Nietzschean Critique and the Hegelian Commodity, or the French Have Landed Author(s): Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Reviewed work(s):

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 70-84 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344146 . Accessed: 18/11/2011 11:25
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Nietzschean Critique and the Hegelian Commodity, or The French Have Landed

JeremyGilbert-Rolfe

The art world may be said to have adopted some of the ideas suggested by the phrase "French theory," while leaving alone those elements in it that might interfere with the collective pursuit of business as usual. In a manner perhaps reminiscent of de Certeau's theory that the working class takes only what it can use from high culture and leaves the rest, the ways in which the art world uses French ideas have less to do with not understanding their original meaning and intention than with deciding what's useful (to the pursuit of business as usual) and what's not. Of the changes in which French theory has played a part in the past twenty-five or so years, one could point to its role in the shift from an interest in art and art objects specifically to one in visual culture in general-from art to anthropology-that has been such a large part of art history and criticism since the seventies. Or, within art practice conceived as such, one could say that a painting hegemony that by the early sevenfounded on a ties had already become a sculpture hegemony-which, pervasive idea about art not being pictorial, was therefore largely devoted to reinventing the pictorial in other terms-has subsequently transformed itself into a Duchampian hegemony. This transformation had two stages and involved the diminution of the idea of pictorialism by artists and critics-for example, Don Judd, as both-who nonetheless made or championed a great deal of work that was pictorial, albeit in a way that somehow slipped beyond the boundaries
This essay was first presented as a paper at the "French Theory in America" conference at New York University and the Drawing Center, Nov. 1997.
CriticalInquiry26 (Autumn 1999) O 1999 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/99/2601-0007$02.00.

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of the definition in use for purposes of denunciation. The first stage involved minimalism's alleged literalization of the art object, which was felt to liberate it from painting's irreducibly illusory pictorialism, a pictorialism that was to be replaced by (an idea of) the specific. At that point one finds Judd briefly embracing Marcel Duchamp.1 But soon minimalism itself was to be found lacking in nonaestheticism, to be altogether too retinal and thus implicitly pictorial in a thoroughly bad way. Sculpture then became obliged to function not only as a ready-made concept but as a form only available as a readymade-as an object that exists to be read and interpreted rather than seen. Duchamp was after all a late symbolist, the antiretinal and the readymade being terms that replace the phenomenological with the iconographical.2
1. See, for example, Amelia Jones, Postmodernism the En-Genderingof MarcelDuand champ(Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 40-42. I refer elsewhere in this essay to W. J. T Mitchell's "The Pictorial Turn," Artforum30 (Mar. 1992): 89-94 and should therefore distinguish my use of the word pictorialfrom his to avoid confusion. Mitchell sees the pictorial as a condition of intensified iconicity that has particular potency in or around the present moment, drawing from that a number of conclusions germane here. For instance, one might say that while Judd withdrew from Duchamp once he realized that it would lead to the kind of iconicity that Mitchell describes, Robert Morris took minimalism in a direction quite consistent with Mitchell's definition of pictorial through works that, as it were, specificallyrefer to Duchamp. My use of the word, however, has less to do with iconicity than with pictorialism's fundamental illusionism. Pictorial here refers to a space that can only be present by being pictured, as in a painting: a space that can only exist by being not real, in the sense of not really being a space because it is a surface; in that way it is the opposite of the spatial in the same way that the image is the opposite of the real. This is what disturbed Judd about painting. Because of its inherently illusionistic condition, Judd associated pictorialism with Europe and other varieties of degeneration, opposing to it the (American) alternatives of himself and, in a manner alternately banal and opaque, Charles Sanders Peirce. The passage from the literal to the iconic has depended on both being grounded in invocations (in effect, idealisms) of the real: "real space" and "specific objects" then; the social and the cultural now. 2. Since it has as yet had no effect on the art world, there is no need to pursue here the implications of Rhonda Roland Shearer's recent claim that none of the readymades were anything of the sort, but it is worth taking note of them-for example, that if it were true it would no longer be possible to make the claim that Duchamp did away with originality. Shearer has researched Duchamp and seems to have shown that the original perfume bottle was peach-colored rather than blue, that the 50 cc ampule of Paris air is unique in

