October journal No.54 Autumn (1990)

Art I Theory I Criticism I Politics

OCTOB

Rosalind Krauss

Marjorie Garber Beat Wyss

The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum Rossellini: Woman as Symptomof Man Fetish Envy Ragnarok of Illusion: Richard

John Corbett

Wagner's "MysticalAbyss" at Bayreuth Free, Single, and Disengaged:

Slavoj Zizek

Listening Pleasure and the Popular Music Object

Group Material

Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition AIDS Timeline

$8.00/Fall 1990

Published by the MIT Press

Wolfgang Kemp

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editors Joan Copjec Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson managing editor Martha Buskirk advisory board Parveen Adams Luigi Ballerini Leo Bersani Homi Bhabha Yve-Alain Bois Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Rosalyn Deutsche Mary Ann Doane Hal Foster Denis Hollier Andreas Huyssen Fredric Jameson Laura Mulvey Allan Sekula Peter Wollen Slavoj Zizek

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2870) (ISBN 0-262-75204-2) is published quarterly (Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring) by the MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, and London, England. Subscriptions: individuals $30.00; institutions $65.00; students and retired $20.00. Subscribers outside of the U.S. add $14.00 for postage and handling. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Jourtials, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. Manuscripts, in duplicate and accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Boston, MA, and at additional mailing offices. To be honored free of charge, claims for missing copies must be made immediately upon receipt of the next published issue. POSTMASTER: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. Deboer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07110. Copyright ? 1990 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and October Magazine, Ltd. Statements of fact and opinion appearing in OCTOBER are made on the responsibility of the authors alone, and do not imply the endorsement of the editors or the publisher.

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Rosalind Krauss Slavoj Zizek Marjorie Garber Beat Wyss John Corbett Wolfgang Kemp Group Material

Cover Photo: Louise Lawler. Installation View, Minimal Art in the Panza Collection: Robert Morris, Untitled (Aluminum I-Beams), 1967.

The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum Rossellini: Woman as Symptomof Man Fetish Envy Ragnarok of Illusion: Richard Wagner's "MysticalAbyss" at Bayreuth Free, Single, and Disengaged: Listening Pleasure and the Popular Music Object Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition AIDS Timeline

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JOHN CORBETT is a video producer and teacher who lives in Chicago. His recent videos include Toe Hold and Slipsism (both 1989), and he is currently producing Dub Toe and Lee "Scratch" Perry in Zurich. GROUP MATERIAL is an artists' collaborative that organizes exhibitions and projects which address socially relevant themes. MARJORIE GARBER is a professor of English literature and director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of several books, most recently Shakespeare'sGhost Writers (New York: Methuen, 1987). The essay published here will be included in her VestedInterests: Cross-Dressingand Cultural Anxiety (forthcoming, Routledge). WOLFGANG KEMP is a professor at the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Philipps Universitat in Marburg, West Germany. He is author of Sermo Corporeus (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1987) and Foto-Essays(Munich: Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, 1978), in which the essay translated here originally appeared. BEAT WYSS teaches art history at the University of Bochum, West Germany. He is an editor in the fields of art, architecture, and aesthetics for Artemis Verlag. Among his books are the recently published Pieter Bruegels Landschaft mit Ikarussturz (Frankfurt a.M., 1990) and Luzern, 1800- 1920, Inventar der neueren Schweitzer Architektur(Basel, 1990). SLAVOJ ZIZEK, professor of philosophy at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, has written many books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, and film. His recent books include The Sublime Objectof Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) and Ils ne savent pas ce qu'ils font (Paris: Point-hors-Ligne, 1990). Zizek ran this fall for the Presidency of Slovenia, an office to which he very narrowly missed being elected. His Looking Awry: Lacan Explained through Popular Culture is forthcoming as an OCTOBER book, MIT Press, spring 1991.

OCTOBER

The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum*

ROSALIND

KRAUSS

May 1, 1983: I remember the drizzle and cold of that spring morning, as the feminist section of the May Day parade formed up at Republique. Once we started moving out, carrying our banners for the march towards the Place de la Bastille, we began our chant. "Qui paie ses dettes s'enrichit," it went, "qui paie ses dettes s'enrichit," in a reminder to Mitterand's newly appointed Minister of Women's Affairs that the Socialists' campaign promises were still deeply in arrears. Looking back at that cry now, from a perspective firmly situated at the end of the '80s, sometimes referred to as "the roaring '80s," the idea that paying your debts makes you rich seems pathetically naive. What make you rich, we have been taught by a decade of casino capitalism, is precisely the opposite. What makes you rich, fabulously rich, beyond your wildest dreams, is leveraging. July 17, 1990: Coolly insulated from the heat wave outside, Suzanne Page and I are walking through her exhibition of works from the Panza Collection, an installation that, except for three or four small galleries, entirely fills the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. At first I am extremely happy to encounter these objects -many of them old friends I have not seen since their early days of as they triumphantly fill vast suites of galleries, having exhibition in the 1960s muscled everything else off the walls to create that experience of articulated spatial presence specific to Minimalism. The importance of this space as a vehicle for the works is something Suzanne Page is conscious of as she describes the desperate effort of remodeling vast tracts of the museum to give it the burnished neutrality necessary to function as background to these Flavins and Andres and Morrises. Indeed, it is her focus on the space as a kind of reified and abstracted I finally find most arresting. This climaxes at the point when she entity-that * This text, written as a lecture for the September 10, 1990 meeting of the International Association of Museums of Modern Art (CIMAM) in Los Angeles, is being published here considerably before I have been able to deliver, as fully as I would have liked, on the promise of its title. The timeliness of the issues, however, suggested that it was more important to open them to immediate discussion than to wait to refine either the theoretical level of the argument or the rhetoric within which it is framed.

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positions me at the spot within the exhibition that she describes as being, for her, somehow the most riveting. It is in one of the newly stripped and smoothed and neutralized galleries, made whitely luminous by the serial progression of a recent work by Flavin. But we are not actually looking at the Flavin. At her direction we are scanning the two ends of the gallery through the large doorways of which we can see the disembodied glow produced by two other Flavins, each in an adjoining room: one of these an intense apple green light; the other an unearthly, chalky blue radiance. Both announce a kind of space-beyond which we are not yet in, but for which the light functions as the intelligible sign. And from our point of view both these aureoles can be seen to frame - like strangely industrialized haloes -the way the gallery's own starkly cylindrical, International Style columns enter our point of view. We are having this experience, then, not in front of what could be called the art, but in the midst of an oddly emptied yet somehow grandiloquent space of which the museum itself-as a building-is the object. Within this experience, it is the museum that emerges as powerful presence and yet as properly empty, the museum as a space from which the collection has withdrawn. For indeed, the effect of this experience is to render it impossible to look at the paintings hanging in those few galleries still displaying the permanent collection. Compared to the scale of the Minimalist works, the earlier paintings and sculpture look impossibly tiny and inconsequential, like postcards, and the galleries take on a fussy, crowded, culturally irrelevant look, like so many curio shops.

These are two scenes that nag at me as I think about the "cultural logic of the late capitalist museum," because somehow it seems to me that if I can close the gap between their seeming disparateness, I can demonstrate the logic of what we see happening, now, in museums of modern art.' Here are two possible bridges, flimsy perhaps, because fortuitous, but nonetheless suggestive. 1. In the July 1990 Art in America there occurs the unanalyzed but telling juxtaposition of two articles. One is the essay called "Selling the Collection," which describes the massive change in attitude now in place according to which the objects in a museum's keeping can now be coolly referred to, by its director as well as its trustees, as "assets."2 This bizarre Gestalt-switch from regarding the collection as a form of cultural patrimony or as specific and irreplaceable embodiments of cultural knowledge to one of eying the collection's contents as so much capital- as stocks or assets whose value is one of pure exchange and thus only 1. Throughout, my debt to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," (New Left Review, no. 146 [July-August 1984], pp. 53-93) will be obvious. 2. Philip Weiss, "Selling the Collection," Art in America, vol. 78 (July 1990), pp. 124-131.

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to be the invention not truly realized when they are put in circulation-seems a that of the American tax law of is, merely of dire financial necessity: result, value of donated art objects. of the market 1986 eliminating the deductibility shift in the very context in of a more the function Rather, it appears profound which the museum operates-a context whose corporate nature is made specific not only by the major sources of funding for museum activities but also, closer to home, by the makeup of its boards of trustees. Thus the writer of "Selling the Collection" can say: "To a great extent the museum community's crisis results from the free-market spirit of the 1980s. The notion of the museum as a guardian of the public patrimony has given way to the notion of a museum as a corporate entity with a highly marketable inventory and the desire for growth." Over most of the course of the article, the market understood to be putting pressure on the museum is the art market. This is, for example, what Evan Maurer of the Minneapolis Institute of Art seems to be referring to when he says that in recent years museums have had to deal with a "market-driven operation" or what George Goldner of the Getty means when he says that "there will be some people who will want to turn the museum into a dealership." It is only at the end of the essay, when dealing with the Guggenheim Museum's recent sales, that some larger context than the art market's buying and selling is broached as the field within which deaccessioning might be discussed, although the writer does not really enter this context. But "Selling the Collection" comes back-to-back with quite another article, which, called "Remaking Art History," raises the problems that have been spawned within the art market itself by one particular art movement, namely Minimalism.3 For Minimalism almost from the very beginning located itself, as one of its radical acts, within the technology of industrial production. That objects were fabricated from plans meant that these plans came to have a conceptual status within Minimalism allowing for the possibility of replication of a given work that could cross the boundaries of what had always been considered the unreproducibility of the aesthetic original. In some cases these plans were sold to collectors along with or even in place of an original object, and from these plans the collector did indeed have certain pieces refabricated. In other cases it has been the artist himself or herself who has done the refabrication, either issuing various versions of a given object - multiple originals, so to speak-as is the case with the many Morris glass cubes, or replacing a deteriorated original with a contemporary remake as in the case of Alan Saret. This break with the aesthetic of the original is, the writer of this essay argues, part and parcel with Minimalism itself, and so she writes: "If, as viewers of contemporary art, we are unwilling to relinquish the conception of the unique original art object, if we insist that all refabrications are fraudulent, then we misunderstand the nature of

3.

Susan Hapgood, "Remaking Art History," Art in America, vol. 78 (July 1990), pp. 114-123.

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many of the key works of the '60s and '70s. ... If the original object can be replaced without compromising the original meaning, refabrication should raise no controversy." However, as we know, it is not exactly viewers who are raising controversy in this matter, but artists themselves, as Donald Judd and Carl Andre have protested Count Panza's various decisions to act on the basis of the certificates they sold him and make duplicate versions of their works.4 And indeed the fact that the group countenancing these refabrications is made up of the works' owners (both private collectors and museums)-that is, the group normally in the interest most status of their propto have specifically protecting thought how inverted situation is. indicates this The writer of this essay as erty original also speaks of the market as playing some role in the story she has to tell. "As the public's interest in the art of this period grows," she says, "and the market pressures increase, the issues that arise when works are refabricated will no doubt gain prominence as well." But what the nature of either "the issues" or the "market pressures" might really be, she leaves it to the future to decide. In the bridge I am setting up here, then, we watch the activity of markets restructuring the aesthetic original, either to change it into an "asset," as in the case outlined by the first article, or to normalize a once-radical practice of challenging the very idea of the original through a recourse to the technology of mass production. That this normalization exploits a possibility already inscribed in the specific procedures of Minimalism will be important to the rest of my argument. But for now I simply point to the juxtaposition of a description of the financial crisis of the modern museum with an account of a shift in the nature of the original that is a function of one particular artistic movement, to wit, Minimalism. 2. The second bridge can be constructed more quickly. It consists merely of a peculiar rhyming between a famous remark of Tony Smith's from the opening phase of Minimalism and one by the Guggenheim's Director, Tom Krens, made last spring. Tony Smith is describing a ride he took in the early 1950s on the NewJersey Turnpike when it was still unfinished. He is speaking of the endlessness of the expanse, of its sense of being cultural but totally off the scale of culture. It was an experience, he said, that could not be framed, and thus, breaking through the very notion of frame, it was one that revealed to him the insignificance and "pictorialism" of all painting. "The experience on the road," he says, "was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that's the end of art." And what we now know with hindsight on this statement is that Tony Smith's "end of art" coincided withindeed, conceptually undergirded-the beginning of Minimalism.

4.

See Art in America (March and April 1990).

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The second remark, the one by Tom Krens, was made to me in an interview and also involves a revelation on a turnpike,, the Autobahn just outside of Cologne.5 It was a November day in 1985, and having just seen a spectacular gallery made from a converted factory building, he was driving by large numbers of other factories. Suddenly, he said, he thought of the huge abandoned factories in his own neighborhood of North Adams, and he had the revelation of MASS MoCA.6 Significantly, he described this revelation as transcending anything like the mere availability of real estate. Rather, he said, it announced an entire change in- to use a word he seems extremely fond of-discourse. A profound and sweeping change, that is, within the very conditions within which art itself is understood. Thus, what was revealed to him was not only the tininess and inadequacy of most museums, but that the encyclopedic nature of the museum was "over." What museums must now do, he said he realized, was to select a very few artists from the vast array of modernist aesthetic production and to collect and show these few in depth over the full amount of space it might take to really experience the cumulative impact of a given oeuvre. The discursive change he was imagining is, we might say, one that switches from diachrony to synchrony. The encyclopedic museum is intent on telling a story, by arraying before its visitor a particular version of the history of art. The synchronic museum -if we can call it that-would forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is experience, now radically spatial, the model for which, in Krens's own account, was, in fact, Minimalism. It is Minimalism, Krens says in relation to his revelation, that has reshaped the way we, as late twentieth-century viewers, look at art: the demands we now put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the space in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial, crescendo towards the intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale. It was Minimalism, then, that was part of the revelation that only at the scale of something like MASS MoCA could this radical revision of the very nature of the museum take place. Within the logic of this second bridge, there is something that connects a certain kind of analysis of the Minimalism-and at a very deep level-to modern museum, one that announces its radical revision.

The interview took place May 7, 1990. 5. 6. MASS MoCA (The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), a project to transform the 750,000 square feet of factory space formerly occupied by Sprague Technologies Inc. into a museum complex (that would not only consist of gargantuan exhibition galleries, but also a hotel and retail shops), proposed to the Massachusetts Legislature by Krens and granted funding in a special bill potentially underwriting half its costs with a $35 million bond issue, is now nearing the end of a feasibility study, funded out of the same bill, and being conducted by a committee chaired by Krens. See Deborah Weisgall, "A Megamuseum in a Mill Town, The Guggenheim in Massachusetts?" New YorkTimes Magazine (3 March 1989).

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Now even from the few things I've sketched about Minimalism, there emerges an internal contradiction. For on the one hand there is Krens's acknowledgement of what could be called the phenomenological ambitions of Minimalism; and on the other, underscored by the dilemma of contemporary refabrication, Minimalism's participation in a culture of seriality, of multiples without originals-a culture, that is, of commodity production. That first side, it could be argued, is the aesthetic base of Minimalism, its conceptual bedrock, what the writer of the Art in America article called its "original meaning." This is the side of Minimalism that denies that the work of art is an encounter between two previously fixed and complete entities: on the one hand, the work as a repository of known forms-the cube or prism, for example, as a kind of geometric a priori, the embodiment of a Platonic solid; and on the other, the viewer as an integral, biographically elaborated subject, a subject who cognitively grasps these forms because he or she knows them in advance. Far from being a cube, Richard Serra's House of Cards is a shape in the process of forming against the resistance, but also with the help of the ongoing conditions of gravity; far from being a simple prism, Robert Morris's L-Beamsare three different insertions within the viewer's perceptual field such that each new disposition of the form, sets up an encounter between the viewer and the object which redefines the shape. As Morris himself wrote in his "Notes on Sculpture," Minimalism's ambition was to leave the domain of what he called "relational aesthetics" and to "take relationships out of the work and make them a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision." 7 To make the work happen, then, on this very perceptual knife-edge-the interface between the work and its beholder -is on the one hand to withdraw privilege both from the formal wholeness of the object prior to this encounter and from the artist as a kind of authorial absolute who has set the terms for the nature of the encounter, in advance. Indeed, the turn towards industrial fabrication of the works was consciously connected to this part of Minimalism's logic, namely, the desire to erode the old idealist notions about creative authority. But on the other hand, it is to restructure the very notion of the viewing subject. It is possible to misread a description of Minimalism's drive to produce a kind of "death of the author" as one of creating a now all-powerful reader/interpreter, as when Morris writes: "The object is but one of the terms of the newer aesthetic. . . . One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context." But, in fact, the nature of this "he himself [who] is establishing relationships" is also what Minimalism works to put in suspension. Neither the old Cartesian subject nor the traditional biographical subject, the Minimalist subject -this "he himself establishing relationships" Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture," in G. Battcock, ed., Minimal Art, New York, Dutton, 7. 1968.

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-is a subject radically contingent on the conditions of the spatial field, a subject who coheres, but only provisionally and moment-by-moment, in the act of perception. It is the subject that, for instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes when he writes: "But the system of experience is not arrayed before me as if I were God, it is lived by me from a certain point of view; I am not the spectator, I am involved, and it is my involvement in a point of view which makes possible both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out upon the complete world as a horizon of every perception."8 In Merleau-Ponty's conception of this radically contingent subject, caught up within the horizon of every perception, there is, as we know, an important further condition. For Merleau-Ponty is not merely directing us towards what could be called a "lived perspective"; he is calling on us to acknowledge the primacy of the "lived bodily perspective." For it is the immersion of the body in the world, the fact that it has a front and a back, a left and a right side, that establishes at what Merleau-Ponty calls a level of "preobjective experience" a kind of internal horizon which serves as the precondition of the meaningfulness of the perceptual world. It is thus the body as the preobjective ground of all experience of the relatedness of objects that was the primary "world" explored by the Phenomenologyof Perception. Minimalism was indeed committed to this notion of "lived bodily perspective," this idea of a perception that would break with what it saw as the decorporealized and therefore bloodless, algebraicized condition of abstract painting in which a visuality cut loose from the rest of the bodily sensorium and now remade in the model of modernism's drive towards absolute autonomy had become the very picture of an entirely rationalized, instrumentalized, serialized subject. Its insistence on the immediacy of the experience, understood as a bodily immediacy, was intended as a kind of release from the forward march of modernist painting towards an increasingly positivist abstraction. In this sense, Minimalism's reformulation of the subject as radically contingent is, even though it attacks older idealist notions of the subject, a kind of Utopian gesture. This is because the Minimalist subject is in this very displacement returned to its body, regrounded in a kind of richer, denser subsoil of experience than the paper-thin layer of an autonomous visuality that had been the goal of optical painting. And thus this move is, we could say, compensatory, an act of reparations to a subject whose everyday experience is one of increasing isolation, reification, specialization, a subject who lives under the conditions of advanced industrial culture as an increasingly instrumentalized being. It is to this subject that Minimalism, in an act of resistance to the serializing, stereotyping, and banalizing of commodity production, holds out a promise of some instant of

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologyof Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London, Routledge 8. and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 304.

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bodily plenitude in a gesture of compensation that we recognize as deeply aesthetic. But even if Minimalism seems to have been conceived in specific resistance its disembodied media images-and to the fallen world of mass culture-with its banalized, commodified objects-in of consumer culture-with an attempt to restore the immediacy of experience, the door it opened onto "refabrication" nonetheless was one that had the potential to let that whole world of late capitalist production right back in.9 Not only was the factory fabrication of the objects from plans a switch from artisanal to industrial technology, but the very choice of materials and of shapes rang with the overtones of industry. No matter that plexiglass and aluminum and styrofoam were meant to destroy the interiority signalled by the old materials of sculpture like wood or stone. These were nonetheless the signifiers of late 20th-century commodity production, cheap and expendable. No matter that the simple geometries were meant to serve as the vehicles of perceptual immediacy. These were as well the operators of those rationalized forms susceptible to mass production and the generalized ones adaptable as corporate logos.10 And most crucially, the Minimalist resistance to traditional composition which meant the adoption of a repetitive, additive aggreDonald Judd's "one thing after another"-partakes gation of form very of formal condition that can be seen to structure consumer capitalthat deeply ism: the condition, that is, of seriality. For the serial principle seals the object away from any condition that could possibly be thought to be original and consigns it to a world of simulacra, of multiples without originals, just as the serial form also structures the object within a system in which it makes sense only in relation to other objects, objects which are themselves structured by relations of artificially produced difference. Indeed, in the world of commodities it is this difference that is consumed.'" Now how, we might ask, is it possible that a movement that wished to attack commodification and technologization somehow always already carried the codes of those very conditions? How is it that immediacy was always potentially we could say-with its opposite? For it is this always undermined-infected, This analysis of the contradictions internal to Minimalism has already been brilliantly argued 9. by Hal Foster in his genealogical study of Minimalism. See Hal Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism," in Individuals, A Selected History of ContemporaryArt: 1945-1986, Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986. His argument there, that Minimalism simultaneously completes and breaks with modernism, announcing its end, and his discussion of the way much of postmodernism in both its critical modes (the critique of institutions, the critique of the representation of the subject) and its collaborative ones (the transavant-garde, simulation) is nascent within the Minimalist syntax, both spatial and productive, is a complex articulation of the logic of Minimalism and anticipates much of what I am saying about its history. This argument was already suggested by Art & Language's critique of Minimalism. See Carl 10. Beveridge and Ian Burn, "Donald Judd May We Talk?," The Fox, no. 2 (1972). That Minimalism should have been welcomed into corporate collections came full circle in the 1980s when its forms served as the, perhaps unwilling, basis of much of postmodern architecture. 11. Foster, p. 180.

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already that is being tapped in the current controversy about refabrication. So, we could ask, how is it that an art that insisted so hard on specificity could have already programmed within it the logic of its violation? But this kind of paradox is not only common in the history of modernism, which is to say the history of art in the era of capital; it could be said to be of the very nature of modernist art's relation to capital, a relation in which, in its very resistance to a particular manifestation of capital-to technology, say, or commodification, or the reification of the subject of mass production-the artist produces an alternative to that phenomenon which can also be read as a function of it, another version, although possibly more ideated or rarified, of the very thing against which he or she was reacting. Fredric Jameson, who is intent on tracing this capital-logic as it works itself out in modernist art, describes it, for example, in Van Gogh's clothing of the drab peasant world around him in an hallucinatory surface of color. This violent transformation, he says, "is to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense-sight, the it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in visual, the eye -which its own right."'2 But even as it does this, it in fact imitates the very division of labor that is performed in the body of capital, thereby "becoming some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them."13 What is exposed in this analysis is then the logic of what could be called cultural reprogramming or what Jameson himself calls "cultural revolution." And this is to say that while the artist might be creating a Utopian alternative to, or compensation for, a certain nightmare induced by industrialization or commodification, he is at the very same time projecting an imaginary space which, if it is shaped somehow by the structural features of that same nightmare, works to produce the possibility for its receiver fictively to occupy the territory of what will be a next, more advanced level of capital. Indeed, it is the theory of cultural revolution that the imaginary space projected by the artist will not only emerge from the formal conditions of the contradictions of a given moment of capital, but will prepare its subjects-its readers or viewers-to occupy a future real world which the work of art has already brought them to imagine, a world restructured not through the present but through the next moment in the history of capital. An example of this, we could say, would be the great unites d'habitation of the International Style and Le Corbusier, which rose above an older, fallen city fabric to project a powerful, futuristic alternative to it, an alternative celebrating

12. 13.

