting inversion. The zombie reference follows directly from suggestions that art might offer an alternative experience to the everyday, the “here and now,” or indeed may dispel “living deadness” (Costello, Bakke, seminar 6). The “conceit of loving zombies” manages to overturn familiar expectations concerning the critical purpose of art and its redemptive capacity: does art save us from becoming zombies, or from what we don’t want to be (perhaps alienated, adrift, bereft of genuine experience)? Alternatively, does the idea of a redemptive art prevent us from noticing that art does not always enliven us? It may actually deaden or deliberately fail to animate us (Elkins, seminar 6).2 Has art itself become zombie-like because it does not animate our lives but instead throws up offerings that are far from redemptive or enlivening? While Foster warns against assigning critical agency to things rather than to people—this critique of fetishism is part of the Enlightenment heritage he admits he still clings to—the fact is that any discussion of art’s critical function inevitably leads the conversation beyond Modernism back to the Enlightenment and forward again to the present. Judging by some of the characterizations given in these Seminars, however, Modernist artists were unbelievably naïve and perhaps stupid people when judged by today’s standards. They exalted simplistically uniform models of art and politics—apparently without exception. The Modernist regime, on the other hand, is “elitist, normative, and oppressive” (Hussain, seminar 8). Yet it is we today who are the zombies. How did this happen? Even the more informed participants, who offer nuanced positions, still present the course of contemporary art after Modernism as a kind of zombie world of dead and forlorn options. For Bernstein, Theodor Adorno is the most enduring and articulate proponent of critical Modernism vis-à-vis modernity. Yet, Bernstein ponders, “Is Modernism alive? I would say, No, it isn’t. Adorno thought it was dead or at least dying when he wrote his Aesthetic Theory” (seminar 5). Accordingly, the heyday of Modernism—alert with critical vitality in 2. See, for example, Christine Ross, The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

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eschewing the “rationalization of everyday life”—is long gone and remote from us today as a viable possibility. The other option is a concept of art deemed too prescriptive today, namely medium-specificity. Essentially a mid-twentieth-century American view of Modernism, it is typically identified with specific painting practices, but also with sculpture. It is haunted by the figure of Greenberg, who keeps returning and never seems to relinquish his hold. Like our fascination with zombies, this version of Modernism appears to be something we need so we can feel better about having surpassed it. All subsequent reactions relate to variations on this interpretation, even Fried’s conception of “theatricality.” This is clear when Costello refers to Modernism; he takes it to mean medium-specificity and thus reads every contrary analysis “in non-medium-specific terms” (seminar 4). His point is to show how the anti-aesthetic is implicated in the aesthetic and also how “anti-modernism does not break with Modernism . . . the more it is predicated on overturning its precursor’s terms, the more closely it is constrained by what it contests” (seminar 4). While on a conceptual level I agree with Costello, my point is not solely theoretical, but also importantly art historical. By using this definition of Modernism, Costello ties himself to the ramifications of the mid-twentieth-century American view. This definition of Modernism already excludes predecessors such as—well, you name it—Schwitters, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Stepanova, even Popova, definitely Tatlin, Heulsenbeck, Peri, Buchholz, Eggeling, MoholyNagy, Schlemmer, Duchamp, Picabia, etc. If they are not Modernists, then they can only be defined as anti-aesthetic, anti-Modernist Modernist artists. You see the problem. Contra Costello, the problem is not uniquely theoretical, but also historical. Smithson, Rauschenberg, Burn, Richter, Bourgeois, Hesse, Kippenberger, González-Torres, etc. seem more closely allied to these predecessors—the “non-Modernist Modernists”—than to the midcentury formulation of Modernism, which today looks more like the aberration than the norm. Where do these Seminars then leave us? In their effort to surpass and resolve certain quandaries, they provide valuable insights into the conceptual puzzles that art theory has wrestled with over the past few decades. Yet their inability to provide resolution is equally informative. It appears we retain the urge for the ever new, earnestly, sometimes frantically, but we stubbornly refuse to identify this new as Modernist. We want the new without being Modernist. Or do we? While the evidence produced by these Seminars is mixed, its stated aim is to explore alternative trajectories within Modernism (either by reshuffling its deck, articulating its alternative vision, or opening it up to multiple Modernisms). Two impediments stand in the way of reaching this goal. The first is that the most viable options are either said to be unavailable to us today (Adorno’s critical Modernism) or redundant (the perpetual return to medium-specificity and the zombie, Greenberg, who must be constantly slain but keeps reappearing). The second impediment is the urge to move on and surpass the current situation,

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which has been one of the prevailing themes of art criticism for two to three decades now. Most of the terms conjured for art over this time have amounted to nothing less than an effort to surpass the Modernist paradigm of art. However, for all the effort to move beyond, it seems we have not moved far. This is true, as is candidly admitted, of the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic dynamic. It could well be that the greatest impediment to “criticality” is the urge to exceed—especially as it has become virtually the exclusive criterion of criticality in art and theory. Even if it is motivated by the urge to go beyond tired notions and confounding dichotomies—and despite the fact that concept invention is often rewarded, for it can fast-track an academic, critical, or curatorial career—we require a different, perhaps messy and diffuse, but for all that more sharpened criticality. The importance of the anti-aesthetic lies in not eschewing the legacy it struggles with—despite the original stated intent of the anti-aesthetic. This suggests a positive, alternative criticality because it articulates what has not been exceeded without returning us to the land of the living dead, the empty repeaters. It does this by transforming the scenario within which it finds itself.

re: re: post

Gordon Hughes

Perhaps the first attempt at a “beyond” in Beyond the Anti-Aesthetic appears early in seminar 1, when Jay Bernstein refutes James Elkins’s position that (as Bernstein paraphrases) “Modernism is about aesthetic claims, and anti-aesthetics is about politics.” Aligning himself with Adorno, Bernstein sees the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic as two sides of the same Modernist coin, each lodging complementary claims that exceed our simply factual or instrumental engagement with objects—“a form of knowing that is also a feeling,” he argues, “a knowing by feeling, and feeling that is already a matter of knowing.” For Bernstein, then, the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic are “different ways of elaborating the autonomy of modern art.” All fine and dandy, Hal Foster replies, but circa 1983, when his edited volume appeared, aesthetics à la Kant was broadly perceived (perceived by “us,” that is) as a site of “reconciliation,” not only between judgments of fact and judgments of value, but “of other kinds of conflicts and contradictions.” As Foster reminds us, even Adorno’s Marxist model of autonomy “seemed overwhelmed by the brute realities of Reaganite reaction, the AIDS epidemic (especially ferocious in the art world), the first moves of neoliberal economies, and so on.” By Foster’s account, then, the anti-aesthetic was indeed “about politics,” adamantly and imperatively so. In these two opposing stories of the anti-aesthetic, we bump against more than just disciplinary differences (“the difference between the philosopher and the historian,” as Foster says to Bernstein at one point in seminar 1), but two incommensurable uses of the term “anti-aesthetic”: one that views the antiaesthetic as an inherent condition of Modernist autonomy stemming from its inception in the Enlightenment; the other that views it as a specific historical moment that took all claims to autonomy, even its more critical variants, to be an instrument of reactionary political and cultural discourse. So if the term “anti-aesthetic,” extended beyond a “not deeply thought through” title (Foster makes no bones about it), lends itself to such incompatibility, what is to be gained from its use? Little or nothing, as far as I can tell. Indeed, given the resulting incompatibility and general lack of clarity, the gains seem entirely negative to me. As Diarmuid Costello asks in seminar 1, what is the relation between the anti-aesthetic and modernity, postmodernity, and the historical and neoavant-garde? The question hangs, unanswered—or at least unclarified, unagreed upon—over the course of the seminar, muddying much of the discussion, as is evident from the get-go.

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Foster clearly—and explicitly in response to a question by Bernstein— understands the anti-aesthetic as roughly equivalent to “postmodernism presented by the nefarious October group.” The anti-aesthetic, for Foster, is “the moment of The Anti-Aesthetic.” Eve Meltzer, the only participant to hazard a response to Costello’s question, sees things otherwise; for her, “we can’t just say that anti-aesthetic practices represent the claims of postmodernism.” Pushing anti-aesthetic practices back a decade or two—to the anti-aesthetic moment rather than the Anti-Aesthetic moment—Meltzer points to the importance of structuralist and poststructuralist discourses within 1960s and ’70s conceptual art—an importance that continues in the work of artists we tend to relate more directly to Foster’s anthology: Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly, and so on. “So as I see it,” Meltzer states in seminar 7, “the sixties and seventies are completely within the relevant historical scope.” This seems both right and wrong to me. Right, certainly, that artists such as Haacke, Rosler, and Kelly grow out of and continue to be theoretically and artistically underpinned by structuralism and poststructuralism. Wrong, however, to see the various anti-aesthetic practices of Conceptualism as entirely of a piece with the postmodernism of the 1980s, particularly as they relate to the question of political imperative (not lacking, obviously, during the sixties and seventies) vis-à-vis autonomy. Take the work of Sol LeWitt, whom Meltzer takes as an exemplar of structuralist Conceptualism in her (excellent) 2006 article “The Dream of the Information World.”1 As Meltzer argues, LeWitt’s grids operate as a form of structural “text,” whereby each cubic unit—significantly termed a “grammatical device” by LeWitt—assumes meaning not in relation to an external referent, but in relation to the internal differences of the system. The value of each unit, therefore, is both arbitrary and purely differential, devoid of positive value outside the closed system of the “text.” As Meltzer puts it, LeWitt’s grids form “a selfgenerated sense of autonomy, like a miniature world created ex nihilo.”2 This autonomy, however, is not viewed as an embrace, but as an unveiling—a laying bare of the structuralist dream turned nightmare. At its best, Meltzer argues, sixties and seventies systems-based work expose structuralism’s dark underside: “The dream of the information world is the dream of being in and of the grid. Self-restriction; arbitrariness; that disciplined, autonomous, device-like quality of being both ‘run’ and ‘followed’ at once; the proposition of an absolute visibility that defies the very conditions of the phenomenal world; the very unquestionability of the laws that govern the system, and the proposition that ‘if the law is anywhere, it is everywhere’—these are the conditions of the grid.”3 In their very autonomy, LeWitt’s grids, along with a wide array of Conceptual art practices, assume a kind of politics as, before our very eyes, the dream turns bad. 1. Eve Meltzer, “The Dream of the Information World,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 1 (2006): 115–35. For another reading of LeWitt’s work and Conceptualism in relation to Structuralism, see also my “Game Face: Douglas Huebler and the Voiding of Photographic Portraiture,” Art Journal (Winter 2007–8): 52–69.

2. Meltzer, “Dream of the Information World,” 119. 3. Meltzer, “Dream of the Information World,” 132.

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By way of contrast, consider the work of Jenny Holzer, who adopts many of the strategies developed within Conceptualism, most evidently her use of language-based systems. Taking a page from the Lawrence Weiner playbook, the locus of Holzer’s work resides in language regardless of whether it is fabricated or not. What crucially differentiates Holzer’s work from Conceptualism, however, is that when her work is made, it assumes a politics of contingency otherwise absent from the majority of work made in the sixties and seventies. Take, by way of example, MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE, a now-famous phrase from Holzer’s 1983–85 work Survival. In its textual form, it could be (indeed, is often) read as a feminist statement: MEN as opposed to women, who assume the position of the addressee YOU.  Then again, MEN could refer to traditionally male-dominated domains of power: politicians, police, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, husbands, fathers, etc., which would in turn imply a gender-neutral YOU. Exactly who constitutes YOU, and MEN remains open. As does ANYMORE and the change it implies: a general collapse of patriarchy, perhaps, or some unnamed crisis or resolution that renders the protection of MEN void. When the same phrase appeared on the plastic wrap of a pair of condoms, which Holzer produced from 1983–85, the work became situated within a specific set of contingencies that constrained and articulated its meaning. MEN are now more narrowly confined to either male sex partners, or, in the context of the AIDS crisis, male, conservative, primarily white politicians who failed to respond to the epidemic. PROTECT is likewise more tightly focused as a health issue in the context of AIDS, while YOU is addressed explicitly to women and/ or homosexual men. MEN no longer protect gay men and women ANYMORE, now that we live in the age of AIDS. The phrase was significantly rearticulated when it reappeared on the Liberty Theatre marquee on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in New York City in 1993. The Liberty was home to a string of Broadway hits during its glory days in the twenties (including musicals by Jerome Kern and the Gershwins), but loss of revenue during the Depression forced it to become an inexpensive movie theater in the 1940s. This downward turn continued unabated until the mid-seventies, at which point the Times Square precincts placed first and second in New York City’s total felonies. By 1993 the theater’s fortunes reversed course again as the newly elected major, Rudolph W. Giuliani, began a notorious program of urban renewal, targeting Times Square in particular. In 1997 it was merged with the Empire Theatre to form a five-story entertainment complex, including a twenty-five-screen Cineplex and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Holzer’s phrase is thus sutured to the specifics of this context: MEN become the police who no longer protect YOU (New Yorkers, tourists). But not ANYMORE, now that redevelopment and the forward march of capital have “Disneyfied” Times Square.

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LeWitt famously viewed Conceptualism as an anti-aesthetic practice, displacing aesthetic value with interest: “It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator.”4 But just as LeWitt moves from value to interest, Holzer, as Foster suggests, moves from interest to critique; from the anti-aesthetic to The Anti-Aesthetic.

4. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), republished in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro

and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 12.

the elusive “beyond” of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic

Toni Ross

In his introduction to this volume, James Elkins acknowledges an earlier, rather modest effort by James Meyer and myself to create a forum where the polarized categories of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic might be refigured.1 While I’m pleased that some of the issues we raised are substantially deepened and expanded in the transcribed seminars, I’m less delighted by Elkins’s account of our framing of the debate. He asserts that we privileged the anti-aesthetic side of the equation, assigning political significance only to art practices designated as such.2 Yet neither the content of our preface nor the theoretically variegated essays we commissioned for Art Journal support this reading. Back in 2004 we concluded the following: “Rather than call for a return to classical aesthetic theory unchanged or an anti-aesthetic suppression of aesthetics, we have sought a structural understanding of these discourses as historically intertwined and a possible cross-pollination of the terms of the debate.”3 With these remarks, we invited a reframing of the aesthetic and antiaesthetic as historically consubstantial, but not necessarily reconciled. We also hint that such a possibility was unlikely to issue from the revivalism of beauty that emerged in the U.S. art scene in the 1990s. This largely classically derived “return to beauty” not only privileged artistic and societal harmonization, but also simply inverted the polarity between aesthetics and politics established in anti-aesthetic frameworks. From the evidence of the Seminars, some consensus was reached regarding the necessity of revising the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic opposition in ways we had previously signalled. In seminar 1, Hal Foster frankly admits that ideas of the aesthetic developed by Kant and Schiller in particular were “reified” as the “bad object” in postmodernist criticism.4 He’s now inclined to agree with Jay Bernstein’s recommendation that the aesthetic and its negative twin be thought as mutually implicated rather than implacably opposed or historically distinct tendencies of modern art.5 Having been given the opportunity to respond to the illuminating, but also exasperating, conversations that make up the Seminars, I will direct most of 1. Meyer and Ross, “Aesthetic/AntiAesthetic: An Introduction,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004): 20–23. 2. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 3. Meyer and Ross, “Aesthetic/AntiAesthetic,” 23. 4. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 5. It should be noted that Foster, as he insists at various points in the Seminars, has long given up defending postmodernism or the

anti-aesthetic. A salient example of this retreat appears in Foster’s book Design and Crime. In a symptomatic analysis of commodity fetishism in its recent technological manifestations, Foster calls for a pragmatic redeployment of the concept of aesthetic autonomy, a concept that had previously been anathema for postmodernist critics. Foster, “Antinomies in Art History,” in Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), 103.

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my comments towards the writings of Jacques Rancière. Clearly, this thinker’s contributions to the issues that preoccupy the seminar participants receive harsh treatment.6  I want to suggest, however, that Rancière does offer a productive reconfiguration of the structural dynamic of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. And that he does this in a way that eschews endless, “zombie”-like demands in the contemporary art world to move “beyond” the past by predicting the next era of something or another. “Administered affect” perhaps? One of the central claims made by Foster and like-minded proponents of the anti-aesthetic was that the postmodern break with Modernism announced the demise of art’s autonomy. This overturning applied both to Greenberg’s “truth to medium” version of Modernism and to ideas of aesthetic experience as distinct from other spheres of modern life.7 Moreover, as Foster’s reference to the art of Barbara Kruger and Hans Haacke confirms, anti-aesthetic practices were commonly defined by an overt commitment to politicized subject matter.8 Conversely, the aesthetic was aligned with (Modernist) art invested in formal experiments that bracketed or obscured social content. Thus, in theory if not always in practice, those who privileged the anti-aesthetic supposed that aesthetics and politics occupied opposing camps. Rancière presents a different view, arguing that politics has been present in modern aesthetics from the beginning, even where we least expect to find it. Commentary in seminar 6 outlines Rancière’s more general account of the aesthetic dimension of political praxis, where the socially disruptive gestures of politics are said to question and reorganize naturalized systems of perception. Seminar 6 also debates Rancière’s attribution of similar functions to art, which he has described as producing effects of “discrepancy” within given systems of expectation or reality.9 Foster dismisses such formulations as wishful thinking in the face of art’s limited social agency and impact, an assessment I don’t entirely disagree with.10 Certainly some of Rancière’s summations of art’s critical capacities could give undue comfort to artists and contemporary art institutions prone to wildly exaggerating art’s socially transformative powers.11 Having said this, I believe that a closer reading of Rancière’s conceptualization of the politics of modern aesthetics could short-circuit such automated appeals to avant-gardism. In numerous publications, Rancière has made a point of questioning the heuristic value of postmodernism as an epochal category. His writings imply instead that the categories of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, as identified in postmodern discourse, approximate two modalities of a larger paradigm of artistic modernity which Rancière names the “aesthetic regime of art.”12 For Rancière, these two contending but chiasmatically related currents of modern aesthetics 6. See Section 6 of the Seminars. 7. Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), xv. 8. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 9. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007), 7. 10. See Section 6 of the Seminars.

11. Rancière has in fact cautioned against a tendency in the contemporary art world to preemptively assume the success of art’s critical interventions. Rancière, “Aesthetics Against Incarnation: An Interview with Anne Marie Oliver,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 181. 12. For a summary of these claims see Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense:

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contain political significance, while also continuing to impinge on contemporary art and its heuristic frameworks. Elkins and Joaquín Barriendos correctly surmise that Rancière finds fault with anti-aesthetic perspectives that reduce art’s political meaning to activist messages.13 But in other ways, his concept of the aesthetic regime recalls antiaesthetic priorities. As Jean-Luc Nancy has observed, Rancière consistently undermines the privilege assigned to “the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy” as the single orientating principle of modern art.14 However, unlike postmodernist critics, he stresses that a recognized loss of stable standards for locating art’s unique field of concern need not be dated to developments in post-sixties art. Rancière reminds us, for example, that the activation of slippages between art and prosaic life, between artistic and other kinds of practice, has been central to art’s agenda since the emergence of Romanticism and Realism (artistic and philosophical) in the early nineteenth century.15 Consequently, no postmodern rupture is required to explain the hybrid formats, the combines of art and political intent, or art and theory, taken to define the anti-aesthetic. As Rancière contends, “Far from being shattered by it, [modern] aesthetics means precisely this ‘blurring of boundaries’ between different spheres of experience.”16 The second politics of the aesthetic regime isolated by Rancière does differentiate aesthetic experience from “everyday” modes of perception. Here Rancière revisits Kant’s contribution to aesthetic modernity, or rather Schiller’s translation of Kantian aesthetics in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.17 Schiller, according to this reading, drew political significance from Kant’s account in the Critique of Judgment of the “free-play” of sensory and intellectual faculties that attended judgments of natural beauty. As Bernstein mentions, Kant describes aesthetic reception as forestalling the submission of the object of judgment to both the categorizing operations of conceptual reasoning and the acquisitive impulses of sensuous appetite. The aesthetic here designates a form of thought where neither mind nor matter, neither reason nor sensory feeling, is set above each other.18 Kant’s identification of aesthetic apprehension with a suspension of relations of domination between passive sensibility and active understanding proved especially attractive to Schiller. According to Rancière’s reading, Schiller conceived of aesthetic experience as offering a proleptic vision of society that no longer authorized “the power of the class of intelligence over the class Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 31–50. 13. See Section 6 of the Seminars. 14. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Rancière and Metaphysics,” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 89. 15. Gustav Frank’s comment in Section 2 of the Seminars on Craig Owens’s essay “The Allegorical Impulse” seems relevant here. He notes that Owens’s characterization of postmodern art as combining artistic and theoretical practice

recalls the thinking of art proposed by Friedrich von Schlegel in the last years of the eighteenth century. 16. Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” 35. 17. Jacques Rancière, “The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller: Two Readings of Kant and Their Political Significance,” Radical Philosophy 126 (2004): 8–15. 18. The seminar discussions devoted to “affect,” or Deleuzian “sensation,” seem to be still operating within this theoretical terrain (see Sections 7 and 8 of the Seminars).

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of sensation, of men of culture over men of nature.”19 In other words, Schiller turned the specificity of aesthetic experience formulated by Kant towards a repudiation of the stratified divisions between human classes, roles, and capabilities predominant in social life. Yet Rancière acknowledges that Schillerian aesthetics located two versions of art’s political potential, the first more commonly attributed to German Romanticism. Here art acts as a model of societal and subjective healing, where the alienation of reason from sensibility, or social divisions, might ultimately be reconciled. Foster reminds us in the Seminars that anti-aesthetic polemics precisely rejected this redemptive, socially ameliorative conception of art.20 Rancière also eschews this version of Romanticism, stressing instead Schiller’s other conception of art as a locus of contentiousness from which established perceptual coordinates of social life might be challenged. The twofold politics of the aesthetic regime elaborated by Rancière may therefore be summarized as follows. The first arises from a recognized loss of stable criteria for distinguishing art from other spheres of experience and practice. Obviously, this tendency encompasses various manifestations of avantgardism where art involves itself in political programs, or remains receptive to contingent shifts and emergent phenomena thrown up by the broader culture of modernity. Anti-aesthetic practices were largely defined in these terms. The other inclination of the aesthetic regime is expressed by Modernist assertions of the heterogeneity of aesthetic sensibility in relation to prevailing values and perceptual systems of modernity. Rancière’s writings have made salient how interconnected emancipatory impulses inhabit both of these commonly opposed paradigms of modern art. In a number of recent publications, Rancière characterizes successful political art as negotiating the two extremes of the politics of the aesthetic regime.21 This means neither privileging art’s autonomy nor dissolving all differences between art and governing systems of everyday life. As a quasi-regulative but capacious formula for assessing art’s criticality, this doesn’t seem too bad to me. For example, it seems highly pertinent to the art of Thomas Hirschhorn, which Foster notably mobilizes to discount Rancière’s aesthetic regime concept.22 Foster invokes Hirschhorn’s appropriation of the makeshift formats of shrines to celebrity figures such as Lady Di, in order to express his own love of dead artists (Mondrian) or philosophers (Deleuze). Hirschhorn, says Foster, thus suggests that we’ve left behind the aesthetic regime and are now located in a new cultural regime of “administered affect” where media management of collective emotional cathexes forms the horizon of everyday experience. According to Foster, Hirschhorn responds to this situation not from a position of critical distance, but by tapping the energies of spectacle culture from within. 19. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 31. 20. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 21. Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” 40. 22. See Section 8 of the Seminars.