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe teaches at Art Center, Pasadena. His critical works include Immanence Contradiction: and Recent on DeEssays theArtistic vice(1986),Beyond on Arts,1986-1993 (1995), Piety:Critical Essays theVisual and two forthcoming works,Beauty the Contemporary and Sublime and (in collaborationwith FrankGehry) Frank the Gehry, City,and Music.He was the 1998 recipient of the College Art Association's FrankJewett Mather Awardfor Art or ArchitecturalCriticism,in part for his most recent contributionto Critical "Blanknessas a Signifier"(Autumn 1997). Inquiry,

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Of which one could also say that, in tandem with a shift of attention from art to culture, there has been a general movement in theoretical and critical practice from the visual as the visible to the visual as the legible. Or, more precisely, perhaps, the "lisible":the visual as writerly, visual only in the sense that writing has to be seen to be read.3 Work that does not repress the visual in this way is now-this is where Duchampianism prepared New York for French theory before proceeding to appropriate it-widely regarded as by definition incoherent, legible only as illegibility, vision itself (as an intransitive and undetermined retinal response to phenomena as opposed to a transitive and determined act of interpretation) only a passive tabularasa for images. Clearly these changes could be placed in more than one relationship of parallelism, convergence, and divergence, and one could add others. How each strand of change relates to this or that French theory is affected by how it coincides with or finds something its protagonists can use in it. For example, as Mieke Bal has pointed out, terms such as intertextuality,
that no one ever manufactured a 50 cc ampule of any kind for commercial purposes, that snow shovels and wine racks were never made the way his are, and so forth; see Leslie Camhi, "Did Duchamp Deceive Us?" Art News 98 (Feb. 1999): 98-102. Suffice it to say that it is not sufficient to dismiss this with the claim that "everything is a commodity"-a non sequitur itself dubiously circular, if not reflexive-as the Duchamp scholar David Joselit is reported to have responded to the news, when the issue is precisely that Duchamp has not simply transformed these objects by "inscribing them." Nor is it convincing to murmur defensively that Shearer has come up with the "'best scholarship that money can buy"' or that she is somehow using her marriage to the prominent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to promote her unpopular premise (Sarah Boxer, "Taking Jokes by Duchamp to Another Level of Art,"New York Times,20 Mar. 1999, pp. B7, B9). One would hope that she has some resources, as every art historian tenured in the last fifteen years and every curator who achieved her or his position during the same period is likely to be arrayed against her. Attempts to dismiss what she has to say out of hand merely invite one to ask why the materialists who have spent the last quarter century celebrating Duchamp's subversion of idealism never checked any of the facts themselves and to suspect that they did not do so because of their eagerness to believe. Arthur Danto's declaration that if it is true he has no further interest in Duchamp seems more logical, or philosophical, than Joselit's response, even if he too misses the sense in which Duchamp may be more interesting when seen as a minor symbolist-which should encourage a closer scrutiny of the peculiar array of objects he now appears to have chosen to laboriously invent-rather than a profound iconoclast. With regard to the question of French theory's assimilation to a reinvented Duchamp, if what Shearer has to say need not matter to artists, a great deal of great art always having been the product of bad ideas-which is to agree with Danto when he goes on to say that the readymade will certainly survive any revision of its putative originator-it does seem to me that for a primary agent of demystification to turn out to have itself been an art historical trick must have some consequences for an art historicism that has taken it literally, that is, been tricked. If it were true, a future history of the recent past could see the theorists of art after art to have been describing instead art that was still art, with dire implications for the critical finality they had claimed for their theories and, perhaps, requiring hurried or tortuous retrieving of some aspects of French theory from its entanglement with a by then demystified Duchamp. 3. I thank Tom Mitchell for suggesting this term to me.