Jameson, p. 59. Ibid.

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the potential creative energy stored within the individual designer. But insofar as those projects simultaneously destroyed the older urban network of neighborhoods with their heterogeneous cultural patterns, they prepared the ground precisely for that anonymous culture of suburban sprawl and shopping-center homogeneity that they were specifically working to counter. So, with Minimalism, the potential was always there that not only would the object be caught up in the logic of commodity production, a logic that would overwhelm its specificity, but that the subjectprojected by Minimalism also would be reprogrammed. Which is to say that the Minimalist subject of "lived bodily experience" -unballasted by past knowledge and coalescing in the very moment if pushed just a little farther, break up of its encounter with the object -could, entirely into the utterly fragmented, postmodern subject of contemporary mass culture. It could even be suggested that by prizing loose the old ego-centered logicallysubject of traditional art, Minimalism unintentionally -albeit prepares for that fragmentation. And it was that fragmented subject, I would submit, that lay in wait for the viewer to the Panza Exhibition in Paris -not the subject of lived bodily immediacy of 1960s Minimalism, but the dispersed subject awash in a maze of signs and simulacra of late 1980s postmodernism. This was not just a function of the way the objects tended to be eclipsed by the emanations from themselves that seemed to stand apart from their corporeal beings like so many blinking signs-the shimmering waves of the floor pieces punctuating the groundplan, the luminous exhalations of the light pieces washing the corners of rooms one had not yet entered. It was also a function of the new centrality given to James Turrell, an extremely minor figure for Minimalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but one who plays an important role in the reprogrammation of Minimalism for the late 1980s. The Turrell piece, itself an exercise in sensory reprogramming, is a function of the way a barely perceptible luminous field in front of one appears gradually to thicken and solidify, not by revealing or bringing into focus the surface which projects this color, a surface which we as viewers might be said to perceive, but rather by concealing the vehicle of the color and thereby producing the illusion that it is the field itself which is focusing, that it is the very object facing one that is doing the perceivingfor one. Now it is this derealized subject-a subject that no longer does its own perceiving but is involved in a dizzying effort to decode signs that emerge from within a no longer mappable or knowable depth -that has become the focus of many analyses of postmodernism. And this space, which is grandiloquent but somehow no longer masterable by the subject, seeming to surpass the reach of understanding like an inscrutable emblem of the multinational infrastructures of information technology or of capital transfer, is often referred to in such analyses as "hyperspace." It, in turn, is a space that supports an experience that Jameson calls "the hysterical sublime." Which is to say that precisely in relation to the what could be called the waning of suppression of the older subjectivity-in

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James Turrell. Blood Lust. 1989.

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is "a strange compensatory decorative exhilaration."14 In place of affect-there the older emotions there is now an experience that must properly be termed an free-floating and impersonal feeling dominated by a peculiar "intensity"-a kind of euphoria. The revision of Minimalism such that it addresses or even works to produce that new fragmented and technologized subject, such that it constructs not an experience of itself but some other euphorically dizzy sense of the museum as hyperspace, this revisionary construction of Minimalism exploits, as we have seen, what was always potential within Minimalism.15 But it is a revision that is, as well, happening at a specific moment in history. It is happening in 1990 in tandem with powerful changes in how the museum itself is now being reprogrammed or reconceptualized.

The writer of "Selling the Collection" acknowledged that the Guggenheim's deaccessioning was part of a larger strategy to reconceive the museum and that Krens himself has described this strategy as somehow motivated or justified by the way Minimalism restructures the aesthetic "discourse." What, we might now ask, is the nature of that larger strategy, and how is Minimalism being used to serve as its emblem? One of the arguments made by analysts of postmodern culture is that in its switch from what could be called an era of industrial production to one of commodity production -an era, that is, of the consumer society, or the information society, or the media society - capital has not somehow been magically transcended. Which is to say, we are not in either a "postindustrial society" or a "postideological era." Indeed, they would argue, we are in an even purer form of capital in which industrial modes can be seen to reach into spheres (such as leisure, sport, and art) previously somewhat separated from them. In the words of the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel: "Far from representing a 'postindustrial society' late capitalism thus constitutes generalized universal industrialization for the first time in history. Mechanization, standardization, over-specialization and parcellization of labor, which in the past determined only the realm of

14. Ibid., p. 61. The various 1970s projects, organized by Heiner Friedrich and sponsored by the Dia Founda15. tion, which set up permanent installations-like de Maria's Earth Roomor his BrokenKilometer-had the effect of reconsecrating certain urban spaces to a detached contemplation of their own "empty" presence. Which is to say that in the relationship between the work and its context, these spaces themselves increasingly emerge as the focus of the experience, one of an inscrutable but suggestive sense of impersonal, corporatelike power to penetrate art-world locales and to rededicate them to another kind of nexus of control. Significantly, it was Friedrich who began, in the mid-1970s, to promote the work of James Turrell (he is also the manager, for the Dia Foundation, of Turrell's mammoth Roden Crater).

The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum

15

commodity production in actual industry, now penetrate into all sectors of social life."16 As just one example of this he gives the Green Revolution, or the massive industrialization of agriculture through the introduction of machines and chemicals. Just as in any other industrialization, the old productive units are broken be up the farm family no longer makes its own tools, food, and clothing-to in which labor each is function now and replaced by specialized independent must be connected through the mediating link of trade. The infrastructure needed to support this connection will now be an international system both of trade and of credit. What makes this expanded industrialization possible, he adds, is the overcapitalization (or noninvested surplus capital) that is the hallmark of late capitalism. It is this surplus that is unlocked and set in motion by the falling rate of profit. And it in turn accelerates the process of transition to monopoly capitalism. Now noninvested surplus capital is exactly one way of describing the in land and in art -of museums. It is the way, as we have seen, holdings-both that many museum figures (directors and trustees) are now, in fact, describing their collections. But the market they see themselves responding to is the art market and not the mass market; and the model of capitalization they have in mind is the "dealership" and not industry. Writers about the Guggenheim have already become suspicious that it is the one exception in all this-an exception, most would agree, that will be an extremely seductive pattern for others to follow once its logic becomes clear. The New York Times Magazine writer of the profile on MASS MoCA was, indeed, struck by the way Tom Krens constantly spoke not of the museum but of the "museum industry," describing it as "overcapitalized," in need of "mergers and acquisitions" and of "asset management." And further, invoking the language of industry, he spoke of the museum's activities-its exhibitions and cataloguesas "product." Now from what we know from other industrializations, we can say that to produce this "product" efficiently will require not only the break-up of older productive units - as the curator no longer operates as combined researcher, writer, director, and producer of an exhibition but will be increasingly specialized into filling only one of these functions -but will entail the increased technologization (through computer-based data systems) and centralization of operations at every level. It will also demand the increased control of resources in the form of art objects that can be cheaply and efficiently entered into circulation. Further, in relation to the problem of the effective marketing of this product, there will be the requirement of a larger and larger surface over which to sell the Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, London, Verso, 1978, p. 387, as cited in Foster, p. 179; and in 16. Jameson, "Periodizing the '60s," The Ideologies of Theory,Vol. II, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. 207.

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product in order to increase what Krens himself speaks of as "market share." It takes no genius to realize that the three immediate requisites of this expansion are 1) larger inventory (the Guggenheim's acquisition of three hundred works from the Panza collection is a first step in this direction); 2) more physical outlets through which to sell the product (the Salzburg and Venice/Dogana projects are potential ways of realizing this, as would be MASS MoCA);17 and 3) leveraging the collection (which in this case most specifically does not mean selling it, but rather moving it into the credit sector, or the circulation of capital;18the collection will thus be pressed to travel as one form of indebtedness; classically, mortgaging the collection would be the more direct form of leveraging).19 And it

17. Projects at different stages of realization include a Salzburg Guggenheim, in which the Austrian Government would presumably pay for a new museum (designed by Hans Holein) and endow its operating expenses in return for a New York Guggenheim-managed program, part of which would entail the circulation of the Guggenheim collection into Salzburg. In addition, there are negotiations for a Venice Guggenheim in the quarters of the former Customs House (the Dogana). That as part of its industrialization the Guggenheim is willing to deaccession not just minor 18. objects but masterpieces is a point made by "Selling the Collection," where Professor Gert Schiff is quoted as saying of the deaccessioned Kandinsky, "It really was a centerpiece of the collection -they could have sold almost anything but not that," and former director, now trustee, Tom Messer, is described as "uncomfortable with the transaction" (p. 130). Another detail in this report is the extraordinary spread between Sotheby's estimate on this Kandinsky ($10-15 million) and its actual sale price ($20.9 million). In fact, on the three works auctioned by the Guggenheim, Sotheby's underestimated the sales by more than 40 percent. This raises some questions about "asset management" in a domain, like the Guggenheim's, of increasing specialization of professional roles. For it is clear that neither the museum's staff nor its director had a grip on the realities of the market, and relying on Sotheby's "expertise" (not, of course disinterested), they probably deaccessioned one more work than they needed to in order to accomplish their target, which was the purchase of the Panza collection. It is also clear-not only from Schiff's comment but also from one by William Rubin to the effect that in thirty years of experience he had never seen a comparable Kandinsky for the separation sale, and that chances are that in the next thirty years there will not be another -that of curatorial from managerial skills is wildly skewing the museum's judgment in the favor to those who stand to profit -in the form of fees and percentages of sales -from any "deal" that takes place: auctioneers, dealers, etc. In August 1990, the Guggenheim Museum, through the agency of The Trust for Cultural 19. Resources of The City of New York (about which more later), issued $55 million of tax-exempt bonds toJ. P. Morgan Securities (who will presumably remarket them to the public). This money is to be used for the museum's physical expansion in New York City: the annex to the present building, the restoration and underground expansion of the present building, and the purchase of a warehouse in midtown Manhattan. Counting interest on these bonds, the museum will, in the course of fifteen years, have to pay out $115 million to service and retire this debt. The collateral for these bonds is curious, since the issuing document reads: "None of the assets of the [Guggenheim] Foundation are pledged for payment of the Bonds." It goes on to specify that the museum's endowment is legally unavailable to be used to meet the obligations of the debt and that "certain works in the Foundation's collection are subject to express sale prohibitions or other restrictions pursuant to the applicable gift instruments or purchase contracts." That such restrictions apply only to "certain works" and not to all works is also something to which I will return. In light of the fact that no collateral is pledged in case of the museum's inability to meet its obligations on this debt, one might well wonder about the basis on which Morgan Securities (as well as its partner in this transaction, the Swiss Bank Corporation) agreed to purchase these bonds. This basis is clearly threefold. First, the Guggenheim is projecting its ability to raise the money it needs (roughly $7 million per year over and above its current [the date in the bond issuance document is for

The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum

17

also does not stretch the imagination too much to realize that this industrialized museum will have much more in common with other industrialized areas of leisure -Disneyland it will with the older, preindustrial museum. say-than Thus it will be dealing with mass markets, rather than art markets, and with simulacral experience rather than aesthetic immediacy. Which brings us back to Minimalism and the way it is being used as the aesthetic rationale for the transformation I am describing. The industrialized museum has a need for the technologized subject, the subject in search not of affect but of intensities, the subject who experiences its fragmentation as euphoria, the subject whose field of experience is no longer history, but space itself: that hyperspace which a revisionist understanding of Minimalism will use it to unlock.

FY 1988] annual expenses of $11.5 million [on which it was running a deficit of about 9 percent, which is extremelyhigh for this kind of institution]) through, on the one hand, a $30 million fund drive and, on the other, added revenue streams due to its expansion of plant, program, markets, etc. Since its obligation is $115 million, the fund drive, even if successful, will leave over $86 million to raise. Second, if the Guggenheim's plans for increasing revenue (added gate, retail sales, memberships, corporate funding, gifts, plus "renting" its collection to its satellite museums, among others) by the above amount (or 70 percent above its current annual income) do not work out as projected, the next line of defense the bankers can fall back on will be the ability of members of the Guggenheim's board of trustees to cover the debt. This would involve a personal willingness to pay that no trustee, individually, is legally required to do. Third, if the first two possibilities fail and default is threatened, the collection (minus, of course, "certain works"), though it is not pledged, is clearly available as an "asset" to be used for debt repayment. In asking financial officers of various tax-exempt institutions to evaluate this undertaking, I have been advised that it is, indeed, a "high-risk" venture. And I have also gleaned something of the role of The Trust for Cultural Resources of The City of New York. Many states have agencies set up to lend money to tax-exempt institutions, or to serve as the medium through which monies from bond drives are delivered to such institutions, as is the case with The Trust for Cultural Resources. But unlike The Trust for Cultural Resources, these agencies are required to review the bond proposals in order to assess their viability. The review carried out by agency employees is clearly made by people not associated with the institutions themselves. The Trust for Cultural Resources, although it brokers the money at the behest of the government like the state agencies, has no staff to review proposals and therefore has no role in vetting the bond requests. What it seems to do instead is to give the proposal its bona fides. Given the fact that the members of the trust are also major figures of other cultural institutions (Donald Marron, for example, is president of the board of trustees of The Museum of Modern Art), the trust's own trustees are, in fact, potential borrowers.

Rossellini: Woman as Symptom of Man

SLAVOJ

ZIZEK

The miracle of Roberto Rossellini's encounter with Ingrid Bergman -this true act of grace that stirred his creativity and caused it to take another direction in an almost uncanny way the Lacanian dictum that "a letter -exemplifies always arrives at its destination."' The background of the story is well-known: in 1947, at the height of her fame as a leading Hollywood star, Ingrid Bergman saw Open City and Paisan, Rossellini's two neorealist masterpieces, in a small New York theater. Deeply affected, she wrote a letter to Rossellini in which, placing her own stardom at his disposal, she offered to help him obtain his well-deserved international fame. She offered to play any role that might be appropriate for a Swedish actress who spoke fluent English, some German, and only two words of Italian: "Ti amo! [I love you!]." But a series of accidents almost prevented her letter from reaching him: An Italian she met in America told her she could reach Rossellini by writing to Minerva Studios. Then, the studio headquarters burnt down just after her letter arrived; sifting through the ashes, they found the letter, but when the studio tried to contact Rossellini, he kept hanging up, since he was in a dispute with them at the time. When the letter finally managed to get to him, he had to have his secretary translate it from English -and then asked her who Ingrid Bergman was. Once apprised of her international fame, he quickly responded with an urgent telegram on May 8, his birthday, that it was "absolutely true that I dreamed to make a film with you."2 A lie pure and simple, opportunistic flattery-or was it? What to think of the fact that in Rossellini's most famous film, Open City (1945), the two central negative characters, the lesbian Nazi and the Gestapo torturer, are named Ingrid and Bergmann? In a way, Rossellini had effectively already dreamed of "Ingrid1. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter, " in The Purloined Poe, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 53. Peter Brunette, Roberto Rossellini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 375. 2.

18

RobertoRossellini. Voyage to Italy. 1953.

OCTOBER

RobertoRossellini. Open City. 1945.

Bergman." What were his thoughts upon receiving a letter signed by a person whose name condensed two impersonations of evil from his film? Wasn't this a kind of "answer of the real" to his reckless playing with filmic illusion, an experience similar to that of Casanova when, as if in response to his magic prattle, nature reacted with a violent thunderstorm? Ingrid Bergman thus entered his life as symptom:although her letter appeared as a shock, a place within Rossellini's symbolic space had already been carved out for her far in advance. Bergman, symptom of Rossellini-woman, symptom of man? "Woman is a symptom of man" seems to be one of the most notoriously "antifeminist" theses of the late Lacan. There is, however, a fundamental ambiguity in this phrase that reflects the shift in the notion of the symptom within the Lacanian theory.3 If we conceive the symptom as it was articulated by Lacan in as a ciphered message-then, of course, woman-symptom the 1950s-namely appears as the sign, the embodiment, of man's fall, a sign of the fact that man had "ceded his desire." For Freud, a symptom is a compromise-formation: in the symptom, the subject gets back, in the form of a ciphered message, the truth about his desire, the truth that he was unable to confront. So, if we read the thesis "Woman is a symptom of man" against this background, we inevitably approach the position

3.

As to this shift, cf. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Objectof Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), ch. 2.

Rossellini: Woman as Symptomof Man

21

that was most forcefully articulated by Otto Weininger, Freud's contemporary, a notorious Viennese antifeminist and anti-Semite from the turn of the century, who wrote the extremely influential bestseller Sex and Character4 and then committed suicide at the age of twenty-four. Weininger's position is that woman is ontologically nothing but a materialization, an embodiment of man's sin: in herself, she doesn't exist, which is why one need not fight her actively to get rid of her. Man need only purify his desire for woman to lose her ontological status and disintegrate. Note here Richard Wagner's Parsifal, Weininger's basic reference: when Parsifal purifies his desire and rejects Kundry, she loses her speech, seems that she existed changes into a mute shadow, and finally drops dead-it male This as she attracted the insofar tradition, which may appear gaze. only film continues to and outdated, noir, where the femme fatale also up extravagant becomes a formless, vacillating inconsistency the moment the hard-boiled hero rejects her. After Sam Spade purifies himself of his pathological desire, Brigid O'Shaughnessy disintegrates in precisely the same way as a symptom dissolves itself once a successful interpretation has been given its repressed meaning. Doesn't Lacan's other notorious thesis-the one claiming that "Woman does not exist" -point in the same direction? Woman does not exist in herself, as a positive entity with full ontological consistency, but only as a symptom of man. Weininger was also quite outspoken about what was compromised, betrayed when man falls prey to a woman: the death-drive. In the last pages of Sex and Character, Weininger proposes collective suicide as man's only salvation. If, however, we conceive the symptom as Lacan did in his last writings and seminars, namely as a particular signifying formation which confers on the subject its very ontological consistency, enabling it to structure its basic, constitutive relationship towards enjoyment (jouissance), then the entire relationship is reversed, for if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself disintegrates. In this sense, "Woman is a symptom of man" means that man himself exists only through woman qua his symptom: his very ontological consistency depends on, is "externalized" in, his symptom. In other words, man literally ex-sists: his entire being lies "out there," in woman. Woman, on the other hand, does not exist, she insists, which is why she does not come to be through man only. There is something in her that escapes the relation to man, the reference to the phallic signifier, and, as is well known, Lacan attempted to capture this excess by the notion of a "not-all," feminine jouissance. In this way, the relationship toward the death-drive is also reversed: woman, taken "in herself," outside her relation to man, embodies the death-drive, apprehended as a radical, ethical attitude of uncompromising insistence. Woman is therefore no longer conceived as fundamentally "passive" in contrast to male activity: the act as such, in its most fundamental dimension, becomes "feminine." Is not the act par excellence Anti4. Cf. Otto Weininger, Geschlechtund Character (1903; reprint ed., Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 1980).

RobertoRossellini.General della Rovere. 1959.

gone's act of defiance, of resistance? The suicidal dimension of this act is selfevident, so that when Lacan says, in another provocative statement, that the only act which is not a failure, the only act stricto sensu is suicide, he thereby reconfirms the "feminine" nature of the act as such. Men are "active"; they take refuge in relentless activity in order to escape the proper dimension of the act. The retreat of man from woman (the retreat of the hard-boiled detective from the femme fatale in film noir, for example), is thus effectively a retreat from the death-drive as a radical ethical stance. This goes exactly contrary to Weininger's image of woman as incapable of a proper ethical attitude. How should we conceive the notion of act at work here, of its suicidal dimension? Forty years after J. L. Austin taught us that we could do things with words, we no longer naively oppose words and deeds. Isn't psychoanalysis embedded in the dimension of language as speech act? Doesn't the talking cure attempt to reach and transform the real of the symptom solely by means of words? And, closer to our domain, does not Lacan, at the very moment when he elaborates his notion of the autonomous symbolic order, formulate a kind of theory of the speech act (the performative) avant la lettre?Is not the fundamental proposition of his first Seminars that symbolic reality is composed of utterances which, by means of their very act of enunciation, make the subject what they assert him to be?- Utterances of the type "you are . . . [my wife, my teacher]," in other words, interpellate the subject, who, by recognizing himself as their addressee, becomes what they say he is. It is obvious, however, that Lacan's thesis that suicide is the only successful act does not enter this frame: the matrix of the act enabling us to grasp suicide as the act par excellence is definitely not that of speech act theory of the performative. Which is, then, this matrix? Instead of risking an immediate answer, let us return to Rossellini, since his central obsession was precisely with the "impossible" suicidal act of freedom beyond the scope of a performative. Germany, Year Zero: The Word No Longer Obliges Rossellini was perfectly aware of the crucial role of the performative in the structuring of intersubjective space: an entire series of his films is centered on the dialectic of "playing a role," of assuming performatively a symbolic mandate. This dialectic was taken to its extreme in General della Rovere, a tragicomic story about Bertone, a petty thief and swindler (played by Vittorio de Sica). The story takes place during the German occupation of Italy. Bertone is arrested by the Gestapo and forced to collaborate. Because of his resemblance to General della Rovere, the legendary partisan leader, Bertone is obliged to pass himself off as della Rovere in a prison full of members of the Resistance (unbeknownst to the partisans, the real della Rovere had already been caught and shot by the Germans). The idea of the Germans is that Bertone, posing as della Rovere, should make inquiries among the prisoners about the organization of the Resistance and

-.A I

its other leaders. Events take an unforeseen turn, however, when Bertone becomes more and more accustomed to his role and ends up insisting on it even at the price of his life. Rather than give the Germans the names they seek, he lets them shoot him as General della Rovere. As Leo Braudy succinctly put it, the the importance of the film lies "in its acceptance of artifice-role-playing, a way toward moral truth. . . . [This film] introassumption of disguise-as duces the idea that role-playing and disguise can lead to a liberation and realization of the self."5 The dialectic at work here is that of symbolic identification, of assuming a symbolic mandate. As long as poor Bertone, under the pressure of circumstances, simply pretends to be della Rovere, the situation is a frequent one in which a common man occupies by chance the hero's place. As soon as he is prepared to forfeit his very life for this "role," the situation acquires tragic dimensions: Bertone's very insistence on the mask becomes an authentic ethical deed. Such a dialectic -developed by Rossellini even more pointedly in his Rise to Power of Louis XIV- implies that there is more truth in a mask than in what is hidden beneath it: a mask is never simply "just a mask," since it determines the actual place we occupy in the intersubjective symbolic network. What is effectively false and null is our "inner distance" towards the mask we wear (the "social role" we play), our "true self" hidden beneath it. The path to an authentic subjective position runs therefore from outside inward: first, we simply pretend to be something until, step by step, we actually become it. It is not difficult to recognize in this paradox the Pascalian logic of "custom" ("act as if you believe and belief will come by itself"). The performative dimension at work here 5.

Quoted in Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, p. 387.