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Such claims uncannily recall Foster’s divination thirty years ago of a new phase of art beyond Modernist aesthetics. Yet Hirschhorn’s art resists adjustment to the functionalist formulations of unified blocs of historical time proposed by Foster. His art consistently maintains a tension between embracing popular cultural phenomena representative of his own time and asserting his art’s autonomy, its distance from contemporary life. It is hardly happenstance that Hirschhorn invokes vernacular memorials to Lady Di, only to replace her with figures from art history or philosophy associated with affirmations of Modernist autonomy. If Hirschhorn were wholly inside spectacle culture, he would only give us handwritten proclamations of undying love, fields of cellophane-wrapped flowers or fluffy toys. But he does more than this.

on politics, art, and mobbing rancière

Justin McKeown

While the problem of the former East was the problem of the right to free speech, the problem of the West has been the right to be properly heard. Much of the artistic production in the West devoted to politics, since at least the late 1960s, has been problematic because it has not contended with the underlying conditions by which political activity—especially that emanating from the field of art—is nullified. To put it another way, much political art produces a spectacle of revolution, as opposed to a revolution against the spectacle.1 I therefore read the dialogue on Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, and relational aesthetics in seminar 6 with great interest, because I hoped that these issues would be raised by the participants. While they were not, in reading the participants’ dialogue, I was fascinated by their lack of acknowledgment of the politics of their statements. What does it mean to mob Rancière when he’s not there to defend himself? To what end was this done? What were the conditions within the conference that gave birth to this? And why was it necessary? The conversation reads as if the whole room shared an unspoken agreement regarding the definition of “politics” and, furthermore, what its purpose is in relation to art. This left me mildly perplexed, not least because the use of the term “politics” seemed to have the same currency as a nice bottle of Scottish malt, that is, something that can be taken out, shared, and appreciated and then put away, leaving us to enjoy its mildly heady effects. Perhaps the ability to treat the word “politics” in this way is indicative of the privileged position of those present, inasmuch as they have not only the right to speak but also the right to be heard. Though when I say this, it is important that the reader does not misinterpret me by reading angst or dismissiveness into my assessment of this situation. I’m simply fascinated by its politics, and who has the right to be heard and the wider effects of their utterances upon discourse within contemporary art. Trying to define the conditions underpinning this series of discussions in terms of agency and affect would be tricky. Instead, taking these discussions as a departure point, I want to air some thoughts on the politics of art and the art industries’ discussion of politics as a means of making my own voice heard on a subject I have devoted a great deal of time to. Through this I hope to provoke the reader to consider some of the points that were absent in the seminar discussions. Towards this purpose I wish to share thoughts on past events where I have 1. In the sense of Guy Debord’s use of the word in Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977).

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participated in similar conference discussions as those outlined in the discussion of Rancière, Deleuze, and relational aesthetics (seminar 6). The first of these was the “Forklift Trucks” conference organized by Gustav Metzger in London in 2003. It was an attempt to bring together opinion makers from the world of white cube galleries and museums and from those involved in marginal political art practices; or, put another way, those whose voices are heard and those whose are not. During this conference, I was struck by a comment by Norman Rosenthal, then director of the Royal Academy of Art. Rosenthal— and I’m paraphrasing—stated that art really only happened in Berlin, London, and New York, and that these places are located on a line if you look at them on a map. Granted, his statement was not without some sense of self-knowing provocation. The notion of Rosenthal’s Line, however, interested me because the resultant image is startling: the line covers a minuscule territory on the surface of the globe, thus leading one to contemplate the myriad of art histories that exist outside this thin bridge between Europe and North America. In 2006 I discussed Rosenthal’s Line with curator Declan McGonagle, who was then director of the University of Ulster’s research institute Interface, which was charged with seeking creative solutions to the sociopolitics of the Northern Irish conflict. McGonagle suggested that Rosenthal’s Line wasn’t so much a representation of centers of artistic production as of centers of artistic consumption. This, I feel, makes a little more sense. The question remains, though, how do artists who live on points outside this line find the means to make their voices heard? What if their localized conditions differ greatly from those of artists living in the centers of consumption? How can their worldview be given credence? The further they are removed from these sites of cultural transmogrification, then—at least in theory—the less chance they have to be heard. While this statement could run counter to many peoples’ conception of a world connected by mobile phones and Internet access, there is, nonetheless, an element of truth to Rosenthal’s Line that must be considered. Here I arrive at the second occurrence I wish to share. In 2008 I attended the “Art Strike Conference” in Lithuania. Here political art aficionados descended on the town of Alytus to discuss the nomination of Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, for the award of European City of Culture. Lithuanian artists feared that naming Vilnius the European City of Culture would cause the reallocation of money for the capital’s extracultural events, which would mean regional artists would suffer a considerable loss of financial support. Thus the periphery would be starved. This concerned visiting artists because the European Capital of Culture shifts every year. Therefore, artists from other European states would experience similar conditions in the future. Key on the conference’s agenda was the kind of effect that bestowing this title on a different city each year had upon artists across Europe. While on paper this event promised to be interesting, I quickly discovered that the very usage of the word “politics”—thanks to the East’s misperception of

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the West and the West’s misperception of the East—rendered any fruitful discussion almost impossible. Granted a glimpse of the problems that must occur on a daily basis in the European Parliament, I found myself frustrated with endless discussions of artistic political strategies that refused to consider the limits of art’s ability to affect political structures and decisions. Highly frustrating was the lack of acknowledgment by many delegates of what would be required on their part if they really wanted to affect society in the ways they claimed. This was particularly because at the root of many delegates’ philosophies—indeed those of many politically engaged artists—is a belief that artistic subversion and playful civil unrest can effect social change. I find this position naïve since the only outcome of a protracted campaign of artistic protest and civil unrest—especially if it were going favorably for the artists involved—would be the engagement of government forces in asymmetric warfare. One need only refer to the classic military textbook Low Intensity Operations by General Sir Frank Kitson to understand that, while artists may engage in such actions out of ethical concerns, it is not a soldier’s job to make ethical decisions. He or she is engaged to win. As Kitson puts it, “When conflicts occur, soldiers like other people, have to have faith in the moral rectitude of their government to some extent, because it is not usually possible to know enough of the facts to make an absolute judgement as to the rights and wrongs of the case. . . . The fact that subversion may be used to fight oppression, or even that it may be the only means open for doing so, does not alter the fact that soldiers should know how to suppress it if necessary.”2 On the grounds of this, the concept of political subversion through art is naïve. A more realistic strategy would be to formulate a practice of creative participation in political systems. An unwillingness to acknowledge this condition rendered the Lithuanian conference moot: useful for hooking up your next conference appearance or exhibition but ineffectual for the stated aim of the event, which was to seek solutions to problems brought about by the European cultural capital initiative. In Lithuania I learned that the most important thing about being a politically engaged artist is being heard to be a politically engaged artist. I also learned that the degree to which people in the West and the (formerly communist) East misunderstand each other is extreme. This makes any discussion of politics highly problematic unless the purpose of said discussion is to capitalize upon a romanticized misconception of cultural origins (a deeply cynical act). The final thing I learned was that those on the periphery, regardless of whether they hail from East or West, feel an intense anxiety stemming from their inability to make themselves heard. This anxiety reminds me of the opening pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Michel Foucault states, “[H]istory, in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and 2. Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-Keeping (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 9.

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lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments.”3 Considering Foucault’s statement in light of the current Western world, where, for most people, ontological problems of being have been supplanted by the more mundane problems of appearance and appearing, it is understandable why people on the periphery feel this anxiety so intensely. This brings me to the final thing I wish to share: a proposal from Scottish poet Tom Leonard, which formed the basis of his examination of how the people of Renfreshire in the west of Scotland came to be deprived of a whole body of literature that they once held as valid poetry: “Any society is a society in conflict, and any anthology of a society’s poetry that does not reflect this, is a lie. But poetry has been so defined in the public mind as usually to exclude the possibility of social conflicts appearing.”4 Applying Leonard’s proposal to the publication of the seminar discussions in Chicago, it is heartening to see that the participants’ contestation of Rancière was not removed from the transcript, though the text would have been considerably enlivened if we had been able to hear Rancière’s response to the charges therein. In considering this further, it would be interesting to apply Leonard’s principle not only to how future discussions about art are conducted, but also to how anthologies are published, art collections formed, and exhibitions curated. This could offer a means of making heard the voices of those who cannot make themselves heard. Through this we may arrive at a more accurate depiction of history in both its living and past forms. In turn, this might go some way to solving the problem of modern history that Foucault so keenly pointed out.

3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 7.

4. Tom Leonard, “Radical Renfrew,” http://​ www​.tomleonard​.co​.uk/​main​-publications/​ radical​-renfrew/​introduction​-to​-radical​-renfrew​ .html (accessed June 3, 2011).

as if

Timotheus Vermeulen

In this Assessment I would like to engage in three debates that run throughout the Seminars: the terms of the debate—the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic; their implications for thinking about the periodization of the arts; and their implications for contemplating the spatiality of art, in particular with regard to the quotidian, that most “dire” of experiences, as Jay Bernstein so emphatically puts it (seminar 5). The Stone Summer Theory Institute Seminars are about the anti-aesthetic, and therefore by implication that which it supposedly opposes, the aesthetic. They are about how we can think beyond this binary. But they are also about what this binary means. In fact, they are also about what these concepts themselves may or may not mean, and have or have not meant over the years. For Hal Foster, for instance, the aesthetic refers to the (modern) construction of a unity, while the anti-aesthetic refers precisely to the (postmodern) deconstruction of that unity. Bernstein, meanwhile, seems to suggest that the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic are about sublimation and the return of the repressed, respectively (seminar 5). Others propose yet other definitions: harmony and dissent, the beautiful and the ugly, art and politics. The concepts of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic thus simultaneously function as the defining problematic and form a problem of definition; its guiding thread and a surprisingly slippery slope. Kant seems to be a central figure, however, in each of the discourses, and so his writings on aesthetics may well offer us insight into some of the issues at stake across the debates. As Diarmuid Costello and Bernstein, among others, note (seminar 1), there are various ways in which The Critique of Judgment can be approached: as an inquiry into the experience of modernity, a reinterpretation of the human faculties, a contemplation of taste, and so on. I would offer yet another way of rethinking Kant’s third critique. This particular way of reading Kant was suggested some years ago by the German philosopher of art Eva Schaper. According to Schaper, the aesthetic judgment in Kant is by definition an allegorical judgment, that is to say, a judgment about something which one knows represents something else. “Nature was beautiful when it appeared as art,” she cites Kant, while “art can only be called beautiful when we are conscious of its being art whilst it yet appears to us as if it were nature.”1 Unfortunately, I do not have the space to discuss Schaper’s argument in detail here. What I want to 1. Eva Schaper, “The Kantian ‘As-If’ and Its Relevance for Aesthetics,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 65 (1964–65): 220.

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draw attention to is that aesthetic judgment is a category of the imagination, the faculty where Kant thinks all mental capacities conjoin. When engaging in an aesthetic judgment, one is imagining. That is to say, one articulates one’s mental capacities to think something that those same mental capacities tell him he cannot think. Kant here simultaneously attests to and casts doubt upon the faith his contemporaries put in Reason. Indeed, as Kant writes elsewhere, “the history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret” and “each . . . people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal.”2 We may view history as the materialization of the Ideal, he says, but we may not, as well. The aesthetic is not an alternative way of thinking about modernity, as Bernstein describes it, but is, in fact, a vital part of Kant’s notion of the modern thought experiment as such. If one accepts this reading of Kant, the relationships between aesthetics and modernity, aesthetics and the human faculties, and aesthetics and taste take on other meanings. It is certainly the case that this particular interpretation of the aesthetic is enabled by modern processes of democratization. After all, to imagine one thing (say, the slave) is something else (say, the master) requires the kind of liberty inherent to democracy. Yet modernity as we have come to understand it, as a universalizing, progressive materialization of Reason, is not, in a Schaperian sense, an aesthetic regime. There is nothing allegorical about the fanaticism of the French terror, the Holocaust, or the pogroms, for instance. Similarly, there is definitely an element of this aesthetic in the democratization of what Jacques Rancière calls the sayable and the visible in Modernist art. After all, such a democratization acknowledges the potential significance of every insignificant detail: a lamppost, a vase, a speck of dust. Yet the purism, if I may call it that, the-saying-what-it-is of Greenberg’s Modernism, is anything but aesthetic. According to Schaper, Kantian aesthetics is about pretending that something is one thing even though one knows that it may well not be. The aesthetic that Foster seems to postulate in his introduction to The Anti-Aesthetic, the aesthetic implicit in the debates in the Stone Seminars, is one of pretense without the knowing: something can be a totality, something can be normal, something can be unique, and so on. Consequently, the anti-aesthetic, as the aesthetic’s supposedly radical critique, is configured as a knowing without the pretense, in which each illusion of totality, normality, unicity is taken apart. If one wishes to rethink the relationship between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic, then, it is worth taking Schaper’s interpretation of Kant’s third critique into account. I think that if we take Schaper’s interpretation of the third critique into consideration, we may be able to write an alternative history of modernity (one that exists alongside the others rather than replaces them) that carries in it both Foster’s anti-aesthetic and the aesthetic implied by it: a modernity that pretends while simultaneously perceiving that what it pretends is problematic; 2. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in On History, edited by Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 21 (my emphasis).

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a modernity that tries in spite of. Indeed, it is this mode of modernity that has long proved problematic for the chroniclers of modernity: the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre, the novels and short stories of Robert Coates, the performances of Bas Jan Ader, the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini; works characterized by being both modern and postmodern and neither of them; both believing and knowing, and because that is a contradiction in terms, neither of them; both sincere and ironic and neither of them; both constructive and deconstructive and neither of them; and so forth. It seems to me, moreover, that this mode of modernity, a mode of modernity that rose to prominence in the Romantic period and all but disappeared in the wake of Hegel and Marx, has recently reemerged as a dominant structure of feeling. It is present especially in the work of artists engaging with the everyday: in the performances of Ragnar Kjartansson, in the installations of Sejla Kameric, and, indeed, in Olafur Eliasson’s architecture. Bernstein offhandedly dismisses such engagements as “hopeless failures.” However, it seems to me that Bernstein is only partly right. Indeed, the works of Kjartansson, Kameric, and Eliasson more often than not amount to failures. But they are certainly not hopeless. In Kjartansson’s God (2009), for instance, the artist sings the same clichéd line— “sorrow conquers happiness”—again and again, for about fifteen minutes at a stretch. Yet with each utterance he changes the notes just a bit. It is as if, by repeating this sentence with a difference, he can try to find some hope in it in spite of itself. He fails, of course. Indeed, he must know before he embarks on his project that he will fail. But he tries nonetheless. The avant-garde tried to transform the everyday. Foster’s postmodernism of resistance attempted to deconstruct it, to denaturalize it and take it apart. What Bernstein fails to see, to my mind, is that what many artists today—artists like Kameric and Eliasson—are attempting is to construct another everyday within the everyday, whilst recognizing the need to simultaneously and continuously deconstruct it. Neither modern nor postmodern, this modernity that is at once critical and naïve may be called metamodernism, oscillating between (meta-) modern practices and postmodern positions. I am not an apologist for this modernity, and so the above is by no means a defense of it. I do feel, however, that I should stress that it is not simply a matter of eating your cake and having it too. For the cake is never there to begin with. Kant, as much as these artists, attempts to intervene in thought experiments in his discourses. The artists imagine eating a cake, which they subsequently, because it is only in their imagination that they eat it, still have afterwards. But by doing so, they resignify their engagements with everyday reality as well as re-envision the pasts and futures preceding it, emerging from it by restructuring their experiences, interactions, and choices.

how do you pronounce the politics of aesthetics?

Noah Simblist

Like Gregory Sholette, I was interested in the statement by Stéphanie Benzaquen in seminar 9. This last seminar was about addressing any lack or exclusion of subjects that the participants noticed. She claimed that the group had “not touched on the social and economic conditions of theories of art.” Instead, she says, “We have been living in the abstract.” She references Edward Said’s text in The Anti-Aesthetic1 because he explicitly talks about the patterns of exclusion that exist within both writing and its interpretation. In his essay, Said talks about the divisions that exist between academic fields of inquiry and likens them to the Cold War binaries in which he was writing.2 Said invokes Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge3 and employs its methodology to look at the structures of knowledge production that he has participated in. For instance, Said notes the partisan politics that exists within the humanities and the actual and social capital at stake in the academic publishing industry. He concludes this analysis with a pronouncement: “we need to think about breaking out of the disciplinary ghettos in which as intellectuals we have been confined, to reopen the blocked social processes ceding objective representation (hence power) of the world to a small coterie of experts and their clients.”4 James Elkins says that this seminar was consciously organized to include participants from a wide range of fields and geographic centers to avoid the problems that Said raised. But, for the most part, there weren’t many actual examples brought up in discussion of patterns or trends in institutional structures or artistic practice that actually compare the ways that art production, dissemination, and interpretation might work differently in places like Beirut or Ramallah as compared to Chicago or New York. Does the matter at hand, the anti-aesthetic, function differently for different communities? Elkins also notes that he thought that this issue was covered in a previous seminar on art and globalization. But again, following Said and bucking the desire to delimit categories, how can we think of one topic informing the other? Why, for instance, have so many artists from the Middle East who address its politics used conceptualist methodologies? Artists like Walid Raad, Emily Jacir, Akhram Zattari, and Khaled Hourani deal explicitly with very volatile 1. Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 2nd ed. (New York: New Press, 1998), 155–83. 2. In a lecture at the Frieze Art Fair in 2011 entitled “The Luxury of Incommensurability,” Katy Siegel also noted the links between this

binary and the Cold War and suggested the famous duck/rabbit diagram as a way out of it by imagining seeing two things at once. 3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). 4. Said, “Opponents, Audiences,” 182.

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politics connected to the Lebanon Civil War, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and other topics. These topics, as Said himself noted in Covering Islam,5 are frequently and problematically represented in mainstream media. But the strategies that the mainstream media often use focus on the bodies of the dead or wounded, burning tires, military strikes, and screaming funeral marches. These artists turn away from the aesthetics of hyperbolic violence and instead choose a tactic of remove. The question, then, is if these conceptualist methodologies are anti-aesthetic or if they simply employ an aesthetic characteristic of a certain brand of conceptualism—what Benjamin Buchloh referred to as the “aesthetics of administration.”6 It is clear that they are not engaging in the kind of aesthetic questions that Clement Greenberg had when he referred to aesthetics—something that existed for him within the realm of painting and sometimes sculpture. They favor text and photographic images instead of the materiality of objects, and they use these media in a way that Fredric Jameson would call “pastiche.”7 Walid Raad certainly cares for and employs aesthetics. In his video I Only Wish I Could Weep (2002), done under the auspices of the Atlas Group, an intelligence agent chooses to focus his surveillance on a sunset instead of the target that his supervisors chose for him. This move by Raad explores the aesthetics of politics by showing an instance where an individual within a saturated political environment seeks out an aesthetic rupture. But as a result this aesthetic moment, which might seem to represent the transcendent beauty of nature, becomes framed by the politics of the social. Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From (2002–3) also plays back and forth between art and politics, aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. In this project Jacir, a Palestinian American artist, used her U.S.  passport to travel across borders and through checkpoints that would have been difficult or impossible for many other Palestinians. She asked a group of Palestinians around the world what, if she could do anything for them in Palestine, it would be. She gets responses like “drink the water in my parent’s village” or “go to Haifa and play soccer with the first Palestinian boy that you find on the street.” In some sense this work embraces the aesthetics of Palestinian politics, but, following the Assessment by Boris Groys, perhaps this work could more accurately be described as engaging poetics. It is also interesting to note that some European curators who have worked with artists like Charles Esche or Catherine David frequently engage ideas that link conceptualism with politics. Institutions like the Vannabbemuseum, the Witte de  Witte, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art often traffic in work that might not be anti-aesthetic (in a polemical sense) but that certainly resists traditional engagements with aesthetics. Middle Eastern institutions like 5. Edward Said, Covering Islam (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 6. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962– 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to

the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43. 7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 15.

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Ashkal Alwan, the Sharjah Biennial, and the Al-Ma’mal Foundation are similar to these European institutions in the proliferation of conceptual practices. Perhaps one of the most sophisticated moves out of the aesthetic/antiaesthetic binary is Khaled Hourani’s project with Charles Esche and the Vanabbemuseum called Picasso in Palestine (2010). This project involved something rather simple by the standards of most international museums. The International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP) borrowed Pablo Picasso’s Buste de Femme (1943) from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. But because the IAAP is in Ramallah, the West Bank—a territory of contested sovereignty—this process became not only complex but also a subject for a much larger artwork that encompassed a painting AND the social forces that surround its movement. It took two years of intense negotiations with art shippers and insurance companies as well as research into the intricacies of the Oslo Accords to set up the first instance of a Western Modernist icon being exhibited in Palestine. The documents of this process were exhibited concurrently with the painting at the Al-Ma’mal Foundation in Jerusalem. For me, this project brings up one of many ways of seeing Jacques Rancière’s contribution to the discussion by highlighting not only the aesthetics of politics but also the politics of aesthetics.8 I understand the latter in a couple of ways. First, in terms of Picasso in Palestine, there are many hidden structures that allow culture to be made manifest. These structures are powered by both ideological and financial forces. I believe that when James Elkins brought up the support of Howard and Donna Stone, he was speaking to this dimension of the institutional and social context in which the seminar was happening. “Picasso in Palestine,” however, chose to be very self-conscious about those structures and to fold them into the project.9 The second way that I understand Rancière’s discussion of the politics of aesthetics is through how regimes within institutions, like universities or museums, have imposed hierarchies of value within the arts in relation to medium or genre. Despite the evolution of models of problematizing and moving beyond the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic binary, there are still many ways in which it is reified by communities of scholars, curators, critics, and artists and by the art market. There are still firm believers in the universal truth of painting’s beauty who decry the hegemonic threats of anti-aesthetic conceptualism. There are also orthodox Conceptualists who are paranoid about the links between aesthetic purity and the market. These caricatures didn’t become extinct once the notion of moving beyond the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic binary was raised. I have met many people in respectable positions who embrace the binary, as if stuck in the 1980s, while falling on one side or the other of it. This is a politics of aesthetics that I think was lacking in the seminar’s discussion—certainly in any concrete way. 8. Jacques Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible,” in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2006).

9. A similar self-consciousness has been performed by WAGE, when members of the group are on panels and make clear how much they have been paid.