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had an immediate application in literature for dissemination,and polysemy which the visual arts were in comparison unprepared. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Barthes and Lacan especially should have first found their way into general currency by way of film theory, helping along an art engaged in a recognizable play of denotation and connotation. However, as we all know, in art history dates matter as much as forms. Barthes's ideas arrived in New York in the early 1970s, having been written ten to twenty years earlier, followed quite shortly thereafter by Derrida's, Foucault's, and Lacan's, while those of Baudrillard and of Deleuze and Guattari took quite a long time to turn up, becoming really popular only in the 1980s. The arrival then of the first wave of translated French theory coincided with the transformation of the art object, noted above, that followed from various attempts to think a way out of what is still called formalism in part by attending to, and reviving, social and psychological content that formalism had either actually or allegedly left out. It was into the service of this debate and what flowed from it-in which Clement Greenberg by then played a purely symbolic role as the defeated but not expunged critic, his actual power having been diminished by the rise of pop art and minimalism-that theory, whether French or not, arriving in the American art world at that moment, was destined to be conscripted. Duchamp having been reinvented in order to topple Greenberg, it also seems unsurprising that the idea of the readymade would have been made compatible with that of the death of the author as soon as that became available, or that the Duchampian deferral of attention from the object to its context should have been related to the shift in interest from the art object to culture in general, and both to French theory's capacity to subvert textual hierarchies. Greenberg's enemies fell into two camps: those who were impatient with abstraction and longed for a realism that would be representational and moreover be so in a way that dealt with a recognizable historical and psychological content, and those who rather liked difficult language but didn't like Greenberg personally. The first group had no reason to like the second, but there were clearly areas of shared tactical interest-for example, neither liked painting-with regard to which Foucault provided the logos for their coalescence. Foucault's popularity never had much to do with anything he said about painting. What made his writing attractive to begin with was what guarantees its continuing popularity: his emphasis on the institutional. For some this has meant that everything in a culture is once again describable in terms of a realism traditionally conceived. For others it has suggested new possibilities for a realism of the sign rather than the thing, which has often taken the form of a Lacanianism itself always already

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reconciled to Foucault by way of Laura Mulvey's idea about the male gaze, that is, by an idea of the visible as a gendered language of surveillance. These were the terms in which Foucault long since became assimilated to thinking founded-however securely-in the example and methods of the Frankfurt school, the transitional model for those (in the art world as elsewhere) who wanted a social content but could not be satisfied with the American populism of earlier generations, requiring instead a more rigorous theory of the social. During the past twenty-five years American social theories of the art object have moved gracefully from an older Marxism to a Frankfurt school phase, proceeding from there to a Foucaultian model in which the institution performs an exemplary role, the museum as paradigmatic historical form, judgment reified, and where all thinking about art, however conceived, is thinking about social power. While Foucault may be separated from the Frankfurt school by a preference for genealogy over dialectics-the implications of which are central to this essay-his reappropriation by dialectical historicism was, obviously, encouraged by what he said about themes and topics he shared with it. Quite apart from the role Foucault gives to transgression, particularly in his later writing, which might invite comparison with Benjamin's characterization of Brecht's artistic practice, or Adorno's of Schoenberg's, as negative reflections (respectively popular and elite) of dominant ideology-knowledge in and as power-his specific interest in how, for example, "in the 18th century one sees the development of reflection upon architecture as a function of the aims and techniques of the government of societies," could be seen to parallel Benjamin's study of the Paris arcades as model and expression of, and for, power and knowledge: "The architectural theorist B6tticher expressed the general conviction when he said that 'with regard to the art-forms of the new system, the formal principle of the Hellenic mode' must come into force. Empire was the style of revolutionary terrorism, for which the State was an end in itself."4 Foucault and Benjamin are both interested in how architecture carries out a plan that reveals-partly unintentionally, partly intentionally-more than the planners planned. (Oddly, they both nonetheless see the architectural program and its realization as quite-one could say ideally-continuous with each other.) They at least overlap in describing power as an economics of display that includes a discernable public language of concealment. It is affinities such as these that make it possible, as W.J. T Mitchell has said, for "Foucault, Adorno, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Debord, Deleuze, and other critics [to] all co-exist happily ... their disagreements
4. Michel Foucault, interview with Paul Rabinow, "Space, Knowledge, and Power" (1982), trans. Christian Hubert, FoucaultLive (Interviews,1961-1984), ed. Sylvere Lotringer (1989; New York, 1996), p. 335; Walter Benjamin, CharlesBaudelaire:A LyricPoet in the Era of High Capitalism,trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973) p. 158.