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consists of the symbolic efficiency of the "mask": wearing a mask actually makes us what we feign to be. The conclusion to be drawn from this dialectic is the exact opposite of the common wisdom by which every human act (achievement, deed) is ultimately just an act (posture, pretense). Instead, the only authenticity at our disposal is that of impersonation, of "taking our act (posture) seriously." This logic of the act qua identification with a mask is, however, overshadowed in Rossellini's films by another, radically heterogeneous logic that emerges in the moments of epiphany.As a rule, epiphanies are read in a Christian perspective, as moments of grace that agitate and illuminate the hero -but is this really the right way to approach them? Let us take a closer look at them by focusing upon three films, all of which are structured as a preparation for or a reaction to the traumatic moment of epiphany: Germany, Year Zero; Stromboli;Europa '51. Each of these films is characterized by a certain structure of lure: each sets a trap which, if perceived in a "spontaneous" way, would inevitably lead us astray. Germany, Year Zero is a story about Edmund, a boy of ten living with his elder sister and sickly father in the ruins of occupied Berlin in the summer of 1945. He is left to the street and keeps his family by petty street crimes and black-market peddling. He falls more and more under the influence of his homosexual Nazi teacher, Henning, who fills him with lessons on how life is a cruel struggle for survival, where one must deal mercilessly with the weaklings who get in our way. Edmund decides to apply this lesson to his father, who constantly moans and groans that he will never recover his health and that he wants to die, since he is only a burden to his family. Edmund grants his father's request by poisoning him. After the father dies, Edmund wanders around aimlessly among the ruins of the Berlin streets. As if they have somehow guessed his horrible deed, a group of children refuse to let him join their game. He awk-

?.,

RobertoRossellini.Germany,Year Zero. 1947.

Rossellini: Woman as Symptomof Man

25

wardly plays hopscotch alone for a few moments, but is unable to let himself get into the game. Childhood is lost for him, and he is already cut off from the human community. His sister calls him, but he can no longer accept her solace, so he hides from her in an abandoned, half-ruined apartment house, walks to the second floor, closes his eyes, and jumps. The last shot of the film shows his tiny body lying amidst the concrete ruins. What is the meaning of this act? An obvious reading immediately offers itself: the film is a story of how the morally corrupt Nazi ideology can spoil even a child's innocence and induce him to accomplish parricide. Once Edmund becomes aware of the true dimension of his deed, he kills himself under the pressure of unbearable guilt. But a closer examination quickly reveals a series of details that disturb this reading. True, Edmund acts, he passes over to the act, while the teacher just chatters pathetically about the rights of the strong, so that when Edmund tells him about his parricide, the teacher shrinks back in horror. Are we justified, however, for all that, in asserting that Edmund simply took the lesson of his teacher literally and acted upon it? Was his act really caused by the teacher's word? Are we concerned with a causal chain linking words and deeds? The least we can add is that, by means of his act, Edmund not only complies with the teacher's lesson, "applying" it to his own family; he at the same time fulfills his father's explicit wish to die. His act is therefore somehow indeterminable, since it is both an act of supreme cruelty and coldness and an act of boundless love and tenderness, attesting to the fact that he is prepared to go to extremes to comply with his father's wishes. This coincidence of opposites (cold, methodical cruelty and boundless love) is the point at which every "foundation" of acts in "words," in ideology, fails. Edmund's act, far from "taking literally" and realizing the most corrupt and cruel ideology, implies a certain surplus which eludes the domain of

AlfredHitchcock.Rope. 1948.

26

OCTOBER

ideology as such. His is an act of "absolute freedom," which momentarily suspends the field of ideological meaning, i.e., which interrupts the link between "words" and "deeds." Precisely by being emptied of every "positive" (ideological, psychological) content, Edmund's act is an act of freedom in the sense defined by F. W. J. Schelling: it is an act founded only in itself, not in any sort of ideological "sufficient ground." It is for this reason that, in Edmund's parricide, pure evil coincides with the most perfect childish innocence. In the very act of murdering his father, Edmund becomes a saint. The use of the term "saint" is not careless: a couple of years after Germany, Year Zero, Rossellini shot Francesco, giullare di Dio, a film about Saint Francis in which the saint's break with all worldly ties, his return to the state of blessed innocence where we "have all" precisely insofar as we have "lost all," is remarkably parallel with Edmund's avoidance of and isolation from ordinary human community.6 Edmund's radical "emptying" is displayed by his extremely reticent manner, especially in the scene in which he provides his father with the glass of poisoned milk. Edmund watches his father with an inexpressive, tired, pale gaze, with no trace of fear, compassion, regret, or any other sentiment. Any kind of "identification" with Edmund is thereby thwarted. "Edmund, who in a more conventional film would be the focus of audience identification, here seems rather a kind of null set, an empty integer, a focal point of effects."7 The null set, the empty integer, these are Lacanian names for the subject of the signifier, i.e., for the subject, insofar as it is reduced to an empty place without support in imaginary or symbolic identification.8 Edmund is in fact pure "demonic" evil, but what we must bear in mind is that, precisely for this reason, he embodies the pure spirituality of a will delivered from every "pathological" motivation. Edmund is excluded from community, "symbolically dead." But it is not The homology between the subjective position of the psychoanalyst and that of the saint runs 6. like a thread through the last years of Lacan's teaching: in both cases, we assume the position of an of object-excrement, of a remainder which embodies the inconsistency of the symbolic order-i.e., an element which cannot be integrated into the machinery of social usefulness, of a point of pure expenditure. True, we also often encounter with Lacan statements that point to the opposite direction, like those which put psychoanalytic associations in the same series as concentration camps -but is the opposition here really insurmountable? Is it not rather that the moment "saints" endeavour to "socialize," to "go marching in" and organize themselves as a social order, we get monasteries:a totally regulated world which can serve as a model for concentration camps, with the exception that, instead of torturing their victims, monks torture themselves, assuming the heavy burden of abstinence? Were not the Jesuit missions in seventeenth-century Paraguay ("reductions," as they were called at that time) a kind of concentration camp with the most thorough regulation of the entire life, including the most intimate details? (Hegel ironically recalls that Jesuits even rang a bell at midnight to remind their Indian subjects of their marital duties.) 7. Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, p. 84. The problem of how Rossellini can render the most intimate moment-absolute 8. abandonment-of the act of freedom is therefore a pseudo-problem: he can render it precisely in so far as it is a totally "empty" act, an act that "hides nothing," not an act of indescribable fullness. In other words, we cannot identify with Edmund, not because of the unattainable depth of his "inner struggle," but because there is simply nothing to identify with.

Rossellini: Woman as Symptomof Man

27

only the concrete human community from which he is distanced; he also underthe Other itself, the symbolic order. What goes a more radical exclusion -from him is an of to act awareness the ultimate insufficiency and nullity of propels foundation: in occupying that impossible/real he succeeds every ideological words where no where their performative power is empty place longer oblige, This is Year Zero": suspended. "Germany, Germany in the year of absolute freedom, when the intersubjective bond, the engagement of the Word is broken. True, we can also call this distance toward the Other "psychosis," but what is "psychosis" here if not another name for freedom?9 So when, after the parricide, Edmund tells his teacher: "You just talked about it, I did it!" this utterance in no i.e., an argument in the way suggests a shift of responsibility to the teachermanner of "Don't blame me, it was you who told me to proceed this way!"-but quite the contrary, a cold, impassionate recognition of the above-mentioned gap that separates words and deeds. And, following the immanent logic of the film, the acceptance of this gap is the very opposite of the acceptance of evil in the form of a corrupting, all-pervading voice. In one famous scene, Edmund tries to sell the record of one of Hitler's speeches to two British soldiers: he puts the record on a portable phonograph and, all of a sudden, Hitler's voice resounds through the debris-filled hallways as passers-by grow stiff, marveling at the sudden reappearance of this uncannily familiar voice. The entire accent of the scene is precisely on the fact that Edmund is not enchanted by this or any of the other ideological voices that bombard him from all sides: not the voice of his teacher nor that of his sister, who offers him the haven of family just before his suicide. What propels him to act is no voice, but precisely the accepted distance towards all voices.10 In this sense, Germany, Year Zero is the exact opposite of Hitchcock's Rope (shot a year later). The fundamental problem of both films is the same: that of the relationship between words and deeds, as exemplified by the realization of a dreadful ideology. Both films are reactions to the traumatic experience of Nazism: how was the realization of such a monstrous ideology possible? At least in Rope, Hitchcock shrinks from the abyss Rossellini confronted (which is why Rope is to be counted among Hitchcock's failures). What is wrongly attributed to Germany,YearZero is effectively the thesis of Rope. When the homosexual couple strangles their best friend, they do it to win recognition from Professor Caddell, their teacher who preaches the right of Supermen to dispose of the useless and This freedom is of course not to be conceived in the common sense of "unprincipled behav9. ior," as when we "ignore our engagements": it is precisely such "unprincipled deceivers" who remain thoroughly attached to the power of the word-by the very act of deception, they count on the trustworthiness of the word and thus stay within its field. Their position is simply split, inconsistent, in contrast to Edmund where we find no trace of a split, i.e. where the cold firmness immediately coincides with childish innocence. 10. Cf. Jacques Ranciere, "La Chute des corps," in Roberto Rossellini (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 1989).

:1mu

RobertoRossellini.Europa'51. 1952.

weak. When Caddell is confronted with the literal realization of his doctrinewhen, in other words, following the Lacanian definition of communication, he gets back from the other his own message in its inverted, i.e. true form -he is shaken and shrinks back from the consequence of his words, from recognizing in them his own truth (Caddell plays the same role as Henning in Germany).Hitchcock, however, stops at this insight: the "rope" from the film's title is the rope linking words and deeds, and the film turns out to be an admonition against "playing with words" - never play with dangerous ideas, since you can never be sure that there will not be some psychotic who will take them "literally." Nobody in the film, neither the professor nor the murderous couple, is capable of breaking this bond and attaining the point of freedom." Europa '5 1: Escape Into Guilt Edmund's suicide has therefore nothing whatsoever to do with remorse: he simply lets himself be drawn into the vertiginous abyss he opened up through his act of parricide. This is the same abyss that swallows the child in Europa '51, a film which is in many aspects complementary to Germany. In Germany, the moment of epiphany arrives at the end, and it functions as the denouement, whereas the entire story of Europa '51 consists of a display of the consequences resulting from a traumatic "encounter with the real" that takes place at the very Romance[Princeton: Princeton University 11. According to Lesley Brill (e.g., in his TheHitchcock Press, 1988]), Hitchcock's oeuvre divides into two series, "romances" and "ironic" films, precisely with reference to the relationship between words and deeds. In "romances," the movement has a direction "from outside inwards," which is why they are dominated by the performative force of the word: the couple, linked by an external contingency, first pretends to be in love, whereupon, step by step, the external link grows into authentic love. These films therefore end with a successful communication, with an establishment of an authentic intersubjective link. Their opposite are "ironic" films culminating in Psycho:here, a mask remains just a mask, the word fails in its performative enforcement, so that instead of communication we get a psychotic dissolution of the social link.

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beginning. Europa '51 is the story of Irene, the mother of a rich Roman family, whose young son desperately seeks contact with her while she is more interested in her busy social life. Her son suddenly attempts suicide (by throwing himself into the void in the middle of a spiral staircase) and soon afterwards dies from a blood clot. His death induces a sense of guilt in Irene, who now feels that it was her superficial life and neglect of her son that drove him to his death. She breaks completely with her former way of life and sets out to search for new meaning in sacrifice and helping other people. Following the advice of her cousin, a Communist, she gets a low-paying job in a factory, begins to attend church, and works with the poor, but nothing appeases her. When she tries to persuade a neighborhood thief to surrender to the police instead of reporting him herself, she finally transgresses the law. The court finds her irresponsible due to the shock caused by the death of her child and sends her to a psychiatric ward for observation. After a series of tests, a cold and distanced psychiatrist proclaims her insane; the family leaves her, and at the end of the film, we see her alone in a sterile cell while, in front of the hospital, the poor whom she tried to help gather and hail her as a new saint.12 The trap laid by the film is the obvious reading according to which Irene breaks down because of the unbearable pressure of guilt that weighs on her as soon as she becomes aware that she was deaf to her son's desperate appeal. Read this way, the film is reduced to a commonplace critique of the so-called "alienation of contemporary society," where the noise of our bustling social life renders us deaf to the desperate cry of our neighbor, and so forth. But if the end of the film, where Irene breaks off all worldly family ties and assumes a "saintly" attitude of abandonment, is to have any sense, then we must question the authenticity of the very guilt that emerges apropos of the son's suicide. This guilt, far from being authentic, functions as an escape, i.e., it conceals a far more radical trauma. In psychoanalytic theory, one talks a lot about transference as a "projection" of guilt, that is, about the way the subject gets rid of his responsibilthe Jew, for example. ity via a paranoiac "projection" of guilt onto the OtherBut it is possible to reverse this relationship and observe that we don't only escapefrom guilt but also escape into it, take refuge in it. To grasp this paradox, we must relate the subjective experience of guilt to the inconsistency of the Other (the symbolic order), i.e., to the fact that the Other is "always-already dead." It is in this sense that we should interpret the famous Freudian dream It is this new community of believers emerging as a by-product of Irene's act that enables us to 12. locate properly Rossellini's seemingly unintelligible, even cynical comment on Edmund's suicide in Germanyas "a true light of hope": ". . . from there is born a new way of living and of seeing, the accent of hope and faith in the future and in men" (quoted in Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, p. 86). Rossellini is quite aware of the illusory character of this new community of hope and faith; what he is really interested in is the suicidal act of radical withdrawal upon which it is only possible to found a new community -the experience of total abandonment, the passage through the "point zero" that is forgotten once we find ourselves within the new community.

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about the father who does not know that he is dead: his figure persists, retains its consistency until he is told the truth. The typical obsessional compulsion is to prevent the Other from learning this truth. He sacrifices himself by assuming the guilt, the impotence, the inconsistency and thus saves the Other. To determine more closely this logic of guilt in its relation to the Other's inconsistency, we must clarify the contradictory nature of the very notion of the Other. That is to say, in ideological discourse, the agency of the Other is present in two mutually exclusive modes. First of all, the "big Other" appears as a hidden agency "pulling the strings"; it appears variously as: divine providence, in traditional ideology; the Hegelian "cunning of reason" (or, rather, the popular version of it); the "invisible hand of the market" in the commodity-economy; the "objective logic of history" in Marxist-Leninist terms; the "Jewish conspiracy" in Nazism. In short, the distance between what we wanted to achieve and the effective result of our activity, the surplus of the result over the subject's intention, is again embodied in another agent, in a kind of meta-Subject (God, Reason, History, the Jew). This reference to the Other is of course in itself radically ambivalent. It can function as a quieting and strengthening reassurance (religious confidence in God's will; the Stalinist's conviction that he is an instrument of historical necessity), or as a terrifying paranoiac agency (as in the case of the Nazi ideology, which recognized behind economic crisis, national humiliation, moral degeneration the same hidden hand of the Jew). These two contradictory aspects are united in the figure of the psychoanalyst qua "subject supposed to know": in the psychoanalytic cure, his very presence functions as a kind of guarantee that the inconsistent string of "free associations" will retroactively receive meaning. At the same time, however, the presence of the analyst materializes a menace to the analysand's enjoyment, it threatens to rob him of his enjoyment through the dissolution of his symptoms. When the analytic cure approaches its final stage, it usually provokes in the analysand a paranoid fear that the analyst is after his innermost treasure, his kernel of secret enjoyment. The reassuring and the threatening aspects are clearly not symmetrically disposed: the supposed subject assures the analysand of his meaning and menaceshis enjoyment. Both aspects are actually already present in the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew who simultaneouslyguarantees meaning -if we accept the premise of the Jewish conspiracy, things suddenly "become clear," we are able to recognize a pattern behind the apparent economic and moral threatens our rightful enjoyment. chaos-and The crucial point not to be overlooked, however, is that the ideological Other functions at the same time as the precise opposite of the hidden agent who manipulates events: it is also the agency of pure semblance, of an appearance which is nevertheless essential, i.e., one which must be preserved at any price. This logic of the essential appearance was carried to the extreme in "real socialism," in which the whole system aimed at maintaining the appearance that the people were united in their support of the Party and in their enthusiastic con-

Rossellini: Woman as Symptomof Man

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struction of socialism. Ritualized spectacles, in which nobody "really believed" and everybody knew that nobody believed, followed one after another. Party bureaucrats were nonetheless afraid that the appearance of belief would disintegrate. They perceived this potential disintegration as a total catastrophe, as the dissolution of the entire social order. The question to be asked here is simply: if nobody "really believed," and if everybody knew that nobody believed, what was the agency, the gaze for whom the spectacle of belief was staged? It is here that we encounter the function of the "big Other" in its purest. In everyday reality, life may be dreadful and dull, but all is well as long as this fact remains hidden from the gaze of the "big Other." It is for his gaze that the spectacle of the happy and enthusiastic people must be staged again and again. If the Other in the primary sense of the term functions as a "subject supposed to know," here it functions, on the contrary, as the "subject supposed not to know," as the agency from which vulgar everyday reality must be hidden. In short, to return again to the dream of the father who does not know that he is dead, what must be kept from the big Other (incarnated in the gaze of the Leader) is the simple fact that he is dead. The last terrifying and spectacular example of this compulsive logic of pure appearance is the fall of Ceaucescu. His crucial mistake, probably the immediate cause of his downfall, was his decision, after the slaughter in Timisoara, to organize a huge old-style rally of his supporters in Bucharest to prove to the "big Other" that the appearance was still being maintained. The crowd, however, was no longer prepared to play the game and the spell was broken. The usual which Ceaucescu was a megalomaniac who lost contact with explanation-by reality, was sincerely convinced about popular support for his regime, and therefalls short. As if the ramified network of the fore organized the rally -obviously Securitate is not evidence enough that he was, for years, systematically preparing to crush popular revolt against his rule! Ceaucescu definitely did not believe in the support of the people. What he did believe in was the big Other.13 It is therefore here, in the relationship to the Communist leader, that we encounter in its purest form the link connecting guilt with the Other's inconsistency: if something goes wrong, we can attest our devotion to the cause by readily assuming responsibility for the failure and so saving the purity of the revolutionary project itself. This is also the logic of the Stalinist purges, of the mystery of the dedicated Communists who unhesitatingly confessed to the most horrid 13. How, then, should we combine these two aspects of the ideological big Other? The solution is simpler than it may seem. The appearance that must be maintained at whatever cost by means of the totalitarian spectacle is precisely the appearance that the Party is an instrument of historical necessity, fulfilling a noble mission, the appearance that the decisions of the Party are authorized by the big Other of the Meaning of History. In other words, the appearance to be maintained at any cost is none other than that there is meaning hidden behind the appearance, behind the apparent historical appearance of the "big Other" in the first sense of the term. It is for that reason contingency-the that the ideology of "real socialism" incessantly accentuated the deep love of the people for the Party and their Leader: "love" is to be conceived here in a strict psychoanalytical sense, as a relation of transference to the "subject supposed to know."

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counter-revolutionary crimes. Their "confessions" were designed to keep intact the Communist Idea, to prevent the Other from learning the truth and thus disintegrating. This "nonexistence of the Other" that we conceal by all too willingly assuming guilt is thus what is at stake in Europa '51: at the end of the film, Irene does not try to get rid of her guilt; rather, she uses it as a way of concealing the ontological void that swallowed her son. Her attempt to take refuge in Communism and Christianity, the two main ideologies of "Europe '51," is thus nothing but a desperate attempt to recover the traumatic encounter with the real (her son's suicidal act) by integrating it into a symbolic universe of guilt, locating it within an ideological field, and thus conferring meaning upon it: "Irene is therefore attracted by ideological constellations which fascinate her as, for the moment, at least, they enable her to integrate the scandal of her son's death into a transcendent logic."14 And what takes place at the end of the film when Irene assumes the subjective position of the saint is precisely separation in the strict Lacanian sense of the term: she falls away from the symbolic network and assumes distance towards the symbolic universe. Stromboli: The Act of Freedom Separation is also enacted towards the end of Stromboli, the first of Rossellini's Bergman-films. Stromboliis a story about Karin, an Estonian emigree who, at the end of World War II, finds herself in a refugee camp in Italy. After repeated failures to obtain an Argentinian visa, she marries a poor Italian fisherman from the volcanic island of Stromboli as a last desperate attempt to escape the camp. Life on the island takes place within the confines of a closed community where a primitive patriarchal atmosphere reigns. Karin is soon stifled by her new life and resolves to run away: she takes a long walk across the mountain with the crater toward the island's other shore, where a boat leaves for the mainland. As Karin ascends the volcano, however, smoke and fumes from the crater surround and choke her. After this terrifying "encounter with the real," the American and Italian versions of the film distinctly diverge. In the American version (put together by RKO against Rossellini's will), Karin later wakes up to a bright morning and descends back toward the village while an obtrusive voiceover tells us exactly what to think: "Out of her terror and her suffering, Karin had found a great need for God. And she knew now that only in her return to the village could she hope for peace." The Italian version, however, over which Rossellini had the final say, leaves the dilemma open: the film ends with Karin repeating offscreen "My God! Oh merciful God!" and with a shot of the billowing smoke of the volcano. Asked if she is leaving or returning to the village at the 14. Alain Bergala, "Celle par qui le scandale arrive," Cahiers du cinema 356 (February 1984), p. 11.

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end, Rossellini replied: "I don't know. That would be the beginning of another film. . . . There is a turning point in every human experience in life-which isn't the end of the experience or of the man, but a turning point. My finales are as for what it is that begins, I don't turning points. Then it begins again-but know." 15

By this very irresolution of its ending, Stromboli marks the proper dimension of the act: it ends at the precise point at which the act is already complete, although no action is yet accomplished. The act performed (or, more appropriately, endured) by Karin is that of symbolicsuicide: a withdrawing from symbolic reality that enables us to begin anew from the "zero point," from that point of absolute freedom which Hegel called "abstract negativity." The moment of this symbolic suicide can be precisely located: it takes place between the two mentions of God. Karin reaches her lowest point of despair and dejection when, on running from the village (the social link), she finds herself surrounded by the volcano's smoke and fumes. In the face of the volcano's primordial power, all social ties pale into insignificance; she is reduced to her bare "being-there": running away from the oppressive social reality, she encountered something incomparably more horrifying, the real. Sobbing wildly, she cries out: "I'll finish it, but I haven't the courage; I'm afraid." Then she cries out the name of God twice, as an expression of extreme frustration and exhaustion, and breaks down. Fade-in into a shot of a quiet, sunny morning; Karin, who fell asleep on the crater's brink, awakens and again says "Oh God!" twice, but the same words are now "transformed into an act of homage to the magnificent stillness all around her."16 To use Hegelian terms: the previous experience of loss is converted into the loss of loss itself. She becomes aware that what a moment ago she was so afraid to lose is now totally null, i.e., is already in itself a kind of a loss. We could also say that Karin experiences the meaning of the tautology of God. Her entire experience could be written: "God is . . . God," denoting

the ultimate coincidence

of

God as all-destructive fury with God as blissful serenity. After we pass through the "zero point" of the symbolic suicide, what a moment ago appeared as the whirlpool of rage sweeping away all determinate existence changes miraculously soon as we renounce all symbolic ties. The act in the into supreme bliss-as Lacanian sense is nothing but this withdrawal by means of which we renounce renunciation itself, becoming aware of the fact that we have nothing to lose through loss. What Karin did not have the courage to complete the previous night was precisely this act of symbolic suicide, this withdrawal from symbolic reality which is to be opposed strictly to the suicide "in reality." The latter remains caught in the network of symbolic communication: by killing itself, the subject attempts to send a message to the Other, that is, this act functions as an acknowledgment of guilt, a sobering warning, a pathetic appeal (like the recent 15. 16.

Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, p. 126. Ibid., p. 124.

RobertoRossellini. Stromboli. 1949.

Lithuanian political self-incinerations), whereas the symbolic suicide aims to exclude the subject from the very intersubjective circuit. The trap laid by Stromboli consists therefore in offering itself up to this obvious reading: through her epiphany, Karin becomes aware of the frivolity and pointlessness of her aversion to the mundane life of the village; reborn, she calmly accepts her destiny. As we have seen, however, the whole point of Rossellini's ending is that it stops short of this conclusion. What lies ahead for Karin is undoubtedly what we can vulgarly call "a new life": because sooner or later she will return to the village and make peace with her husband, or she will return to the mainland and assume a new place in a different community, she will, in one way or another, become active again. But the film ends beforeKarin takes one of these alternatives, beforeher insertion in a new symbolic network. There is of course something exceptional, excessive even, in such an encounter with the real, with the abyss of "abstract freedom." Lacan's point, however, is that such a passage through the "zero point" of symbolic suicide is at work in everyact worthy of this name. What is an act?17Why is suicide the act par excellence? The act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically transforms its agent: the act is not simply something I "accomplish" -after an act, I am literally "not the same as before." In this sense, we could say that the subject "undergoes" the act ("passes through" it) rather than "accomplishes" it. In the act, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not); that is, the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse, aphanisis, of the subject. Which is why every act worthy of the name is "mad" in its radical unaccountability. By means of the act, I put everything at risk, including myself, my symbolic identity; the act

Cf. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Jacques Lacan: Bemerkungen iber sein Konzept des passage a 17. l'acte," Wo es war 7-8 (Wien: Hora Verlag, 1990).

is therefore always a "crime," a "transgression," namely of the limit of the symbolic community to which I belong. The act is defined by this irreducible risk: in its most fundamental dimension, it is always negative, that is, an act of annihilation. It is not simply that we do not know what will come of it; rather it is that its final outcome is ultimately insignificant, strictly secondary in relation to the "No!" of the pure act.18 Today, as Communism falls apart everywhere, it is worth recalling the act that started it all, an act contemporary with Germany, Year Zero and Stromboli: Tito's "No!" to Stalin in 1948, i.e., the split of the Yugoslav Communists from the Moscow-dominated international Communist movement. The negative dimension was here far more decisive than its positive outcome or motivation: what really counted was simply the fact that a Communist party that held power said "No!" to Stalin's hegemony. The positive reasons in the name of which this break was accomplished were probably not clear to the actors themselves. We might even risk a cynical hypothesis that all the later inventions that made Yugoslavia the mess it is today (worker's self-management, etc.) sprang from the desperate attempts of the Party ideologues to "rationalize" the "No!" of the pure act, to 18. Here, we could also establish a link with the notion of act recently elaborated by Ernesto Laclau: the act seen as the point of undecidability of a symbolic structure (cf. his "Introduction" to New Reflectionson the Revolution of Our Time [London: Verso, 1990]). The irreducible "unaccountability" of an act attests to the fact that what defines an act is a temporality irreducible to space: the act introduces a cut separating "after" from "before," a discontinuity which cannot be accounted for by a spatial disposition of elements. In this sense, the act runs counter to the tendency to reduce time is at work in modern to space-i.e. temporal succession to spatial, synchronous coexistence-which art and in modern science. In these accounts, that is, in cubism and the theory of relativity alike, the universe no longer "develops in time": it is always-already given in toto. In contrast to this conception, the irreducible temporality of the act presupposes a space where there is always, constitutively, something "amiss," "out of joint." Time as such implies spatial imbalance, a universe where the thing is always "missing from its place."

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found it upon some positive ideological project. What we must bear in mind here is this hiatus: the break with Stalin was not a break in the name of worker's self-management (as was claimed by later apologists); it was an act of pure risk, of refusal. Only later did this refusal assume a positive, determinate existence in the ideological project of self-management. With their "No!" to Stalin, Tito and his companions crossed their Rubicon without being sure of what awaited them on the other bank. It should also be clear, now, why an act, although it belongs to the real, is possible only against the background of the symbolic order: the greatness of an act depends strictly on the placefrom which it was accomplished. In other words, as it has already been pointed out by numerous political historians, Tito's "No!" had such a subversive impact only because it was pronounced by a Communist,only because he resisted Stalin as a Communist.(For this reason, there was no great pressure on Yugoslavia to become part of Western political or military alliances.) If Tito had "changed sides," passed over to the West and "restored capitalism," nothing really subversive would have happened: we would simply have had a case of the defeat of Communism during the Cold War, and the West would have appropriated a part of Stalin's empire. It was precisely through his insistence that he was acting as a Communist that Tito made an incision into the Communist monolith.19 With an act stricto sensu, we can never foresee how the existing symbolic space will be transformed: the act is a rupture after which "nothing remains the same." Which is why, although history can always be explained and accounted for afterwards, we can never, as agents caught in its flow, predict its course in advance. Prediction is impossible because history is not an "objective process," but a process continuously interrupted by the scansion of acts.20 Though many famous examples of such acts -from de Gaulle's "No!" to Petain and to French capitulation in 1940, to Lacan's dissolution of the Ecole freudienne de Paris in 1979, and up to the mythical case of the act of transgression, Caesar's crossing of are all gestures of male leaders, we should not forget that the the Rubiconof such an act is feminine: Antigone's "No!" to Creon, to state case paradigmatic Her is act literally suicidal; she excludes herself from the community power. without offering any new program. She simply insists on her unconditional demand. Perhaps we can then risk the hypothesis that the act as real is "feminine," in contrast to the "masculine" performative, that is, the great founding gesture of a new order. In the case of Lacan, the dissolution of the Ecole freudienne would be "feminine," while the gesture of founding the new Ecole de la Cause freudienne was "masculine." The line could be drawn from Antigone to Simone Weil, the Catholic mystic and French Resistance fighter who ended her life in London by starving herself to death. It was she who served Rossellini as the Which is why today's disintegration of Communism, in spite of the tremendous consequences 19. of what is going on, produces no acts. Cf. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 20.

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model for Irene in Europa '51. In this perspective, the difference masculine/feminine no longer coincides with that of active/passive, spiritual/sensual, culture/ nature; rather, masculine activity is an escape from the abysmal dimension of the feminine act. The "break with nature" is on the side of woman, and man's compulsive activity is ultimately nothing but a desperate attempt to repair the traumatic incision of this rupture. The "Night of the World" and the Fiction of Reality The "year zero" in the title of Rossellini's film is therefore that "dark passage" through the zero-point, that "eclipse of (constituted) reality," that withdrawal of the subject into itself, that "night of the world" or experience of the pure self as "abstract negativity," about which Hegel speaks in a manuscript for the Realphilosophie of 1805/06: The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains unending wealth of many presentaeverything in its simplicity-an which none of tions, images, happens to occur to him-or which are not present. This night, the inner of nature, that exists here-pure self-in phantasmagorical presentations, is night all around it, here another white shape, suddenly here shoots a bloody head-there before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when a night that becomes one looks human beings in the eye-into awful . . . And the symbolic order, the universe of the Word, emerges only against the background of the experience of this abyss, as is demonstrated by Hegel in the same manuscripts, when he points out that this Inwardness of the pure self "must enter also into existence, object becoming, opposite this innerness to be external; return to being. This is language as name-giving power. . . . Through the name the object as individual being is born out of the I.21 Reading these fragments now, one cannot help recalling the traditional "deconstructionist" reproach to Hegel: true, Hegel acknowledges this radical withdrawal of the subject into itself, this "night of the world," but only as a passing moment that is quickly sublated (aufgehoben)in a new spiritual reality of is thus again reduced to a vanishing point within the selfnames-negativity mediation of the spirit. Such a reading, however -in spite of its convincing, even the crucial accent of Hegel: the experience of self-evident character-misses "abstract negativity" is not a passing moment sublated in the final result of the

21.

Quoted in Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel's Recollection (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), pp. 7-8.

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dialectical movement, the positive articulation of concrete content; the point is rather that this very concrete articulation of the positive spiritual content is nothing but theform in which radical negativity (the "night of the world") assumes determinatebeing. In the famous paragraph 32 of the "Preface" to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says precisely this when he praises the power of understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom -this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure "I." Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. . . . [The life of Spirit] is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.22 We already know how the negative is converted into being: through language as name-giving power, that is, through the emergence of the symbolic order. Hegel's statements about the way Understanding breaks up the living organic Whole and confers autonomous existence on what is effective only as a moment of concrete totality are to be read against the background of the fundamental Lacanian notion of the signifier as the power that mortifiesdisembodies the life-substance, "dissects" the body, and subordinates it to the constraints of the signifying network. The word murders the thing, not only by implying its absence- in naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, even when the thing is still present - but above all by dissecting it. The word "quarters" the thing, it tears it out of its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we begin to speak of color, form, shape, and so forth as if they possessed self-sufficient being. The power of Understanding consists in this capacity to reduce the organic Whole of experience to a catalogue of these "dead" symbolic classifications. In our everyday attitude, we are "spontaneous Bergsonians": we bemoan the fact that the fullness of our life experience escapes forever the network of language categories; we

22.

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenologyof Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 18-19.

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laugh at those who become so entangled in the fictitious world of symbols that they lose the taste of effective life. Hegel is, on the contrary, full of wonder for this mortifying faculty of Understanding before which the living substance is utterly helpless, for this tremendous power that is able to subordinate the very reality of the life-process to its symbolic "fictions." For him, this inversion whereby fiction subjugates reality proves the inherent ontological nullity of what we call "reality." For what is the "life of the Spirit" if not a life-process governed by (what appears to our everyday view as) fictitious non-entities? Let us take the example of the ethical-political arrangement of a given community: its symbolic identity is bestowed upon it by a series of legal, religious, and other values which regulate its life. These values are literally "fictions"; they exist nowhere, they possess no substantial ontological consistency, and they are present only in the form of the symbolic rituals which enact them. The entire legal order, for example, is founded on fictitious "moral" entities with their own will, their own rights. These entities declare wars, make treaties: "our State concluded peace with its neighbor," "the company bought raw materials," "the Fatherland is humiliated." The point here is not that "these are all just fictions," but that because of these "fictions" thousands die in wars, lose their jobs, and so on. In other words, although such a "fiction" effectively exists only in its real effects (the State is actual only in the real activity of its citizens, the Fatherland only in the patriotic feeling and actions of those who recognize themselves in its mandates), we cannot reduce the fiction to these effects and say, for example, "the Fatherland is nothing but the sum of these actual individual deeds." On the contrary, these very deeds assume their ontological consistency only by way of reference to the symbolic fiction of the Fatherland. The Fatherland as the Cause for which we fight "is nowhere in reality," but in spite of this, we cannot explain the very "material" reality of fights and sufferings without reference to it. To resort to the traditional philosophical terms, Hegel, like Lacan, avoids the idealist as well as the nominalist trap: the "big Other" (the symbolic order) possesses, of course, no substantial actuality, yet neither can it be reduced to a nominalistically conceived "abbreviation" for the multitude of individual, really existing entities. Precisely insofar as the Other is a "dead scheme," we must presuppose it as an ideal point of reference which, in spite of its nonexistence, is perfectly "valid," and which dominates and regulates our actual lives. In a somewhat poetic manner we could say that man is that animal whose life is governed by symbolic fictions. This is the way "tarrying with the negative" takes place, this is the way negativity as such acquires positive, determinate being: through the structuring of the actual life of a community by reference to symbolic fictions. In our everyday lives, we accept this as something so self-evident that we do not even notice the oddity of it-to become fully aware of it, a philosophical experience of "wondering" is necessary. Lacan rejoins Hegel by insisting on the radical discontinuity between the organic immediacy of "life" and the symbolic universe: the "symbolization of reality" implies the passage through the zero point

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of the "night of the world." What we forget when we pursue our daily life is that our human universe is nothing but an embodiment of the radically inhuman "abstract negativity." And what is the act if not the moment when the subject who is its agent suspends the network of symbolic fictions which serve as the support for his daily life and confronts again the radical negativity upon which they are founded? What we call "culture" is therefore, in its very ontological status, the reign of the dead over life, i.e. the form in which the "death drive" assumes positive existence. Herein lies the fundamental "Hegelian" lesson of Rossellini's films: the act as real, as the transgression of a symbolic limit, does not enable us to (re)establish a kind of immediate contact with some presymbolic life-substance; it throws us, on the contrary, back into the abyss of the real out of which our symbolic reality emerges. Now we can further specify the lure of Rossellini's Bergman films: they always contain some image of "authentic," substantial life, and it seems as if the heroine's salvation depends on her ability to immerge into this substantial "authenticity": Karin in Strombolimust accept life in the closed island community; Irene in Europa '51 must find herself in the naive but authentic faith of the poor who at the end of the film proclaim her a saint; the English couple in Voyage to Italy must overcome the restraints of their relationship through contact with the spontaneous life feeling of the Italian people. The strategy of these films is precisely to denounce this lure as such, to present it in its falseness: Karin in Stromboliis "reborn" by experiencing a horror before which life of the fishermen is thus the misery of the island community pales-the Irene definitely renounces of the end at in all its '51, Europa nullity; exposed outcasts is just a cruel irony, the -her beatification poor by religious ideology her and the between encounter missed of a them; couple cruising English proof inert presence crowds the vivacious Italian the behind encounters through Italy of ancient statues and ruins. In all three cases, we have therefore a movement from reality to the real, to what, in reality itself, is "more than reality": the volcano is what is "on the island more than the island itself," its real excess, just as sainthood is what is "in religious ideology more than ideology," the nonideological kernel in its heart, and, finally, just as the old ruins are "in Italy more than Italy," a mute witness to some past, long-lost enjoyment.23 In all three cases, the

23. According to Alain Bergala, the fundamental feature of Rossellini's Bergman films consists in the fact that the third element disturbing the harmonious relationship of the couple is not the usual third member of a love-triangle, but some radically heterogeneous element of a wholly nonpsychological nature: the volcano in Stromboli,ideologies (Communism and Catholicism) in Europa '51, the statues and ruins of Naples in Voyageto Italy (Cf. Bergala, "Celle par qui le scandale arrive," p. 10). What we must add to this observation is that this disturbing element is of a different nature in each case: the volcano in Stromboliis real (Bergala himself determines it as a "Thing-in-itself" upon which every experience of meaning breaks down); the ideologies in Europa '51 are symbolic; the ruins of Voyageclearly function as a sinthome,fragments of a culture that are at the same time the congealment of a lost enjoyment.

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41

heroine is able to perceive this fissure of the symbolic "substance" insofar as she occupies the position of a stranger, i.e. insofar as her gaze is external: those who find themselves within the symbolic order are necessarily blinded. The mechanism that renders them blind is that of the sacrifice, whose elementary function is to heal thefissure of the Other. What holds together a "substantial" community is its rite of sacrifice, and the position of a "stranger" is defined precisely by her refusal to partake in this rite. The Fascination of the Sacrifice In the final pages of his Seminar XI, Lacan directly opposes psychoanalytic experience to the fascination of the sacrifice: the heroism demanded by psychoanalysis is not the heroic gesture of accepting the role of sacrificial victim but, on the contrary, the heroism of resisting the temptationof the sacrifice, of confronting that which the fascinating image of the sacrifice conceals. Lacan himself draws our attention to the political dimension of the sacrificial logic, pointing out the way the drama of Nazism reenacts the most monstrous and supposedly superseded forms of the holocaust. . . . the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell. . . . But for whoever is capable of turning a once again, there courageous gaze towards this phenomenon-and, are certainly few who do not succumb to the fascination of the sacrifice in itself- the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other that I call here the dark God.24 What is concealed by the fascinating spectacle of the sacrifice? Lacan relates the sacrifice to the desire of the Other, to the enigmatic Che vuoi? "What does the Other want of me?" in its most fundamental dimension. Sacrifice is a "gift of reconciliation" to the Other, destined to appease its desire. Sacrifice conceals the abyss of the Other's desire; more precisely, it conceals the Other's lack, its inconsistency. Sacrifice is a guarantee that "the Other exists," that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice. The trick of the sacrifice consists therefore in what speech-act theorists would call its "pragmatic presupposition": by the very act of sacrifice, we (presup)pose the existence of its addressee. Thus, even if the act fails in its intended goal, this very failure is able to be read from within the logic of the sacrifice itself, as our failure to appease the Other.

24. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Conceptsof Psycho-Analysis(London: The Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 275.

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Insofar as this abyss of the Other's desire emerged in all its violence with the is, insofar as the fundamental position of the Jewish beJewish religion -that liever is that of a perplexed Che vuoi?, "What does He want of me?" -it was unavoidable that this religion would break with the logic of sacrifice. For sacrifice means that we have betrayed the abyss of the Che vuoi? and translated God's desire into a demand that can be appeased by means of the sacrifice. And -at this point, we can follow Rene Girard25- it was precisely for this reason that we encounter in the Jewish religion the first appearance of a subject who resists assuming the role of a scapegoat-victim: Job. Job's refusal to play his part in the sacrificial rite is the exact reverse of his perplexity in front of his calamities: instead of identifying heroically with his evil fate, Job continues to raise the question of the meaning of God's request. We witness here what is perhaps the greatest ethical revolution in the history of mankind: the moment when the subject refuses the allotted role of the victim, the moment when the social perspective that demands the sacrifice of the scapegoat is confronted with the perspective of the victim itself. What is here so subversive and path-breaking, what confers upon the story of Job its dramatic tension and at the same time its truth, is the very confrontation of the two perspectives. Girard, however, falls short of his own conception when he reduces Job to a kind of forerunner of Christ, the true paradigm of a victim who speaks out and thus subjectivizes himself. Christ's gesture is a gesture of love: it conceals the anxiety-provoking abyss of the Other's inconsistency and thereby performs the turn from a religion of anxiety (Judaism) to a religion of love (Christianity). What defines love is a basic discord or gap: the lover seeks what he lacks in the beloved, but - as Lacan puts it - "what the one lacks is not what is hidden within the other."26 The only thing left to the beloved is thus to proceed to a kind of exchange of places, to change from the object to the subject of love, in short: to return love. Love's most sublime moment consists in this inversion by which the beloved endeavors to deliver himself from the impasse of his position, from the impossibility of complying with the lover's demand by assuming himself the position of the lover, by reaching his hand back to the lover and thus answering the lover's lack, the lover's desire, with his own lack. Love is based on the illusion that this encounter between the two lacks can succeed and beget a "new harmony." Therein consists also the supreme sublimity of Christ's gesture: what is it if not a sign of God's lovefor man. In reply to the believer's love for Him, in reply to the hands that the believer stretches towards Him, God himself changes into a lover and reaches back towards man-concealing thereby the abyss of the Otherness that no sacrifice can appease.

25. 26.

Cf. Rene Girard, Job: The Victimof His People (London: Altlone, 1987). Cf. Jacques Lacan, "Le transfert" (unpublished seminar from 1960-1961).

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43

One can only wonder, then, at the fact that even some Lacanians continue to maintain that analysis ends when the analysand is able to accept a fundamental renunciation as the condition of access to desire, to accept "symbolic castration." Lacan is as far as possible from such an ethic of heroic sacrifice: the lack the subject must assume is not his own but that of the Other, which is something incomparably more unbearable. Since the Other does not possess what the subject lacks, no sacrifice can compensate his lack. Now, we can also see how foreign to Lacan is the notion that the "big Other," as the structural order, "pulls the strings" and regulates the subject's self-experience. Lacan's position is completely different from the standard "structuralist" thesis that the subject, in his imaginary relation to the social, fails to recognize that it is the Other that effectively "runs the show." The supreme illusion consists precisely in this reliance on the consistency of the "big Other." Here we will find the crucial difference between the Lacanian Other and the Althusserian Other, materialized in ideological state apparatuses. Althusser's constant insistence on the materiality of ideology is deeply symptomatic and functions as a kind of theoretical denial. It testifies to the fact that Althusser misrecognizes the specific agency of the "ideal," "immaterial" Other in the shape of the symbolic order guaranteeing meaning to historical contingency. This "big Other" is retroactively posited, that is, presupposed, by the subject in the very act by means of which he is caught in the network of any ideology. The subject, for example, (presup)poses the Other in the guise of Historical Reason or Divine Providence in the very moment and gesture of conceiving himself as its executor, as its unconscious tool. This act of (presup)position which makes the big Other exist is perhaps the elementary gesture of ideology, and it is precisely here that we must locate the above-mentioned difference between suicide as "demonstrative" act and suicide as suspension of the symbolic order. The "demonstrative" suicide still addresses the Other, whereas the "symbolic" suicide cancels the very presupposition of the Other -it is, in a way, the very "undoing" of the founding ideological gesture. In this precise sense, that is, insofar as Rossellini's films endeavor to enact this suspension, they are nonideological, they enable us to break out of the ideological closure. This "withdrawal" of the subject from the Other is what Lacan calls "subjective destitution." This is not an act of sacrifice (which always implies the Other as its addressee), but an act of abandonment that sacrifices sacrifice. The freedom thus attained brings the very opposite of the relief of "liberation." "Liberation" always implies a reference to the Other as Master: ultimately, nothing liberates as well as a good Master, since "liberation" consists precisely in our shifting the burden onto the Other-Master. So-called "free associations" in a psychoanalytic cure are the supreme proof of this. By means of them, the analysand liberates himself from the pressures and constraints of censorship, he begins to prattle freely-but only because he can rely on the analyst, the "subject supposed to know," the "master of signification" (as Lacan put it in the

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1950s), whose very presence guarantees that, retroactively, his prattle will obtain meaning and consistency. The freedom attained by the act is the very opposite of this last: by undergoing it, all the burden falls back upon the subject, since he renounces any support in the Other. In conclusion, we can now also define the trap laid by Rossellini's films on the level of their form. It is already a commonplace of cinema theorists to oppose Rossellini to those directors who create meaning by artificial interventions in the cinematic material (through montage, and so on): in contrast to these, Rossellini is supposed to let the unorganized material speak for itself, that is, to renounce the position of the artist as master who pulls the strings and to limit his role to that of a collector-observer of cinematic material, keeping his eyes open to the contingency of the real. In Rossellini's films, meaning does not result from the author's conscious manipulation; it emerges from the material itself by means of miraculous, unpredictable acts of grace (Andre Bazin attempted thus to detect the roots of Rossellini's Christianity in the very formal qualities of his films27). But if this were the case, Rossellini would proceed somewhat like the analysand who freely associates: stringing contingent fragments of the real, he would rely on the presence of the "big Other" (God) to produce meaning. What Rossellini effectively does is rather the opposite: we constantly sense in his films a tremendous effort to "manipulate," to bring under control the excess of the real, and the features that are usually taken as proofs of his "modernism" (the "empty time" that subverts the linear narration, etc.) are precisely monuments of his failure to attain his goal. Rossellini's greatness lies in the fact that he intentionally included in his films traces of their own failure. What is "modern" about them is the fact that the tension between "manipulation" and material is acknowledged as part of the artistic endeavor itself. Each of his films is an ultimately failed attempt to come to terms with the real of some traumatic encounter. What are Open City,Paisan, and Germany,Year Zero if not three attempts to come to terms with the trauma of Fascism? What are Stromboli,Europa '51, and Voyageto Italy if not attempts to integrate, to master the traumatic encounter with Ingrid Bergman, her act of saying "No!" to Hollywood and joining Rossellini at the height of her stardom? This was tremendous decision, an effective "act of madness" that nothing in Rossellini's own life, full of opportunistic maneuvering, can match. True, all of his films in which she stars display a frenetic activity, an attempt to balance the dignity of her act, to recompense for it. But the act remains hers.