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So why have so many recent artists from the Arab world focused on Conceptual anti-aesthetic modes of making to deal with politics? Certainly this has to do with the politics of aesthetics, which traditionally has organized communities that are aligned with social content toward certain modes of making. But of course, that isn’t to say that artists who embrace aesthetics are any less political. If we take a few Palestinian artists as examples, we could draw a spectrum from the abstract paintings of Kamal Boulata to the surreal sculptures by Mona Hatoum to the more didactic poetics of Emily Jacir. All of them make work that is deeply connected to Palestinian politics and identity, but I don’t think that any of them consider themselves to be anti-aesthetic. Perhaps the less abstract work of Jacir, like works by Raad and Hourani, resists some amount of aesthetics so that her politics can be more pronounced. Indeed, the way that politics is most often expressed in Israel-Palestine is not through baroque violent actions but more commonly through the quiet remove of administration. These artists are highly conscious of a place in which affected representations of politics are commonly used by mainstream media outlets. The spectrum of aesthetic to antiaesthetic becomes available for various ideological strategies. For many of these artists, the tactic of remove becomes an option to resist pat answers, offering up systems and ideas that mirror the hegemonic norm and speak an equivalent language of power.

r e m a r k a b l e o v e r s i g h t s , o r c o u l d w e a c t u a l ly m a k e p o l i t i c s e a s i e r t o ta l k a b o u t ?

Rebecca Zorach

“Art” is the zombie here.1 Not because it keeps moving along as a vestigial automatism long past its relevance, but because it eats the brains of some very smart people. I’m joking, of course. But it seems like this conversation, perhaps by its very nature, ends up less than the sum of its formidable parts. What interests me, mainly, is the evacuation of the political from this conversation—which I take as a diagnostic for much current (academic) discourse on art. The invitation to write this Assessment included the statement that one of the goals of the volume is to make it more difficult to write about aesthetics, politics, and art. Frankly, I don’t want to make it more difficult to write about art and politics; I want to make it easier. I want us to have more vocabulary, more tools. For politics, I might mention occupation, privatization, precarity, extraordinary rendition, anti-globalization movement, Afghanistan, war without end, national security state, carceral democracy, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, racism. These are conditions of our political context. I wonder: did politics emerge in the interstices of the seminar—over drinks at the bar, in knowing looks, in a quick chat between sessions? Foster frequently invoked the situation of the Reagan years as the backdrop to the inflated rhetoric of The Anti-Aesthetic. “The situation,” he says, “was polemical” (seminar 1). Why is the situation not polemical now?2 The stakes of politics are higher than ever; the stakes of art seem impoverished in comparison. Given this situation, might we imagine that art could actually be nourished by politics more than it’s diminished by it? But when politics irrupted into the conversation it kept sliding quickly into something else; it got no traction. Or it produced severe misunderstandings. In a strange moment at the end of the last seminar—the meeting for all the things that hadn’t been discussed in all the others—Stéphanie Benzaquen suggests that the seminar might have discussed the “social and economic conditions of theories of art” (seminar 9). Hal Foster misunderstands Benzaquen’s reference to precarity—she’s not talking about the precarity of art practices “that want to map social and economic conditions.” There might be such practices; but she’s talking about art workers who are precarious—economically precarious. Somehow this is an intervention that simply can’t be heard in the moment. Foster suggests relational aesthetics as 1. On zombies see also Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 779–805. 2. Is it an effect of the evacuation of the political that the Craig Owens essay discussed

was not the one actually collected in The AntiAesthetic—“The Discourse of Others”—which redressed some of the political oversights of the otherwise quite brilliant essay “The Allegorical Impulse”?

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the (apparently superior) obverse: what relational aesthetics actually expresses, by creating privileged spaces for certain kinds of human interaction, is not the authenticity of those interactions but rather how very fragmented our social world is that we should need to find such solace in art. The implication, I think, is that this oblique expression is more aesthetic (and hence more acceptable?) than directly addressing economic problems would be. The move Foster made was to jump to the conclusion that Benzaquen was talking about politics as the content of certain forms of art, and asking why such modes of artmaking might be marginalized. Foster’s argument is one for thinking of politics as, rather, providing or being indicated by the form of relational works. The turn to relational aesthetics and affect theory (notably both terms that entered art discourse in the 1990s3) is the product of good instincts— precisely because the constellation of issues they raise helps us think through political engagements of art that cannot be confined to the level of representational content. It’s unfortunate that Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics confusingly relies (consciously or not) on a representational model: the image of benign social relations produced in the circumscribed sphere of the gallery is to circulate, representationally, in society at large, in order to propagate itself and produce some sort of democratic outcome:

1. Gallery 2. Gallery goers 3. ???????????? 4. Democracy!!!!!!

But the image that actually circulates, if it circulates at all, is that of a divide between those inside a privileged sphere and those outside it—in other words, a mirror of society’s existing divisions. Perhaps, though, we can allow relational practice to transcend Bourriaud’s notion of it. As I was formulating this response, I read of a peaceful demonstration—one cannot even say protest—at the Gagosian Gallery in New  York that resulted in participants, and a frail bystander, being forcibly ousted from the gallery because of T-shirts they wore that had the temerity to translate the title of the Anselm Kiefer exhibition Next Year in Jerusalem into both Hebrew and Arabic. The ejection, accompanied by the haughty 3. I was surprised not to see reference to Eve Sedgwick’s work on affect, particularly in the context of structuralism, given, especially, her work on Silvan Tomkins (originator in the early 1960s of the term “affect theory”) coauthored with Adam Frank. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (1995): 496–522. The essay is an effort to move beyond the structuralist and the poststructuralist (thus a prefiguration of this Art Seminar’s problematic) by taking a look back to a moment before structuralism took hold, arguing that “some momentum of modernity (call

it monotheism? call it the Reformation? call it capitalist rationalization?) has so evacuated the conceptual space between two and infinity that it may require the inertial friction of a biologism to even suggest the possibility of reinhabiting that space” (512). The word “aesthetic,” of course, comes etymologically from a verb meaning “to feel”; so “affect” in relation to art is hardly a new thing. Emotion has been a key element of the response to art for innumerable writers (one can cite Visscher, Worringer, Dewey, Warburg, and others at the beginnings of modern writing on art).

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asseveration “we’re here to sell art,” seems to me the best possible evidence that the demonstrators, whose message was both pointed and open-ended, were both making art and engaged in politics.4 The events at Gagosian seemed a kind of echo of what had just happened at the National Portrait Gallery, where, in a demonstration of how tenuous any claim to a public sphere for art might be any more, museum administrators acted at the behest of right-wing congressmen who, acting on orders of the Catholic League, threatened to reject the Smithsonian’s budget, and the museum removed David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Silent protesters of the decision who played the video on an iPad were ejected and banned for life from all Smithsonian properties. In a more auspicious vein, a wide spectrum of cultural institutions jumped to present the Wojnarowicz video. Of course the institutions’ response also has an element of art snobbery; but the form of the protest is what interests me, more than the content. These responses to (and by) art institutions might have some continuities, say, with the Mexican American mothers who in autumn of 2010 staged a long-running sit-in at the Whittier School in Chicago to demand a library, or the Georgia prisoners who used text messaging to organize a strike against egregiously bad working conditions. In the conversation, the relational and the affective seem to operate in individualistic ways. Meltzer refers to the affective and the relational as more “rudimentary” (hence to be privileged?) than the social and the political (seminar 9), but I scratch my head trying to understand how relationality is not social, and how the affective is not shot through with the political (and vice versa), how we know, for a “fact,” what is the grid and what is its excess.5 Since human beings can’t survive unaided at birth, might it not be argued that the requirement of a social field is the most relevant biological fact about us? We should (I think) pursue the analytic possibilities afforded by the study of groups and collectives. At the outset Foster states about the aesthetic that the Anti-Aesthetic writers “construed the aesthetic as a space of resolution—of subjective integration and social consensus—and we wanted to question this conciliatory dimension” (seminar 1). I think it’s precisely Rancière who (despite the drubbing he gets in seminar 6) helps to see that the conflict between aesthetic and anti-aesthetic is not a historical divide but an ever-present division (at least in modern times) between two sides of the same coin. (I don’t care if he’s not a good critic; that’s not the point.) To take a slightly different tack: we might find a generative oscillation between the integrative and the contestatory in community arts—forms consistently frowned upon by “critical” writers on art for their supposed affirmative qualities. What if a community art project, undertaken for reasons of the very “subjective integration and social consensus”—creating a shared set of 4. Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Incident in Art Land,” http://​www​.newyorker​.com/​online/​ blogs/​newsdesk/​2010/​12/​gagosian​-jerusalem​ -protest​.html (accessed January 15, 2011). 5. See http://​www​.feeltankchicago​.net (accessed January 2, 2011).

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assumptions (very possibly by the working through of disagreement)—actually creates a platform for contestation? Is it perhaps not a coincidence that the Whittier School sit-in occurs in a neighborhood, Pilsen, with a rich mural tradition? The microtopia; the futile-seeming but insistent gesture; passive protest; fragile social assemblages; ambiguity and “blunted affect”—these are actually the current conditions of political action on the left, hopeless in rational terms but, at their best, effective in affective and relational terms. They need not be confined to the gallery anymore to bear a remarkable similarity to the “alternative forms of rationality” that Bernstein sees as the Adornian province of art (seminar 5). Sometimes, though, it’s hard to distinguish this view from liberalism, which tends to eject political content from art because it believes in a notion of a public sphere that is the proper place for direct political speech. But we now have the consummation of decades of privatization that began with Reagan. A left politics in the wilderness of privatization requires acts of imagination. And art is in need of politics precisely because political action, increasingly, is required not just for art to flourish but for life to flourish. In Chicago, the Tamms Poetry Project began with people gathering to write and send poems, once a month, to Supermax prisoners at Tamms Prison in downstate Illinois. Most members had no particular pretension to avant-garde status or high artistic standards for their poetry. It was, on many levels, a futileseeming gesture. But the conversation that ensued led to a sustained (and ongoing) political organizing project on behalf of the right of prisoners not to be subjected to conditions of isolation that constitute torture. Why not have forms of art that run alongside, but also mobilize, reinvent, recirculate, and generate new forms of politics? (Why not: because we would have to examine ourselves a little more closely?) Art has a choice. It can rescue itself from zombification. It can be the place where politics goes to die—or it can be a place where it (in all its hopeless aspiration) comes alive.

adorno and affect

Carrie Noland

“Affect” is taken up at various points in the Seminars, but rarely, and only negatively, in relation to Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. In contrast, the name most frequently associated with affect theory is that of Gilles Deleuze; in fact, Deleuzian affect theory is presented during the Seminars as the major contemporary alternative to Frankfurt School theory and its dour narrative according to which the sensual and the affective are increasingly subjected to instrumental rationality. Deleuzian affect theory is thus called on to support a host of responses to the art object supposedly excluded by Adorno’s account of modern art and its astringent asceticism (or avoidance of pleasure in viewing). Deleuze thus comes to replace Adorno as the source of vital approaches to today’s art (the aesthetic of sensation for sensation’s sake, or art as fun), while any contribution the German philosopher might have made to our understanding of the affective register in art is neglected, ridiculed, or tossed out. The most dramatic example of this attitude (that “affect” is not Adornian) occurs when Dakota Brown objects that the neo-Kantians are forgetting “pleasure” (seminar 5): “I’d like to know why it seems to people like Jay [Bernstein] himself doesn’t want anyone to experience pleasure” [sic]. After a humorous pause (“Laughter”), Joana Cunha Leal adds, “The pleasure you describe in relation to art, Jay, seems very far from Adorno’s negativity.” But if we read the passage closely, we see that Jay Bernstein hasn’t been discussing pleasure per se; rather, he’s been discussing affect, and the account Adorno takes of it. What needs to be clarified, then, is Adorno’s account of affect and of its relation to art. Channeling Adorno, Jay Bernstein states in seminar 5 that for Adorno, art constitutes an attempt to preserve a form of rationality that differs in significant ways from “rationality” in the Weberian sense, the standardization and quantification of experience leading to the domination of the subject over its environment. The rationality of artworks, he says, is “about sensuous particulars as having a standing claim that we can address in their particularity, and not sacrifice them to the universal.” To address something in its sensual particularity, Bernstein continues, is to construe an “alternative rationality of the ordinary,” one that can serve as a “critical epistemology.” The aesthetic (which sees things in their “sensual particularity”) is “critical” because it refuses conceptual rationalization as a half-truth. At the same the aesthetic is an “epistemology” because it offers a way of knowing that does not subsume the object of knowledge (the “sensual particular”) under the concept. A few pages later, Bernstein returns to

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the same theme, adding an important clarification: the aesthetic aims to provide “thick” experience—not just “raw feelings”—but Erfahrung, or an orientation in the world. This orientation (Erfahrung) is “epistemological” insofar as it is directed by “feeling laced with cognition.” Again, Erfahrung is “critical” insofar as it is cognition that involves feeling, not “raw feeling” in itself. This distinction between a feeling that is a type of knowing and “raw feeling” will become an important one. Bernstein is repeating here a proposition he introduced earlier, namely that “[a]rtworks interrupt our merely instrumental engagement with objects, and further, demand a form of knowing that is also a feeling, a knowing by feeling” (seminar 1; emphasis added). At this point Eve Meltzer responds, introducing the notion of “affect” for the first time: “a lot of what [Jay] talk[s] about in terms of the puzzle, and the gap between the two critiques [knowledge and morality], and what might exist in [that gap]—sensuous particulars, love, appearances—all that could be thought of in terms of affect” (seminar 1).1 I’m not so sure. While I acknowledge the interest of the term (and the pressure it places on some accounts of postmodernism), I see a significant difference between the “critical epistemology” Bernstein finds in Adorno and the word “affect” as I believe Meltzer is using it, that is, “affect” as it is developed in Deleuze and Deleuze-inspired thinkers such as Brian Massumi and José Gil. The “feeling laced with cognition” that characterizes the alternative rationality of aesthetic experience appears in Aesthetic Theory under many guises, but the one pertinent for our purposes is the guise of the “shudder.” This “shudder” is both an “affection”—an “impingement,” as Massumi would say—and an apprehension, an experience of the other that de-stabilizes what the self thinks it knows. As a destabilizing experience, this “shudder” is “radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience [Erlebnis].”2 It is a visceral reaction, an “involuntary comportment,” that signals the subject’s momentary release from “self-preservation.” If “affect” is being “touched” by the other, then the “shudder” can be considered the exemplary moment of affective exchange in Adornian terms. But let’s go over this narrative carefully. For Adorno, the subject is “petrified” by “his own subjectivity,” gained over millennia of instrumental self-protection. This “congealed” subject, when moved by the touch of the other, momentarily “dissolves,” and the “narrowness of his self-positedness is revealed.”3 Art, according to Adorno, “preserves” this shudder of contact, but is not equivalent to it. And this is the important point. The shudder opens the subject to an experience of what it is not—and to that extent can be considered continuous with what Deleuze means by “affect.” However, the registering and transmission of that experience, 1. Bernstein brings Deleuze and Rancière together in the next paragraph: “I think the question of the aesthetic—and this is present in Rancière and in Deleuze—is about the kind of experience such works provide, and so I do not see there is much difference between works that are overtly political and those that are not, nor between those aesthetic theories that are explicitly political like Rancière’s and those that

are more epistemological or phenomenological like Deleuze’s.” This “kind of experience” has to do with an apprehension of nontotalizable “sensuous particulars.” 2. Theodor W. Adorno, “Draft Introduction,” in Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert HullotKentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 245. 3. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 269.

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that “shudder,” is itself mediated. That is, “involuntary comportment” is not, in itself, the experience either of the artist or of the viewer, but a “feeling” that has been provided, staged, and preserved by strongly historical means.4 Further, the object with which the subject comes into contact is not a stable, ahistorical entity either, but one which becomes an object of knowledge— perceivable at all—because it differs from a historically specific definition of itself (its “concept” or “identity”). That is, the experience Adorno is interested in is a thoroughly historicized one: we have no access to “affect” or “shudder” or “sensation” in some absolute sense, only a dawning consciousness of that which we hadn’t felt before, the “remainder” excluded from our knowledge of things, the thing in the thing that was muted and needs a historical language with which to speak. “Full, comprehending experience [Erfahrung],” which is the goal of art, is not the “shudder” as “raw feeling” or nude “flesh”:5 “The shock aroused by important works is not employed to trigger personal, otherwise repressed emotions. Rather, this shock is the moment in which recipients forget themselves. . . . This immediacy, in the fullest sense of relation to artworks is a function of mediation, of penetrating and encompassing experience [Erhahrung].”6 In other words, our full experience of artworks is a cognition laced with feeling, a consciousness even within the loss of self-reflexive consciousness (which is feeling) of being in contact with something one is not. Artworks must make this shudder (this opening of the insular self ) available while at the same time making us aware of how the experience is mediated for us, given to us, as historical subjects and by historical means. If Kant imagines the shudder as a moment of sublime surrender to Nature’s magnitude, Adorno reimagines the shudder as a restaging of the sublime through the properties of an artwork’s—not Nature’s—immanent laws.7 There is another way to unpack this, but it requires that we return to the phrase “involuntary comportment.” Throughout Aesthetic Theory, Adorno employs three seemingly interchangeable expressions: “involuntary comportment”; “mimetic comportment”; and “aesthetic comportment.” All three share a single kernel: they refer to behaviors, orientations toward the world that are less interested in domination than in contact and vulnerable understanding. However, the three are not the same; they refer to different historical phases of the subject’s exchange with the other. We can think of “involuntary comportment” as the most archaic, what Adorno calls “a memento of the liquidation of the I.”8 An example of this would be the flight reflex, when the most instinctual gestures take over as the mind 4. For a fuller discussion of this point, see my Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), especially “Confessing Philosophy: Negative Dialectics and/as Lyric Poetry,” 60–88. 5. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 245. 6. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 244. 7. “Not just in the sublime, as Kant thought, but in all beauty the subject becomes conscious of its own nullity and attains beyond it to what is other. Kant’s doctrine of the sublime falls short

only in that it established the counterpart to this nullity as a positive infinity and situates it in the intelligible subject. Pain in the face of beauty is the longing for what the subjective block closes off to the subject, of which the subject nevertheless knows that it is truer than itself. Experience, which would without violence be free of the block, results from the surrender of the subject to the aesthetic law of form.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 266. 8. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 245.

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cedes to the knowing body. The second of these terms, “mimetic comportment,” would be a mode of behavior toward the other that also involves a loss of conscious self-direction, a return to the knowing body; but at the same time, mimetic comportment—if it is to be recognizably mimetic—requires for its operation some kind of acquired, repeatable, and therefore conventional technique or language. The openness to what the self is not remains the goal, but the style of that openness is mediated by specific gestures. In other words, the skills, materials, techniques, and gestures mobilized to demonstrate that openness are socially and historically inflected. The affective response of the mime and the affective response of her audience can both be described as “feeling,” but they are feeling “laced with cognition,” imbued with an awareness of the status of mime as a genre of performance. If the mime were not on some level aware of the techniques that make her different from the wild animal she is miming, she would lose herself completely as an evaluating, technique-applying, and material-manipulating agent. Likewise, if the audience were not on some level aware that they were observing a semblance (built out of conventional languages), they would simply turn away and run. The third term, “aesthetic comportment,” is “mimetic comportment” to a higher (more rationalized) degree. It is mimesis for its own sake, the selfconscious pursuit of specialized gestures (not those of the habitus) and specialized techniques (not those of the ethnos). Aesthetic comportment still involves being touched (“the artist must feel the presence of the empirical other”).9 However, the “other” doing the touching and the means by which that touching is registered change radically over time. Like mimetic comportment, aesthetic comportment involves a qualitative apprehension (a “feeling laced with cognition”), but the object that is being qualitatively apprehended is no longer the wild animal and the way it moves, or even—once we reach Modernism—the human and the way it behaves. In the post-Realist age (the age of Constructivist aesthetics), the aesthetic subject mimes the thingness of things or the materiality of the materials themselves. Adorno puts it this way: “The sensibility of the artist is essentially the capacity to hear what is transpiring within the material, to see with the work’s own eyes.”10 Let us briefly compare this account to Deleuze’s account of affect in Bacon. In The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze uses the terms “sensation” and “affect” somewhat interchangeably. (In his earlier work on Spinoza, however, Deleuze is careful to distinguish “affection”—or “sense impression”—from “affect.”) The intricacies of Deleuze’s affect theory, meticulously explored by Rei Terada, seem to fall away once Deleuze’s gaze turns to the artwork.11 For instance, with respect to Bacon’s canvases he states, somewhat baldly, that “[t]he Figure is the sensible form related to [brought back to: rapporté à] sensation; it acts immediately on 9. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 9. 10. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 267. 11. See Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 110–27. 

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the nervous system, which is of flesh.”12 Elsewhere, Deleuze proposes that “sensation” is what is transmitted “directly”; captured in the painted “Figure,” it acts “directly on the nervous system.”13 According to Deleuze, this is Bacon’s accomplishment: to have discovered a way to fix “affects, that is to say, ‘sensations’ and ‘instincts’ ” on the canvas, to have emulated a “Rhythm,” “more profound than vision,” the very Rhythm that is affect’s action as a dynamic principle when it “invests the visual niveau.”14 There is no effort here to situate the historicity or conventionality of Bacon’s techniques, without which Bacon’s canvases could never act on the “nervous system” at all. However, a history of the ways in which “affect” is contextualized, brought into the techne and discourse of painting, is not entirely incompatible with Deleuze’s approach. We could, for instance, locate the outlines of such a history if we were to put pressure on the genealogy of Bacon that Deleuze provides, a genealogy reaching back to Rembrandt through Cézanne and Soutine. But clearly, Deleuze is not interested in facilitating a historical analysis of mediating techniques, for this would require an investment in theories of social determination that Deleuze does not want to make.15 The advantage of Adorno’s model, then, is that it historicizes the nature of the empirical “other”— the source of the “Rhythm,” or “shudder,” which is supposedly assimilated into the pictorial space—while demanding a historical account of the specific skills, materials, and techniques/technologies that allow the artist to emulate the effect of that “Rhythm” on the nervous system of viewers. In Adorno’s understanding, affect inheres not only in the spectator’s exposure to the animal energy assimilated by the dancer’s mask, the human anguish portrayed in the Passion, or the twisted, brightly colored flesh of a Bacon “Étude du corps humain.” Affect is also produced by our encounter with the cold rationality of a newspaper clipping pasted strategically onto the Cubist canvas. Energy, anguish, and cold rationality can all be considered vehicles of that affective charge, that “shudder,” that turns out to be the quintessential slip of anti-art without which no art would be conceivable.16 So yes, as Meltzer states, “affect doesn’t go away” (seminar 1), but this is because affect emerges from a contact with an otherness that is perpetually redefined over time. Another way to say this would be as Meltzer does in seminar 8; she is quoted (by Diarmuid Costello) as suggesting that affect emerges “not from below symbolic structures, but as a product of symbolic structures.” Indeed, the study of what Stéphanie Benzaquen calls “the cultural context of our reactions” (seminar 8) is the ideal antidote to an affect theory that posits a “pre-symbolic” rather than a “proto-subjective,”17 12. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 39 (my translation).  13. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 43. 14. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 46. 15. The closest Deleuze comes to delineating the stakes of a history of affect in painting appears in his discussion of Cézanne and the “cliché” (Logique, 83–85), which is little more

than a recasting of Merleau-Ponty’s “Cézanne’s Doubt” added to the passage on Cézanne in Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 376. 16. “Ratio itself becomes mimetic in the shudder of the new.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 20. 17. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 112.