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and discrepancies ... utterly forgotten in the blinding light of a 'domiThat is the sense in nant model' illuminating a 'homogeneous terrain.'"'5 which Foucault has provided a way of thinking of the space of the art object as, once the metaphysical subject and with it the idea of art as such have disappeared, one that can be helpfully filled with objects, installations, and nonobjects exclusively devoted to a socioanthropological function. This function is roughly equivalent to something some kinds of art did when we were still able to have works of art, but which was then regarded as supplementary to an aesthesis itself now felt to be merely one more aspect of the work's identity as an iconographical enunciation (voluntary or involuntary) of power relationships in (or as) the public sphere. On the other side of the reformulated version of the Frankfurt school's model of the institution and the individual, where Foucault has now replaced Marx, Lacan has similarly replaced Freud. Lacanianism quickly became a popular way of thinking about artworks or successors to the idea of the artwork as opportunities for the reinvention of the subject, and while Steven Melville and others have talked about Lacan's indebtedness to Hegel, this has tended to get lost in Lacan's understandable assimilation to issues of a sociopolitical sort where Hegel is understood to have been on the wrong side.6 It remains, however, one possible explanation among several for Lacan's acceptability within the discipline of art history. Another may be that as a rehearsal in other terms of an idea of empathetic contemplation, the mirror phase is quite consistent with earlier theories of the subject's relationship to the pictorial and therefore can readily be brought to bear on those earlier ideas that it seeks to modify or replace. Lacan has been enormously useful in expanding art history's sense of the rhetoric of picturing, but mention of his Hegelianism brings me to the central problem posed by most French theory's proceeding from a Nietzchean position7 while the art world cannot do without Hegel, that is, the problem of wanting to use history in a way that Nietzsche and therefore Foucault et alia do not. This leads to the pragmatic selectivity I mentioned when I began. The art world clearly cannot do without the Hegelian idea that there are certain works that are more important than others because they capture, or otherwise manifest or even in part produce, the spirit of the age. The art world can't do without the idea that
5. Mitchell, "The Pictorial Turn," p. 93. 6. See Stephen Melville, "Division of the Gaze, or, Remarks on the Color and Tenor Art ed. of Contemporary 'Theory,"'Seams: as a Philosophical Context, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 111-19. 7. Even though, as Mitchell delicately notes, "it's not clear that Foucault himself completely avoided [German Idealism's] temptations" (Mitchell, "The Pictorial Turn," p. 93). See also note 8.

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there is an age, a temporal finitude defined by specific characteristics, that it does have a spirit and that works of art, or what has taken their place, are to be judged in these terms, which is to say, according to their historical significance-which they achieve through historical introspection or retrospection. In one sense Foucault's role in all of this was prepared for him. As Robert Gooding-Williams has noted, "Nietzsche's postmodernism can be ... identified with his belief that the modern or classical episteme is one of domination. From this perspective, Nietzsche's postmodernism links him to Heidegger, and to Horkheimer and Adorno."8 Michael Podro has shown how, in principle, Hegel's Aesthetics "irreis ducible to his general philosophy of history," an irreducibility that was subsequently maintained, in principle, by (not only) Hegelian art historians.9 Greenberg's defense of the New York school's painting was couched in a Hegelian history of forms irreducible-but not in that unrelatedto history in general: two manifestations of the spirit. However, many of his detractors, as well as critics who simply came afterwards and from somewhere else, seem both to dispute his claims and to transpose them, concerned as they are not only to claim a comparable (and competing) historical significance for work that is not New York school, but simultaneously to insist there is no longer any history other than history in general. This suggests a state of affairs that remains Hegelian-although in a that Hegel did not recommend, since while imagining the art object's way disappearance he didn't anticipate its replacement by anthropology but
8. Robert Gooding-Williams, "Nietzsche's Pursuit of Modernism," New GermanCritique 41 (Spring-Summer, 1987): 96. This suggests, perhaps, that temptation may be seen to travel in both directions, according to the mutual attractiveness of theories of power. One may compare what Gooding-Williams says about Adorno and Heidegger with what William Spanos describes as the "affiliative relationship" between Heidegger's theory of the "world that bore witness to picture" and Foucault's definition of the Enlightenment as "the episteme the emergence of the 'panoptic' schema, the microphysics of power that constituted the subject (the sovereign individual) to facilitate the achievement of sociopolitical consensus (identity) in the volatile social context precipitated by a rapidly changing demography" Retrieving the CulturalPolitics of Destruction[Minneapolis, 1993], p. (Heideggerand Criticism: 138). Spanos is concerned to preserve Heidegger from the neoconservative assault on his thought launched in the name of humanism by Victor Farias-that is, he uses Foucault in a dispute about how Heidegger is being used-and for some the affiliation he discerns will seem too broad, a function of both seeing Western civilization as having "involved the ... recognition and exploitation of the indissoluble relationship between visual (spatial) perception of things-as-they-are and cultural, economic, and sociopolitical power," when the same thing could be said-for example-about Marx (although, ironically, perhaps with less certainty), but here that could be the point (p. 138). However general the claim may be that these thinkers have in common a discomfort with what has become of the Enlightenment and may even share a definition of how the visual, as an idea of the spatial (that is, as a concept), plays a part in that project, it remains something of a leap to proceed from theories that allow for vision's implication in cultural (and so forth) power to seeing the visual only as a sign or symptom of domination. 9. Michael Podro, The CriticalHistoriansof Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982) p. 17.