Cf. his articles on Rossellini in vol. 5 of Qu'est-ceque le cinema?(Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 27. 1962).

Fetish Envy

MARJORIE

GARBER

Whoseunderwear is under there? Fruit of the Loom. 'Cause it fits. -Advertising

jingle for Fruit of the Loom underwear

A fetish is a story masquerading as an object. J. Stoller, M.D., Observing the Erotic Imagination

-Robert

Few women are ready to go to a party dressed in a skimpywhite toga that reveals of pair of shorts embellishedwith a large drawing of a phallus. -Gladys

Perint Palmer, "Fashion Famine Plagues London"

A fetish gave my patient the power to ignore a man and deny his penis. Her bitter resentmentagainst menfor her lack of a penis and for her great need of them, stemmingfrom oedipal sexual disappointment,was expressedin an attachment tofetishes. This was especially notable when she lavished attention on her denim jacket and turned awayfrom the analyst. -David

A. Raphling, M.D., "Fetishism in a Woman"

In recent years, feminist literary criticism and film theory have been preoclinked by a cupied with issues like female fetishism and male subjectivity -issues have it. Or, if we should has If he it, common desire for equality, or reciprocity. too. it have to have to we have to have it, he ought "Female subjectivity" is itself, I think, a recuperative strategy; its apparent counterpart, "male subjectivity," is a fantasy construct designed to obscure the fact that the male equivalent of "female subjectivity" is not "male subjectivity" but, alas, "subjectivity," just as the male equivalent of "female transvestism" in most psychoanalytic and popular discourse is not "male transvestism" but "transvestism" tout court. Men who are surgically transformed into women are transsexuals; women who are surgically transformed into men are "female-to-

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male transsexuals." (Unfortunately, in most of the literature, neither are described simply as "women" or "men.") At the end of her provocative essay on female fetishism, Naomi Schor raises this point directly, confessing to "a persistent doubt that nags at [her] as [she] attempt[s] to think through the notion of female fetishism. What if the appropriation of fetishism . . . were in fact only the latest and most subtle form of 'penis envy'?" What I am going to suggest here, using examples from Shakespeare's plays, modern theatrical productions, psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and pop music videos, is that this question, though highly pertinent, is wrongly posed, because it is, finally, tautologous. Penis envy is phallus envy; phallus envy is fetish envy. It is not clear that it is possible to go "beyond ideology" here; the ideology of the fetish is the ideology of phallocentrism, the ideology of heterosexuality. "If the penis were the phallus," writes Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni, "men would have no need of feathers or ties or medals."2 The penis is an organ; the phallus is a structure. What does it mean to say that envy for the one is envy for the other? Here we might remind ourselves of what Freud has to say directly about "penis envy": that it marks the castration complex of the young girl; that she wishes to be able to exhibit the penis she does not have (as, for example, by urinating while standing up); that a "successful" maturation toward adulthood will convert this female wish for the penis into a wish for a baby; and that the "ultimate outcome of the infantile wish for a penis . . . in women in whom the determinants of a neurosis in later life are absent [is that] it changes into the wish for a man, and thus puts up with the man as an appendage to the penis."3 Why is fixation on the phallus not called a fetish when it is attached to a man? The concept of "normal" sexuality, that is to say, of heterosexuality, is founded on the naturalizing of the fetish. And this in turn is dependent upon an economics of display intrinsic both to fetishism and to theatrical representation. In general, according to Freud, men have perversions, women have neuroses. Perversions have to do with having something and neuroses with lacking something. Thus, when Freud articulated for psychoanalysis both the idea of "penis envy" and the psychoanalytic concept of the fetish as "a substitute for the woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and . . . does not want to give up," he privileged the "man's penis" as the "normal prototype of fetishes."4 The "woman's real small penis, the clitoris," was, he claimed in the

Naomi Schor, "Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand," in The Female Body in Western 1. Culture, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 371. 2. Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni, La Robe (Paris: Seuil, 1983), p. 34. "On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism," trans. E. Glover, in The 3. Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1955), p. 129. 4. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in The CompletePsychological Works,vol. 21, p. 157.

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same essay, "the normal prototype of inferior organs," where "organ-inferiority" became the basis of all neuroses. Men had the penis; men had the fetish. Lacan, in moving from penis to phallus, from the level of anatomy or "nature" to that of the unconscious and of representation, addressed the question of fetishism in relation to the phallus as the mark of desire. Thus, commenting on "the absence in women of fetishism," Lacan notes (after Freud) that the "imaginary motive for most male perversions is the desire to preserve the phallus which involved the subject in the mother." Since fetishism represents "the virtually manifest case of this desire," he concludes that "this desire," the desire to preserve the maternal phallus, "has a different fate in the perversions which she [i.e., woman] presents."5 Again following Freud and Ernest Jones, Lacan locates both this desire and this perversion in "the homosexual woman," who exemplifies the patterns of "courtly love" in that she "excels in relation to what is lacking to her." So it is the lesbian, and not the straight woman, who follows the path of something analogous to fetishism. Lacan notes "the naturalness with which such women appeal to their quality of being men, as opposed to the delirious style of the transsexual male," and takes this as a sign of the path leading from feminine sexuality to desire. It is the trajectory of desire which is at issue here-the position of "the homosexual woman" as not the object but the subject of desire. Thus Lacan can claim, in a complex but suggestive passage, that "feminine sexuality appears as the effort of a jouissance wrapped in its own contiguity (for which all circumcision might represent the symbolic rupture) to be realized in the envy of desire, which castration releases in the male by giving him its signifier in the phallus."6 "The envy of desire." In the woman who lacks the penis but "has" the phallus (that is, who "has" it by becoming aware of its lack), it is phallus envy, the desire for desire, that motors and motivates her actions. "Having" the phallus, having the fetish, becomes therefore a matter of one's position in the symbolic register and in the economy of desire. "Men" have the phallus; "men" have the fetish. What is at stake is the ownership of desire. What I will be arguing is that fetishism is a kind of theater of display -and, indeed, that theater represents an enactment of the fetishistic scenario. Thus Freud's "penis," the anatomical object, though understood through Lacan's "phallus," the structuring mark of desire, becomes reliteralized as a stage prop, a detachable object. No one has the phallus. In contrast to other animals, sexual visibility in humans is marked in the male rather than the female. In most mammals, readiness for sex (and for reproduction) is displayed by estrus, a regularly recurrent period of ovulation 5. Jacques Lacan, "Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality," in Feminine Sexuality:Jacques Lacan and the dcolefreudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchel and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 96. 6. Lacan, "Guiding Remarks," p. 97.

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is also called "being in heat." The human animal substiand excitement-what tutes erection for estrus, the overt, signalized sexual readiness of man for the overt, signalized sexual readiness of woman. It is no accident, I think, that the invention by humans of recreational sex (sex not for reproductive purposes but for fun) is coextensive with this shift from female to male display. Since the theory of fetishism employs a developmental narrative which implies loss, here is another version: phallocentrism is loss of estrus. So that the loss or lack that is described in the Freudian fetishistic economy as castration is itself a substitution for another loss or lack. Phallic fetishism - which is to say, fetishism - is already a substitution and a displacement. And Freud's attempt to make the fetish part of the female body is both denial and displacement. As Naomi Schor notes, "it is an article of faith with Freud and Freudians that fetishism is the male perversion par excellence. The traditional psychoanalytic literature on the subject states over and over again that there are no female fetishists; female fetishism is, in the rhetoric of psychoanalysis, an oxymoron."7 For the same reason, there have traditionally been in psychoanalytic literature no female transvestites, although the fantasies collected by Nancy Friday in My Secret Garden (for example, a woman admiring herself in the mirror wearing jockey shorts with a Tampax protruding from them), self-help manuals for female-tomale passing transvestites (for example, how to pin rolled-up socks to the inside crotch of your underwear to enable you to pass in the men's room ["dress socks, that is . . . be realistic"], recent medical acknowledgments (for examples, that items like "blue denim Levis," "engineer boots," or a false moustache have in fact produced orgasmic sensations in women),8 and a wealth of historical research from the medieval and early modern periods have turned up innumerable cases of women who were, or are, fetishizing cross-dressers. Freud describes the fetishist as someone who both believes in the "reality" of castration and refuses to believe it. "Je sais bien, . . . mais quand meme . . ." says the little boy in Mannoni's example; "I know, but still. . . ." As Sarah Kofman argues, "since there can be no fetishism without a compromise between castration and its denial and because the fetishist split- this is what distinguishes it from psychosis always preserves the two positions, the fetish can in no sense be a simple Ersatz of the penis; if there were really a decision in favor of one of the two positions, there would no longer be any need to construct a fetish."10 And Derrida, reading Freud, observes that it may be possible "to reconstruct from

7. Schor, "Female Fetishism," p. 365. Robert J. Stoller, Observingthe Erotic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 8. pp. 135-36. Octave Mannoni, "'Je sais bien . . . mais quand meme' la croyance," Les TempsModernes 212 9. (1964). Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University 10. Press, 1985), p. 87.

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49

Freud's generalization a 'concept' of fetish that can no longer be contained within the traditional opposition Ersatz/ non Ersatz, or even within opposition at all.""l An example of an "undecidable" fetish is in fact given by Freud, in his description of a garment that rendered the wearer's gender unknowable: the case of a man whose fetish was an athletic support-belt which could also be worn as bathing drawers. This piece of clothing covered up the genitals entirely and concealed the distinction between them. Analysis showed that it signified that women were castrated and that they were not castrated; and it also allowed of the hypothesis that men were castrated, for all of these possibilities could equally well be concealed under the belt.12 Whose underwear is under there? This is where the transvestite comes in, not as a mask, or masquerade, or male or female, but as a theoretical intervention. For the transvestite is the equivalent of Lacan's third term, not "having" or "being" the phallus, but "seeming" or "appearing": "the intervention of a 'to seem' that replaces the 'to have,' in order to protect it on the one side, and mask its lack in the other."13 That the fetishistic patient is sometimes in fact a transvestite renders more complex but also more plausible the argument that the transvestite on stage or in culture is himself/herself a fetishization. The fetish is a metonymic structure, but it is also a metaphor, a figurefor the undecidability of castration, which is to say, a figure of nostalgia for an originary "wholeness" -in the mother, in the child. Thus the fetish, like the transvestite- or the transvestite, like the fetish- is a sign at once of lack and its covering over, as in the case of Freud's patient's athletic support - belt -a garment very similar to devices worn, as it happens, by some present-day female-to-male transvestites. The history of the fetish in representation (and this is not just, as the anthropological nature of the term implies, in non-Western cultures) indicates that the fetish is the phallus; the phallus is the fetish. Let us look at some examples. I will be concentrating here, at least initially, on the plays of Shakespeare, in part because Shakespeare has virtually come to define theatrical representation in Western culture, and also because there has been so much recent attention to cross-dressing in his plays, though it has tended to focus on social and political rather than theoretical issues. Shakespeare's plays are famously full of moments in which characters exthreaten castration. lago to Brabantio: "Look to press castration anxiety-or

11. 12. 13. (New

Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974), pp. 232ff. Freud, "Fetishism," pp. 156-157. Jacques Lacan, "The Signification of the Phallus," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 289.

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your house, your daughter, and your bags" (Oth. 1.1.80); Solario, mocking Shylock's loss, ventriloquizing his imagined voice: "two stones, two rich and precious stones,/Stol'n by my daughter! Justice! find the girl,/She hath the as phallic woman; stones upon her, and the ducats" (MV 2.8.20-22)-Jessica Malvolio, caught in his erotic daydream, a masturbatory fantasy: "having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping. . . . perchance wind up my rich jewel" (TN 2.5.48-60); Viola, in a double watch, or play with my-some entendre clearly aimed by the playwright at the audience: "A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man" (TN 3.4.302-303). To best make an argument about fetishism in the plays, though, I select an obvious example from Renaissance theatrical representation: that of the codpiece, itself, bizarrely, a sign of gender undecidability, since it is the quintessential gender mark of "seeming," and thus interposed between "having" and "being" the phallus: the space occupied, as I have argued, by the transvestite. The codpiece is the thinking man's (or woman's) bauble, the ultimate detachable part. It may seem curious to choose the codpiece to demonstrate something about 'female fetishism," but in fact it is perfectly logical to do so. For the codpiece, like Freud's undecidable underpants, is a sign of what might -or in The Roaring might not- be "under there." A woman with a codpiece-what Girl is called with fear and titillation a "codpiece daughter" -is the figure of the phallic woman, the ultimate fantasy of male transvestite scenarios (if the psychoanalysts are to be believed). At the same time, the woman with the codpiece is the onstage simulacrum of the female transvestite, a crossover figure who, whether or not she exists in psychoanalytic theory, has a substantial claim to existence in history and in representation. less intuitively-the More importantly -and codpiece confounds the question of gender, since it can signify yes or no, full or empty, lack or lack of lack. It is the stage equivalent of Freud's equivocal underpants. The codpiece is is to say, a theatrical figure therefore a theatrical figure for castration-which a We call it foundation itself. for transvestism garment. might One thing that sticks out about the codpiece in all of Shakespeare's direct references to it is its explicitly (and precariously) artifactual nature. For example, when Julia and her waiting-woman Lucetta in The Two Gentlemen of Verona discuss Julia's transvestic disguise (in terms that anticipate a similar conversation between Portia and Nerissa), the piece de resistance of her male costume is clearly the codpiece: Lucetta. What fashion, madam, shall I make your breeches? Julia. That fits as well as, "Tell me, good my lord, What compass will you wear your farthingale?" Why, ev'n what fashion thou best likes, Lucetta. Lucetta. You must needs have them with a codpiece, madam.

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Julia. Out, out, Lucetta, that will be ill-favor'd. Lucetta. A round hose, madam, now's not worth a pin, Unless you have a codpiece to stick pins on. (TGV 2.7.49-56) Like Portia's comment that she and Nerissa, once cross-dressed, will appear "accomplished/With that we lack" (Merch. 3.4.61-62), this exchange draws attention to what is absent, to what seems. Since the original "actresses" in their parts were boys, they in fact "have" what they seem to "lack" -or do they? That the codpiece is to be ornamented by sticking pins in it is not entirely comforting -and in the case of Julia, the whole codpiece itself will be an ornament, pinned on, rather like the socks in the jockstrap of the passing female-to-male transvestite. We are dealing with a detachable part. But Julia is, of course, a woman in disguise. (Although "she" is also a boy in disguise as a woman in disguise.) Surely there are "real men" in the plays, with real contents in their codpieces? It's not so clear. In Much Ado About Nothing, the scoundrel Borachio refers to "the shaven Hercules in the smirch'd worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as massy The Riverside editors, like others, suggest that this as his club" (3.3.136-137). "shaven Hercules" is a representation of the hero as subjugated by the Eastern Queen Omphale, dressed as a woman and put to work spinning among her maids.14 An earlier reference to Hercules in the same play (2.1.253) cites this incident. But A. R. Humphries in the Arden edition finds an allusion to the cross-dressed Hercules unlikely (although he has no satisfactory alternative to suggest) because "Borachio's Hercules is in man's dress with a club."15 The "man's dress" to which Humphries refers, however, is a hypothetical, metonymic expansion of the codpiece, the only item of clothing specifically mentioned. The whole malappropriate discussion comes in the context of a description of "fashion," of a "deformed thief" who "giddily . . . turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty" (3.3.121 -129), so that we might expect some connection between male erotic energy and this item of self-advertising sartorial style that "puts the goods in the shopwindow," as used to be said of low-cut blouses for women. Indeed, both editors characterize the "codpiece" in determinedly nonanatomical terms, as if it were itself a totally whimsical deformation of fashion with no reference to the body: "the bag-like flap at the front of men's breeches" (Riverside); the "projecting forepiece of men's breeches" (Arden). Whose underwear is under there? So the "codpiece" of Two Gentlemenis pinned to the pants of a cross-dressed woman, and the "codpiece" of Much Ado marks the representation of a hero who

14. G. Blakemore Evans, et al., The RiversideShakespeare(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 349. 15. A. R. Humphries, MechAdo AboutNothing,in The Arden Shakespeare(London: Methuen, 1981), p. 161.

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may well be wearing the classical version of drag. In neither case does there seem to be a phallus in the case-or rather, what is represented is the transvestite fantasy, the phallic woman. The anxiety of male artifactuality seems already much in evidence. And things are not made more reassuring by the "codpiece" references in The Winter's Tale, Love's Labor's Lost, and King Lear. In The Winter's Tale, Autolycus boasts that it is easy to "geld a codpiece of a purse" (WT 4.4.610-11). In Love's Labor's Lost, Berowne, decrying the power of Cupid, calls him "king of codpieces," using "codpieces" as the metonymic equivalent for "men," and the Fool in Lear does the same: "The codpiece that will In both cases the part is house/Before the head has any" (Lr. 3.2.27-28). detached by metonymy. And the Fool, of course, also refers to himself as a a wise man and a fool" codpiece ("Marry, here's grace and a codpiece-that's [3.1.184- 85]), alluding to the common wisdom that fools had extra-large genital celeequipment to compensate, so to speak, for their lack of brainpower-the brated "fool's bauble." In a recent one-man show in San Francisco called "Feast of Fools," actormime Geoff Hoyle presented, in a series of vignettes, the history of the fool in Western culture. In sequence after sequence the Fool was defined by his comic interactions with a detachable phallus, from the medieval "bauble" to Pantalone's money bag to modern sight gags involving a third leg or a large, red, preternaturally sensitive nose. The New York -based Mabou Mines troupe has been performing an experimental version of King Lear in which all the roles are cross-dressed ("a kind of homage to Charles Ludlam," says the director). As a result, many of the Fool's lines play like phallic jokes, especially his advice to Lear, "delivered," wrote one reviewer, "with a reference to his own anatomy- 'have more than thou showest.'"16 And what about men dressed as women? The Dame of English Panto had, we might say, an early incarnation in the figure of the cross-dressed Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. As it happens, the cultural production of The Merry Wives is linked to a famous "historical" incident of cross-dressing, the founding of the Order of the Garter, when, King Edward III supposedly picked up a garter dropped by the countess of Salisbury at a dance and rebuked his critics with the words that became the Order's motto, "Honi soit qui mal y pense." Editors following Leslie Hotson have suggested that the play was written for the Garter Feast of 1597, and several scenes take place at the Garter Inn; an extended passage in Act 5 describes the festivities that attend the installation of a Knight (5.5.57-74). Recent criticism of Merry Wives has stressed the historical and cultural links among the Order of the Garter,

16. Jim Beckerman, "A Cheer for Standing Lear on its Ear," The News Tribune (Woodbridge, New Jersey), January 10, 1988, p. C- 11.

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Queen Elizabeth, and courtly forms,17 but in emphasizing a female ruler's association with a male order, critics have occluded - or repressed - the fantasy of the founding scenario, which imagines a transvestism of the opposite (gender) kind, the king wearing the countess's garter. (Whose underwear is under there?) The overdetermined presence of male-to-female cross-dressing in the play -from Falstaff to the boys costumed as (and substituted for) Anne Page in the comic denouement -is related, I would suggest, on the one hand, to this "foundational" subtext, and on the other, to the omnipresent pun on "page" as a surname, a male-to-female disguise, and a code word for a male homosexual love object. Yet Falstaff is not often discussed in the context of Shakespearean crossdressing; he represents no ideal figure, either for women or for men, dressed as he is like an old woman, carried onto the stage in a basket, his motive seduction, his cause both ludicrous and offensive. He thus satisfies neither the feminist "role-model" progress narrative of the early 1970s nor the recuperative image of the Shakespearean "sensitive man." If the Falstaff of the history plays is often seen these days as a pre-Oedipal figure, a pre-Oedipal mother, even, the Falstaff of Merry Wives-always carefully kept separate from the history Falstaff-is seen as something of an embarrassment, not a glamorous drag queen like Antony in Cleopatra's tires and mantle, but rather the quintessence of what is known in transvestite circles as "cod drag." "Cod" -as in codpiece. Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English18 defines cod as "the scrotum," or in the plural, "the testicles." Since 1690 (that is, after Shakespeare), "cod" has also meant "a fool." In its verbal form, "to cod" is "to chaff, hoax, humbug; to play the fool." Adjectivally, it connotes "burlesque; especially cod acting, as in acting a Victorian melodrama as though it were a post-1918 farce of burlesque." Since 1965, Partridge adds, "it has been used colloquially for 'pretence, or mock'-e.g., cod German, cod Russian." So cod means both scrotum or testicles, and hoax, fool, pretence, or mock.19 The anxiety of male artifactuality is here summed up, as it were, in a nutshell. What is particularly important to note here is that, traditionally, transves-

17. See, for example, Peter Erickson, "The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class-Gender Tension in The Merry Wivesof Windsor," in ShakespeareReproduced, ed. Jean E. Howard and Miriam F. O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 116-140. 18. Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, ed. Paul Beale, 8th ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). 19. Indeed, we might even consider "cod" as in "codfish." It is no accident, I think, that one of the most overt and outrageous Dame figures of the twentieth-century stage, Captain Hook of Barrie's Peter Pan, is taunted by Peter in a famous scene in which Peter calls him a "codfish." Hook is of course the living embodiment of castration and consequent phallic display, his right hand having been severed by Peter in an earlier encounter. See my chapter "Fear of Flying, or, Why Peter Pan is a Woman," in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressingand Cultural Anxiety (forthcoming, Routledge).