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a “direct” access rather than a rationally structured one. It is not that affect is “culturally constructed”—to cite an expression that has replaced, for too long, real thought. It is that culture and affect, symbols and sensations, are co-constructed, and it is only through a dialectical theory of transduction that we will come to know why symbols convey sensations as they incontestably do.18

18. On “transduction,” see Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de formes, information, potentiel, et métastabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1989).

l e t ’ s n o t a n d s ay w e d i d

Robert Storr

As everyone knows, politics is theater, and theater requires the active suspension of disbelief. That permission is granted in light of need and promise, the need being to make sense of perplexing realities, the promise being that of the author or company that their product will fill our need. Did I say product? Indeed I did, because our topic is the initial staging and present revival of The Anti-Aesthetic, which was in its first version and thirty years later improbably remains a premium product of the culture industry, vigorously promoted in the niche markets of the academy and the intellectually respectable neighborhoods of the art world. Although the ostensible focus of this dramaturgical commodity—now a period piece—is the contradictions, falsehoods, and corruption of “late capitalism,” it was in fact launched by a previously unknown private press partially subsidized by a major American developer, investor, and collector of contemporary painting and sculpture. As such, it did not emerge from the ferment of “off West Broadway” experimentation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, much less from the gritty storefront political theaters of the Lower East Side or the Bronx, but rather was financed by the kind of money that usually goes straight to mainstream projects and was thus parachuted into a plum spot in the critical lineup without having to battle for position from outside it. Now, I have nothing categorically against such arrangements. As a former museum curator, I consider negotiating the subsidization of art and ideas as an intrinsic part of the practical politics of culture in a flawed democracy, and since I happened to know the patron in question, I can also speak well of him. But the suspension of disbelief of which I spoke at the outset begins to wobble the minute one becomes aware that the stern institutional critiques voiced within the pages of the book that popularized the idea of the anti-aesthetic were in fact highly privileged commodities among many others paid for by “enlightened capitalism,” rather than the fruit of the radical countercultures that grew organically out of the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s, for example those championed by Lucy Lippard and scrutinized in their inconsistencies by Yvonne Rainer. This and many other instances make clear the extent to which institutional critique was in truth a “natural” offshoot rather than the revolutionary “mutation” of institutional culture. The unsurprising result has been that most of those who specialized in it issued from universities—freshly restored to their ivory tower status following attempts to demolish such splendid isolation during the 1960s—and, after more or less brief periods in publishing or other parts of the

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culture industry, most went back to universities or segued into museums or the market without bothering to reconcile their ideological oppositions to either with their actual jobs and without trying very hard to reform either in ways consistent with those oppositional stances. (Of course, I have held jobs in all these domains, but in keeping with my “impure” position I have assiduously abstained from “purist” rhetoric while simultaneously working hard to bring those on the outside in so as to diversify those overly homogenous precincts.) All “fundamental challenges” to the existing order have working premises and make predictions. The basic tenets of the anti-aesthetic combine schematic glosses of Ernst Mandel’s late Marxist analysis of “late capitalism” with an eclectic, sometimes irreconcilably contradictory assortment of Lacanian, Derridian, Foucaultian, Spivakian, and other additives. Central to the polemic in Hal Foster’s introduction to the eponymous 1983 essay collection that popularized the term “anti-aesthetic” is a tendentious, inherently weak misreading of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”1 and I will pause here briefly to state that her work and that of Fredric Jameson are of lasting value in ways that very little that is modeled on them has been. With its Greenbergian underpinnings ever apparent, Foster’s contempt for art that does not suit his fastidious, patrician tastes and his moralizing rather than dialectically political approach to criticism results in his condemning the things that displease him as examples of the crass exploitation of the pleasure principle by the manufacturers of art luxuries. It is but a short step to the notion that somehow “denying” the bourgeoisie its delights would destabilize its cultural hegemony—and he and his cohort did not hesitate to take it. Thus, austere modes of conceptual photography and textual work were held up as the inherently progressive—that is to say, bracingly difficult to fathom and virtuously hard to sell—alternative to the easy satisfactions of the reactionary painting and sculpture which 1980s boom time buyers couldn’t get enough of, with the attendant conviction that because of its commercial appeal and traditional materials all painting of the era was symptomatic of “Reaganite” attitudes. Just how wrong can an assessment be? And how many failed predictions does it take to undermine a critical model predicated on their coming true? On the painting side, shall we start with Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Leon Golub, to name just a handful of the conceptually and politically important artists who had their best years in the 1980s after the mandated death of painting? Of women who struggled to paint despite the indifference of the market and the hostility of a good many ostensibly feminist critics—and so, using the jargon of the period, “problematized” painting as a gendered medium—we may count among numerous others Elizabeth Murray, who radically reconceived the predicates of Formalism by replacing the rigid picture plan with a pliable picture surface, and Nancy Spero, whose codices blur the distinctions between conceptual and studio means, the unique handmade image and the 1. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

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reproduced one making Spero a belatedly pivotal figure for the discourses of the period. Of artists of color who chose traditional media to make work that questioned social norms—Robert Colescott, for example—one heard little or nothing in anti-aesthetic circles during the 1980s. And it goes without saying that as a “representative” of the kind of neoexpressionist painting anti-aestheticians so abhorred, Jean-Michel Basquiat was paid no serious attention by them, despite the knowing innovations he made by grafting conceptually driven “text” art onto graffiti and graphic sloganeering, and despite the rich cultural politics of his riffs on Pop and Neo-Dada picture making. It wasn’t until his work was scrutinized by art critics and historians such as Robert Farris Thompson, Kelly Jones, and Greg Tate who were steeped in Afro-Diasporic traditions and currents that Basquiat’s work got a close, informed reading. But of course “doing theory” rarely meant doing the primary research of art history or any in-depth cultural studies of cultures outside “the mainstream.” For despite the constant discussion of “Otherness” that went on within them, they were—and in their present reconstitution are still—overwhelmingly white. Even to the exclusion of artists such as Adrian Piper, whose text-, image-, and performance-based work should have been a matter of major concern to them but was not. Nor did openly gay critics lead the conversation among the anti-aestheticians, the signal exceptions being Craig Owens and Douglas Crimp, with Crimp’s response to the AIDS epidemic being a partial turning point in the group’s history. Yet even Crimp has steered clear of fully accounting for the subversive powers of aesthetic pleasure, which so many gay artists—Jack Smith chief among them—pushed to hyperaesthetic extremes. Meanwhile, given its axioms, not the least of the ironies of Foster’s antiaesthetic is that Richard Prince, the eponymous book’s cover boy, has gone on to be the market darling of a new age of warehouse-filling collectors even as photographers such as Andreas Gursky have shown that, far from preventing commodity fetishization of the art object, reproductive technologies have simply increased the number of commercially available fetishes. So much so that one photographic image sold at a premium many times over in editioned copies can maximize profits in ways that even the most industrious and extravagant of the painters Foster and company disparaged never dreamed of. Moreover, the auction prices for Prince far outstrip those of Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Eric Fischl, the 1980s painters anti-aestheticians loved to hate. Of far greater consequence culturally and politically, the exponential expansion of the trade in “multiples” has added an entire speculative sector to the global economy, making art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction the perfect vehicle for laundering money and moving assets around the world with virtually no restrictions. The anti-aesthetes of the 1980s belabored painters but have by and large given the Koonses, the Hirsts, and all their spawn a pass while failing to update their analysis of the intervening economic spasms of capitalism in ways that explain its constant innovations and adaptations and its tenacious refusal to

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become “late.” Item by item in the abysmal spiral of promises unkept and predictions unfulfilled, the suspension of disbelief necessary to the anti-aesthetic has become harder to maintain, while the desire to correct past misconceptions has not grown apace. At times in the Stone Summer Theory Institute Seminars even Foster seems at pains to sidestep his former dogmatism, downplaying his role in the “nefarious October group”—as he calls it with defensive sarcasm— suggesting that we should regard its zealous excesses in light of the political context in which they arose and seemed imperative. And so Foster says, “The moment of The Anti-Aesthetic was also the moment of Reagan, and it is hard not to dissociate the cultural manifestations we opposed—neoexpressionist painting, postmodern architecture, etc.—from that political reaction.” Later he begs off a question from a fellow panelist, saying, “I don’t really want to be the antiaesthetic answer man here; I feel distant from the kid who proposed that opposition, and I was just one of many critics.”2 Apparently being a cultural theorist means never having to say you’re sorry and blaming youthful indiscretions on geriatric Republican presidents. Nowhere in Foster’s remarks do we find a sustained or rigorous account of what preceded and produced the Reaganite years—Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford, anybody?—or anything systematic or enlightening about the rightward turns of two Democratic presidents, the disastrous reign of two Bushes, and the cultural wars and ideological retrenchments their collective conservatism has produced. Mandarin politics do not require such efforts at historically comprehensive dialectical thinking. Nor do they require expanding one’s horizons artistically, as Foster’s contribution to these seminar sessions and Art Since 1900—the Titanic of textbooks which he captained—attest.3 The upshot is that with an evasive Foster in the starring role, rather than a full-dress Brechtian recasting of The Anti-Aesthetic, these conversations have restaged it as faculty club follies. To avoid belaboring all of the absurdities that come with such intramural histrionics, I will end simply by citing a long, profoundly ironic, and truly destabilizing passage from Baudelaire that anyone who is tempted to write about cultural theory should have tacked to the wall above their keyboards or memorized as I do. Like all my friends I have tried more than once to lock myself within a system in order to preach there at my ease. But a system is a kind of damnation that forces one to a perpetual recantation; it is always necessary to be inventing a new one, and the drudgery involved is a cruel punishment. Now my system was always beautiful, spacious, vast, convenient, neat and, above all, water-tight; at least so it seemed to me. But always some spontaneous, unexpected product of universal 2. Section 1 of the Seminars. 3. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004). 

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vitality would come to give the lie to my childish and superannuated wisdom—that lamentable child of Utopia! It was no good shifting or stretching my criterion—it always lagged behind universal man, and never stopped chasing after multiform and multi-coloured Beauty as it moved in the infinite spirals of life. Condemned unremittingly to the humiliation of a new conversion, I took a great decision. To escape from the horror of these philosophical apostasies, I haughtily resigned myself to modesty; I became content to feel; I returned to seek refuge in impeccable naïveté. I humbly beg pardon of the academics of all kinds who occupy the various workrooms of our artistic factory. But it is there that my philosophic conscience has found its rest; and at least I can declare—in so far as any man can answer for his virtues—that my mind now rejoices in a more abundant impartiality.4

4. Charles Baudelaire, “Exposition Universelle 1855: I. Critical Method—on the Modern Idea of Progress as Applied to the Fine Arts—on the Shift of Vitality,” in Art in Paris, 1845–1862:

Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965), 123–24.

why is adorno so repulsive?

William Mazzarella

Something very striking happens during Jay Bernstein’s presentation in seminar 5 of the 2010 Stone Summer Theory Institute. Several participants react to Bernstein’s invocation of Theodor Adorno much as Harry Potter might respond to a dementor—that revolting, wraithlike creature who sucks all the happiness and vitality out of its victims. Or at least that’s how I read the following protests, each addressed to Bernstein: Elise Goldstein: Well, I can’t feel alive in the face of rationality as you do. Joana Cunha Leal: The pleasure you describe in relation to art, Jay, seems very far from Adorno’s negativity.

And even: Sven Spieker: Adorno didn’t know much about the experience of falling in love.

Is this what Adorno has become—the Grinch Who Stole Pleasure? A creepy old guy with bad breath who leans over just when you’re shaking with laughter to remind you that “fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe” and, just in case you haven’t wiped the smile off your face yet, that “[i]n wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.”1 Why would anyone want to be stuck in Adorno’s gloomy closet, trying to remain world-historically hopeful about that tiny little ray of light making its way in from under the door, when they could be hitching a polymorphously perverse ride on one of Deleuze and Guattari’s thousand plateaus, from which infinite lines of flight radiate out toward the horizon?2 But Adorno sticks in my craw. He will not go down easily. He’s that fragment of bone on which I keep choking. Joana Cunha Leal adds the familiar longing to know how to oppose: “If only we could know what resistance looks like.” And it occurs to me that Adorno 1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 112.

2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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was at his weakest when he was most implacably opposed. Opposed to what we now call popular culture. To Disney cartoons. To the syncopation of jazz, which Adorno dismissed as pseudo-individuality. His close friend Walter Benjamin, who by upbringing had similar scruples, nevertheless allowed himself, when stoned in Marseilles, “to mark the beat with my foot.”3 Adorno steadfastly refused to groove. He fixated instead on the “superior” smile of the jazz cat that gets rapped on the knuckles for “involuntarily” funking up a bit of Beethoven.4 Let’s face it: Adorno’s insistence that art produced for the market, made as a commodity from the very beginning, is inherently incapable of doing uncanny, unexpected, and rather beautiful things was never very convincing. Crudely stretched across the entire cultural field, the wholesale dismissal of mass culture has rightly been ridiculed and dismissed by every generation of critics since those female students flashed their breasts at stuffy old Adorno in the spring of 1969 and sent him stomping out of the lecture hall for the very last time.5 But having driven a stake through the Grinch’s tiny heart, the new generation of populists unwittingly imported and reproduced his central mistake. They scurried off to find canny acts of subversion in every last nook and cranny of “everyday life.” And in the very act of resisting all those totalizing Adornian constructs—“the culture industry,” “the administered society,” and so on—the new cadre of kitchen-sink redeemers gave these constructs a coherence and an authority precisely as something to be opposed that even Adorno at his most paranoid could not have imagined. At least they found out what resistance looks like. In seminar 4, Diarmuid Costello notes, “If a term is so thoroughly determined by what it is opposing, then it won’t succeed in what it’s trying to do.” Simply taking an ideological polarity and turning it upside down only reinforces the polarity with which you began.6 Hal Foster invokes Yve-Alain Bois on the four dimensions of Bataille’s informe—each of them, in this way, reconfirming the omnipresent threat of the Bad Term that is to be resisted: “horizontality against the primacy of the visual (and the verticality of its field); base materiality against the tyranny of form . . . ; pulse against the exclusion of materiality as permeated by desire; entropy against structure and totality.” Elsewhere the list of reified oppositions marches on two by two: politics against police (Rancière), molecular against molar (Deleuze and Guattari), intuitive against conceptual knowing (Bergson). In every case, the narcissistically “critical” valorization of the first term brings the second back in the mode of the undead. A zombie concept, leached of the complexities of life but reliably indestructible. The Bad Guy in the melodrama of Critical Theory. No wonder it’s hard to feel alive in the face of this kind of rationality. 3. Walter Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 678. 4. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 101. 5. Lisa Yun Lee, “Interrogating Philosophy: The Bared Breasts Incident,” in Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of

T. W. Adorno (New York: Routledge, 2005), 49–76. 6. For a detailed illustration of this dynamic at work, see my critical reading of Hardt and Negri’s category of the multitude vis-à-vis crowd theory in William Mazzarella, “The Myth of the Multitude,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 4 (2010): 697–727.

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For Adorno the promise of art was the possibility of a world where sensuous corporeality in all its particularity would not be alien to critical judgment, but would also not be reducible to it. As Jay Bernstein says in seminar 5, “Art promises a different form of practical reason and so a different form of life.” Benjamin thought this could happen even at the picture palaces: “The progressive attitude [made possible by the cinema] is characterized by an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure—pleasure in seeing and experiencing—with an attitude of expert appraisal.”7 But the Grinch thought Herr Benjamin—in other respects “a dazzling trap set by heaven”8—was being less than properly dialectical in pitting the liberatory potential of popular media against the reactionary charismatic authority of “autonomous” art.9 “Dialectics at a standstill,”10 then—but not in a good way. Something vaguely reminiscent happens when, in seminars 7 and 8, the talk turns to affect. Eve Meltzer has already, during the preliminaries of seminar 1, suggested to Jay Bernstein that much of what he derives from Adornian aesthetics might usefully be reframed in this light: “sensuous particulars, love, appearances—all that could be thought in terms of affect.” And at the outset of seminar 8, Jim Elkins proposes that affect “is the principal contender for a reconceptualization of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic at a ‘deeper structural level.’ ” But just as several participants greet Jay Bernstein’s Adornian exposition with variously expressed anxieties about the loss of life and love, so for others all this affect-talk seems to threaten a dangerous eclipse of the critical subject. Omair Hussain complains that talking affect in contemporary art too often means affirming plurality “without working through potential conflicting positions and stances.” Jay Bernstein worries that the focus on affect means capitulating indiscriminately to expressive appeals to the point where “judgment seems like an insult.” The old polarity-thinking again: subject versus object, judgment versus life. In its dominant formulation, affect theory emerges out of a vitalist line of thinking: Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze, Massumi, Hardt and Negri.11 To that extent it remains trapped in the romance of pure immanence and radical emergence. It is, as Eve Meltzer claims in seminar 7, “beyond the limits of our current discourse”—even as it installs itself as our current discourse. In the familiar polar way, it is implacably opposed to all the tiresome tools of Critical Theory as Master Discourse: mediation, representation, and, most of all, dialectics.12 7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935– 1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 116. 8. The phrase is from a September 1929 letter from Adorno to Siegfried Kracauer, as cited in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 86. 9. “Letter 47: Wiesengrund-Adorno to Benjamin, London, 18.3.1936,” in Theodor Adorno and

Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, edited by Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 127–34. 10. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 865. 11. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 12. William Mazzarella, “Affect: What Is It Good For?,” in Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, edited by Saurabh Dube (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009), 291–309.

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It’s no surprise, then, that two problems that emerge as linked in these Seminars—affect as that which invests us sensuously in our ideological commitments and affect as that which constantly escapes all ideological inscriptions— cannot be theorized together. They remain in what Slavoj Žižek has called a parallax view: a “constantly shifting perspective between two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible. Thus there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space—although they are closely connected, even identical in a way. . . . [T]hey are two sides of the same phenomenon which, precisely as two sides, can never meet.”13 Perhaps we could do to Adorno what Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, wanted to do to Hegel: that is to say, make him drink his own dialectical medicine to the last vile drop. Adorno’s beef with Hegel was that the master dialectician was not dialectical enough. He argued that Hegel preached the importance of yielding to the sensuously emergent properties of objects as a crucial moment of the dialectic while in fact practicing the kind of “identity-thinking” where “the thought he discusses always extracts from its objects only that which is a thought already. Despite the program of self-yielding, the Hegelian thought finds satisfaction in itself. . . . If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.”14 And now let’s ask the implicit question directly: how great is the distance between the desires of the dialectical Master Grinch and antidialectical Anti-Oedipus?15 I imagine coupling Adornian aesthetics with affect theory in a Benjaminian dialectical image, “an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash . . . in the now of its recognizability.”16 A leap across time, a historical short-circuit that bypasses the disabling intercession of a cultural studies whose polarity-thinking is only an inverted form of Hegelian identity-thinking. Both the Grinch and the plateau hoppers might emerge strangely potentiated from this obscene clinch, each released by the other from their impasses. The affect theorists’ generalized concern with emergent potentials pushes Adorno to yield his thought to the products of the culture industries until some of them, too, “start talking under [his] lingering eye.” For his part, Adorno reminds the affect theorists that the sensuously mimetic moment of self-yielding still “needs the rationality [it] scorns, and needs it precisely at the moment of concretion.”17 In the parallax view the two sides can never meet. But the dialectical image promises to change that. “In order for a part of the past to be touched by the 13. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 4. 14. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1999), 27–28. 15. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

16. Arcades Project, 473. 17. Negative Dialectics, 9.

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present instant, there must be no continuity between them.”18 Who knows whether it will work. Try it. Perhaps he is no longer roaming the ramparts. But the Grinch must certainly be turning in his grave. Good. At least now his remains are looking a bit more lively.