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by a future art unencumbered by the material rather than the reversein that what has replaced art is still lodged in a dialectic where one kind of work, rhetoric, process, or ontological or morphological reduction or generalization is understood to be more important or relevant or significant than others; but distinctions between and to some extent within works of art, or alternatives to the idea of works of art, remain Kantian, as they are in Hegel.10 One is judged to be better than the other in terms of what it does with the intrinsic properties of the form or of whatrefusal of form's priority, or supplement to it-has been substituted for an idea of form. However, where Hegel took the presence of intrinsic properties to mean that art could parallel a history to which it could not be reduced, these current distinctions may now do little more than defer to a general (historicist) idea, the contemporary critic having extended to absurdity Hegel's claim that although "abstract peculiarities of works of art may, like their material medium, be consistently explored in their characteristic traits ... they cannot be worked out as the ultimate and fundamental law, because any such aspect itself derives its origins from a higher principle, and must therefore be subordinate thereto."" The already conditional autonomy granted to works of art by Hegel having been withdrawn altogether, their abstract particularities and characteristic traits are now implicitly reduced to insignificance. While seeing no alternative, one notes certain difficulties with this situation. For example, Nietzsche, in a very Foucaultian passage on punishment, talks about some events being connected not by any causal relationship within them but instead only by the will to power and goes on to say that "while forms are fluid, their 'meaning' is even more so."12 But despite twenty years of occupation by Nietzscheanism the art object is always championed, by those who want one to look at it for whatever reason-who want to sell it intellectually or actually-as a particularly acute use of art history, specifically, of the very recent history of the art object or its institutional or conventional semiotics. If the work doesn't do anything with those themes, or do something by not doing anything with them, then it's hard to make a case for it as an interesting art event or object in art world terms. There is no fluidity here. And this is where Nietzschean antiHegelianism, for example its rejection of history conceived as a teleology
10. "For other objects, such as instruction, purification, improvement, pecuniary gain, endeavor after fame and honor, have nothing to do with the work of art as such, and do not determine its conception" (G. W. E Hegel, Introductory Lectureson Aesthetics,trans. Bernard Bosequet, ed. Michael Inwood [Harmondsworth, 1993], p. 61). 11. Ibid., p. 96. One should also note the ambiguity of "itself derives its origins"Hegel doesn't say "is derived from" or "originates in." 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy Morals, in "TheBirth of Tragedy" "TheGeneand of alogy of Morals,"trans. Francis Golfing (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), p. 210.

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divided into periods, can cause difficulties. At least one art historian has been caught offering the original proposition that the posthistorical is a period in which one doesn't have periodicity because one doesn't have originality.13And that is what leads me to suggest that the bits of French theory that get left out are the bits that would make the art world situation as a whole untenable if left in. I think, then, that in addition to any given failure to resist temptation, it is because of the intractible Hegelianism of art discourse itself-manifest in its effortless folding of the death of the art object into art history, which thereby becomes eternal once more-that Foucault and Barthes and perhaps Lacan, too, become incorporated into a game about what kind of artistic production currently best captures or articulates the spirit of the age, which turns out to be a kind of art that is about institutions, about the varied cultural content of signs, and about the kind of viewer and viewing constructed by dominant culture. It becomes a socioanthropological art-in which cultural codes are socially allegorical-that usually ornaments theories that are already complete and need no supplementation by decorating them with some (icono)graphic instantiation of themselves, but that also on occasion takes those same theories off somewhere they wouldn't have gone if left to themselves. There is, for example, little if anything in Foucault's idea of the death of the author that leads inexorably to Sherrie Levine's application of it to the readymade, and thence to her production, as critical objects, of reproductions of the work of Walker Evans. But Foucault provided her, or those who champion her work, a set of theoretical predispositions that allowed her to extend the rhetorical scope of Duchampianism into a kind of historicism of the undead. (Whether or not will to power made the work, it conceives itself as reaction.) Reversibility reappears within a doctrine of the irreversible. Marx is subsumed, but then again he's not. Going in the other direction, Foucault's (and Barthes's) subsumption by Frankfurt school Hegelianism has certainly been facilitated by our seeming to have decided that, while Freud may not be quite adequate to human psychology, all artworks are Freudian (the immense popularity of Rudolph Schwarzkogler or Paul McCarthy testifies to the popularity of this belief). Also, just as all artworks exhibit an unconscious made possible by fetishistic privileging, contiguity, and implication, so too we've come to agree that while Marx may have been subsumed or displaced, art may still be said to employ a Marxist attitude to surplus value, where it plays with a marginal surplus squeezed out of the signs it appropriates. Andy Warhol is a crucial figure here, despite his seeming to have felt none of the need to leave the object/ only by context-characteristic sign virtually untouched-transformed of many otherwise indebted to his example. Like American television companies seeking pure profit out of the European market once their prod13. See Gooding-Williams, "Nietzsche's Pursuit of Modernism," pp. 98-99.