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tism on the Western stage and in clubs and drag acts has turned on the artifacbreasts, fluffy wigs, makeup. Is it possible that tuality of women'sbodies -balloon a source of consternation to this overt acknowledgment of artifice -often women and to feminists -masks another (I hesitate to say, a deeper) concern about the artifactuality and the detachability of maleness? What if it should turn out that female fetishism is invisible, or untheorizable, because it coincides with what has been established as natural or normal- for women to fetishize the phallus on men?In other words, to deny female fetishism is to establish as natural the female desire that the male body contain the phallus. Heterosexuality here -as so often -equals nature. Female fetishism is the norm of human sexuality. That is why it is invisible. We might note that when the English stage ceases, after the Restoration, to actresses appear on the public stage in roles be a transvestite theater-when appearance coincides with the redesign of previously reserved for men-their the playhouse to include the Italian innovation of the front curtain. The curtain is a veil that marks off the "not real" from the "real." The work done by transvestism in putting the phallus under erasure is now done by a different kind of theatrical punctuation. The one substitutes for the other -the curtain for the transvestite troupe, both marking theatrical difference. The phallus does its work only when veiled: veiled by a difference which makes it difficult to know whether there is difference or not (since "having" and "lacking" can both be kinds of "seeming"); veiled by the curtain that says, "this (and only this?) is theater." Or, to put it another way, the substitution of female actresses for boy actors is not a naturalizing move that returns theater to its desired condition of mimesis, replacing the false boy with the real woman. It is, instead, a double substitution - a rerecognition of artifice - something tacitly acknowledged by Restoration critics when they praised the women for playing female roles almost as well as the boy actresses did, just as later critics would praise nineteenthcentury actresses playing Hamlet, Othello, or lago for their fidelity in for being dogs walking on their hind legs. "Mrs. Waller's representation-not was last truly great," "worthy of being ranked with the best lago we lago, night, have ever seen," "the best 'lago' which has been produced on our stage since the days of the elder Booth."20 And here it will be useful to look, briefly, and in conclusion, at yet another contemporary instance, which could be compared to Emma Waller's celebrated moustachioed lago, or to the cross-dressing of Viola in the style of her "lost" brother Sebastian -an impersonation which turns on Viola's (supposed) "lack."

20. Opinions of the Press of Emma Waller . . . [c. 1876], Harvard University Library. (Newspapers cited are: the Chicago Herald, New Orleans Picayune, St. Louis Herald, Boston Transcript, Cincinnati Commercial, Cincinnati Index, Buffalo Post, Buffalo Express, Memphis Bulletin, and the Memphis Avalanche.) Cited in Frank W. Wadsworth, "Hamlet and lago: Nineteenth Century Breeches Parts," ShakespeareQuarterly 17 (1966): 137.

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My example is drawn not from a Shakespearean production but from the crossdressing and fetishization which has become so noticeable a part of the performance of contemporary rock and pop music-specifically, the triangulated relationship of Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Madonna. That Michael Jackson has literally remade himself as a figure for transvestism itself seems to me evident not only from his three nose jobs (which have made him more and more resemble Diana Ross) but also from other signatory gestures of "castration," like his glittery clothes, his long lustrous hair, and the fact that his singing and speaking voices have become higher rather than lower over the years- a phenomenon that has led some to speculate that he has altered himself in some fundamental way in search of a voice "that can sing both high and low." As for Madonna, in some of her most recent theatrical selfrepresentations she has made herself into a figure of and for Michael Jackson. Here I have in mind, in particular, a music video called "Express Yourself" and the moment she chose to perform from that video at a recent Music Video Awards Show.21 21.

I am grateful to Nancy Vickers for calling both the video and the awards show to my attention.

MichaelJackson.

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Appearing in a men's double-breasted suit (the mammary description of this garment almost surely a kind of unexpressed pun), as she does periodically throughout the longer version of "Express Yourself," she danced before the audience in a style deliberately imitative of Michael Jackson, mimicking many of his moves, and wearing the signature items of his look, white socks and shiny black men's shoes. Flanked by two female backup singers in pin stripes, she assertively claimed all possible gender space, at one point stripping off her jacket to reveal a lacy teddy beneath, so that she became a kind of sartorial centaur. But the moment that scandalized critics was a moment of sheer quotation from Michael Jackson, when Madonna danced toward the audience and squeezed her crotch. Now, Michael Jackson does this all the time, and no one every complains -quite the contrary. But Madonna, squeezing what she hadn't got (or had she?) emblematized the Lacanian triad of having, being, and seeming. Squeezing the crotch of her pants became for her, onstage, the moment of the claim to empowered transvestism, to seem rather than merely to have or to be - not (and this distinction is important) just a claim to empowered womanhood. In this moment, and by the very fact that she chose the cross-dressed costume from her longer video to present at the opening of the awards show, Madonna became transvestism itself, the more so since she was so deliberately troping off Michael Jackson. "Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool" (TN 1.5.57). The speaker is Feste the clown, who surely knows if anyone does about the fool's bauble which is the codpiece. Madonna is a famous female star who is impersonating a famous male star who is impersonating a woman. She is, that is to say, a transvestite impersonating a transvestite. Why is it shocking when she grabs her crotch, repeating as she does so a gesture familiar to anyone who has watched a two-year-old male child reassuring himself of his intactness? Not because it is unseemly for a woman to do thisalthough it may be, to some people -but because what she is saying in doing so is: I'm not intact, he's not intact; I am intact, this is what intact is. Theater elicits, produces, and panders to fetish envy in both its male and its female spectators. Female fetishism, fetish envy, is indeed possible in a theatrical space where the symbolic nature of the maternal phallus makes it the only phallus the boy actor and the that is real. Thus the transvestite in Shakespeare-both not an accident of historical contingency but cross-dressed woman-becomes the necessary intervention that makes fetishism not only possible but foundational to theater itself.

Ragnarok of Illusion: Richard Wagner's "Mystical Abyss" at Bayreuth

BEAT

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TRANSLATED

BY DENISE

BRATTON

"The jurisdiction of the stage begins where the realm of worldly law leaves off," Friedrich Schiller remarks in his essay "The Stage as a Moral Institution," asserting further, "Ifjustice is blinded by gold and indulges in the wages of vice, if the crimes of the powerful mock their impotence, then the stage must take up sword and scales and rend the vices before a terrible throne." In 1784, the same year Schiller delivered this statement to the Kurpfalzisch Deutschen Gesellschaft in Mannheim, Nicolas Ledoux completed the theater at Besan;on, and, for a panel decorating the entrance, he designed an eye that becomes a mirror of the space of the spectators. The pupil reflects an auditorium with a tiered theater, the colonnade above the tiers immediately suggesting its model: the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, which takes up the antique tradition of the tiered platform in the theater and even the circus arena.2 During the epoque of the French Revolution, this platform became an architectonic sign for the public that was associated with the ideals of the Greek polis and the Roman Republic. In Ledoux's eye, the public sees itself, takes itself as its own object or res, and thus politicizes itself. In the theater, people experience themselves as a public affair, as res publica. There is an unmistakable resemblance between the auditorium reflected in Ledoux's eye and Jacques-Pierre Gisors's Chamber of the Deputies, erected in Paris between 1795 and 1797.3 The colonnade above the rear wall quotes the Colosseum, while the coffered ceiling recalls the Pantheon. Tribune and shrine become, in this interior space, one. From the Enlightenment to Vormarz, the

Friedrich Schiller, Schillers SdmmtlicheSchriften (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'schen Buchhandlung, 1. 1867), 3, p. 514. Andreas Beyer, Teatro olimpico. Triumpharchitekturfir eine humanistischeGesellschaft,ed. Klaus 2. Herding (Frankfurt a.M:Fischer Taschenbuch, 1987). On projects for public halls during the French Revolution, see Werner Szambien, Les projets de 3. l'an II, concours d'architecture de la periode revolutionnarie (Paris: Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts, 1986).

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Decorative Panel for the Theater of Besancon. 1784.

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Ottavio Pertotti Scamozzi. Longitudinal section of Palladio's Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza. 1790.

Charles Percier. Perspectivedrawing of Jacques-Pierre Gisors' Chamberof the Deputies. 1795- 99.

Ragnarok of Illusion: Richard Wagner's "MysticalAbyss"

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theater is considered tribune, and the stage, the "pulpit of revolution,"4 which Schiller could only have had in mind when he called the stage a "terrible throne" judging injustice. In the theater, the eye of justice reigns. But whose eye is it that Ledoux intends to depict? Is it the eye of the public? The tiered hemicycle of the theater offers all spectators a single, optimal view of the action taking place on the stage. Ledoux may have intended to give visitors this guarantee as they entered, bluntly advertising his prowess as an architect. In this sense, the eye may signify the equally distributed, all-encompassing view for all spectators. But this reading is contradicted by the direction of the eye's line of vision: it doesn't point toward the stage but rather away from it. Thus, it could also be the eye of the actor, who stands on the platform of the stage looking out into the auditorium toward the onlookers. In the eye of Ledoux, a double meaning seems to prevail, one in which the gaze of the actor is fused with that of the public. The eye is the "subject-object" of a justice that is handed down from the "throne" of the stage. But where does the ray of light just above the eyeball emanate from, and where does it strike? It seems to stem from within the skull, from the brain, and, at the same time, from the oculus of the reflected space, the "eye" of the Pantheon above Ledoux's eye itself. In the notorious words of Immanuel Kant -words that also, by the way, distinguish his grave at Konigsberg -illumination seems to come from "der Vernunft in mir," from reason within man himself, and from the "bestirnte Himmel iiber mir," from the starry heaven of the Supreme Being above.5 The cone of light is trained upon the empty rows of seats in the theater where we, the spectators in Ledoux's eye, are positioned. Would the beam of light illuminate us? Would it inspire us to action? Or does it instead reveal us as the accused? Ledoux's eye at Besancon may be read as a rebus for enlightenment and revolution, whose enigmatic density gives rise to inexhaustibly contradictory hermeneutics. I selected this image as the ticket, so to speak, for entry into my performance because the term theater itself stems from theaomai, the Greek verb to view. During the French Revolution and the emancipation of the German bourgeoisie, the term gained a juridical and determining edge. How this view would gradually soften again, how the eye would transform itself from a moral to a purely optical organ, is my subject here. The story of nineteenth-century theater design traces this as the development from an equal view for all to an equally good view for all, from legal equality to the illusionistic equality of seeing. One may locate the juncture of public morality and public illusionism in Ledoux's eye. It situates itself at precisely that place which the illuminating cone 4. See Hans Lange, Vom Tribunal zum Tempel. Zur Architekturund GeschichtedeutscherHoftheater zwischen Vormdrzund Restauration (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1985). 5. Quoted from Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Kants GesammelteSchriften (Berlin: Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1910), 5, p. 161.

GottfriedSemper.Modelfor a theaterin theMunichGlassPalace. 1865. of light wants to blur: on the lower lid of the eye, which, together with the orchestra pit reflected in the pupil, marks the borderline between the world of reality and the world of imagination. Beyond this, in the tear glands of the public eye, so to speak, yawns what Richard Wagner used to call the "mystischeAbgrund," or the "mystical abyss." And with this, we have the cue to begin the story that follows. In May 1849, Richard Wagner participated in the fierce struggle over the barricades at Dresden. In the same year, he wrote his manifesto "The Artwork of the Future," wherein the term Gesamtkunstwerk,or synthesis of the arts, was coined. Wagner's masterpiece of the future consisted of the rebirth of Attic tragedy as Gesamtkunstwerk,in which music, dance, poetry, theater, and the plastic arts would be unified under the roof of architecture. The Gesamtkunstwerk would be revolutionary because it would redeem man from the compulsory bond of instrumental reason and return him to his highest destiny, the sphere of artistic self-awareness. I shall return to this subject of theater praxis in Wagner's critical theory of instrumental reason. By 1850, Wagner had already decided that the "masterpiece of the future" must express itself in the Germanic realm of legend. Implanting Germanic content into the forms of ancient Greek theater is a German prerogative claimed again and again from Holderlin to Heidegger. In the Hellenic, the Germanic created its idealized self, a self with which it then falls in love, like Pygmalion. In 1862, The Ring of the Nibelung appeared in print. Two years later, Ludwig II of Bavaria came to the throne. The nineteen-year-old king, having read all the writings of Wagner, intended to execute them at once. After an audience with Wagner on October 7, 1864, Ludwig's will was confirmed; Munich would have a monumental theater dedicated to the German nation. As Wagner proposed, Gottfried Semper was entrusted with the task of designing the theater.6 A more 6. For a comprehensive history of the project for a Wagnerian festival hall, see Heinrich Habel, Festspielhaus und Wahnfried, Geplante und ausgefiihrte Bauten Richard Wagners (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1985).

AugustVoit.MunichGlassPalace. 1853-54. ironic team could not have been brought together here: two artists who had fought on the same side of the Dresden barricades in 1849, and a king whose self-fulfilling intention was to distance himself from his subjects with a dreamy arrogance. The common denominator would be Wagner's notion of revolution as an art radicalized in opposition to everyday praxis. It was this idea in particular that must have pleased the monarch. Semper first projected a setting for the Nibelung Festival of 1865 in the Munich Glass Palace. The monumental glass and iron structure, a direct descendant of the London Crystal Palace, had been erected for the Bavarian trade and industry exposition of 1854. Semper's plan was to install the theater in the middle wing of the exhibition hall, an overscale reconstruction of the Odeon at Pompeii consisting of platform and tiers surrounded by a colonnade, with a rather deep stage. Semper's modifications of the antique theater type are significant. Instead of the level orchestra derived from the platform for the chorus in Greek tragedy, Semper opens up the deep chasm of the orchestra pit, Wagner's "mystical abyss." The antique scenaefrons is broken by the Guckkasten-stage.The panels of the proscenium, doubled and graduated, condition the view of the spectator to a central perspective. Orchestra pit and Guckkasten-stagededicate themselves to an illusionistic marriage of space and dramatic action, something for which the antique theater did not even strive. In Semper's provisional theater project for the Munich Glass Palace, one notices a considerable shift in the relation between civil engineering and architecture. This ersatz "style" does not even pretend to conceal a skeleton composed of functional construction elements. Instead, the illusion of style limits itself to an interior design executed in cheap timberwork and decorated with wallpaper painted a la Pompeii: an open-air stage that simulates southern the shelter of a gridded scaffolding of glass and warmth-indoors-beneath iron. With this, historicism enters a phase in which the illusion of style withdraws into an enveloping space of purely inner values, while outside, the increasing evidence of industrial progress goes unchecked. Nineteenth-century culture re-

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Friedrich Gilly. Projectfor the Nationaltheater, Berlin: perspectiveview of the auditorium. 1799.

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signed itself to the disjuncture between the artistic ideal of the beautiful and ugly reality. In the end, Semper's plan was opposed by the people of Munich, who refused to give up their beloved multipurpose hall. Rivers of beer, not Rheingold, would flow until the Glass Palace burned down in 1931. At the same time, Semper designed a monumental festival hall for Munich. It would have stood at the Isarterrasse, near where Burklein erected the Maximilianeum in 1874. His model, which we know from a copy of the destroyed original, shows the planned building situated on the Isar as point of view linked to the proposed boulevard by a bridge. It is no accident that urbanistic associations tie the convex central wing, the bridge and the river to the Ponte Sant'Angelo and the Castel Sant'Angelo on the Tiber in Rome. Like the ancient mausoleum, Semper's project constituted an imperial monument. Theater and memorial grew together in the twilight of the eighteenth century. In 1768, Lessing remarked on his failed aspirations for a national theater at Hamburg with the statement, "We Germans are not yet a nation."7 Schiller, however, believed that a nation could yet come into being, "if we could live to see a national theater."8 Friedrich Gilly designed its visionary architectonic shape for Berlin in 1799.9 The Berlin Nationaltheater, as Gilly planned it, would have stood on the Gensd'armenmarkt between the German and the French domes. The structure, with its monumental presence, is linked to both churches by colonnades, the theater thereby assuming an importance equal to that of sacred architecture. Gilly's ideal project constructs, to use Goethe's own words, the Urphdnomen, or archetype for German theater design. The components, which would be elaborated during the course of the nineteenth century, are already evident in his sketch: the forecourt, the cylindrical auditorium with arcades, and the stage. Semper's project for Munich follows its prototype, drawing on the Renaissance vocabulary of forms: the forecourt as triumphal arch, the auditorium as Colosseum, the stage as temple. Semper adds to these main elements only the two slender lateral wings. As an architectural idea, this development can be traced from inception to culmination between these two unrealized projects for national theaters at Berlin in 1799 and at Munich in 1864. On the eve of the imperial Reich, Semper's design summarized a typologievolution of buildings for theater, the stages of which I should like to sketch cal of the first theaters to set itself apart, as an autonomous structure, One briefly.10 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke 1767-1769, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Werkeund Briefe 6, 7. Bibliothekdeutscher Klassiker 6 (Frankfurt a.M.:Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989). 8. Schiller, SammtlicheSchriften, 3, p. 253. Alste Oncken, Friedrich Gilly 1772-1800 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein fur Kunstwissenschaft, 9. 1935). General surveys include Richard and Helen Leacroft, Theatre and Playhouse: An Illustrated 10. Survey of Theatre Building from Ancient Greece to the Present Day (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), and Donald C. Mullin, The Developmentof the Playhouse:A Surveyof TheaterArchitecturefrom the

GottfriedSemper. First Dresden Court Theater. 1838-41.

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with the Hedwig Church and the Academy, part of an ideal Forum Fredericianum. The Berlin Opera House has a compact shape, but subsequent theater designs would gradually reveal more about the diversity of functions on the

outside of the building. In this regard, an important step was taken with Schinkel's Berlin Schauspielhaus, which was erected on the same Gensd'armenmarkt where Gilly had planned to put his national theater. Its "temple facade" thrusts decidedly forward, and its tympanum is echoed in the pediment of the main building, a theme that would be quoted in several other German theaters. The two side wings emphasize the orientation of the facade toward the square. The Munich Hof- und Nationaltheater also has a double pediment." An element that was dominant in Gilly's design is lacking in the German nuiineteenth third of the theaters of the first century. In Schinkel's Berlin Schauspielhaus, no auditorium is visible from the outside of the building. But when one

Renaissance to the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970). Among recent literature on German theaters, see Julius Posener, "La construzione del teatro a Berlino da Gilly a Poelzig" in Zodiac 2 (1989), and Isabell Matthes, "Revolutionsarchitektur und Aufklarung. in Betrag zur Geschichte des Theaterbaus," unpublished thesis, Munich University, 1989. See the very useful comprehensive pictorial documentation provided in Joseph Adler and Clemens M. Gruber, Deutschsprachige Theater der Jahrhunderstende in alten Photographien (Vienna: Osterreichischer Bundesverlag, 1987). Oswald Hederer, Leo von Klenze. Personlichkeitund Werk(Munich: GDW Callwey, 1981). 11.

GottfriedSemper and Manfred Semper. Second Dresden Court Theater. 1871-78.

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knows the immediate precedent, this concealment is not so astonishing. The interior of Gilly's Nationaltheater quotes an interior of the French Revolution: the Chamber of the Deputies at Paris, which Gilly visited just prior to beginning his project. In particular, he takes up the forms of the semi-dome ending in a broad arch, the cavea-shaped tiers, and the colonnade at the rear wall. The first auditoriums to adopt the shape of a thrusting hemicycle emerged with the bourgeois consciousness of Vormarz. The earliest German example is Georg Moller's Schauspielhaus at Mainz erected between 1829 and 1833.12 It is symptomatic of the times that the town's community, and not the court, was the patron. The semi-cylindrical wall is articulated with arched openings that are positioned between pilasters, reminiscent of the Colosseum and the Theater of Marcellus at Rome. By renouncing the temple facade, Moller's theater recalls less the pompousness of an imperial forum than the commonness of a circus. In the literature of architectural history, the theater at Mainz is overshadowed by the building of a more renowned architect who would employ the theme of the half-cylinder less than a decade later, Gottfried Semper. His first Hoftheater at Dresden was built between 1838 and 1841. Above the second story there is a balcony with a balustrade. More obviously than at Mainz, this gives the Dresden theater the look of a circus: the conical roof of the attic story resembles nothing if not a big top. One cannot overemphasize architectural semantics, but it seems symptomatic that the "egalitarian" circus form for theater buildings did not survive the failure of the bourgeois revolution. The simple form of the half-cylinder vanishes is, so to speak, given up, suppressed during the second half of the century-or more become ever behind porches that pompous. After the 1869 fire in the Marie Fr6lich und Hans-Giinther Sperlich, GeorgMoller. Baumeisterder Romantik(Darmstadt: 12. E. Roether, 1959).

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Dresden theater, the new building was given a shape that better accommodated the more ceremonious desires of Griinderzeit. Manfred Semper executed his late father's plans, giving to the auditorium this discrete, circular thrust. More dominant than the amphitheater effect is that of the portico, which further divides the shallow cylinder. The colossal portal combines triumphal arch and loggia of benediction. The second Dresden Court Theater was later renamed the Opera in a linguistic rearrangement that parallels the architectural semantics of the building: during the early stage of their emancipation, the bourgeoisie were reluctant to give the theater a name associated with the courtly pleasures of the ancien regime. In the so-called "Semper-Oper," the architectural vision for Munich became a reality: with the exception of the side wings, the project for Wagner's festival hall at the Isarterrasse came into being on the Schlossplatz of Dresden. The motif of the tribune is the architectural expression of a public that gathers in a circle in order to observe the lessons of history as they are transacted upon the stage: this was the point of departure for bourgeois emancipation. During the second half of the century, the visit to the theater became a ceremonial end-in-itself. In the process, the public cultivated the habits of the aristocracy-or at least that which the bourgeoisgentilhommeunderstood to be their habits. The cylindrical space of the auditorium, where the dramatic action is pursued, is increasingly hidden behind porticoes where the action before and

Charles Garnier. Stairwell of the Paris Opera House. 1861-74.

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after the intermissions takes place: the public casts itself as a body that enjoys culture, in stairwells, foyers, and lobbies. Heinrich Hiibsch's Landestheater of Karlsruhe, completed in 1853, possesses such a "westwork," in which the portico, with its central bay thrust slightly forward, anticipates the forms of the King's loge at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus or Festival Hall. The most pompous public platform emerged, however, not on German soil but rather in France: the Paris Opera House built by Charles Garnier between 1861 and 1874. In the longitudinal section, it spans twice the depth of the auditorium. Viollet le Duc, the doyenof rationalistic architecture, was tempted to remark, "The hall seems made for the stairway and not the stairway for the hall."'3 At the Paris Opera House, the bourgeoisie celebrated communion with imperial attitudes by supporting its garish habit. Commercial rights as well as birth rights were exchanged as freely convertible currencies in this stairwell. At this point, the exceptional character of German theater should be stressed. France never knew this manifold court theater tradition, because there, the enterprise of theater was concentrated in the capital city of Paris. German pluralism, on the other hand, rendered itself a cultural opportunity: the plurality of the states in combination with the backwardness of public policy contributed to the emergence of a particularly rich theater life. What the Realpolitik failed to accomplish, the large and small court theaters of the mid-nineteenth century compensated for, namely, a constitutional agreement between court and populace. In court theaters, it was at least achieved in the form of the "aesthetic state," Schiller's "dsthetischemZustand."'4 The theater constitutes a sensitive platform for cultural balance and consensus, which could not be carelessly given away to the free market, as had been the case in France, Italy, and England since the end of the eighteenth century. In London, even the King was a mere tenant of his loge, while in Germany, the sovereign virtually performed as the patron of bourgeois formation. From this stems the German tradition of repertory theater, which, not compromised by economic considerations, guarded the treasures of cultural identity, while at the private theaters in London, Milan, and Paris, the ensuite programs turned on the capricious carousel of public taste. The phenomenon of the Festival Hall at Bayreuth should be understood against this backdrop. The plans for Munich would never be realized. This can partially be explained by the fact that while Semper was busy arduously working out his designs at Zurich, no hint of the intrigues brewing between the king and Richard Wagner reached him. At court and among the people the festival project was equally unpopular; Wagner was seen as a parasite, who, standing in

13. Quoted from Monika Steinhauser, Die Architektur der Pariser Oper, Studien zu ihrer Entstehungsgeschichteund ihrer architekturgeschichtlichenStellung (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1969), p. 104. On Schiller's aesthetic state, see Uber die asthetischeErziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von 14. Briefen, SdmmtlicheSchriften, 10, in particular, letters 20 to 27 and p. 38.