18. Arcades Project, 470.

t h e o r y c ata r a c t s

Luis Camnitzer

When I was twenty-seven (Hal Foster’s age when he wrote his book), I also was very interested in theory. It was 1964, and structuralism had hit Latin America during the previous years and somehow wakened us with an intellectual shock. I  tried to keep up for some time, but my activities in art, and my efforts to understand why and for whom I was working, added to the increasingly hermetic quality of the discourses, soon left me in the theoretical dust. In principle, I would say that this disqualifies me for a serious assessment of the Chicago Seminars around Foster’s book. My notion of “anti-aesthetics” relates more to Luis Felipe Noé’s book Antiestética, published in 1965. It is a book written from the point of view of the artist, who was trying to cope with colonialism, chaos, a broken versus a unified aesthetic vision, and “bad painting.” All this informed early Latin America neoexpressionism of the sixties and captured the spirit of rupture of the times. The advantage of that book, at least for me then, was that it discussed issues of contemporaneity from the point of view of the conundrums of making art. It had a limited scope, since making art was based on the act of painting, and it was bound by concerns that were valid then and of less interest today. But it had an endearing (and useful) connection with what we considered reality at the time. Maybe this reminiscence is sort of a backhanded assessment after all, though not one directed explicitly to these particular Seminars. I would say that I haven’t read 80 percent of the literature cited, and this alone makes me an outsider. However, I should stress that I find purely theoretical pursuits very important. They help raise and formulate problems that, one way or another, influence art practice. The possible shortcomings of these sorts of exchanges are that the people involved in them are the only public addressed, and in their earnestness, while advancing a good and important intellectual depth, they have the side effect of fostering bad social stratification. The many excluded publics are by default reduced merely to looking (if they look at all) at the outer shell of the art object. They’re left with little to work with except their own (schematic) taste and handed down dicta, reaching in the end a useless “consumer” opinion. I believe in problem solving as the main basis for making art and that art objects as we know them are best read as solutions to problems consciously or unconsciously posed by the artist. When approached in this way, the art object becomes a conduit through which artist and viewer communicate. Understanding the problems and the theoretical questions they raise is therefore very

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important to everyone involved in this communication. It provides a basis on which taste can be bypassed and the focus can be placed instead on the way art expands knowledge. This is why, for me, art is a fundamental pedagogical tool. Once people get beyond conceiving of art as the appreciation of objects, they are able to join artists and theoreticians in the activity of making “illegal” connections, the kinds of connections that are possible when the constraints of disciplinary thinking are removed. By coincidence, the invitation to write these comments reached me in Caracas. I had gone there with the purpose of visiting a school in La Bombilla, a violent neighborhood in the shantytowns of Petare on the hills surrounding Caracas. The coincidence left me feeling I didn’t want to enter the proposed discussion; remaining outside seemed a more honest position for me to be in. But the reasons I was in Petare in the first place made me want to try writing in spite of the obvious risks that I’d fall into demagogy, false populism, or just cheap shots. Prompting me is a question that came up during conversations with the teachers in the school: “Why should we refer to your art examples,” one teacher asked, “if they were made without our population in mind?” The question was not aggressive, and it didn’t reflect a demand for “local” art or narratives of identity. The concern expressed was much more general. It was mostly about detachment, something like having to follow pointless or incomprehensible orders. I was in Petare with educators working with the Cisneros Foundation, which is sponsoring development of a program for integrating art thinking into the curriculum of primary schools. The school in Petare is one of our pilot projects. This school had some years ago begun working with a curricular model that adhered to current notions in use in most art-educational programs. Students were shown works of art and then were invited to discuss them. (What do you see? What makes you say that? and so on.) We were now proposing to the school in Petare a different approach, in which art would be presented to students not as a collection of skills and objects, but as an arena for problem solving using fantasy and imagination. Solutions that might be unacceptable in other disciplines would be possible and acceptable in this arena. The teacher’s question—“Why should we refer to your art examples if they were made without our population in mind?”—was perfectly targeted to get to the heart of what was driving our pedagogical project. The answer is that in our approach, students are introduced to an open-ended problem without first being presented with an art object associated with that problem. (What is mapping? Make a map of the area between your home and school. Make a map of your life.) The students are then prompted to search for solutions to that problem, without limits to what they can imagine. They are free to speculate, search, and experiment. The solutions they come up with may or may not take the form of art. Once they are finished, they are shown the art piece from which the problem was generated and are led to compare their results with the work of the artist so as to decide about viability and quality of both their work and that of the artist

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(in this case a mattress by Guillermo Kuitca). This places the student in the position of a colleague of the artist instead of that of a consumer forced into awe. While the answer we gave in Petare allayed the teacher’s concern, her question remains in my mind as a warning signal about communication, about the difference of what we want and what we are communicating. Theory should be revised, refined, and used for increasing levels of complexity. That seems to be the easy part. The more difficult one is to share that process to a maximum while keeping the loss of complexity to a minimum.

moving beyond aesthetics and politics

Jon Simons

As the title of the this seminar series suggests, one of its central concerns was the possibility of moving “beyond the anti-aesthetic.” A premise of the discussions was that “there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or nonaesthetic art.”1 At the same time, Hal Foster made it quite clear in his retrospective assessment of the anti-aesthetic moment that it was “also the moment of Reagan” and its “cultural manifestations.”2 Referring to The Anti-Aesthetic as “just a musket shot in downtown Manhattan,” Foster notes the “extremism of the rhetoric” in the text, while Jay Bernstein characterizes it as “a polemic, an intervention.”3 Although the discussion never quite settles on the current political-economic conditions and its cultural manifestations, it is more than apparent from the discussion that the aspiration to move beyond the antiaesthetic in art theory and/or in practice is wrapped in the hope of producing a similar political intervention. It is then not surprising that Jacques Rancière is one of the “new” theorists whose work is introduced into the seminar as a way of “describing art outside the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic.”4 Certainly, the art historians and critics participating in the discussion do not seem terribly impressed with his work, but the opposite is the case with his reception among those Anglo-American contemporary political theorists who have followed the wave of “theory” since its influx into their discipline around the same moment as The Anti-Aesthetic.5 One of the reasons for Rancière’s popularity among this group of theorists who are broadly aligned to a project of radical democracy6 is that, as Jay Bernstein puts it in his neat summary of Rancière, he considers that “art and politics are two different practices targeted at the same problem,” namely “redistributing the sensible” by making the world more democratic and equal.7 If the world of “radical” art theory, criticism, and practice has been beholden to the anti-aesthetic, this particular trend of radical political theory has invested heavily in folding the allegedly excluded “aesthetic” back in to politics. In the Kantian scheme of things, 1. See the preface to this volume. 2. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 3. See Section 2 of the Seminars. For a contemporary consideration of the polemical form and its place in political theory, see Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine, Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New York: New York University Press, 1999). 4. See Section 6 of the Seminars. 5. The intellectual trends of this loosely affiliated group can be followed through the online

journal Theory and Event. The journal published a translation of Rancière’s “Ten Theses on Politics” in volume 5, no. 3 (2001) and a symposium on the theses in volume 6, no. 4 (2003), as well as numerous articles that are either about Rancière or refer to his work extensively. 6. See Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen, eds., Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 7. See Section 6 of the Seminars.

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which is followed by Habermas, modernity is differentiated into three cultural value spheres (mirrored in Kant’s three critiques): the cognitive-instrumental, the moral-practical, and the aesthetic-expressive.8 As Bernstein puts it, in this scheme of things “aesthetics is the spaceholder for something that gets left out of these new authoritative practices of reason,” that something including the body, affect, sensation, love—all the sources of Weberian disenchantment with modernity.9 So radical democratic theorists have busily been rescuing aesthetics, reintegrating it into and broadening the discourse of political theory, which had, in its hegemonic, liberal tendency taken a normative, moral-practical form.10 Yet, though I count myself as one of these radical political theorists, I doubt that Rancière offers a productive route towards radical aesthetic-political thought. He has an idiosyncratic notion of politics, defined in contrast to “police,” meaning the ordered, intelligible, hierarchical distribution of the sensible. Politics, in this sense, occurs only rarely, at moments when something that previously had been invisible or unsayable can be sensed, when some people who did not count make a claim to be counted. In other words, politics is for Rancière the interruption of any given regime of the sensible by a democratic moment, by something that exceeds or is denied by its limitations. Politics and aesthetics (or literality) thus play for Rancière the role that Hal Foster wanted for anti-aesthetics, namely, to work against an aesthetics of reconciliation that entails a politics of “subjective integration and social consensus.”11 The current neoliberal order, after all, does not reproduce itself by appearing to be hierarchical and exclusionary, but by appearing to reconcile all “valid” social demands through the mechanism of the “free market.” Rancière’s aesthetic-politics and the anti-aesthetic are both intended as practices that disrupt and hopefully rupture the seeming aesthetic reconciliation of neoliberal capitalism and its cultural manifestations. Just as it makes sense to regard the anti-aesthetic as a movement within Modernist aesthetics, as Bernstein and Foster concur,12 it makes sense to consider Rancière’s “redistribution of the sensible” not as a radical departure from modern democratic theory but as another movement within it, another movement to count those who did not previously count (the propertyless, slaves, women, undocumented immigrants). 8. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). 9. See Section 1 of the Seminars. As Fredric Jameson says, in Habermas’s scheme the aesthetic-expressive sphere ends up as “a kind of sandbox to which one consigns all those vague things . . . under the heading of the irrational . . . [where] they can be monitored and . . . controlled.” Appeals to aesthetics and protests according to its values provide “a kind of safety valve for irrational impulses.” See his Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 232. 10. The most obvious example of such normative political thought was written by a

philosopher, John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) has been credited with reviving the AngloAmerican discipline of political theory. Examples of the aesthetic turn in contemporary radical political theory include Kennan Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 11. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 12. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

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Nonetheless, Rancière has been received as the current exemplar of radical democratic theory precisely because his rendition of politics is itself an aesthetic move, though not in the way he suggests. Wolfgang Welsch has helpfully listed many different semantic elements of the term “aesthetics,” which he considers to bear only family resemblances to each other, though the elements often overlap and entail each other. Among his list is the sense of aesthetics as reconciliation, as a structuring or arranging of matters that brings them into harmony with each other, against which the anti-aesthetic is targeted. Another semantic element of aesthetics is that of elevation, meaning in particular elevation from ordinary sensuous experience to “an especially cultivated attitude towards the sensuous” that requires a certain distancing from it.13 Rancière conceives politics in the same aesthetic, elevated manner, formulating a sense of politics that is always somehow outside or above the “police.” Yet he denigrates “police” in the same manner in which an aesthete disdains common experience while privileging “art.” But just as art practitioners have no option but to make more art even as they wish to break with constraining artistic conventions, radical political practitioners also have no choice but to engage in the humdrum of politics—organizing, building alliances, confronting enemies, persuading, raising and using resources—if they are to transform existing sociopolitical conditions. Radical democratic theory, in my view, needs to theorize this ordinary, humdrum politics at least as much as it conceptualizes or imagines new political orderings or critiques the limitations of existing ones. Just as the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic are imbricated in each other, so are “police” and “politics.” There is little to be had from investing one’s affective energies in an aesthetically elevated notion of “politics” at the expense of engagement (theoretically and practically) in the ordinary politics that enables those who currently do not count to be counted.

13. Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, translated by Andrew Inkpin (London: Sage, 1997), 10.

the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, a n d t h e n w h at ? w h y a n s w e r i n g t h i s q u e s t i o n i n v o lv e s thinking about art as labor

Angela Dimitrakaki

I received and read with great interest the proceedings of the Seminars “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic.” The title of my response, paraphrasing the title of Dan Karlholm’s recent article “Post-war, Postmodern, and then What?,” delivers in summary what, I think, is at stake here:1 an implicit need to address questions of periodization pertaining to, and connecting, art and theory. This should be far from a formalist exercise. Such a need arises in the concrete, if perplexing, conditions that art and theory find themselves in as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, when we are confronted with a new twist of the plot “all that is solid melts into air,” first elaborated by Marx and Engels. I therefore concur with those voices in the Seminars that stress the intellectual and political obligation to place this enquiry within a historical context.2 There is no doubt in my mind that such a context can now be described as the crisis of contemporary capitalism—indeed, the identification of the current stage of capitalism, the one known as globalization, with crisis. The crisis of the Eurozone (from where I write these lines), the crisis of the markets, the crisis of feminism,3 the crisis of the humanities, and the crisis, I would dare say, of the anti-aesthetic (so associated with postmodernism) are part of this crisis in the hegemonic mode of production. It will, of course, be noted that I did not place art in terms of a crisis. In my view, the radical art of our times is exempted from this predicament, having managed to provide a new dialectics of the contemporary—creating a contemporary art history on a horizontal rather than vertical axis. And it does this in ways that both engage and reconfigure the debate on the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. In discussing these developments, my main premise is the Seminars’ spectral question: did the discourse on the anti-aesthetic not go far enough in turning into social praxis, or is this a case where a radical thesis was outsmarted by a project of “structural adjustment” transforming the institution of art? Let us not forget that the discourse on the anti-aesthetic took place at the same time as capitalism led Fredric Jameson and others to speak about a generalized, dominant cultural logic.4 Without conflating the two terms, there was something 1. Dan Karlholm, “Surveying Contemporary Art: Post-War, Postmodern, and Then What?,” Art History 32, no. 4 (2009): 712–33. 2. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 3. See Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56 (March/April 2009): 97–117.

4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) (see especially the introduction).

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connecting postmodernism’s eminently cultural (as opposed, say, to economic) logic to the broader aestheticization of all areas of life. Hal Foster, who played a most important role in launching the anti-aesthetic as a strategy of resistance, also contrasted postmodernism’s cultural subject with the economic subject of modernity.5 I have argued elsewhere that globalization, far from simply privileging a politics of geography (as is commonly thought), introduces a new economic subject that cannot be uncritically identified with that of modernity.6 The implications of this shift are yet to be understood—at least by me—but are hardly irrelevant to an imagined move “beyond” the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, as they foreground new urgencies. Where indeed do we find the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic? In artistic practice, even if neither term can be collapsed into artistic intentions. And what is artistic practice? It is what the artist does when he works. This is a major implication of the rise of the economic subject in art after postmodernism: it draws attention to art as work, in ways that today subvert any understandings of art as nonalienated labor. What is interesting is that the anti-aesthetic, especially, has been associated with forms of art that have been explained with reference to a wide range of different laboring subjects: the engineer, the ethnographer, the anthropologist, the museum educator, the prostitute, the housewife, the journalist, the curator, the social worker, and so on. This has been a helpful exercise at the same time that it has prevented us from grasping the role of the anti-aesthetic in relation to the political economy of art—that is, to remember Walter Benjamin again, what art tells us about our historical mode of being when examined in the context of relations of production. So understanding art in these terms is, in my view, a first step in unraveling the ideological exchanges between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. I would be very hesitant to see the anti-aesthetic, in its postmodern(ist) realization, as a departure from the visual, which was discussed by seminar participants.7 A certain strand of feminist work was particularly important in shaping a postmodern(ist) anti-aesthetic. Mary Kelly, whose work is mentioned in the Seminars, was (much like many other feminist artists and theorists) involved in foregrounding a radical politics of representation and an alternative visuality. In  what Griselda Pollock aptly called “scripto-visual” work, with Kelly as the main representative, even the text gained in visuality!8 The break with visuality has recently emerged as a major issue, associated with the possibly problematic term of “participatory art,” extending from Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics to Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics and their many variants. The Creative Summit conference in New York (October 9–12, 2010) offered many points of reflection on this. Often the urgency of the matters, in light of contemporary 5. See chap. 6, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The AvantGarde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 6. Angela Dimitrakaki, “The Spectacle and Its Others: Labor, Art, and Conflict in the Age of Global Capital,” in Globalization and

Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 7. See Section 7 of the Seminars. 8. See Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (New York: Routledge, 1988).

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capitalism’s new round of enclosures, vindicated Kester’s insight that what is really threatened here is the role of the critic,9 because when the work of art is the process of setting up a clinic for the homeless, as the Austrian collective WochenKlausur did in the early 1990s, what is to be mediated to the public by the critic? Yet how WochenKlausur was founded complicates this: Wolfgang Zinggl, the founder of the group and now a member of the Austrian Parliament (Green Party), was himself a critic for the weekly Falter. In reviewing a Young Scene show in the early 1990s, Zinggl criticized the habitual showcasing of, say, black-and-white photographs of homeless people as socially engaged art. He was then asked by the institution what other kind of socially engaged art he could imagine. Founding a collective that addressed the social beyond the visual field and outside representation was the answer.10 In the early 1990s, the full absorption of a politics of representation and identity into nominally alternative, canonical histories was apparent. We might say that we had the aestheticization of the antiaesthetic, which I would posit as the beginning of the end of postmodernism’s cultural hegemony. Foster’s essay “Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?” posed the crucial question in 1996,11 which still remains unanswered. Unfortunately, I do not have the space here to outline the complications of this trajectory which are lived out today in artists’ life as work. Nor am I willing to confine the aesthetic to the derogatory process of “aestheticization,” which I reserve for the IKEA lifeworld. But we do need a much closer exchange— one without territorial hang-ups—between philosophy and art history in order to understand what happened when Serbian artist Tanja Ostojić executed the rather famous “durational” artwork Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport (2001–5). She placed a photograph of herself on the Web in which she appeared completely naked (as in shaved) in search of a husband from the European Union; she received numerous responses, which led to her actual marriage with a German citizen; she presented the first encounter between future husband and wife as a public performance; she married the German citizen, moved to Germany, and divorced the German citizen—and although her life at present is not part of this artwork, she does live in Berlin.12 This is not so much a relational as a biopolitical artwork, and there are many like it. Interestingly, this work circulates in the art institutions comfortably as a document. More broadly, in art’s documentary turn we encounter a range of practices where art that is firmly articulated in the field of social relations in the first instance gets reduced to a more or less visual site (the document) where divisions between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic can be projected. Why does this happen? Because the exhibition 9. Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 10. Interview with WochenKlausur, Vienna, November 19, 2010. I am grateful to the group for the information provided. The series of shows Young Scene took place intermittently throughout the 1980s and featured the work of not yet established artists. In their own words, WochenKlauser “strongly believe’ ” that “there is

a lot to be mediated to the public by the critic” and “how WochenKlauser was founded proves the fact.” Electronic communication with the group, November 24, 2010. 11. This is the title of the last chapter in Foster, Return of the Real, 1996. 12. See Marina Grzinic and Tanja Ostojić, eds., Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić (Berlin: Argobooks, 2009).

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form continues to be the privileged context of “our” encounter with art, having become an ideology in the proper Althusserian sense. The Seminars’ emphasis on affect is highly relevant here, but I would like to approach it through the concept of affective labor, which unites art with other forms of labor today. If we managed to break free from the exhibition form, there would be no good reason why the artwork’s affective work on the viewer should be privileged over art’s affective work on the collaborative producers (one of whom happens to be the artist). That is, we would be able to break with notions of the aesthetic based in the fundamental division between an author-producer and a reader-spectator-consumer.13 Saying this is quite different from suggesting, as Claire Bishop did, that in participatory art the aesthetic aspect is neglected over ethical concerns.14 Kester’s counterclaim that we may now be faced with the emergence of a new notion of the aesthetic (and, in my view, of the antiaesthetic) must be given much more careful consideration.15 Simply put, as I understand it, the aesthetic and its negations can no longer be anchored in a politics of representation. Because of profound transformations in the very organization of labor in contemporary capitalism (including forms of mobility that cannot be addressed through postcolonial theory), we are faced with economicpolitical subjectivities that challenge both the possibility of and desire for representation.16 So in conclusion, I would say that an approach to the aesthetic that decouples it from visuality, as well as representation—and this would require attention to art as labor—might either cancel out the anti-aesthetic or help to dehistoricize it, imagining its new meanings. In which case the very terms of the debate would be transformed.

13. I do not see how Rancière’s defense of an “emancipated spectator” does not preserve the hegemony of the exhibition form. See Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009). 14. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum (February 2006), available at http://​findarticles​.com/​p/​ articles/​mi​_m0268/​is​_6​_44/​ai​_n26767773/​ (accessed November 21, 2010). 15. Grant Kester, “Another Turn,” Artforum (May 2006), available at http://​findarticles​.com/​

p/​articles/​mi​_m0268/​is​_9​_44/​ai​_n26865774/​ ?tag​=​content;col1 (accessed November 21, 2010). 16. Hardt and Negri’s much contested “multitude,” as the cooperative, transnational manysubjects-in-one that produces capital’s wealth but that, unlike the nation, is unrepresentable, is a case in point, but merely the one most familiar to art historians. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

afterword t h e b at h wat e r a n d t h e b a b y

Gretchen Bakke

Jay Bernstein: I’ve been interested in this debate [the anti-aesthetic in relationship to

Kantian aesthetics], and I have a certain anxiety about it, because I am afraid the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater. I’d like to say a little about what the bathwater is. Jim Elkins: You care about the bathwater? Jay Bernstein: Well, okay, the baby. —Seminar 6

Let us imagine ourselves Freudian for a moment; let us pretend that this privileging of the bathwater over the baby was not a simple slip of the tongue but the articulation of a true preference for what is left to think with (and about) once the baby has been tossed out the back door and has landed with an ignominious thunk among the weeds of the kitchen garden. The bathwater, cooled to tepid, is a bit gray, and the tub, with a slight scum stuck to the edges of it, is  then brought back in, placed on the kitchen counter, ripe for contemplation. We  lean over it, all twenty-three heads of the seminar participants, and just before anyone utters a word—though several brows are wrinkled and lips pursed as if to speak—Elkins comes running in bearing the howling tot, rescued from the refuse, and plops it unceremoniously back into the tub. Everything set miraculously right again. But is it really? What has been avoided by this refusal to let the remnants rise to the fore? And I ask this not just in reference to this one perverse moment lost (though I am curious how Bernstein might have answered his own question about what the bathwater is . . .) but in reference to the way in which the Seminars unfolded. It is at least possible that in rectifying “wrong” interests, in diverting attention from tepid, gray, scummy substrates and deleting—from the public record at least—the bodily traces left by live infants,1 we have biased just what Hal Foster asked us to avoid, all those many years ago, in The AntiAesthetic: we have acted for reconciliation rather than against it.2 We have in a word, accepted the return of the splashing, distracting howling baby to the bathwater and ensured, in the form as much as in the content of this volume, that the next time anything is tossed out the back door it will be the dull and 1. I refer here to a lengthy discussion of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, a work devoted to the traces and leavings of a baby.To my mind, at least, it was one of the more engaging and

generative conversations of the week, and it has been omitted in almost its entirety from this, the now official, record of the event. 2. Section 1 of the Seminars.

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unpleasant residues that linger in the water (and that, it should be noted, were integral to the baby before it was cleaned). If I were a cynic, I would stop here and say that the “beyond” as the spoken aim of these Seminars and this volume is sheer folly—our battles are precisely those fought by a twenty-seven-year-old Foster et al. against a regime not only of conventional aesthetics and Greenbergian Modernism but of acceptable forms of argumentation, permissible objects of care, and proper avenues of interest. But I am not a cynic, and I stand with Foster, whose claim in seminar 8 that we now live in a regime of affect makes a great deal of sense to me (a point I will return to).3 That said, I want to devote this afterword, also a “beyond” of a certain sort, to the miscarried—or perhaps aborted—question of the bathwater. I leave concern for the baby to others. After all, a baby has a remarkable capacity, most especially in late-capitalist, neoliberal, affect-obsessed America, to steal the show.4 A Matter of Knowing [T]o know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where “to matter” means at once “to materialize” and “to mean.” —Butler, Bodies That Matter

We who follow upon the heels of artists, whether as critics, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, or students, are but diviners over unclear pools of grayish irrigate. Not that individual artworks are so muddied as that, and not that we don’t often have strong opinions about how lines of judgment ought to be drawn, but the expanded field has done something to our ability to speak to the centrality of particular works and movements, trends, and analytics.5 The baby, despite its discomfiting re-entrance here, is more difficult to locate these days than one might expect. This is as true for those who want to dispense with it once and for all as it is for those who wish to recuperate it and restore it to its rightful position smack dab in the center of things.6 What one has instead—in this 3. Section 8 of the Seminars. 4. Special thanks to Aaron Richmond for his council and his initial editing of this essay, to Harper Montgomery for her patience and editing, and to those seminar participants whose strong opinions were so essential to the proceedings and my experience of them and yet are almost entirely absent from this the official record: Martin Sundberg, Béata Hock, Gustav Frank, Michael Kelly, Joana Cuhna Leal, Sven Speiker, Aaron Richmond (again), and Sunil Manghani. This is a far from a complete list; these are just those whose voices I miss most in the transition from the chaotic vocality of the Seminars to the more static silences of the printed word.

5. “The expanded field” is of course a nod to Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which was first published in October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44 and reprinted in The Anti-Aesthetic. 6. The conflict of how to cope with the baby and bathwater is represented in this transcript by a generational divide that is also, here, a structural one. The role of the teacher, here played by Elkins, is pitted against that of the student, here perhaps best represented by Elise Goldstein. The former wants the baby firmly in the bath, while the latter cares not a whit for either the befogged water or the beast itself. Section 7 of the Seminars.