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uct has more than returned its original investment on the domestic one, Warhol understood surplus meaning-artistic content-to be what you got if you could put an already circulating sign to one more use. For him the sign didn't have to be dead and it didn't matter who originated it, but for Levine it did, in both cases so that it could become a critical object. It is in these terms that Foucault especially seems to have been made to measure for the socioanthropological art that fills most of the art magazines nowadays. Some will of course find an uncanny parallelism between the attraction of a model derived from a building that was never built, as Norman Bryson has remarked ofJeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and the popularity of conceptualism, an idea of institutional transparency committed to the convention of the proposal rather than the object. Likewise, the Foucault who argued that people in ancient Rome didn't have sex but instead only had power relationships has been incorporated into a connoisseurship of cultural rather than aesthetic displays grounded in a traditional debate about which one provides the more relevant insight into, or, better, embodiment of, the spirit of the age. As an institution devoted to symbolic exchange (conceivably a pleonasm to a Foucaultian) the art space-gallery, museum, or magazine-has become the zone where the world may be turned upside down by being read from the point of view of a writing that cannot take place elsewhere and is about the sociocultural implications of that exclusion. All of this boils down to Foucault having been incorporated into the redemptive art practice-that is, art as exemplary social practice, where what is exemplified is social contradiction conceived in an essentially Brechtian sort of way--theoretically outlined by Peter Buirger in his Theoryof theAvant Garde,a theory of art that did not originate in France and that has no use for counterhistory or any kind of theoretical or artistic project that might frustrate or seek to find a way around a historicist teleology.14 (This is what raises the question of whether Biirger's theory and its derivatives constitute a Hegelianism in which the symbolic praxis of the counterdominant performs the reduction against which Podro warns, which is not a question of the cultural as opposed to the aesthetic but of the aesthetic as only a reflection of cultural causality.)15 But in its assimilation to a kind of Brechtianism, thinking such as
14. See Peter Birger, Theory trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984). oftheAvant-Garde, 15. As in Heidegger: "The term 'anthropology'... does not mean just some investigation of man by natural science.... It designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man" (Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," TheQuestionConcerning and OtherEssays, trans. and ed. William Lovett [New York, 1977], p. 133). One Technology difference is that we now do live in a world overwhelmed by technology, which is why I should think of Mitchell's pictorial turn as an intensification and inversion of the one Heidegger proposed, a further turning away from phenomena to appearance as iconicity, part of a general project concerned with the origins of the human in the posthuman-the anthropology of the techno-sublime.