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the good graces of an unworldly king, plundered the state's treasury. He was called "Lolus," an allusion to the mistress Lola Montez who cost Ludwig I his throne. In the end, Ludwig II would be compelled to get rid of his composer, who was paid off and exiled to Lucerne. Here, in a provincial Swiss town, the idea of a Festival Hall at Bayreuth grew, far away from the envious mass, from mocking urban intellectuals and even from the caprices of the patron. Wagner turned down offers from both Berlin and Chicago: Bayreuth lay in the geometric center of a future German Reich, he argued in favor of the place. "Warum Provinz?" Heidegger's famous questionl5 answered itself, as it were, "selfevidently": the same could be said for Wagner's stubbornness. The place for the performance of the Ring should not be a noisy amusement park, but rather a holy place of pilgrimage, a shrine: the building site for national communion would be set in the midst of grass. The Festival Hall of Bayreuth, then, is an extreme example of German repertory theater: an establishment in which one principal exclusively performs one piece by one author. With his idea for the festival, Wagner struggled against the power of money and against a market-oriented theater. In his essay, "The Artwork of the Fu-

See Martin Heidegger, "Schopferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?" 15. originally published in Der Alemanne Kampfblatt der National Sozialisten Oberbadens,67a (Freiburg, March 7, 1934) 9, p. 1. Reprinted in Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger:Documentezu seinem Leben und Denken (Bern, 1962), pp. 216-218.

Christian Jank. Study for scenographic design for The Twilight of the Gods, Halle der Gibichungen am Rhine, Munich, 1878.

Bayreuth Festival Hall. Engraving after a painting by Louis Sauter. 1972.

ture," he proposed to present the plays gratis. According to him, The Ring of the Nibelung should be performed only three times, and after that, the theater should be destroyed, scenery and libretto extinguished in the flames. The master intended to prevent the commercialization of his work with an aesthetic Ragnarok16 that would have scared off all of his patrons- with perhaps the exception of Ludwig II. In any case, the opening performance of the Ring cycle in August of 1876 was a financial fiasco. The Festival Hall at Bayreuth stood empty for years, a ruined investment. Wagner himself witnessed only one other performance there: in the summer of 1882, half a year before his death, Parsifal opened in Bayreuth. 16. The term Ragnarok, or "decline of the gods," can be traced to the Poetic Edda, a thirteenthcentury manuscript that serves as one of the main sources of knowledge about old Icelandic myths. This mythology was taken up by Wagner as the theme for The Twilight of the Gods in The Ring of the Nibelung.

King's Loge, Bayreuth Festival Hall. Added 1882.

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A representation of the Festival Hall at Bayreuth from the time of its opening displays the scale of the stage in a manner that is particularly striking.17 A stage legible from the building's exterior is a phenomenon that emerges rather late, even though Gilly had already defined it in his project for the Berlin Nationaltheater. Aesthetic reservations were raised against the blatant exposure of the machinery of illusions, which was supposed to be concealed under the roof of the "temple of the muses." But the desire to perfect illusionism would have its price: behind and above the scenery, the technical means are the ugly-and highly visible-backside of artifice. This is apparent in the longitudinal section of the Paris Opera House, where one can see the stage reduced to a huge machine for fooling the eye, with gridirons and pulleys for raising and lowering the scenery. On the right, there is the rotunda of the auditorium, the black box of illusions that the public enters, having rushed through a labyrinth of stairwells where its own desire for performing has been satisfied. In Germany, the oversized stage of the Neuen Theater at Leipzig, completed in 1868, drew criticism. The Festival Hall at Bayreuth, completed one year earlier, stands among the first theaters to expose the mechanistic underpinnings of the stage. It is illumined by "Diocletian" windows that at the time were also used in factories and railroad stations. The isolation of the stage was not exclusively determined by matters of scenographic technique; there were also reasons of safety: the elements of the theater building were isolated to 17. The Wagnerian stages have been published by Detta and Michael Petzet, Die Richard WagnerBuhne Konig Ludwigs II (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1970).

Ludwig Bechstein. Bayreuth Auditorium during a performanceof Rheingold. 1876.

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ensure the containment of fires. The proscenium was equipped with an iron curtain that could be lowered to separate stage and auditorium. Such a stage that could be closed off became compulsory after the 1881 disasters at the theaters of Nizza and Vienna. Fire protection for the Festival Hall proved to be an even more pressing issue as the building was to be constructed with cheap half-timber. The stage of Bayreuth is flanked by four slender towers equipped with water tanks at the top to feed the sprinkler system. After prolonged disagreement between Semper and Wagner over the fate of the Munich project, Wagner instructed the architects Neumann and Brickwald to begin building at Bayreuth. Evidently, Semper's concept shone through nevertheless: the thrusting, tiered tribune flanked by side wings, and above, the ceiling over the stage as crowning top. These elements correspond to the Munich project and the second Dresden Hoftheater: a grand shape, but rather frugal execution. The lack of adornment on the building's exterior was compensated with several meagre courses of garlands. The Festival Hall was indeed considered only a provisional structure. An old photograph shows the bare half-timber wall of the tribune beneath the front porch constructed of wooden posts. The side wings and stage are made of brick. The king's loge was erected only in 1881, built exclusively with the hope that Ludwig II would 'deign' to attend the opening of Parsifal. The king, in fact, would not come. Reception rooms for the public didn't exist when The Ring of the Nibelung opened in August 1876. It was hot-'"just like at Waterloo and Sedan,"'8 18.

W. Marr, in Die Gartenlaube, 1867, p. 570.

Louis Sauter. Bayreuth Auditorium without seats. 1875- 76.

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Walkuren rode through endless soundwaves screamed one ticketholder--the over the stage while the temperature in the auditorium rose to 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit. A journalist from the popular magazine Die Gartenlaube spoke of an "artistic Mount Calvary."'9 Eduard Hanslick reported, "Wohnungsnotund Hungersnot im Nibelungennest"20- less poetically in English: housing shortages and starvation in the nest of the Nibelungen. The care and feeding of 1,345 ticketholders broke down in this little burg of Bayreuth. The mountain should have come to the prophet, but his shrine was equipped without even a single toilet. Mercilessly denying the fact of human bodily needs, the Ring unfolded over the course of four days, from four o'clock in the afternoon until ten in the evening: Rheingold, Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods. Annoyance simmered in the audience. But the dictatorship of art-over-life governed, even in this hamlet of Bayreuth, offering no escape. One critic imagined himself physically at the mercy of the opera, commenting that during the Munich performance one would have at least had town life as shield. "There, during the insupportable length of the performance," he wrote, "one could occupy oneself with the surroundings, with fellow martyrs, but in Bayreuth, every salvation was cut off. He whom sleep would not comfort could only in desperation count the bald heads glimmering from the deep twilight of the auditorium."21 Wagner's dictatorial art cancels the public as a corporeal fact. Contrary, for example, to the commodious facilities of the Paris Opera House, at Bayreuth there are not even architectural props to satisfy the public's desire to perform itself. The public exists exclusively for the work of art, and in the auditorium, as a corpus it is literally extinguished. Here, it is pitch black so that the stagelight can shine all the more brightly. What we have already seen in Semper's provisional plan for the Munich Glass Palace also appears here. The Wagnerian stage corresponds to the historicist idea of cultural formation, wherein the claim of culture withdraws to an interior "soul" while on the outside, the unsightly material circumstances are tolerated as necessary evils. It is a question of the inner realm, "das Eigentliche," the essence;22 and for the superficial, for the clatter of vanity, there is no space. The Bayreuth Festival Hall is distinguished by a functional sobriety conceived to shelter a place of longing for mythical origins. Unpretentious to the point of ugliness, the cheap timberwork building stands in stark contrast to an inner space that strives to achieve an elaborate illusionistic sublime. This touch of See n. 18; on the contemporary reception, see Martin Vogel, Nietzsche und Wagner. Ein 19. deutschesLesebuch(Bonn: Verlag fuir systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1984). Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Ausgemeiner fur deutsche Litteratur, 1911), 2, 20. p. 181. Hans Michael Schletterer, Richard Wagner's Biihnenfestspiel (N6rdlingen: C. H. Beck, 1876), 21. p. 130. For the critique of the usage of this term, see Theodor W. Adoro, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. 22. Zur deutschen Ideologic (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964).

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frugality was, by the way, immortalized when, in the 1960s and 1970s, costly restorations replicated the cheap timber construction in reinforced concrete. This tension is appropriate to a characterization that Oswald Spengler, in his The Decline of the West, would ennoble as Faustian.23 At the heart of the building is the auditorium, a tiered tribune conceived a with purity that no other theater of the nineteenth century achieved. Wagner, the former revolutionary, offers here a tribune to aesthetic democracy: a place of reunion for the equal in spirit. The rhetoric of the circus is figuratively expressed in the stucco design of the ceiling as velum, a tent used by the Romans to shelter open amphitheaters. The outstanding acoustics of the room stem from the fact that it is, like baroque theaters, paneled with wood. One large baroque theater in fact inspired Wagner to bring the Ring to Bayreuth. The Margrave Opera House, one of the few loge theaters still standing, built by Giuseppe Galli Bibiena between 1745 and 1748,24 was originally considered as a place for the Ring, but its interior, with its ceiling shaped like a huge contrabass, proved to be too narrow. Quoting Galli Bibiena's corner solution for the proscenium, which leads the eye from auditorium to stage, the architects of the Festival Hall also made reference to the genius loci of the lively Bayreuth theater tradition. The graduated columns along the sides of the proscenium constitute a three-dimensional repoussoirfor scenery that Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf, 1926-28). 23. Susanne Schrader, Das Markgrafentheater in Bayreuth. Studien zum Hoftheatertypusdes 18. 24. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Tuduv, 1985).

Giuseppe Galli Bibiena. Margrave Opera House, Bayreuth. 1745-48.

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74

is designed with central perspective. The Festival Hall takes up this theme of the optical recession into space and extends it even into the space of the auditorium. It can be seen in the concertina partitions at the sides, articulated as rows of columns. The seated public as a whole is drawn into the illusionistic perspective vortex of the stage. The auditorium as the funnel of illusionism directs all ears and eyes equally toward the action on the stage. The inescapable, if you will, equality of central-perspective-for-all is antithetical to a concept of the loge theater that accentuates social discrepancies. The baroque auditorium, with its hierarchy expressed in the architecture, represents a Welttheater-a microcosm of feudal life-that parallels the theater presented on the stage. In the Margrave Opera House, with its king's loge, even technical reasons precluded the darkening of the auditorium, because light produced by candles was not sufficient to spotlight the acting. But darkness was not even desired. At the theater, the public took itself to be at least as important as the performance. The functions of public self-performance and the performance of the work of art were not yet distinguished from one another. What is transacted at the Paris Opera House in the stairwells happened at the baroque theatre throughout the entire performance: a gallant seeing and being seen. The theater was a festive hall: the sloping auditorium in the Munich Residenztheater by Francois Cuvillies can be raised to horizontal by behind-the-scenes mechanisms,

King's Loge, Margrave Opera House.

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and the theater transforms itself into a ballroom; after the performance, the orchestra pit disappears, the meal is served, dancing begins.25 The spectator reclaims the space that he had, for a certain time, given over to the play. Along with the possibility of closing the gap of the orchestra pit, Wagner sacrifices the possibility of bringing together life and play. He even deepens the distinction by letting the orchestra pit gape open as-to use Wagner's own term - the "mystical abyss." Blinders prevent the light needed for the musicians from penetrating the completely dark enclosure of the auditorium. This clear distinction between artificial light and darkness was made possible by the invention of the gaslight and later, electricity: the perfect journey back to the time of the Nibelung is made possible by gasometer and dynamo.26 Technical capability to produce absolute darkness for the spectator and an equally good view of the illuminated stage enhances, on one hand, the illusionistic spatial effect. But the price of an optimal illusion for all is the enforced distinction between being and appearing.

25. Hildegard Steinmetz and Johann Lachner, Das Alte Residenztheaterzu Miinchen: "CuvilliesTheater" (Starnberg: J. Keller, 1960). A striking example of the view from backstage was published by Annette Michelson; see 26. "Bayreuth: The Centennial Ring," in October 14 (Fall 1980): p. 68.

Erich Mendelsohn. Interior, Cinema Universum, Berlin. 1928.

76

Exterior, Cinema Universum. John Eberson. Riviera Theater, Omaha, Nebraska. 1931.

OCTOBER

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One commonly speaks of the baroque "black box," but the expression is not quite accurate. The principle of the black box was perfected in the nineteenth century and is exemplified in Wagner's intentions, which have their parallel in the desire for illusionism that spawned the dioramas and panoramas of the same period. This trend leads eventually to the movie house of the twentieth century. The Wagnerian stage contributed less to the development of theater praxis than to something one step beyond, as Wagner's perfect "black box" foreshadows the movie screen. In the strictest sense, the tiered theater was succeeded by the cinema auditorium rather than the modern theater.27 So that the appearance of the projected image can reign, the empirical being of the spectator must be extinguished. In this way, film projection corresponds to Wagner's will to cancel the reality of the public for the good of total theatrical experience. It retains the idea of the tribune as an architectural rhetoric, a tribune that even transforms itself into a "mother's womb," because only in an atmosphere of embryonic narcissism can illusion be successfully generated. The mutual self-consciousness of subjectivity interferes with the experience of illusion. Illusionism neither allows the spectator to see how its effects are produced, nor should the viewer be aware of its presence. A mere sidelong glance reminds me of my own reality as one among many spectators, and interferes with the "pure" experience of the movie. Erich Mendelsohn's cinema Universum at the Lehninerplatz in Berlin, opened in 1928, swells out into the square like an amphitheater.28 Here, an architectonic topos is carried from the theater to the cinema in the manner of the International Style: Gilly's eighteenth-century vision of a Nationaltheater finds its late fulfillment in a movie house of the early twentieth century. Above the "big top" of the auditorium, Mendelsohn has housed the movie screen so that it looks like the bridge of a ferryboat. Even when the auditorium no longer takes the shape of an amphitheater, the "tribune" is quoted in a mere ornamental phrase, as for example, in the entrance of Oskar Kaufmann's Cines at the Nollendorfplatz in Berlin. Early movie houses celebrated the democracy of illusion. The New York architect John Eberson built tiered theaters in the 1920s, tribunal spaces enveloped in evocative decoration. What at first looks like the bridging of the orchestra pit that the nineteenth-century theater of illusion opened up, indeed serves to deepen the illusion. Imperceptibly, the decoration corrodes the public's selfawareness as a body gathered together to preside over the trickery being per27. On the movie theater as a building type, see Paul Zucker, Theater und Lichtspielhduser(Berlin, E. Wasmuth, 1926); Paul Zucker and G. Otto Stindt, Lichtspielhduser, Tonfilmtheater (Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1931); Philip Morton Shand, Modern Theatres and Cinemas, The Architecture of Pleasure (London: B. T. Batsford, 1930); Francis Lacloche, Architecturesde cinemas, CollectionArchitecturedes Batiments (Paris: Editions de Moniteur, 1981). 28. See Der Mendelsohn-Bau am Lehniner Platz: Erich Mendelsohn und Berlin (Berlin: Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, 1981).

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formed. This critical self-awareness provides the necessary counterbalance to the aesthetic experience of self-forgetting. In Eberson's movie house at Omaha, Nebraska, the scenographic designs, reminding one of Serlio's tragic set (albeit superfluous), now force their way from the stage into the auditorium. The sphere of appearance is transferred to the tribune itself; in other words, it bribes the tribunal with a promise of what will happen on the screen. The orchestra pit, the mystical abyss, had already been constructed in these cinemas to animate the silent film; the sound film would render it obsolete. The mystical abyss retires behind the eyelids of the moviegoers. As Ledoux had foreshadowed in his eye at Besancon, in the experience of the eye, of the subjective camera, the public as a body of spectators becomes conscious of itself as reflected in the eye of the hero. This miracle is produced by the light from Ledoux's eye that, read anacronistically, deciphers itself as a beam from the movie projector that crosses and blurs the mystical abyss.

Free, Single, and Disengaged: Listening Pleasure and the Popular Music Object*

JOHN

CORBETT

Rockand roll was scorned atfirst by the major record companies. Theypaid for their priggishness while basement labels like Chess and Sun made fortunes. Disco was discoveredby alert independents like Casablanca. Once a bandwagon is underway the majors are happy to climb aboard-and elbow their way to thefront-but theyare rarely in the driver's seat. So it's silly to say of the listening public, as Adorno does, that "in this insistence on thefashionable standards it fancies itself in possession of a remnant offree choice." It is free-at least, its straitjacket is custom-cut. -Evan

Eisenberg

Extending Eisenberg's sartorial metaphor, one can read the above quotation as articulating a line that divides skeptic from optimist in the evaluation of "popular music" as a cultural commodity. On the one hand, the custom-cut straitjacket: for the optimistic critic, this metaphorical body of the listening public constitutes an essential thing to which the music is tailored. In this paradigm, the consumer is figured as the prime mover, the motivation behind production. Emphasizing as it does the selectivity of the populace, such a conception finds its greatest support within the network of (often contradictory) viewpoints of sociological heritage. These are not limited to the marketplace pluralism of quantitative research, but extend to the "bottom up" theories of many scholars of cultural studies, who conceptualize popular culture as having inherent room for negotiation. Thus the major record labels follow smaller labels that, by virtue of their size, have their fingers on the prized "pulse" of the public, which is considered to be an a priori, living, choosing, needing body. On the other hand, clothes make the man. In this configuration, "fashion* The title of this essay comes from a 1950s R&B song by Huey Piano Smith entitled "Free, Single, and Disengaged." I wish to thank Ben Portis, Jalal Toufic, Beth Rega, Mark Wolff, Dave Douglas, Lyuba Konopasek, and especially Rosalind Krauss for their careful reading and helpful criticism.

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able standards" are not set by an essential popular body, but by the industry, which may choose at will to incorporate or disenfranchise smaller labels and artists, and these are, in any case, judged only in relation to industry standards. Here the public body is contorted to squeeze it into ill-fitting, prefab duds. This is Adorno's "fetishism," in which he likens the consumption of popular music to "the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love."' Nothing custom-cut about it. Clearly more skeptical, this camp is peopled by critics less interested in the barometric function of the "mass" and more concerned with the way that dominant ideology force-feeds its subjects or the ways it more subtly controls the consumption and production of popular music. Either/or. That the issue is entirely polarized should be of no particular surprise; two different analytic approaches to the question are represented. Actually, however, they involve far more than two methodological positions; each is borne of a specific musical discourse -one deriving from the statistical, tabulatory, scientific irrefutability of the "top 40," the other charting the margins, groping for the project that was modernism (serialism/Adorno) or jettisoning overt political questions in favor of a postmodern critical edge (punk/Baudrillard). For social scientists, the very "popularity" of pop music grounds and legitimizes it as an object of study while, for critical theorists, popular currency provides the matrix for a critique of dominant industrial practice. Once the antithetical positions have been defined and recognized as such, we are faced with an obvious, rational recourse: namely, to locate this text in the reasonable space that is not either/or, but both. I do not aim to synthesize this opposition, however, but to interdigitate its terms, to describe their compatibility, their simultaneity, and ultimately, the capital efficacy of their coexistence. To do so, in a sense, positions this text among those of skepticism, yet out of place there, with an important degree of optimism concerning the possibility of resistance.

To begin again, we should reframe the question, not in terms of fields, but in terms of pleasure. In short, how is aural desire formed, charged, and inflected within the current social body? This question guardedly assumes a conception of the "mass public" as a manifest thing, and this is cause to hesitate. Not only is it possible to conceive of manypublics, but moreover, the very model of the "mass" may be an inappropriate way to understand the problematic given the specific

Theodor Adorno, "FetishCharacterin Musicand Regressionof Listening,"in TheEssential 1. FrankfurtSchoolReader,ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 280.

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way commodity capitalism currently manifests itself.2 Indeed, the recent reformulation within positivist communication studies of a more heterogeneous audience with any number of readings and uses of media (so-called "readership move that sweeps the issue clean, rendering it neutral and studies")-a itself be read as an effect of apparent changes in the economic apolitical-can discourse. Thus, it is not that social science now better understands the way audiences work, but that fundamental changes have (or seemto have) occurred in the actual terms of consumption and the consumers' relation to mass-mediated objects. Jacques Attali identifies this change when he writes: "Contrary to currently fashionable notions, the triumph of capitalism, whether private or State, is not that it was able to trap the desire to be different in the commodity, but rather it went far beyond that, making people accept identity in mass production as a collective refuge from powerlessness and isolation."3 The positing of a less monolithic mass audience, then, is correlated with an accompanying change in commodity relations, opening up two general modes of consumption, two types of fetishism- one individualizing ("the desire to be different") and one identificatory ("identity in mass production"). Rather than one superceding the other, as Attali would have it, let us suppose that these two modes coexist. We can conjure many examples of both modes. First, the atomized, individualized commodity, such as the bumper sticker, the coffee mug, jewelry, sunglasses, sneakers. This mode exhibits a proclivity toward small objects that articulate a measured distance from identical others and are subject, amid a vast array of variations and mutations of a given form, to a relatively short life expectancy. Here the effectiveness of planned obsolescence is most deeply felt, personalized, and given a name: style. It is in this, what we might call the "local" commodity mode, that collecting proper functions as people individualize their consumption and associate themselves with the singular, idiosyncratic object. This mode correlates with the type of "fragmentary" use of texts to which social science has turned: a heterogeneous media marketplace, with its plethora of commodities, is seen to provide anything for anyone. The problem, of course, is that the "measured distance" between personalized objects is just that; it works on the statistical probability (a promise) that two people, both wearing T-shirts bearing the motto "Foxy Lady," will not cross paths. There exists, counter to the local mode, a species of commodity that works within what we might call a "systemic mode" of commodity association. In this case, there is no concealment of mass consumption, no measured distance. Rather, these commodities find their appeal in their "mass," in the proximity they share, in their simulation of a social body. A list of them might include now-useless examples: mood rings, pet rocks; perennial institutions, like Coca See Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). 2. 3. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985), p. 121.