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transcript, at least, and in the many storied longings it half-misrepresents—is a certain nostalgia for surety. A close study of the text for evocations of Kant might best reveal this longing for a system of judgment which precludes things like double rainbows, falsified subway maps, and drawings of scary monsters from getting in the way of the serious consideration of serious works of art.7 Such a study would, however, produce mostly a critique of the philosophers in the group, which, given the diversity of the whole and the breadth of the subject matter, would not be the most useful analytic task. Rather, one might more profitably begin with The Anti-Aesthetic itself—the book, not its ripples. For there is a recurrent debate in the transcript, at times overt and at others very much between the lines, about what The Anti-Aesthetic is, or was; about what it might have meant, and what it might still mean; about what it did, and what it might still have the potential to do. Behind all of this definitional dowsing, I posit that the book, as a historical document, continues to promise that it might be possible to find a single answer to what is happening in and to the arts. In other words, in its time The Anti-Aesthetic served as a sort of “beyond” of its own. It was the “not X” by means of which one could argue forcibly against the “X”—where the “X” could be understood variously as Modernism, aesthetics, reconciliation, conviction, continuity, originality, verticality, structure, textuality, or even Clement Greenberg himself (mind you, this is but a partial list!). For its part, “not X” is rendered differently in different cases in the Seminars: not-modernism becomes, with time, postmodernism; not-aesthetics is cast as the anti-aesthetic; not-conviction becomes as sort of praise for doubt;8 notcontinuity is called rupture or “the celebration of the epistemological break”;9 not-originality is quickly transformed into “the orthodoxy of the purloined image”;10 and not-textuality becomes the material or the corporeal.11 Regardless of lexical nuance, however, the procedure for getting beyond the conventional by means of its opposite is a constant feature of the operations carried out in the name of destabilizing the theoretical apparatus “X,” which had calcified and grown stony.12 There is, of course, a certain irony in The Anti-Aesthetic holding so many divergent and, as Foster takes care to point out, young voices within it that it can hardly be considered a singular instance of anything. Nevertheless, the procedural impulse that characterizes the volume—as well as, I think it’s fair to argue, the artworks which ground the discussions therein—is one of opposition, 7. Double rainbows, a falsified subway map, and the pleasures of drawing scary monsters were all issues that arose during the course of the Seminars. In the first case a Kantian argument (meant, very likely, to render Kant entirely superfluous) regarding the sublime ecstasy that natural beauty (rather than art) might inspire was made by means of a YouTube video of a double rainbow that went viral in July of 2010, just as the Seminars began; the second was a further rehashing of the long-since-dry-withdust debate on what does or does not qualify

as art; and the last—discussed in much detail in the third section of this essay—is a reference to the participants worrying the Gordian knot of whether pleasure is sufficient justification for making art (spoiler alert: it was generally agreed upon that it is not). 8. Section 1 of the Seminars. 9. Section 2 of the Seminars. 10. Section 3 of the Seminars. 11. Section 3 of the Seminars. 12. Section 3 of the Seminars.

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in which it is precisely the “opposite of ” that holds the greatest analytic and aesthetic purchase. We are left, thus, with something of a binary. The aesthetic (“X”) and antiaesthetic (“not X”)—as one exemplary pair among many—are wedded one to the other like the front and backsides of a coin. The currency of art is not changed; it is simply flipped while continuing to be spent. It is this unity of opposition within the system it opposes that motivates so many of the seminar participants’ probings of Modernism’s underlying structure and its continued claims upon us. We wonder, are we still in it? Can we get out of it? It certainly seems as though we would like to. Did the “post-” of postmodernism and the “anti-” of the antiaesthetic take us anywhere new? And if we still care about newness, how can we even pretend to claim that we have escaped Modernism’s pull?13 What role can we now say that, with the benefit of one score and ten years of hindsight, this text has had in moving us along—or perhaps beyond—Modernism’s own long and ravenous trajectory? More than finding definitive answers to these questions in the transcript, or in my less-than-perfect memories of the proceedings, what is important here is to consider the impulse that undergirds them—the impulse that served as the very premise, the raison d’être,14 of the entire event—and that is to arrive at a point where we can collectively say that something is known, and that something definable and definite matters in both senses of the word. The goal of the Seminars was not to rub our thumbs through the sludge left at the water’s edge. It was not to point definitively at the murk itself, nor to plug our collective nose and plunge our common head into the lukewarm slosh of a bath abandoned. We were not flown from the earth’s four corners, fed, put up, and cared for for a week in order to put our minds together and suggest, in the end, that peripherality and marginality were all that was left of us, our professions, and our bodies of evidence. That this is precisely where we did end up is more an accident of histrionics—what Bernstein might call a “feeling that is already a matter of knowing”15– than of good intentions earnestly deployed (I say more on this below in “The Last Word”). When I speak, then, of orthodoxy16 or of the babe returned to its bath, what I mean is that we want to know, or perhaps to feel, that something is certain. 13. See Boris Groys, “On the New,” Res (Autumn 2000): 5–17. Full text also available online at http://​www​.uoc​.edu/​artnodes/​espai/​ eng/​art/​groys1002/​groys1002​.html (accessed October 28, 2011). 14. Raison d’être is also the name of a Swedish “dark-ambient-industrial-drone music project,” a description that gets me closer to where I want to be (the bathwater) than anything the X’s and not-X’s of Modernism and its aftermaths have to offer. See the Wikipedia entry, http://​en​ .wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Raison​_d​%27etre (accessed October 28, 2011). 15. “Art is the interrogation of a possibility of how ordinary items, just things, can be

demanding in themselves; how something merely factual, just this complexion of paint on canvas, can not only be meaningful, but lodge a claim. Artworks interrupt our merely instrumental engagement with objects, and further, demand a form of knowing that is also a feeling, a knowing by feeling and feeling that is already a matter of knowing” (emphasis added). Jay Bernstein in Section 1 of the Seminars. 16. “Orthodoxy” here is short for “acceptable forms of argumentation, permissible objects of care, and proper avenues of interest” mentioned in the introduction.

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That there is an order to things, that it can be found, and that any group of the well-intentioned and well-educated might, through the pleasures and rages of discussion alone, have the good fortune of lighting upon it. With this given, the seminar participants set about plaiting a lovely sort of bow by means of which to tie up loose ends—a bow that came, in the end, to be called by the name “affect.” This is not, I would hazard, the answer we were looking for. Rather, it was the one we were given to find. In identifying our task in this way, I do not attribute an ardent interest in grand narratives (and their inversions) to any of the seminar participants in particular. Indeed, I can think of several who would shake an angry fist in my direction at the merest hint of such an attribution. My point is, instead, that the thrust of the event itself drew us in. We had been asked to imagine that it was possible to find a “beyond” equal in its impact to The Anti-Aesthetic. The promise of this beyond—a dream, a fantasy, a propellant—moved us forward through a model of history in which “forward” left “behind” what was temporally past and in which progress was defined by alighting upon something new that superseded, eclipsed, and rendered immaterial what came before. The new betters the old, not necessarily because it is a superior or more timely model for accessing and assessing the arts, but simply because it is the latest (always necessarily) penultimate theory on a timeline that never ceases its unfolding toward the future. The Anti-Aesthetic could not, thus, have been our answer, for it is what we were specifically tasked with leaving behind. Neither, I think, could the aesthetic be thought a viable option, though some did argue in this direction. The return to beauty was discarded as irrelevant (though I tend not to agree). Rancière might as well have been the bathwater itself for all the attention his arguments were accorded, while relational aesthetics—the great white hope for a grand narrative in the morass of the expanded field—was, with a dismissive washing of hands, reduced to the socializing of socialites.17 Interest, criticality, critique, and conviction all fell by the wayside, dubbed procedures of an earlier era,18 while Diarmuid Costello’s tentative dipping of his biggest toe into theory’s potential 17. It is worth noting that the Seminars’ champions of relational aesthetics—myself, Béata Hock, and Stephánie Benzaquen—have all had significant dealing with Eastern European artists and their undertakings. Section 6 of the Seminars. 18. Section 1 of the Seminars. 19. See Section 4 of the Seminars, in which Costello bares something of his soul regarding the centrality of a certain vision of philosophical inquiry to his own life and is immediately given a thorough and unsympathetic trouncing by the rest. It was such an immediate and unforgiving reaction that I was reminded of Bataille’s musings about the intense disrespect humans afford the big toe. It holds them upright, and yet they forever withhold the credit due for this change in perspective. Not a linear association, but one with which the issue of mattering (in both senses of the word) is intimately entangled, and

thus I deem, somewhat arbitrarily, worth quoting at length: “The big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, or gibbon). This is due to the fact that the ape is tree dwelling, whereas man moves on the earth without clinging to branches, having become himself a tree, in other words raising himself straight up in the air like a tree, and all the more beautiful for the correctness of his erection. . . . “But whatever the role played in the erection by his foot, man, who has a light head, in other words a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, sees it as spit, on the pretext that he has this foot in the mud.” Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 20.

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for universality ended unceremoniously with a boulder being dropped upon his head.19 I could go on: good-bye to the Lacanian sense of the body so popular in the 1990s,20 good-bye to rupture,21 and good-bye to the “authentically human,”22 to name just three more. But it is the procedure of looking for significance— for something that matters still and broadly—and not the specific instances of each individual straw man held up to scrutiny and then burnt to cinders to which I want to call attention. Or to put it differently, there may have been little agreement among the seminar participants as to what matters, but there was remarkable accord that something must still, despite the morass of the modern world, be felt to matter—both materially and in a more abstract realm of meaning. But this agreement was structural, or worse, it was perhaps coerced. For had the baby been left to molder, there among the weeds in the Seminars’ opening moments, had Bernstein been allowed to continue his musings on the gray indistinctions of sludgy precipitate, perhaps the search for grand narratives, questions of definition, and anxious worrying over the stakes of even the most modest of proposals would have taken up less of the Seminars’ time. I come back then, to my original question: what might we have spoken about if the bulk of a week’s talk, rather than a sliver of it, had been devoted to an investigation of insignificant remnants rather than redirected toward the presumed centrality of the squalling tot itself? For the Love of Scary Monsters Brandon Evans: A friend of mine . . . is concerned only about his ability to draw scary monsters. Scary monsters make him happy. —Seminar 6

Art is always about wakefulness and horror. —Scribbled in the margins of my own notes to seminar 1

Tilt the transcript slightly; read it as if from the side; let your eyes swim over the text until the words begin to elongate into patterned smudges and blurs; wait and watch as these too transform into a flight of weightless Rorschach blots— tempting to the eye, signifying nothing. Take as your model, if you will, the fecal stains upon baby Kelly Barrie’s diapers.23 These smudges and smears of shit and of ink, equally, may tell us something about the state of the baby (and not only his bowels) and about the state of art—or at least attempts at art theory or philosophy or criticism “beyond” the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic. Psychology is, however, lodged in a different interpretive spot in the two sets of markings. Both words and shit matter. But, if we are to stick with Butler’s split typology

20. Section 3 of the Seminars. 21. Section 4 of the Seminars. 22. Section 8 of the Seminars.

23. This is a reference to “Documentation I: Analysed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts,” in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1974), discussed in Section 7 of the Seminars.

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of “mattering” above—where to “to matter” means both to both “to materialize” and “to mean”—both matter differently (the first “materially” and the second “meaningfully”). And yet, if one tunes one’s eye to the same parameters for both the diaper and the document, the stakes of the latter slide into the same register of smudge and blemish and stain that characterize the former. Can you not see, once the distractions of the explicit and purposeful are removed from the realm of the overt, that what you hold in your hands is in fact a love story? Or perhaps love is too strong a word for it, but it is a place where the passions play out, where intimate things rise to the fore, and where pleasure attempts to have the last word. It fails, of course (as we shall soon see the last word points us in a rather different direction). But scratch the surface of the exchanges here transcribed and what you will find is not simply a conversation about the significance of a thirty-year-old book that became a movement, but a deep and abiding worry that a thing loved is in the process of being lost. That thing—that scariest of monsters—is art. All the more so since it began to mutate and multiply, since genres began to slip through the careful fingers of those who dreamt of true typologies, since judgments of “quality” and “merit” became descriptors of a curator (or a Kantian) but not of a work of art,24 and since traces rather than objects have became not only de rigueur but also déclassé. It would be splendid to build a cage25 for this monstrous love and let it sing in the corner of the sitting room (this was perhaps what Greenberg was ultimately after), but art will have none of it. Nor, for their part, will artists consign themselves to being caged while continuing to sing. It may seem, at times, that they care less and less with every year that passes what paroxysms their work might inspire in the sensibilities of its would-be lovers.26 But it is not disregard that moves them, but the very pleasures of movement itself. Evans’s friend, drawn into his work by the near to infinite potential of the scary monster, is far from alone in this proclivity, for this same love pulls a great many artists working now into the systems and pleasures of their labor. Or to put it more succinctly: a work of art need not look like a scary monster to be one. During the course of the Seminars such paroxysms in the hearts of art’s lovers abounded. There were moments, mostly absent from the transcript, when individuals were moved to tears, when things broke down completely, when some laughed while others found only cause for dry impotence and fury. These moments were not those devoted to talking about the “beyond” or even about the vaunted book itself. They were those moments, few and far between, when almost despite ourselves the conversation turned away from questions of significance and toward those of specificity. They were the moments at which artworks 24. I do not mean to intimate that Kantians are particular in caring about the quality or merit of a work of art, but rather that they are particular in caring about the facility of judgment, as such. 25. This is, of course, one way one might classify what a museum or gallery space is.

26. Or to put it otherwise and by means of a quote quite worth repeating, “Aesthetics is for artists is what ornithology is for birds”: Barnett Newman in 1953, and repeated by Foster in Section 4 of the Seminars. 27. “Wakefulness” and “horror” are not categories I find useful in my own work, but they

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entered the frame and with them came, in equal measure, wakefulness and horror.27 And these instants, both ferocious and delicate, served to pull the rest of the seminar discussions into relief, for it was there that one could feel the stakes—nestled like a den of snakes—stirring beneath the unerring push for correct and useful definition that characterized so much of the rest of the week’s talk. Things that ought to have been firm quivered and slithered, passions rose to color the cheeks of one or another of the participants, and language changed as we attempted to grapple with something that could neither be systematized nor made to produce pleasure. I do not use these two notions, that of systematization and that of pleasure, lightly. For it often seems, if one takes care with the transcript, that the only things that are really being allowed to matter—that is, to be of significance—are those that escaped the easy boxes of systematization and pleasure. It is for this reason that affect as an “a-signifying non-sign” could be posited as the answer to what lies “beyond.” Far from being an emotive or emotional quality, affect is here something that exists outside the grid of systematization or administration. “Affect,” Meltzer says, quoting Sianne Ngai, “renders visible different registers of a problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) [and] conjoins these problems in a distinctive manner.”28 Continuing on in her own voice, Meltzer elaborates: “This is to say something about how it emerges, the fact that it is the conjoining of valences in a new way that is revelatory of something otherwise not registered.”29 Affect is, by this definition, a sort of excess given off by systems and processes of administration, an excess that becomes palpable—that is, made capable of being “registered”—most especially when captured in aesthetic projects that rely upon systematization for their content and often also for their method. Meltzer spoke of the work of Robert Morris or Mary Kelly in this vein, while Foster pointed us toward sociopolitical regimes that encompass much more than art worlds,30 But as a theoretical suggestion, affect thus defined would also seem to subsume the likes of Jacques Lacan (with his structured love of the mathematical formulae)31 and Claude Lévi-Strauss (with his almost crystalline charts of human symbolic life) within it. Just as none of this work, nor these postulates about politics, are reducible to systems, neither is it possible to reduce this particular way of reading affect to the pleasures of hyperbolic aestheticization of the systematic as such. Something does emerge; something is made visible; something can be registered; something has been revealed. But this “something”—whatever its were, like Bernstein’s instance upon liveliness and deadness, of particular salience to many of the Seminars’ participants. I make use of them here because they have a real explanatory purchase within the limited context of the week’s discussions. Bernstein cites Deleuze in Section 6: “Abjection becomes splendor. The horror of life becomes a very pure, and very intense life. ‘Life is frightening,’ said Cézanne, but in this cry he had already given voice to all the joys of lines and color. Painting transmutes this cerebral pessimism into nervous optimism.” Gilles Deleuze,

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 52. 28. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2005), 3. 29. Section 8 of the Seminars. 30. Section 8 of the Seminars. 31. Meltzer makes this point in “After Words,” chap. 4 of Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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positive qualities—is not collapsible into a commonsensible reading of “affect” as simply “pleasure” or “feeling.” We need go no further than back to the transcript to see the difficulty of this procedure—this how of an affect that is neither systematization nor the satisfaction of pleasures taken—in action. For it is here, as Costello shows us, that the quintessence of the problem as a problem arises. What is more, we are allowed to glimpse this process—of seeking pleasure, presuming to find it, and belatedly understanding that what has been found is not pleasure at all—in its entirety in that, the rarest of beasts, a transcribed parenthetical.32 Costello: Eve uses the expression [a-signifying non-sign] to speak of the affect of representing administration; it allows her to demonstrate that works like Robert Morris’s Card File do not need to be read solely as acts of administration without a surplus of pleasure. (Although “pleasure” might not be the right word. “Corrosive irony” might be better.)33

If we the follow the model offered up here, we see that even if one’s first impulse is to seek what looks like pleasure, in this case, in the aesthetic excesses of hypersystematic artworks, it only takes the shallow space of a breath to understand that this seemingly easy recognition of known quantity (the pleasurable) has been reached in error. A blunder has been made. Misrecognition has come to stand in recognition’s place. It is precisely here in this moment of correction, away from pleasure as an effect of art, as a slippage off the grid, or as a “conjoining of valences in a new way,” that “something otherwise not registered” emerges into visibility. We can speak of affect, if not always by means of it. I am not suggesting here, as Costello may be, that “corrosive irony” is a better explanation for the excess emerging from artistic acts of representing administration than pleasure. Rather, what is worthy of note is that pleasure is clearly, for him, not quite the right answer. I would argue that this is a generalizable statement. For at no point in the transcript—cordoned off, as it was, from talk about systems of art—that pleasure is, in and of itself, considered a viable analytic force. As Dakota Brown asks in response to the purported happiness brought to our artist-as-foil by the drawing of scary monsters: “Is the point of theory and criticism simply to describe what makes people happy, whatever that might be?”34 The implied answer here, which was never explicitly given, is “No, it is not.” 32. A procedural note: the conversations that make up the body of this text were recorded and then transcribed and edited in a way meant to make them more streamlined and focused than they actually were. Participants were then given the opportunity to edit the transcript. They could, in other words, change or amend what they had said in the body of the transcript,

as if they had spoken differently at the time. I suspect, though I cannot confirm, that this is how such an anachronism as a “parenthetical” in what is supposedly an official record of a recorded conversation might arise. 33. Section 8 of the Seminars. 34. Section 6 of the Seminars.

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Theorists and critics, philosophers and anthropologists, artists and historians may all well be driven by a love for the fearsome, difficult-to-cage, lively, engaging, shape-shifting, and occasionally horrific monster that is art. We may all have found ourselves in that room, with its white ceilings, exposed duct work, and wraparound windows, for the span of that week because of art’s draw (call it “wakefulness” or “seduction” or “horror”). Yet neither systematization nor the simple rightness of pleasures taken managed to account for the whole of what art impassions.35 In this, a certain application of affect theory is right.36 When someone grows red in the face, when laughter rings forth, when ulcers jump in protest to that third cup of coffee, when stony eyes and set jaws come to characterize once animate participants, and when what is said lingers in the air a short sharp shadow of what has been left unsaid, then one might best begin approaching things symptomatically rather than literally. That is, rather than looking for the inherent truth of the situation, the grand narrative that will put it right, or the baby splashing mightily in its bath (to return briefly to that metaphor), what might serve us best is an examination of how certain valences come together so that something emerges into visibility. It is not visibility per se that matters here, nor even the specificities of the thing emergent, but rather, the conditions of possibility themselves—the joints and conjoints—that allow visibility to happen at all. These are what ought to attract our scholarly attention. One could end here. Indeed, the goal of the Seminars was that one would end here, for it was no accident of conversation that affect became the “beyond” of choice. If you like this answer, and I admit it has a certain undeniable purchase, I would suggest you stop reading now. A Brief Meditation on the Importance of Cows In Switzerland, as in other mountainous regions with cows, each spring people and beasts peregrinate from lowland valleys to high mountain pastures and then, when the weather turns toward bitter, they travel back down again toward stable and home. This twice-yearly migration is called the “transhumance”—a word signifying both a movement and a breadth of species “across” rather than “beyond” or “against.” Humans with cows; mountains with valleys; stables with pastures; dried hay with fresh alpine flowers. Neither term in the pair stands out, neither is privileged, what is important, always, is the movement between the two, the 35. Eitan Wilf speaks of the rise of pleasure’s identification with “proper action” during the eighteenth century: “The revolutionary factor in this development [the identification of beauty and the formulation of the good], however, was the introduction of pleasure as an indicator of proper action: ‘the fact that a course of action not only “felt right” but also gave pleasure could now be advanced as a forceful argument in favor of its propriety.’ ” Wilf, “Sincerity Versus SelfExpression: Modern Creative Agency and the Materiality of Semiotic Forms,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 3 (2011): 470, quoting Colin

Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 152. 36. I would argue that Žižek and Lacan’s notion of the objet petit a does the task just as well but that is a project for another day. See especially Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 12, though the notion is pandemic in Žižek’s work, and almost any text will bring you round to it somewhere along the way.