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Foucault's has been to varying degrees deprived of its Nietzschean volition. The will to power has been reconciled with, or displaced into, an organic theory of art historical development that remains Hegelian not least in that it still explains itself in terms of this as a reaction to that, where the relationship of this to everything else defines an entirety. In being reconciled with what it once was not, thinking that was formerly (but is now only formally) Nietzschian seems precluded from asking-in its own (for example, Foucaultian) terms-what significance is acquired by those terms that are now excluded by the socioanthropological, what sort of counterfunction is thereby attributable to them by virtue of their exclusion, and how that might be deployed. One of these excluded terms would be disinterestedness, the reorientation from freedom from (deterand to freedom to (think) that it brings with it. mination) If Foucault's thinking has been made to contribute substantially to the theoretical language of a more varied content, reinforcing a process underway when it arrived, but to do nothing about ideas about form, French theory that does seem to have contributed directly to rethinking criticism about, or which proceeds from, the appearance-as opposed to the social reason for being, or not-of the art object or its alternative has had a very spotty reception. There are two reasons for this that, mirroring those that facilitated Foucault's reception, return me to the distinction between the visible and the legible-implicit in the question of appearance-and to Bal's observation about literature's reception of deconstruction as opposed to art history's. Derrida and Deleuze have been received very differently by the art world than were Foucault or Barthes, or so it seems to me, and I think this is because it was or is more difficult to enlist them in the pursuit of business as usual. As with other French thinkers, much of what has been done with Deleuze has been done by people wishing to adapt his and Guattari's observations to arguments that return to the Frankfurt school, or that show everything to begin there, which is the same thing.'6 But convergences that threaten reversibility by cutting across causation and putting provisional genealogies of functionality in its place-not to mention Deleuze's insistence that capitalism is strong because it is infinitely weak and slack-are of only limited use to determinists, while Foucault's world of symbolic power as actual power is invaluable. As noted, Deleuze (like Baudrillard) arrived in America long after the Greenberg wars, when even minimalism had slipped into art history, and all was firmly
16. Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time, Theory after Television(Durham, N.C., 1994), and J. M. Bernstein, The Fateof Art (University Park, Pa., 1992) are examples of this. Both, let me take this occasion to note, are works from which I have derived a great deal. Bernstein's book is where I first encountered a convincing equation of contemporary capitalism with the sublime, and Dienst goes further than anyone else I know in theorizing the temporal order proposed by the continuity of video.

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realist once again. That his thought threatens to provide an argument for a work of art that deterritorializes (the morphology of the art object) without guaranteeing reterritorialization by the institution, from the art world's point of view an inverse mirror of Foucault's guarantee of an ordered world, may account for his limited popularity. The art market confirms Deleuze's image of capitalism in its capacity to absorb anything, but the art world prefers to see capitalism as symbolically embodied in the museum, where it may be creatively critiqued, for which one needs Foucault, rather than in the market, which may be critiqued but where critique cannot take place. What is true of Deleuze seems even truer of Derrida. I should relate Bal's point that literary studies was more prepared to receive deconstruction-because it originated there-than were philosophy departments to the question of literary studies's relative indifference to the historical model, when compared not with philosophy (although one could make a similar case) but to the visual arts. We usually have departments of literature rather than of literary history, but we only study art in art history departments-unless we actually want to make some, in which case we have a special little ghetto, as we also do if we want to create writing. It's not that deconstruction is ahistorical, which it obviously is not; it's that it destabilizes the priority of the historical, and this renders everything incomprehensible from the point of view of the art world, which wants to be told where the work stands in a historical continuum and, once it has been told that, doesn't feel the need to hear much else. Furthermore, to add insult to injury as it were, Derrida has been extremely valuable to people (for example, Michael Fried and Steven Melville) who want to write about the kind of work that is identified with Greenberg and Greenberg's formalism (that is, with the kind of work no one is supposed to do or write about)."7 Having returned to a kind of social realism by way of Foucault, and to a neoclassical model of transparent form and signifying content by way of Duchamp, the art world has for the most part lost interest in the visual as the visible. Paradoxically, Derrida, whom some allege to see nothing but writing anywhere, except, one supposes, where he sees the space of writing, has provided a great deal of stimulus, because of his work's foundation in the phenomenological problematic, to new ways of describing nonrepresentational art. To take one example-from within literary studies rather than art historyCharles Altieri's Derridean reading of Frank Stella, which, in elaborating a quintessentially phenomenological object, nonrepresentational painting, through a discourse built out of a critique of phenomenology, re17. Which is also to say, especially in regard to Fried, to writing which strives to be scrupulously and, as it were, exclusively historical. I discuss Fried's and Melville's relation to Derrida in my introduction to Melville, Seams, pp. 8-13.