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rhythmic swing of displacement that is simultaneously a replacement within a different order of things. As the brass bell swings around the fat of the cow’s neck, so too does the cow’s own motion along mountain pathways and through alpine seasons map out a space and time, not in terms of a beyond (post-) or an against (anti-), but rather by means of an “across” which nevertheless remains a verb of accounting. I am not suggesting that this is the answer to the problem of The AntiAesthetic thirty years on. What I am suggesting is that there are several different sorts of ways to look at cows. One can consider them as a part of a dispositif, an operation, or a complex network of human and nonhuman actors (kudos to Rancière, to Bataille, and to Latour, respectively).37 Or one can consider them beasts, with a ring through the nose to be led by the tugging of a rope wherever some two-footed agent with more agency pleases. One can see it both ways. The cows are led to spring grasses or they are accompanied there. They are dragged reluctantly home again or they are set on their own meandering way back down into the valley to the warmth and security of the winter stable. Though it could be argued that both sets of interpretations are equally apt, that it is just a matter of the semantics of painting (i.e., that valley, that story, and that transhumance) that casts cows and humans into a series of different relationships of power, such an approach as this would leave out the fact that on the way up, the cows, they dance. So it was for the seminar participants, and so, it has been argued, it usually is for humans engaged in a common intellectual cause.38 Indeed, the reason one even bothers with the often intensely frustrating project of collaboration (read: putting up with the peculiarities, personalities, and varying competencies of one’s peers) is that there are moments when all that is disparate and impenetrable is bridged and thoughts move between or across what had seemed a vast gulf with the ease of spring cows happily rushing up the side of an Alp to summer’s green pastures. It does not matter that the terrain is difficult or the path narrow and steep, when one’s own mind finds a certain purchase in the minds of others things are seen and known collectively that could not have been seen or known otherwise. The arduousness of the path is forgotten in the fleeting serendipity of the moment. It is not, thus, solely the task of finding the answer that causes people to come together across whatever (structural and base) divides them, it is also the possibility of working in concert—of working, if only fleetingly, as if with a single mind that provides the collaborative impulse. For it is in these moments of movement-in-companionship that we humans also dance the dance of the transhumance. Intellectual, bovine. It is the same. 37. Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT), the last of these models, would also notably include the cause célèbre of migratory cows (i.e., the cheese). Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Both Eve Schürmann and Gary Peters urge us in their comments to this volume

to take Bruno Latour’s work into account in relationship to the problem of the modern (and its aesthetics). I could not agree more. 38. Stacia Zabusky, Launching Europe: An Ethnography of European Cooperation in Space Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

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What was foreclosed during this week ostensibly devoted to the intellectual peregrinations of disparate minds over the rough hills and through the bramblefilled valleys of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic (and perhaps even their beyond) was precisely the possibility of real intellectual collaboration. What is more, this barring of a certain sort of highly uncertain and potentially totally unproductive concerted movement was procedural, rather than overtly ideological, and it was so twice over. First, the pressing need to arrive at an answer for what might lie “beyond” pushed the conversation toward the litany of grand narratives detailed above. Second, “affect” as an acceptable, indeed compelling, answer to this problem of the “beyond” was not arrived at by common conversation but was, in fact, planted, as surely as false evidence in a crime, as the answer to be lit upon as the Seminars drew towards their close. The participants did not discover affect, they did not choose it, it was there all along buried in the shallowest of holes and marked by a giant, three-dimensional X so blatant that only the willfully blind could possibly have avoided happening across it. The search, that is to say, may have been real, if channeled, but finding the reward was never in question. Or, to put it differently, the necessity that the Seminars progress toward a definitive (and predefined) “beyond” trumped the various attempts made by individual participants over the course of the week to move more companionably and collaboratively “across” uncharted yet (if hunches can be trusted) fertile terrain. The goal was thus not discovery so much as arrival. My complaint, then, about affect is neither that it fails to provide a fascinating way to proceed, nor that it leaves any number of doors, both intellectual and theoretical, locked up tight, their far sides utterly inaccessible to even the most inquiring of minds. Far from it. Affect, especially when posed as an a-signifying non-sign, appears as nothing so much as an interesting key to further thought. Nor is my complaint really that affect did not arise as an organic proposal homegrown in the fertile ground of collaborative effort, though I do think this bears both mention and critique. Rather, my problem with affect as a given answer (instead of a found object) is rooted in its effects. First, its effect upon the Seminar proceedings, which of necessity had to be channeled toward a definitive end—no place here for the sludgy, half-stagnant indeterminacies of the bathwater. And second, its even greater effect upon the final, heavily edited form of the transcript. For, despite the structural constraints necessitated by affect as suitable “beyond,” there were occasional moments during the week’s discussions when minds began to dance, when passions rose, and when the thoughts and knowledge of selves and others intertwined and intertangled for reason and perhaps, even, toward an end. Almost none of these interchanges, however, made it through the editorial sieve and into the final product. One of the few that did slip through, because it is funny and thus worth keeping for color if not necessarily for content, was Bernstein’s early studied contemplation of the bathwater, and it is for this reason that I have made much of it here. It is a crack in the

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document that shows something of what might have been had the ebbs and flows of conversation not been tied to a deliverable. The Seminars were, in other words, a forge, not a garden, and its results were never meant to be a dense weedy mass of collective thought or a herd of cows dancing around high mountain crags. Its results were meant to be and indeed are, this very book—the one you are now holding in your hands or are speedily scanning upon some sort of electronic screen. This structure of the economy of thought, of collaboration, of answer finding and argument making, of editing and of publication is intimately linked to the very real power, not of affect (our given answer) but of market. Or to put it more plainly, the Seminars needed to arrive at a viable “beyond” in order to assure a tenable, salable, citable, and otherwise proper sort of end product to the process. In the contemporary world of the academy, a place where almost all the seminar participants live and work, the most proper product of all is still a book. Affect, whatever its organizational and inspirational potential, was not thus particularly important in its particularities. It works, rather, as an answer (to the foil of what lies “beyond”) that can be parlayed into a product (this book) because it is both a believable and very rarely maligned analytic at which thinking people in conference might reasonably be expected to arrive. Affect is, after all, a pretty hip theoretical maneuver at present, and there is therefore relatively little risk associated with tying the skiff of our “beyond” to its august hull and allowing ourselves to be pulled out into the sea of professional contributions by the power of its cross-disciplinary appeal. Affect, in other words, was both a very safe proposal and a decidedly nonrevolutionary one. It assures that a book called Beyond the Aesthetic and Anti-Aesthetic, while having none of the critical impact that a book called The Anti-Aesthetic can claim for itself, will also not sink like a stone into the disreputable muck of scholarly miscarriages. Despite the editing of the proceedings in real time, the editing of the document after the fact, and the editing out of the very possibility of a collaboration that moved “across” rather than toward a definitive “beyond,” the Seminars did come to their own conclusion. Unlike affect, however, this unbidden, unpalatable, and largely ignorable end point offers little hope for redemption. Like the bathwater, it is a murky presence of seemingly secondary import, lurking around everything else we were being led to find. Like the bathwater, it might be a far wiser thing to ignore, for it will only transfer its tepid grime to every finger held probingly out to test it for relevance and warmth. There is no comfort here. The Last Word Given that Hal Foster is the one who started this great debate, it would only seem fitting that he have the last word here, some thirty years later, And indeed he does. The easiest way to find this last word is to bypass all that I have done 39. I am borrowing a lovely turn of phrase from Melzer. The full quote reads, “the sterility of a specimen . . . the affective charge of a

memento . . . the alienation of information, and the longing of a document.” “After Words,” 7.

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thus far in this afterword (i.e., better to ignore all of the details of the transcripts oft-aborted conversational threads, turn a blind eye to the participants’ own misguided searches for surety, leave to the side the longing of the document,39 forget about the joyous movements of cows, and disregard the turn toward affect entirely). Instead, I would suggest that a far more profitable strategy would be to turn to the last lines of the last page of the transcript and simply read what is written there. To make things easy, I’ll quote them for you here: Foster: Thirty years ago, in The Anti-Aesthetic, Said said that the task of the humanities was to represent “humane marginality.” Forget about the humane; maybe now it’s simply human marginality.40

The last word is “marginality,” literally. Though it might as well be “bathwater.” For, once again, albeit by Foster’s speech rather than Bernstein’s, we see the human(e) jettisoned from the realm of immediate concern. And this time there is no opportunity to pick up the pieces and set things right, simply because there are no more words to be had. Marginality is where it ends. No space remains for attempted orthodoxy, for intervention, or for setting the twenty-three pairs of the seminar participants’ feet upon the correct path. In the end, then, in one brilliant and fell swoop, the emancipatory potential of the “beyond” is swapped in for the precarity of the edge—there where the soap scum and sloughed skin sticks until scrubbed off by some earnest and underpaid employee who lives and works at the fringes of a system that still dreams itself modern. Nor is the impulse to put things right as strong here as it was in the beginning, for even Elkins agrees “that the academic arena has a persistent lack of interest in aesthetic issues.”41 His love, too, his arena of care, is defined not by the emancipatory potential of “beyond” but by its marginality. This, then, is perhaps Benzaquen’s point regarding precarity: that the stakes are much higher than they might appear at first glance, for we are not talking only about socioeconomic marginality and the power differentials known to be associated with such disparities in status (e.g., to be a tenured professor at Princeton or a long-term adjunct at Nowhere-in-Particular University), but about something that has happened to art (as a field in which one is trained, as much as a substrate of material culture).42 Or to put it more bluntly, everyone in the Seminars seems to be suffering from some sort of loss. The breadth of these complaints, often only symptomatically present, is both vast and spectacular. There is the loss of the normative claim, the loss of art’s redemptive potential, the loss of liveliness, of the sublime, of the modern, of theory as a universal explanatory apparatus, of criticality (and of critique), of sharp edges, of resistance, of interest in aesthetic issues, of practice and of care in the realms of production (both scholarly and artistic). Even the loss of affect comes up now and again. So much is gone that it all feels at

40. Section 9 of the Seminars. 41. Section 9 of the Seminars. 42. Section 9 of the Seminars.

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times like a country-and-western song: the dog died, the wife ran off, the truck done broke down, and the guitar has but two strings left upon it for the skillful playing of the lament. Not that anyone in particular is melancholic. And though nostalgia may be spied now and again hawking its rose-colored, backward-looking glasses (for a fair price, mind you), there were not many takers. The past is not in these conversations some idealized golden place where art was fully and contagiously alive but, following an early formulation of the October group, something summoned to clarify the present.43 It is by paying careful attention to which bits of the vastness of the past continued to be recalled and redeployed in the service of the just now that we can know what remains essential to the present. (Kant, for instance, much like the dog of our fictitious country singer, cannot simply be left to rot in his grave.) What is important about loss (as we learn from country music) is that it is rarely about the emancipatory potential of the beyond, but rather about a marginality that is precisely the result of being displaced from one regime of the sensible (a wife, a dog, and a truck) into another (a bottle of whiskey, a one-night stand, and cold, driving rain). Here, in this formulation, “X” is not replaced by “not-X” but by something else entirely. This “something else” is not easy to situate, systematize, or make good sense of, nor is it necessarily true that one is wiser, or better off, for having made the switch. The margins, after all, are a place of secondary relevance. It is both difficult and risky to cultivate these margins or to inhabit this limit, and, I might add, once one finds oneself there it is a state of being that makes for a very hard sell. When we look at the problem of the bathwater and the baby from this countrified angle, it is easy to see how perfectly the baby as metaphor represents the purposes of a system which, though it has largely disappeared from the everyday life, continues its attempts to govern the realm of recognition.44 The wife may be gone, but he still wears that ring upon his finger; the dog may be dead, but the leash still hangs on its hook by the door. This lack of recognition of a substantive change that has already happened is the equivalent of attempting to theorize the baby, when all there is really left is the bathwater. It is ripe for examination, but who really wants to admit that this is where—for the moment at least—it all ends? Foster does. Benzaquen maybe. But what of the rest of us?

43. Section 3 of the Seminars. 44. This lost system is characterized by things like full (rather than un- or under-) employment that is meaningful and respected; by adequate remuneration for one’s labor; by access to affordable and quality health care and education; by progress in the material arena from one generation to the next; by growth, fulfillment, potential, and hope. It was a world in which an examination of the bathwater did not

matter, because the baby itself was so ripe with potential that all that was required to ensure its flourishing was care and an adequate allocation of resources. It was a world in which all that was derivative had little purchase, a world in which one could walk into a gallery and recognize what is art by where it hung and how it looked, while letting slip off to the edges of one’s consciousness the motes of dust gathered in the gallery’s dark corners.

notes on the contributors

Gretchen Bakke is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal. Her work is on contemporary performance art in Eastern Europe, specifically Neue Slowenische Kunst and other Slovene artists and collectives active since the 1980s. Additionally, she publishes on American blockbuster movies and teaches courses on popular culture, film, and the cultural fantasies of the posthuman. Recent publications include “Dead White Men: An Essay on the Changing Dynamics of Race in American Action Cinema,” Anthropology Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2010): 400–28; “Reframing History,” Slovene Studies 30, no.  2 (2008): 185–217; and “Continuum of the Human,” Camera Obscura 22, no. 3 66 (2007): 60–91. Bakke also has a trade book currently under contract with Bloomsbury USA. Joaquín Barriendos works at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, New York. He is part of the editorial board of Journal of Visual Culture. His publications include Geoestética y Transculturalidad (Girona, 2007); Global Circuits: The Geography of Art and the New Configurations of Critical Thought, coedited with Pilar Parcerisas (Barcelona, 2011); and “Geopolitics of Global Art: The Reinvention of Latin America as a Geo-aesthetic Region,” in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums, edited by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern, 2009). Stéphanie Benzaquen is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Historical Culture, Faculty of History and the Arts, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her publications include “Samples,” in Artist and Arm, edited by Yulia Gnirenko, Irina Tchesnokova, and Irina Yashokva (Moscow, 2005); “Harbin Express,” in What Does the Veil Know?, edited by Eva Meyer and Vivian Liska (Zurich, 2009), 85–102; “The Weird Man Who Thought He  Was a Tree,” in Salute Romano (Prague, 2009), 85–89; “Remediating Genocidal Images into Contemporary Art: The Case of the Tuol Sleng Mug Shots,” Rebus 5 (2010). J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He works primarily in the areas of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, ethics, critical theory, and German Idealism. Among his books are The Philosophy of the Novel (Minneapolis, 1984); The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Oxford, 1992); Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York, 2001); and Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, 2006). He is presently at work on book provisionally entitled Torture and Dignity: Reflections on Moral Injury. Karen Busk-Jepsen  is MPhil in art history and PhD candidate at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, with the project “An

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Anthropological Turn?” Her publications include an article on Marian apparitions in Das magische Bild, edited by Iris Wenderholm, Hendrik Ziegler, and Uwe Fleckner (Hamburg, forthcoming). She has coedited the conference proceedings Anthro/Socio together with Mikkel Bogh et al. (Copenhagen, 2011) and the anthology Warburg Now? together with Joacim Sprung (Copenhagen, forthcoming). Luis Camnitzer is an artist, teacher, and art writer. His works have appeared in biennials and group shows, including Information at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1970); the Biennial of Havana (1984, 1986, and 1991); the Whitney Biennial (New York, 2000); and Documenta 11 (Kassel, 2002) and On Line (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010). His latest retrospective started at the Daros Museum in Zurich (2010) and traveled to El Museo del Barrio in New York (2011), Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Mexico, and the Helen and Morris Belkin Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2011). Camnitzer received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1961 and 1982 and the Frank Jewett Mather Award of the College Art Association in 2011. His writings frequently appear in ArtNexus, and his publications include New Art of Cuba (Austin, 1994, 2003), Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin, 2007), and On Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias (Austin, 2009). Diarmuid Costello is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Chair of the British Society of Aesthetics, and codirector (with Margaret Iversen) of the AHRC “Aesthetics After Photography” research project. He coedited (with Margaret Iversen) “Photography After Conceptual Art,” special issue, Art History 32, no.5 (2009); (with Dominic Willsdon) The Life and Death of Images (Ithaca, NY, 2008); and (with Jonathan Vickery) Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (Oxford, 2007). Recent articles on Greenberg, Fried, Cavell, Danto, de Duve and Kant, among others, have appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Critical Inquiry, Rivista di Estetica, and Angelaki. He is working on two longer projects: “Aesthetics After Modernism” and “On Photography.” Joana Cunha Leal  works at the Department of Art History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her edited publications include Arte & Paisagem (Lisbon, 2006) and Arte & Poder (Lisbon, 2008), and her essays include “Uma entrada para Entrada: Amadeo, a historiografia e os territórios da pintura,” Intervalo 4 (2010): 133–53. Her current projects include “Writing Portuguese Modernism” and “Other Modernisms? The Case of Amadeo Souza Cardoso” (Fulbright Research Fellowship). Angela Dimitrakaki works at the Department of History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include “The Spectacle and Its Others: Labor, Conflict, and Art in the Age of Global Capital,” in Globalization and Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris (Hoboken, 2011); “Researching Culture/s and the Omitted Footnote: Questions on the Practice of Feminist Art History,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones (New York, 2009); “ ‘All That Is Solid Melts into Air,’ but I Can’t Change Anything: On the Identity of the Artist in the Networks of Global Capital,” in Identity Theft: Cultural Colonisation and Contemporary Art, edited by

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Jonathan Harris (Liverpool, 2008); “Materialist Feminism for the Twenty-First Century: The Video Essays of Ursula Biemann,” Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 2 (2007): 205–32. Alexander Dumbadze is an Assistant Professor of Art History at George Washington University. His publications include Death Is Elsewhere: Bas Jan Ader (Chicago, forthcoming, 2013); Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present [edited with Suzanne Hudson] (Malden, forthcoming, 2013); “Of Passivity and Agency: Jack Goldstein,” in Jack Goldstein x 10,000, edited by Philipp Kaiser (Newport Beach, 2012); “Spectacle and Death,” in September 11, edited by Peter Eleey (New York, 2011); and “Can You Hear the Lights?,” in Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, edited by Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (Surrey, 2010). T. Brandon Evans is an MA candidate in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His work deals with sound theory and politics of representation. He is also a Portuguese-English translator. He holds a BA from Georgetown University in Linguistics and Art Theory. Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archaeology. His most recent books are The Art-Architecture Complex (London, 2011) and The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton, 2012). He is presently at work on a theory of Modernism as a way (in the words of Walter Benjamin) “to outlive culture, if need be.” A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foster writes regularly for October (which he coedits), Artforum, and the London Review of Books. Gustav Frank  works at the Department of German Studies Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversity, Munich. His publications include (with Barbara Lange) Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft: Bilder in der visuellen Kultur (Darmstadt, 2010), Modernism and the Beginnings of Visual Culture (Bielefeld, 2013), and “The Invisible Hand: Schiller’s Media Theory of Modernism,” in Aesthetics and Modernity from Schiller to Marcuse, edited by Steve Giles, Maike Oergel, Jerome Carroll (Oxford, 2012). Geng Youzhuang works at the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China. His publications include Stigmata: Christianity and Western Art (Taiwan, 2009); The Myth of Writing: Literature in Western Culture (Beijing, 2006); “The End of Poem and the Impossibility of Witness: On Agamben’s Poetics,” Foreign Literature Review, no. 1 (2010): 83–94; “Language and Visual Figuration: Roland Barthes’ ‘Word and Thing,’ ” Literature and Art Studies, no. 3 (2009): 116–23. Elise Goldstein is a performance and installation artist, and additionally works as a freelance creative consultant and dramaturg. Her present research includes the intersection of object and affect theory in live-media history and practice, as well as dramaturgical practices for participation-contingent work. Her exhibitions and performances have been hosted by the Mattress Factory Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, the International Museum of Surgical Science, the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, and

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the Gent Stadsmuseum, among others. Her monograph of artistic research, Ectopia: A Travel Guide to the Displacement of Self, will be published by a.pass (Brussels) in 2013. Boris Groys is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. A philosopher, critic, and media theorist, he is an expert on late Soviet postmodern art and literature, as well as on the Russian avant-garde. His publications include The Communist Postscript (London, 2009), Art Power (Cambridge, 2009), and History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (Cambridge, 2010). Groys has edited numerous collections of articles in Russian and German and has written more than a hundred articles. Since 1994, in addition to serving as the curator and organizer of numerous international art exhibitions and conferences, he has been Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Art and Design, Karlsruhe. Beáta Hock  teaches at the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University, Budapest, and at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest. Her publications include Nemtan és pablikart: Lehetséges értelmezési szempontok az utóbbi másfél évtized két művészeti irányzatához (Women’s art and public art: Possible interpretive aspects for two kinds of art practice emerging in the past fifteen years; Budapest, 2005); and “Sites of Undoing Gender Hierarchies: Woman and/in Hungarian Cinema (Industry),” Media Research: Croatian Journal for Journalism and Media (Summer 2010): 9–30. Her most recent curatorial project was the international group show Agents  & Provocateurs (Institute of Contemporary Art—Dunaujvaros, Hungary, 2009; Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, Germany, 2010). Gordon Hughes  is a Mellon Assistant Professor in Art History at Rice University. He was a 2012–13 scholar at the Getty Research Institute. His most recent book is Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism (Chicago, forthcoming). His publications include “Braque’s Regard,” in Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945 (New  Haven, forthcoming, 2013); “Abstraction Chez Delaunay,” in  Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 (New  York, forthcoming, 2013); “Camera Lucida Circa 1980,” in Palinode: Reflections on Camera Lucida, edited by Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge, MA, 2009); “Game Face: Douglas Huebler and the Voiding of Photographic Portraiture,” Art Journal 66, no. 4 (2007–8): 52–69; “Envisioning Abstraction: The Simultaneity of Robert Delaunay’s First Disk,” Art Bulletin 89, no. 2 (2007): 306–32; “Power’s Script; Or, Jenny Holzer’s Art After ‘Art After Philosophy,’ ” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 3 (2006): 419–40; “Coming into Sight: Seeing Robert Delaunay’s Structure of Vision,” October 102 (Fall 2002): 87–100. Omair Hussain is an artist based in Chicago. Michael Kelly  is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North  Carolina at Charlotte. His publications include A  Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (New York, 2011); Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2003); Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C. Danto (coedited with Daniel Herwitz) (New York, 2007); and Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (editor-in-chief ) (Oxford, 1998; new edition forthcoming). Previously, Kelly was the Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association

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and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Philosophy at Columbia University; he has also taught at Columbia University and the University of Delaware. Grant Kester is Chair of the Visual Arts Department and Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego. His publications include Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley, 2004) and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, 2011). He edited Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from “Afterimage” (Durham, 1998). Meredith Kooi is an MA candidate in the Visual and Critical Studies program at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Her publications include voiceover commentary in ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media, vol. 16 (2010) and “Reframing the Disabled Body Through Photo Therapy” in the Visual Studies Reader, edited by James Elkins (forthcoming). Cary Levine is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His recent publications include “Manly Crafts: Mike Kelley’s (Oxy)Moronic Gender Bending,” Art Journal 69, no.  1 (2010): 75–91; “You Are What (and How) You Eat: Paul McCarthy’s Food-Flinging Frenzies,” Invisible Culture, no. 14 (2010); and “Dana Schutz: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” in Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, Neuberger Museum of Art, 2011. He is the author of Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Raymond Pettibon (Chicago, forthcoming, 2013). Sunil Manghani is Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory in the Faculty of Arts at York St. John University. He is author of Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Bristol, 2008) and coeditor (with Arthur Piper) of Images: A Reader (London, 2006), an anthology of writings on the image from Plato to the present. He is currently preparing a book for Routledge entitled Images Studies. William Mazzarella is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, where he works on the political anthropology of mass publicity, commodity aesthetics, and postcoloniality, with an ethnographic focus on India. He is the author of Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, 2003) and The Censor’s Fist: Performative Dispensations, Cinema, and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (forthcoming), as well as the coeditor (with Raminder Kaur) of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Bloomington, 2009). He is currently researching a new book on the charismatic and controversial Bombay advertising agency MCM, tentatively titled Mad Men of Bombay: A Tale of Magic Found and Lost. Justin McKeown is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at York St. John University. His publications include “Speaking from the Void: Thoughts on Northern Ireland and the Archiving of Its Culture,” in Arkive City, edited by Julie Bacon (Belfast, 2008); “Nowhere Between Now and Then,” in Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, edited by Megan Johnston (Portadown, 2009); and “The Road to Neoism,” in Amazing Letters: The Life and Art of David Zack, edited by Istvan Kantor (Calgary, 2010).