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stages an argument about the ethical function of a Kantian project that should be of interest to a very wide audience, regardless of anyone's specific interests or point of view.'8 It is, however, nothing of the sort. As remarked, most people are not interested in the kind of art that raises the question of art rather than deferring it by declaring it dead and doing socioanthropology instead. And when it comes to art, as opposed to society and culture, which may be infinitely divided, they seem uninterested in writing that raises the possibility that, at the very least, there must always be a number of histories and not just one and therefore what might be required might be a model of interactivity-of, indeed, intertextuality-rather than the same old one of replacement and subsumption through negation. Even less attractive, in a general sort of way, is the idea that in any case one can only know history as wrong turns and significant if not irreversible loss, which is the Heideggerian side of Derrida and which reduces history's appeal as the institution that will provide a way forward and a proper appreciation of the things in the present that we like, while also presenting and preserving those from the past that we like because they illustrate contradiction and error--unconsciously performing a critique around which the contemporary revolves consciously. If Deleuze is less popular than Foucault because he's always reordering rather than returning to an order, Derrida is comparably unpopular because he, rather unexpectedly, reaches out to nonrepresentation--and therefore to Kant and disinterest-where Foucault offers the certainty of representation and the immutable mutability of eternally competing interests. Perhaps it is even arguable that this certainty and immutability themselves guarantee that no line of flight cutting through categories to form a singularity, nor any overflowing of any signature, will disturb the episteme through which the art world represents itself, without doubt, to itself. To conclude, then, the art world must be selective with regard to Nietzschean thought of any sort because it depends on ideas succeeding one another in a manner that is a clue to and a condition of their value. The art historian teased about describing the present as a period in which one doesn't have periodicity was, after all, in a sense quite right. The art world must be able to imagine that the present will come to an end, that there will one day be a period when the nonhierarchical, even the intertextual, was fashionable once and therefore can be no longer. Only the periodizing industry will proceed as it has in the past. The art world depends on it. It is a market where this costs more than that because it is more historically significant than that, historical significance being its
18. See Charles Altieri, "Frank Stella and Jacques Derrida: Toward a Postmodern Ethed. and ics of Singularity," in Deconstruction the VisualArts:Art, Media, Architecture, Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 168-87.

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stock in trade. One irony of this situation, which, again, seems to me inevitable and inescapable, is that an art world so doomed to repeating a model can for that very reason only have repetition as an idea that, if it's to be significant now, will have to be insignificant soon. These are the sorts of questions that an art discourse more open to deconstruction could permit itself to think about. What one has instead is the incorporation of lots of good ideas into an old idea that is left untouched. I have said almost nothing about specific practices within what I've collectively called the socioanthropological, which are indebted to French theory and have, as separate discourses, made it a prominent part of the production and dissemination of things found in art galleries. Within what is as far as I can see a universal Foucaultianism, different strains and genealogies, sometimes combining thinkers often regarded as incompatible, like Kristeva and Irigaray, have developed lives of their own. Just like art used to have when it was around. This should lead to a varied sense of intertextuality, of the polyvocal and of the polysemic construction of any particular voice. It, however, would require an end to the implication and fundamental belief that even if people are describing different things in different ways all things are in fact and nonetheless governed by a movement towards a single truth (which only some can realize, which is to say, make visible). My topic has been the impact of French thought on the American art world, but I see the general condition as ubiqitous and international: exciting when one finds (in an Australian art magazine) the Japanese artist Mariko Mori's assault on neo-orientalism discussed through Donna Haraway and Irigaray, because one rethinks the continuity and discontinuity between those two thinkers and sees both in an unusual, artlike, context, where a sort of poesis of the theoretical may take place; less so when one reads (in an essay by a French critic about a French artist in an English magazine) that Annette Messager is significant because her "work is of her generation" thanks to a "refusal of traditional aesthetic criteria" that turns out to be very much an affirmation of the criteria of a by now equally traditional anti-aesthetic.'9 I was going to call my essay "Fatal Subtraction" because it occurred to me that the art world's relation to French theory is doubly fatal. If it accepts French theory wholesale, then the whole edifice must collapse. Without works that are more historically significant than others the rich would lose interest and none of us would be able to get paid for doing only what we want to do. If the art world behaves toward French theory selectively, as it has and must, then it can never use theory to rethink itself but only to complicate and elaborate itself, largely, I would suggest,
19. Hubert Besacier, "Sweet Sadism, Annette Messager's Collection," Artscribe,no. 82 (Summer 1980): 60. See Robert Fouser, "Mariko Mori, Avatar of a Feminine God," Art/Text 60 (1998): 35.

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as an array of parallel activities that have no demonstrable relationship to one another whatsoever but are critically and commercially administered as if they do. It becomes a vast jungle of mutually irrelevant practices that have nothing in common save the conditions of their display. Which suggests to me that while Foucault and Lacan may have taken over the roles of Marx and Freud-to expose and explain external and internal repression-and while Derrida and Deleuze offer-through deferral and fluidity, difference and the singular-possibilities for an enlivened and messy formalism by no means committed to endings and final conditions, it is, as usual, Baudrillard who gets the economics right. The sign may be reversible, but the art world requires it to be lodged in a discourse of irreversibility, where reactivity is a precondition of meaningful signification.