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Andrew McNamara  teaches art history–theory in the Creative Industries faculty, QUT, Brisbane. His recent publications include Sweat—the Sub-Tropical Imaginary (Brisbane, 2011); An  Apprehensive Aesthetic: The Legacy of Modernist Culture (Bern, 2009); “The Colour of Modernism: Colour-Form Experiments in Europe and Australia,” in Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, edited by Sacha Bru et  al. (Berlin, 2009); Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, edited by Ann Stephen, Philip Goad, and Andrew McNamara (Melbourne, 2008); and “Wondrous Objectivity: Art History, Freud and Detection,” in The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road, edited by Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer (Minneapolis 2007). He coedited (with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad) Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967 (Melbourne, 2006). Eve Meltzer is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Visual Culture in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Her publications include many exhibition reviews as well as “What’s the Matter with Words? Vito Acconci’s L-l-l-language of the Written Text,” Fort Da 9 (2003): 49–67; “How to Keep Mark Making Alive: Robert Morris in Blind Time,” in Pro Forma: Language/Text/Visual Art, edited by Jessica Wyman (Toronto, 2005); “The Dream of the Information World,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 1 (2006): 115–35; and Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago, forthcoming, 2013). Nadja Millner-Larsen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she teaches courses on media criticism and visual culture. Her dissertation research explores the representation/aestheticization of leftist militancy in contemporary art and media practices. Her coauthored article “Militant Imagery and the Right to Genre” is forthcoming in the journal Triple Canopy. Maria Filomena Molder works at the Department of Philosophy at the New University of Lisbon. Her publications include “Stammering in a Strange Tongue: The Limits of Language in The Birth of Tragedy in the Light of Nietzsche’s ‘Attempt at a SelfCriticism,’ ” in Nietzsche on Instinct and Language, edited by João Constâncio e Maria João Branco (Berlin, 2011); O Químico e o Alquimista. Benjamin, leitor de Baudelaire (Lisbon, 2011); “Symbole, Analogie et Affinité,” in “Philosopher au Portugal Aujourd’hui,” edited by Maria Filomena Molder, special issue, Revue Rue Descartes, no.  68 (2010): 62–75; “Why Is Etty Hillesum a Great Thinker?,” in Spirituality in the Works of Etty Hillesum, edited by Klaas A. D. Smelik, Ria van den Brandt, and Meins G. S. Coetsier (Boston, 2010); “Cries, False Substitutes and Figurative Expressions,” in Wittgenstein on Forms of Life and the Nature of Experience, edited by António Marques and Nuno Venturinha (Bern, 2010); “Que sait Louise Bourgeois, que je ne sais pas?,” La Part de L’Oeil no.  23 (2008): 171–87; Semear na Neve. Estudos sobre Walter Benjamin (Lisbon, 1999); O Pensamento Morfológico de Goethe (Lisbon, 1995). Harper Montgomery  is the Patricia Phelps de  Cisneros Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art and Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. Her

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publications include “Evangelist Cynic: Text in the Work of Daniel Joseph Martinez,” in InterReview 2, no. 8 (2008): 42–45, “Facture and Gloss: Making the Woodcut Modern,” in El Futuro: XXI Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte (Mexico City, 2010), and “ ‘Enter for Free’: Exhibiting Woodcuts on a Corner in Mexico City,” Art Journal 70, no. 4 (2012): 26–39. Exhibitions she has organized include the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan (2005) and Open Work in Latin America, New York, and Beyond at Hunter College (2013). Carrie Noland is the Chair of French and Italian and faculty in French and Italian, and affiliate faculty in Comparative Literature and Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton, 1999); “The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 1 (2010): 46–60; and “Red Front/Black Front: Aimé Césaire and the Affaire Aragon,” Diacritics 36, no. 1 (2007): 64–84. Gary Peters is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at York St. John University. For many years (and still) a composer, musician, improvisor, Gary has a background in Sociology (London School of Economics) and Cultural History (Royal College of Art). He has written widely on continental philosophy, aesthetics, and pedagogy. His publications include The Philosophy of Improvisation (Chicago, 2009) and Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas (London, 2005). He is currently working on a book for the University of Chicago Press entitled Yes, No, Don’t Know: Affirmation, Negation, and Neutrality in Art and Philosophy, and is writing a chapter entitled “In the Moment . . . Not” for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, edited by George Lewis). Aaron Richmond  is an artist currently based in Montreal, Canada. In 2005, he received an MPhil in Intellectual History from Cambridge University, writing a thesis titled “Theodor Adorno: Aspects of the Secular.” In 2011, he worked as an artist in residence at the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, Romania. His work can be seen through the Emerging Artist Viewing Program at the Drawing Center in New York. Lauren Ross is a Masters candidate in the Visual and Critical Studies program at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently researching and writing about dialogical art practices as well as ritual theory in relation to fiber arts practices. Toni Ross  is Senior Lecturer in Art History at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Her publications include “Departures from Postmodern Doctrine in Jacques Rancière’s Account of the Politics of Artistic Modernity,” Transformations, no. 19 (2011); “Image, Montage,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, edited by J.  P.  Deranty (Durham, 2010); and “From Classical to Postclassical Beauty: Institutional Critique and Aesthetic Enigma in Louise Lawler’s Photography,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Jaleh Mansoor, Vered Maimon, and Seth McCormick (Durham, 2009). She is currently writing a book on Jacques Rancière’s refiguring of the politics of aesthetic modernity and contemporary art.

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Eva Schürmann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, Germany. Her publications include Sehen als Praxis (Frankfurt am Main, 2008); Erscheinen und Wahrnehmen (Munich, 2000); “Das Unsichtbare im Sichtbaren,” in Das unendliche Kunstwerk, edited by Gerhard Gamm (Berlin, 2007); “Die Medialität von Medien,” in Raum, Perspektive, Medium, edited by Yvonne Schweizer (Tübingen, 2010); and “Transitions from Seeing to Thinking: On the Relation of Perception, Worldview and World-Disclosure” in Bilder, Sehen, Denken, edited by Klaus Sachs-Hombach (Cologne, 2010). Gregory Sholette  is a New  York–based artist, writer, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D, 1980–88) and REPOhistory (1989– 2000). He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College of City University of New York and a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, and teaches an annual seminar in theory and social practice for the CCC postgraduate research program at Geneva University of Art and Design. His recent publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (London, 2011); Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945, with Blake Stimson (Minneapolis, 2007); and The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, with Nato Thompson (Cambridge, 2006). Noah Simblist works as a writer, independent curator, and artist. He is an Associate Professor of Art at Southern Methodist University and is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Texas, Austin, where he was the 2010–11 Curatorial Fellow at the Visual Arts Center. His curatorial projects include Yuri’s Office by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Out of Place at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, and Queer State(s) at the Visual Arts Center. Recent writing projects include “Setting Sail: The Aesthetics of Politics on the Gaza Flotilla”; interviews with Jill Magid, Walead Beshty, and Nicholas Schaffhausen for Art Papers; “Trouble in Paradise: The Erasure of Memory at Canada Park,” Pidgin Magazine (2012); and “The Art of Forgetfulness, the Trauma of Memory: Yael Bartana and Artur Żmijewski,” Transmission Annual (2011): 135–42. Jon Simons is Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Trained in political theory in Israel, he has published Foucault and the Political (London, 1995) as well as essays on poststructuralist and feminist theory. He has edited three volumes about critical theorists, From Kant to Lévi-Strauss (Edinburgh, 2002), Contemporary Critical Theorists (Edinburgh, 2004), and From Agamben to Žižek (Edinburgh, 2010), and coedited Images: A Reader (London, 2006), an anthology about the interdisciplinary study of images. He has published essays about aestheticized politics, democracy and mediated politics, and edited a themed issue of Culture, Theory and Critique about democratic aesthetics (2009). Robert Storr is Professor of Painting/Printmaking and Dean of the School of Art at Yale University. He was Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New  York, from 1990 to 2002, where he organized exhibitions on Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann, Tony Smith, and Robert

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Ryman, in addition to coordinating the Projects series from 1990 to 2000. In 2002 he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is Consulting Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and was the commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale. He has been a contributing editor at Art in America since 1981 and writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), and Frieze (London). He has written numerous catalogs, articles, and books, including Philip Guston (New  York, 1986), Chuck Close (with Lisa Lyons, New York, 1987), and the forthcoming Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois. Martin Sundberg has a postdoctorate position at the project Eikones—NCCR Iconic Criticism, University of Basel. His publications include his doctoral thesis, Tillvaratagna effekter: Om Jan Håfströms konst och konstnärskap (Gothenburg, 2005); “Fragment,” (with Nils-Eric Sahlin), in Hare. Linje. Bianca Maria Barmen och Håkan Bengtsson, edited by Magnus Jensner (Helsingborg, 2007); and “Between Experiment and Everyday Life: The Exhibition Catalogues of Moderna Museet,” in The History Book: On Moderna Museet, 1958–2008, edited by Anna Tellgren (Göttingen, 2008). Timotheus Vermeulen  is Assistant Professor in Cultural Theory at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Since 2011, he has been Director of the Centre for New Aesthetics at the same university. He is also cofounder of the international research project Notes on Metamodernism, which brings together an international network of theorists, critics, and curators to study recent changes in aesthetics and culture that are symptomatic of the post-postmodern condition. As part of this project he edits a webzine (http://​www​ .metamodernism​.com) and has curated various contemporary culture festivals and art shows in New  York, Moscow, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Vermeulen writes on contemporary aesthetics, inter- and transmediality, art, cinema, and television. His work has appeared in various books, catalogues, journals, and magazines, including the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Screen, Frieze, and MONU. He is currently preparing two books on metamodernism. Rebecca Zorach teaches in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago, 2005); “Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence: Or, What Edgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s Primavera,” Critical Inquiry 34 (2007): 190–224; The Passionate Triangle (Chicago, 2011); and “Art and Soul: An Experimental Friendship Between the Street and a Museum,” Art Journal 70, no. 2 (2011): 66–87.

index

Participants in the Seminars are only indexed when they are referred to in the Assessments and Afterword. abject, 47, 50, 54–55, 75, 81–82, 212 Adorno, Theodor, 14, 29–30, 65, 68, 70–71, 74, 87, 120, 123, 152, 155, 190–94; affect theory and, 179–84 aesthetics, 3–9, 64, 76–89, 110–14; absent from relational aesthetics, 6; conservatism and, 8; contemporary understandings of, 3–4; as formalist, 23–24; opposites of, 4; precedes the affective regime, 108; transcultural and intercultural, 114. See also migratory aesthetics; relational aesthetics affect theory, 10–13, 26, 28, 91–108; administration, 101; Adorno and, 179–84; blunted, 102–3; clinical understandings of, 102; as conservative, 107; as deconstructive, 95; evoked but not named, 120; labor and, 204; relation to feelings, passions, moods, and sentiments 106–7; resistance and, 96. See also trauma theory affectation, 103 aisthesis, 79, 138 Alberro, Alex, 8 allegory, 49–40, 42. See also Owens, Craig altération, 51, 53 altermodernity, 6 Althusser, 93, 96, 101, 105, 204 animal, the, 11 animism, 89, 101, 103, 118 anthropology, 13

anti-​aesthetic (concept), first- and second-​order problems in, 15; not opposed to the aesthetic, 25–26, 70, 148, 155; origins of, 1–2, 26–27, 156. See also Anti-​Aesthetic, The (book) Anti-​Aesthetic, The (book), 1, 3–4, 37–39; aesthetization of, 203; essays as allegories, 42; essays as associative, 43; funding of, 185; reception in Europe, 48–49. See also anti-​aesthetic (concept); taste anti-​semiotics, 12 antihumanism, 91–92 Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 47 art history, 7, 9, 41, 43, 63–64, 91–93, 114, 117, 123–24, 151, 187, 201, 203 a-​signifying non-​sign, 99–100, 105, 212–13, 216; affect theory and, 12 assemblage, 42 Augé, Marc, 84 aura. See Benjamin, Walter autonomy, 29 “Avant-​Garde and Kitsch,” 30, 38 Bacon, Francis, 50, 77, 81–83, 91, 95, 99, 103, 123, 131, 182–83 Badiou, Alain, 7, 66; absent from the discussions, 109 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 50 Bal, Mieke, 10 balance, 9 Barriendos, Joaquín, 14 Barth, Karl, 6, 109 Barthes, Roland, 39, 42–44, 73, 93, 96, 122; affect theory and, 96; on structuralism, 34 Bataille, Georges, 5, 49–54, 101, 124, 134, 191, 209, 215

Baudrillard, Jean, 49, 123 beauty, 1, 3, 75; in art criticism, 35; in Christian hermeneutics, 109; contemporary positions regarding, 5–6 Beckley, Bill, 5, 109 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 30, 38, 44, 47, 59–60, 88, 120, 123, 140–41, 148–49; affect and, 74; authors of The Anti-​Aesthetic and, 39–40; concept of aura, 65, 89; two readings of, 75 Bennett, Jane, 10, 12 Bennett, Jill, 103 Bennett, Tony, 14 Berlant, Lauren, 26 Bernstein, Jay, 125, 127, 131, 135, 145, 151–52, 155–56, 159, 161, 168–70, 178–80, 190, 192, 198–99, 205, 208, 210, 212, 216, 218 Bersani, Leo, 26 beyond, as in Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-​ Aesthetic, 16 blasé, 102 body, biomediated, 11 Bois, Yve-​Alain, 27, 47, 50–54, 57, 59, 61, 72, 93, 134, 151, 191; reading of Manet’s Olympia, 68 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 14 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 6–8, 15. See also relational aesthetics Brecht, 78, 88–89, 97, 188 Breitz, Candice, 91, 96–97, 99, 104; affect in, 105 Brennan, Teresa, 106 Brown, Dakota, 179, 213 Buck-​Morss, Susan, 4, 43, 113 Bürger, Peter, 29, 32, 72, 151 Butler, Judith, 103–5, 206, 210 Camnitzer, Luis, 4 Caravaggio, 68–69 Cavell, Stanley, 60, 67–68 Christian scholarship, 5–6 clarity, 9

232

index Clark, Lygia, 85, 103 Clark, T. J., 7 Clough, Patricia, 11 Colescott, Robert, 187 Connolly, William, 12 conviction, 35 Costello, Diarmuid, 151–56, 168, 183, 191, 209, 213 creepy, the, 89 criteria, 67–68 Critical Art Ensemble, 4, 15 critical theory, 67–76, 123 criticality, 1, 35, 76, 113, 126; and affect, 95; as uninteresting, 86 criticism, 65–66, 78 critique, immanent, 58, 60–63, 68 Crowther, Paul, 4 Cunha Leal, Joana, 179, 190 Damisch, Hubert, 114 De Bolla, Peter, 4 Debray, Régis, 44 de Certeau, Michel, 84 decolonial theory, 114 deconstruction, 36, 40, 50–51, 57, 59, 61, 95 De Man, Paul, anti-​aesthetic and, 39 Demos, T. J., 10 Derrida, Jacques, 11. See also deconstruction desublimation, 51–53, 57 Didi-​Huberman, Georges, 101 difference, 50–51 différance, 95 disaffection. See affect theory Danto, Arthur, 1–2, 109; on beauty, 5 de Duve, Thierry, 7, 23 Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 12, 25, 50, 58, 68, 77–80, 92, 95, 99, 123, 127, 162; on affect, 182–83; Chinese reception of, 131; on sensation, 103–4, 179–80, 182. See also Bacon, Francis Eagleton, Terry, 9–10, 14 Eliasson, Olafur, 67, 71, 99, 170 Elkins, James, 132–33, 142, 144, 150, 152, 155, 159, 161, 171, 173, 192, 205–6, 218 empathy, 11, 112 Erfahrung, 74, 179–81 Evans, Brandon, 210 fascism, 96–97 feelings, 106, 180 fetishization, 47, 86, 99, 152, 187; Enlightenment critique of, 89

Fischl, Eric, 187 Flanagan, Mary, 76 Flavin, Dan, 67 formalism, 23–24 Formless: A User’s Guide. See informe Foster, Hal, 122–23, 125–26, 130, 132–34, 139, 140, 144, 151–52, 155–58, 159–63, 168–72, 175–77, 187–88, 191, 195, 198–99, 202–3, 205–7, 210, 217–19 Foucault, Michel, 14, 166–67 Freedberg, David, 89 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 52, 58, 92; as aesthetician, 10; and affect, 94, 99 Fried, Michael, 32, 35–37, 57, 59–62, 153 geography, 13 Giacometti, Alberto, 51 Gil, José, 180 Gilbert-​Rolfe, Jeremy, 5 Golub, Leon, 186 González-​Torres, Felix, 87–88 Greenberg, Clement, 23, 30, 143; quality and, 35; worldwide dissemination of, 49 Gregory of Nyssa, 145 Grossberg, Lawrence, 96 Guattari, Félix, 12 Gumbrecht, Hans, 13 Gursky, Andreas, 187 Haacke, Hans, 32–33, 51, 139, 156, 160 Hanning, Jens, 87 Harman, Graham, 11 Harrison, Charles, 102 Heidegger, 104, 148–50 Heiser, Jörg, 95 hermeneutics, 109, 138 Hertz, Neil, 4 heterochrony, 6 Hickey, Dave, 5, 109 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 106–7, 112 historicism, 40, 44 history of art. See art history Hollier, Denis, 50 Holly, Michael Ann, 13 Holzer, Jenny, 157 Hussain, Omair, 134, 192 Husserl, Edmond, as an aesthetician, 10 Huyghe, Pierre, 8 Habermas, Jürgen, 9, 24, 49 Hegel, 16, 24, 65, 136, 147–48, 170; Adorno’s reading of, 193 immanence. See critique, immanent

immediacy, 13 informe, 15, 49–52, 57–61, 68, 93, 151, 191 intemporality, 6 interesting, the, 35 Jameson, Fredric, 118, 201 Jones, Kelly, 187 Judd, Donald, 35, 103 judgment, 4, 23, 26, 34–35, 62, 67, 125, 135, 155, 161, 192, 207; and commitment, in Fried, 60. See also criticism; criteria; Kant Kameric, Sejla, 170 Kant, Immanuel, 44, 63, 65, 117–20, 150, 161, 168–69, 181, 207, 211, 219; contemporary understandings of, 4–6, 23–28, 168; non-​ aesthetic reading of, 135–38 Karlholm, Dan, 201 Kelley, Mike, 133–34 Kelly, Mary, 14, 33–34; Post-​ Partum Document, 43, 86, 91, 205, 210 Kentridge, William, 103 Kierkegaard, Søren, 104 Kiossev, Alexander, 110 Kitson, General Sir Frank, 166 Kjartansson, Ragnar, 170 Klein, Robert, 145 Krauss, Rosalind, 33–34, 40, 43, 49, 50–54, 65, 133–34; as author of Formless, 58–62; reception in China, 129; the paraliterary and, 37, 122. See also “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” Kuhn, Thomas, 35 Kuitca, Guillermo, 197 Lacan, Jacques, 42, 55, 93, 101, 186, 210, 212, 214 language. See affect theory Latin America, 48, 195 Latour, Bruno, 120, 143–44, 149, 215 Leroi-​Gourhan, André, 146 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude, 212 LeWitt, Sol, 156–58 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 78 Lyotard, Jean-​François, 4, 7, 44, 49, 78, 100, 123, 151 Manet, Edouard, 40, 50–51, 53–54 Maritain, Jacques, 6, 109

233

index Marx, Karl, 170, 201; as aesthetician, 10 Marxism, 89, 123, 155, 186 Massumi, Brian, 11–12, 26, 92, 99, 192 Mazzarella, William, 13 McGonagle, Declan, 165 medium, 32, 36, 59, 60–62, 107, 151, 153, 160, 173 Meltzer, Eve, 156, 177, 180, 183, 192, 212 Mental Status Examination, 12 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 103 Metzger, Gustav, 165 Meyer, James, 8, 34–35 migratory aesthetics, 10 mimesis of the hardened, 105 Mitchell, W. J. T., 89, 103, 112 modernism, 1, 27–35, 40, 47, 49, 57, 69, 143–44; mid-​ century formulation of, 153. See also metamodernism; nonmodernism; postmodernism modernity, 24–25 moods, 106 Morris, Robert, 92, 95, 99 Moxey, Keith, 13 Mulvey, Laura, 186 Murray, Elizabeth, 186 mysticism, 89, 147 neural correlates, 11 neuroaesthetics, 11 neurobiology, 11 Newman, Barnett, 2–3 Ngai, Sianne, 92, 94, 100, 212 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 40 Noé, Luis Felipe, 4, 195 Noland, Carrie, 103 nomadic thought, 6 nonmodernism, 143 nonrepresentational theory, 13 Ostojić, Tanja, 203 Owens, Craig, 37–41, 43–45 Panksepp, Jaak, 11 paraliterary, the, 37, 43, 122 performance art, 10 phenomenology, as aesthetics, 10 Pisters, Patricia, 10 pluralism, 50, 126 poeisis, 118 poetics, 135–38, 172, 174 political theory, 12 politics, as missing from the Seminars, 111–12, 119, 139–42, 171–76, 186, 188 Polke, Sigmar, 186 Pollock, Griselda, 4, 202 Pollock, Jackson, 52, 57, 61

Post-​Partum Document. See Kelly, Mary postcolonial theory. See decolonial theory; self-​colonization postmodernism, 31–33, 38, 118, 143; German reception of, 44; resistant and reactionary, 47–48, 75 poststructuralism, 33 presence, 13 Prince, Richard 187 psychiatry, clinical, 12 quality, 35 Rancière, Jacques, 7–8, 14–15, 25, 66, 77–89, 160–67, 198–200; Chinese reception of, 130 Rauschenberg, Robert, 42–43 redemption, 27, 68, 70, 75, 88, 111–12 Rediscovering Aesthetics, 9 reification, 47, 83 relational aesthetics, 6–7, 60, 75, 83–89, 103, 111–12, 118, 121, 164, 175–78, 209; as affirmative, 84 representation. See nonrepresentational theory resistance, 1, 76, 87; affect and, 96 Richter, Gerhard, 60, 62, 153, 186 Rollins, Tim, 139 Romanticism, anti-​aesthetic and, 39 Rosenthal, Norman, 165 Rosler, Martha, 51 Ross, Toni, 8, 34–35, 159–63 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 33, 40, 129, 206 Said, Edward, 111, 113–14 Salcedo, Doris, 103 Salle, David, 187 Scarry, Elaine, 109 Schaeffer, Jean-​Marie, 7; absent from the discussions, 109 Schaper, Eva, 168–69 Schiller, Friedrich, 24–29, 68, 70, 120, 159, 161–62 Schjeldahl, Peter, 5, 109 Schlegels, the, 28, 43, 65, 148–50, 161 Schnabel, Julian, 187 Sedgwick, Eve, 12 self-​colonization, 112 semiotics. See a-signifying non-​sign; anti-​ semiotics

Silverman, Kaja, 92 Singer, Peter, 11 Smith, Jack, 187 spectacle, 97 Spero, Nancy, 186 Spinoza, Baruch, 12 Steiner, George, 13 Steiner, Wendy, 5, 109 Stephanson, Anders, 141 structuralism, 33, 195 sublimation. See desublimation sublime, 2, 4–5, 7, 28, 35, 74, 95, 135, 138, 161, 181, 207; The Anti-​Aesthetic and, 65; contemporary understandings of, 4; Lacan’s Real and, 55 symmetry, 9 synesthesia, 12 taste, 8, 24, 100, 118–19, 125, 135–37, 168–69, 195–96; things that go against Anti-​Aesthetic, 186–87 Tate Triennial, 6, 10 Tate, Greg, 187 temporality. See heterochrony; intemporality Terada, Rei, 26, 92, 99, 182 theory, narrowness of, 111–14, 119, 123 Thompson, James, 10 Thompson, Robert, 4, 187 Thrift, Nigel, 13 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 84 Tomkins, Silvan, 12 trauma theory, 10, 96, 104 Turrell, James, 66, 71, 99 Updike, John, 6 van Damme, Wilfried, 9 Van den Braembussche, Antoon, 14 Vermeulen, Timothy, 12 Viola, Bill, 4, 12, 67, 99, 107 Wall, Jeff, 60 Warhol, Andy, 55, 223 Weiskel, Thomas, 4 Welsch, Wolfgang, 44 Willsdon, Dominic, 8, 85 Wojnarowicz, David, 177 Yes Men, 15 Zinggl, Wolfgang, 203 Žižek, Slavoj, 193 zombies, 88