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Cola and Pepsi; and new incarnations, such as the stuffed Garfields so ubiquitous in cars of late. Obviously, any local-mode form may well also be represented in the systemic mode, like Air Jordans or Ray-Ban glasses. And systemic-mode commodities may also pretend to serve the local function, like Michelob Dry beer, which markets itself as "for those who thirst for something different." In any guise, systemic-mode objects are beguiling. They represent the subsumption of heterogeneity, the unification of desire under the common flag of the commodity -as a clothing chain's recent advertising campaign makes absolutely clear: "United Colors of Benetton." These two modes of commodity fetishism are not opposed to one another. On the contrary, the triumph of capitalism lies in its ability to incorporate both of these modes at once, to play them off one another in a form of reciprocal exchange. In the aural arena, it is the apparatus of the music industry that sets the basic terms of desire, pleasure, and interest that now encompass both the notion of free choice/eclecticism/idiosyncracy and the desire for "refuge" afforded by mutual consumption, and it has done this initially by conflating heretofore discrete definitions of "popular" as 1. statistical, 2. formal, and 3. technological. Pure Pop: Clarifying the Object All music is now popular. In a sense, this is true; there is virtually no music extant that has not been electronically colonized. Musical imperialism of this sort involves a complex treatment of the notion of "popularity" that cuts across three territories, blurring their boundaries. 1. Popular music as a statistical region. The popular is that which sells best, fares best in a poll, or in some other way "faithfully represents" a population. Clearly, some degree of recursivity is necessary to maintain this area. This is accounted for, for example, in Billboard magazine's use of record sales that mix preretail order shipments with actual retail sales to establish the "popularity" of a recording. On the fringe of this is music that doesn't "make it" and music that has generic similarities to statistically popular music but operates in a different, "alternative" network of production and distribution. 2. Popular music as a formal genre. The preeminence of certain "types" of music that recur within the aforementioned category has produced a definition of popular music that aligns it with rock or rock-associated music, funk, and soul - music, in short, of American and British derivation - as a pop form. This allows, for example, a consideration of punk as popular music, regardless of its nonconsensual status.4 4. See Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock'n'Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); and Chris Cutler, File Under Popular (London: November, 1982).

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3. Popular music as anything recorded. In a certain sense, it is the medium that unites the previous two categories and blurs their distinctness, for the technology of recording has made it possible to consider any mediated music as popular. This idea has permeated the sphere of production, as is readily apparent in scratch, dub reggae, hip-hop, and rap (and in British "acid house" and On-U Sound). In these musics, intertexts may include arcane pop music or classical music, spoken words, animal calls, music of "other cultures," and other sounds of known and unknown origins. Although an analysis on these grounds is outside the scope of this paper, this is the foundation of postmodernism in music. The collapse of these meanings one upon the other has not been haphazard. It has progressively led to an all-encompassing usage of "popular" as that which represents popular demand and as that which has been secreted along the edges of earlier need "gratification." Furthermore, it sets the stage for the appropriation of territory not yet sounded. The tremendous proliferation of both localand systemic-mode sound objects corresponds to this slippage: any popular need can be sold; all music is popular, all music can be sold. "You Won't See Me"-For

Lack, a Better Term

Although traditional music history is constructed around the abstraction and idealization of music and art (or entertainment) and as consisting of musical periods, genres, movements, and styles, it is possible to elaborate another set of histories. These would focus attention on those material objects deliberately overlooked in the production of standard musical history. As a blatant instance of such "overlooking," we might invoke a scenario familiar to anyone who has studied music: imagine several partitioned cubicles, each of which contains a headphoned student who faces an amplifier and a turntable; on each platter spins a record of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. One student lifts his needle to run to the bathroom, another listens twenty times to a difficult passage, a third is frustrated by a skip in the record and proceeds directly to the next movement of the symphony, while yet another finds it difficult to concentrate due to the volume of her neighbor's headphones. These students are required, even as they act in a way made possible only by the technology of recording, to develop a historico-theoretical interpretation as if the technical means through which the of no signifimusic is accessed-right there, staring them in the face-were cance whatsoever. This is disavowal, as in the Land of Oz: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." Such idealization is not limited to classical musicology, though. In fact, the situation described could just as easily have taken place in the listening booths of a record store anywhere in Europe. The characterization of music as an abstract, autonomous entity is extremely pervasive, appearing as historical assertion in the popular music press from Rolling Stone to Option, as categorization in music guidebooks from the Illustrated Encylopedia of Rock to the Da Capo Guide to ContemporaryAfrican Music, and in the form of

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"music cultures and subcultures" in academic music criticism by George Lipsitz and Larry Grossberg. All these sources base their analyses on recorded music, thereby accurately recognizing recording as the contemporary mode of musical exchange. Nevertheless, the question of the nature of the recorded music object remains relatively untheorized, its elements not yet sufficiently teased out. As an initial step, we must therefore look at rather than past the material of music. In itself, the disavowal present in our scenario already isolates the basic condition produced by recording and reified in music objects: the audio-visual disjunction. What is elided in the construction of standard music history is precisely the materiality of the apparatus, the status of music not as "immaterial production," as Attali would suggest, but as a set of objects that produce their own visual lack. With these issues in mind, it is possible to integrate the conceptualization of erotic fetishization into our consideration of musical fetishism as another form of commodity fetishism. Within the framework of feminist film studies, Laura Mulvey constructed an approach to the analysis of the (male) gaze in its relation to and recuperation of visual pleasure as it is threatened by the image of the woman on film.5 In order better to understand popular music as an eroticized mass-commodity, we may conceive that gaze as directed toward -not a representation of, but the empty space of-that which threatens it: nothing. Lack. The technology of reproduction specific to our experience of popular music, that of recording and playback, carries with it the mechanism for its insertion into the economics of compulsive consumerism. For it is the lack of the visual, endemic to recorded sound, that initiates desire in relation to the popular music object.6 The appropriateness of Mulvey's model for the study of music objects lies in the fact that it does not rely on a single response to the threat of loss, but interrelates two "avenues of escape" for the unconscious in a reciprocal bind. In her formulation, the viewing subject occupies two primary positions with respect to the image of woman: voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia. Although voyeurism in its usual sense has intriguing implications for a theory of listening pleasure (eavesdropping as it relates to radio broadcasting, for example), Mulvey's usage is more involved, linking voyeuristic pleasure with the sadistic narrative of the

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Visual and OtherPleasures (Bloom5. ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 14- 26. As Mulvey makes clear in her follow-up article, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946)" (pp. 29-38), this form of visual pleasure is not exclusively male, but is predicated on a particularly "masculinized" subject position available to both men and women. It seems to me that this is equally pronounced in relation to music objects and hi-fi equipment. An extraordinary instance of castration and the recorded music object can be found on the 6. cover of a record by the mid-'70s rock group Mom's Apple Pie. On it, a (conspicuously young) grandmother is pictured bearing a pie from which a slice has been cut to reveal, not apples, but a gaping vagina. More recently, see the Cramps' What's Inside a Girl? (Big Beat Records, 1986).

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exposure of woman's guilt and her reform and punishment. This is coupled with a complex fetishistic response, in which an eroticized object, even the object that produces the threat of lack itself (woman), is overvalued and substituted for the missing phallus. As Mulvey puts it: "fetishistic scopophilia builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself."7 Recorded music, at once the site of intense pleasure and the producer of a similar threat of lack, is therefore constituted in its object-form as erotic-fetishistic, and the aural is mystified as "something satisfying in itself." The threat of absence, of loss, creates a nostalgia for the fullness of a mythical past; pleasure is inscribed in its memory--the gap. If we modify those aspects of Mulvey's analysis that are specific to film, in particular the way that compulsive sadistic response to threat is rationalized via narrative, it becomes clear that a similar mechanism propels the commodification of music objects. Consumerist compulsion is rationalized in a narrative of trends and styles, the object's story of becoming obsolete. Through an intricate interweaving of disavowal and fascination, the music industry has succeeded in seizing a medium that optimizes both. Voyeuristic fascination is concentrated into issues of fidelity; "unfaithful" music objects (scratched records, obsolete technology) are diagnosed and controlled.8 Fetishistic pleasure is organized around the reconstitution of the visual and the substitution of music objects for the impending loss that they trigger. Thus, in fetishistic audiophilia, the scramble to negotiate the menacing void manifests itself in one of three ways: 1. the attempt to reconstitute the image of the disembodied voice; 2. the assertion of the autonomy of sound and the fetishization of audio equipment; and 3. the attempt to fill the void with recorded music objects. As these strategies are crucial, they require individual attention. Unseen Strategies Since the second decade of the twentieth century, with the spread of commercial recording, the musical world has been driven by two conflicting quests: on the one hand, the direct attempt to disavow the cleavage of image/ sound and to restore the visual to the disembodied voice; and on the other, the desire to complete the break absolutely, once and for all-and further, to naturalize the audio-visual split and interface the independence of recorded music with an already well-established musicological construction of music as autonomous. Concomitant with these has been the ongoing commodification of music objects.

7. Mulvey, p. 21. 8. For a discussion of the gendering of audio equipment and records, see Eisenberg, "The Cyrano Machine," The Recording Angel, esp. pp. 90-91.

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I. Replacing the Absent Image Much of the work of the music industry has centered around overcoming the absolutism of the all-sonic recorded music object. From this, we can produce our own historically specific account. First, recorded music objects in themselves have engendered more and more sophisticated graphic accompaniment. Thus the album cover takes on tremendous significance as it provides a binding element for the aural/visual disarticulation. Bright colors, the image of the performer, the gatefold, the inside sleeve, as well as various more esoteric strategies, have become integral to the music commodity -something to look at while you listen. This can be read as the formative attempt to restore the visual, to stitch the cut that separates seeing from hearing in the contemporary listening scenario. The most extreme example of this is perhaps the "picture disc," in which the visual is inscribed directly upon the surface of that which produces its absence. Concurrent with the general rise of visual advertising from the 1930s onward,9 the image has thus assumed a particular and specialized role in relation to music. For evidence of its centrality to the industry, one need look no further than the fifth volume of Album Cover Album, the latest in a series of coffee-table books compiled by "album cover artist" Roger Dean.10 While the record cover is the central focus of concentrated marketing techniques designed for its commodification (the true "billboard" of music objects), it is also an erotic surface, composed of the reckoning of audio/visual tension, rearticulated as lack." In record shops, where these relations assume their most intense form, records are generally arranged to engage the consumer sensually: in order to find the desired object, one does not just read the titles on their spines but must look through and touch many others. Records, CDs, and cassette tapes create a region in which economic and erotic fetishization coincide in visual objects on the market. Of course, Music Television (MTV) is currently the most intensive strategy employed in the reconstitution of the visual in music. Indeed, since the beginning of record industrialization, the navigation of the audio/visual split has been

Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920-1940 9. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 153-154. Album Cover Album 5, compiled by Roger Dean and Storm Thorgerson (New York: Billboard 10. Books, 1989). See also volumes 1-4. In an argument suggesting that the function of commodity aesthetics is to "stimulate desire in 11. every possible way," W. F. Haug specifically chooses an album cover as an example. Considering Andy Warhol's design for the Rolling Stones' StickyFingers, Haug writes: "Whoever buys the record, purchases with it a copy of a young man's fly, the package identified by the graphic trick which stresses the penis and highly stylizes the promised content. The buyer acquires the possibility of opening the package, and the zip and finds . . . nothing. It is a reversal of the tale of the Emperor's new clothes: the tale of the buyers' new bodies. They buy only packages which seem to be more than they are." Critique of CommodityAesthetics:Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Robert Bock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), pp. 86-87. See also, W. F. Haug, CommodityAesthetics,Ideology and Culture (New York: International General, 1987).

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accomplished in the context of moving pictures (an encounter that now often terminates in a purchase at the record store as well). Starting with musical accompaniment for silent films,12 it is important to note the association of music and, more widely, recorded sound with cinema and later with television. Synchrony, the assertion of a relationship between action that is seen and heard simultaneously, represents the filmic disavowal tactic: I know (that the sound is coming from a speaker and not the character's mouth), but I don't know (because they belong together). Lip sync provides the effect of virtual plenitude, fusing the audio/visual fissure. In the filmic construct, as Mary Ann Doane summarizes, "All the signifying strategies for the deployment of the voice . . . are linked with . . . homogenizing effects: synchronization binds the voice to a body in a unity whose immediacy can only be perceived as a given."13 While they are both strategies for resolving the basic audio/visual tension, it is a mistake to use film (or commercial television) as the basis for an analysis of music video. In the first place, at base MTV is basically radio coming to grips with the overwhelming visuality of current music commodities; it exploits the association of the visual with a medium long known to be merely auditory. It is therefore no great surprise that verisimilitude is not the basis for value in image/sound replenishment in music video, that the viewer need not "believe" that the singer is actually singing. As with extra-diegetic music in narrative film (MTV's closest cinema cousin, now available on soundtrack records), there is no assumption that the music emanates from within the profilmic space; the seen and heard need not necessarily coincide in supposed unity. Rather, image and sound simply co-occur. As in the record sleeve, there is no assertion of a "real" identity linking what is looked at and what is listened to. Pointing to this condition in which "reality" and "fiction" are fused in the simulacrum, E. Ann Kaplan questions the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to MTV, asking: "Are 'fullness' and 'emptiness' still relevant terms?"14 These are obviously no longer the criteria if we take them to mean that the effect-of-the-real is required to supercede (or "fill") fictive disbelief (the "emptiness" of the exposed means of production), as is accomplished through the linking of specific sounds with specific images in classical film. But if we look at MTV somewhat less dramatically as an adjunct to radio, this incomprehensible postmodern medium may make a bit more sense. If MTV is a "24-hour commercial," it builds on radio's dual construction of popular music as simultaneous instrument of pleasure and advertisement for itself. The visual is enlisted into this strategy, capitalizing on the 12. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1987), pp. 31-52. 13. Mary Ann Doane, "The Voice In the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia, 1986), p. 345. 14. E. Ann Kaplan, RockingAround the Clock:Music Television, Postmodernismand ConsumerCulture (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 44.

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audio/visual juncture in a way impossible for ordinary radio: by means of the cathode ray tube. Rather than treat MTV as a radicalization of the codes of film and television, this allows us to recognize music video for what it is: a hybrid of radio and record jacket. Thus, working at the level of the basic music-reproduction apparatus, music video establishes a domain in which radio's visual lack can be "filled" with any set of images; the terms of psychoanalysis are therefore not annulled. Between the seen and the heard, the plane of dislocation is a slippery one; the visual and the aural may be realigned imprecisely and still provide the erotic spark that drives the music industry motor.15 II. Gapping the Bridge As a matter offact, thosewho maintain that theyonly enjoymusic to thefull with their eyes shut do not hear better than when they have them open, but the absence of visual distractions enables them to abandon themselvesto the reveries induced by the lullaby of its sounds, and that is really what they prefer to the music itself. -Igor Stravinsky Various scholars have recently charted the construction of the concept of music as an autonomous sphere of creation.16 The lineage that produced this conception, persistent in the West, emerged from a precapitalist period in which music-making was divided between those musicians outside the aristocratic system (as in religious ritual) and those fully under the ownership of the courts, whose production was dictated by them. The subsequent separation of art from its social production, the standardization and widespread dissemination of music notation, coupled with new laws governing copyrights, enabled a valorization of the absolute value of music itself, apart from any material considerations. "End of the obliged sign, reign of the emancipated sign."17 Musicology as it now exists remains a classical mode of analysis bound up in the defense of this independence, in the assertion of music as access to the "absolute" and as timeless and apolitical. The situation of "art music" within the academic institution has served

The impulse to disavow lack need not be registered in media alone. The familiar mock or 15. "air" guitar gesture which is a characteristic accompaniment to popular music listeninga strikingly literal example in the social field: the particularly among adolescent boys-conjures absent phallus is assertively replenished, its lack disavowed through visual mimicry, the missing organ gently caressed and metamorphosed into a longing for technical virtuosity and identification with the cult of the star. See Attali, Noise; and Janet Wolff, "The Ideology of Autonomous Art"; and Susan McClary, 16. "The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year," in Music and Society,ed. Richard Leppart and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 17. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 85.

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to reinforce this supposed autonomy-allowing simultaneously for the individualization'8 and transcendence19 of music theory. Unencumbered by the social, political, or technological, Western art-music is seen to exist in a vacuous, theoretical space- the contemplative ether of the "great works." It is no mere coincidence, then, that compact discs experienced their first wholesale takeover in the sphere of classical music. The compact disc is the latest in a long line of audiophilic devices in the history of the attempt to eliminate the long-standing enemies of "fidelity" in playback: surface noise, scratch, hum, and hiss. To render music free of noise is to grant it its proper musical status as sonically autonomous, whereas such noise foregrounds the music object as such. It draws attention to the record's blackness, its roundness, its materiality--in short, to its visual presence. These defects, these idiosyncracies, the "grain" of the record, are vestiges of the image in sound. Adorno and Horkheimer explain: "nature which has not been transformed through the channels of conceptual order into something purposeful, the grating sound of a stylus moving over a slate . . . has a penetrating effect; it arouses disgust."20 Surface noise indicates the surface, a reminder of the visible topography of recorded music objects. In order to alleviate temporarily (and capitalize on) the anxiety produced the threat of visual loss audible in these imperfections, another strategy has by developed: cultivation of lack itself; loving the gap; noise reduction; and consequently, fetishization of the technology that produces the lack. The celebration of the liberation of audio from the vestigial visual is linked to the aforementioned musical autonomy with a naturalizing effect: of course we don't want noise, because it's not music! Just as a coughing cellist foregrounds the physicalityorchestral music (a "mistake" that and potentially the social production -of recording makes less and less frequent),21 so does surface noise threaten to expose the visual lack- and potentially the industrial construction of musical by recorded music. Hence the underlying significance of autonomy-produced the American music industry's recent slogan: "Recorded Music Is a Sound Investment" -that is, it is an investment in the autonomy of sound. This aspect of fetishistic audiophilia has provided for the curious possibility of larger economic investment in the playback apparatus than in the sound

For example, Milton Babbitt, whose compositions are each based on individual mathematical 18. theories. For a gloss of his music, see John Rockwell, All American Music (New York: Vintage, 1985). 19. Four-part harmony, a la Bach, is still taught as the foundation for students of music. See McClary, "The Blasphemy of Talking Politics" for an alternative reading of Bach's academic appropriation. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment(New York: Contin20. uum, 1989), p. 180. In its original context, this stylus was clearly meant as a writing utensil, but it may be accurately misread as an audiophile stylus. 21. Attali, Noise, pp. 105-106.

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objects it is designed to feature. More significantly, the technology of the compact disc allows for a deeper disavowal of visual presence at the level of the mechanism. Turntables generally leave the record in plain view, while the disc machine consumes the CD, removing it visually and further concealing the playback process. Thus, a spatiality inherent in the technology of the record-a vestigial sense of materiality or depth -is absent in the playback of the compact disc, where the focus is turned to the issue of temporality (confirmed by the digital time display on most CD machines). It is, however, not only the disc that is taken in by the machine; the entire visual structure is supplanted by a prosthetic eye (the laser). No more analogy of material contact (tape/head; needle/groove), but a luminous reading-a seeing-internalized by the technology itself. This reconfiguration is in fact anticipated by several devices introduced toward the end of turntable technology. First, an oscilloscope is implanted in a bunker on the base of the table, casting a beam of light at a ring of dots around the rim of the platter. A listener fine-tunes the speed of the disc until the dots seem to stand still, at which point the speed is correct. Denon Corporation produced an automatic turntable that relocates this beam on a cone just higher than the surface of the platter, which has four narrow pits in it. Each pit contains a tiny mirror. If there is no record covering the platter, the beam is bounced back to a receptor that shuts the table off, protecting the needle from damage. Finally, on "linear-track" turntables, a laser beam positioned in the tone arm next to the stylus locates and guides the needle into the groove. These are steps toward a technology that looks at (and for) itself. With the oscilloscope the listener still participates in visual verification, but by the time the compact disc machine is fully deployed, the visual apparatus has been entirely reconstructed and tucked away in the machine itself, negating the issue of the material and visual presence of the music object. Paul Virilio links the loss of material space to the acquisition of speed and instantaneousness.22 Material space still fully binds the magnetic tape, a nonrandom-access medium which requires that, to arrive at a given point, one must, in obedience to a spatial imperative, first pass through everything between here and there. Phonograph records maintain their materiality in that, while they are random-access, to get to a given point the tonearm must pass over the vinyl between here and there. With the CD, there is no "here" or "there," no material space, only digits (track numbers, clock). As the increased speed of the spinning disc blurs its materiality (already concealed), so the instantaneousness of access erases the last metaphor of travel and territory. The technology that allows for the mass standardization of noise-free playback thus involves an accompanying shift in the status of the operative playback object, now immaterial and virtually invisible.

22.

Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).

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With the fetishization of audio equipment, the very sound of music has acquired a noise-free standardization. Roland Barthes' essay "The Grain of the Voice" marks the transition to this universe of noiseless recorded music in the difference between the singing voices of Panzera, as representative of the era before recording, and Fischer-Dieskau, as archetypal of the era of recording. Panzera's voice sported the "grain" of his body, the trace of his visual presence, where Fischer-Dieskau's has been "flattened out . . . under the pressure of the mass long-playing record."23 Wishing to resuscitate grain and implement it as an evaluative category by which a "different history of music" could be written (in a sense, the prototype for our reconceptualization of the current music-industrial formation), Barthes explains: "I shall not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style . . . (I shall not wax lyrical concerning the 'rigour,' the 'brilliance,' the 'warmth,' the 'respect for what is written,' etc.), but according to the image of the body (the figure) given me."24 Grain is thus explicitly visual, an image, in Barthes. While his critique centers on the loss of grain in performance technique, the last gasps of the visible body appear in recorded music as well. The flow of popular music production standards has worked to eliminate this image and to widen the gap between the bodies of performers and the sound of their music. It is now common knowledge that "voices have neither feet nor ears."25 Once again, the fetishization of autonomous sound enables an alternative history linked to this emergent conception, one that might otherwise be constructed strictly according to "musical content." In the late '60s, a music engineer named Manfred Eicher left Deutsche Grammophon, and in 1969 he formed ECM Records. Its motto was: "The most beautiful sound next to silence." Over the subsequent decade, the label acquired notoriety for "the ECM sound," usually described as "ethereal" or "spacey." In the late '70s, ECM gained a distribution contract with Warner Brothers, spawned several "jazz" stars (Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny), and set the stage for the introduction of an entirely new commodity genre: New Age Music. What set ECM apart was its use of two key production techniques: echo and compression. The combination of these, along with other studio methods, allows for the next step in the fetishization of autonoRoland Barthes, Image-Music23. Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Flamingo, 1977), p. 189. 24. Ibid, pp. 188-189. 25. Rudolph Arnheim, "In Praise of Blindness: Emancipation from the Body," Radio (London, 1936), p. 191. This book foretold the coming institutionalization of the disembodied voice in audio production at a fairly early stage, valorizing the medium as the distiller of sound-art, free of the complications of the visual. In so doing, Arnheim succeeded in laying out (albeit from an antagonistic position to that of this paper) the major issues still at stake in the audio/visual problematic as indicated by the section subtitles of his chapter: "The Bodiless Announcer," "Music without Musicians," "Voices without Bodies." Radio also represents the site for the deployment and dissemination of the standard practice of compression, a technique that is becoming obsolete with the expanded dynamic range of digital recording, but which has left an indelible mark on popular music's sound.

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elimination of the musician. The sound of fingers, lips, legs, mous sound-the and nose are all traces of the performer, the absent performer, and they foreground the visual. Echo, by doubling the sound upon itself, and compression, by doing away with unseemly transients, wrench the sound of music from the body of the performer and erase its trace. It is not surprising that ECM's records are of "audiophile quality." They appeal to a fantasy of absolutely independent music, where concerns of the image never enter the picture. Lullaby, close your eyes, and good night. If the crux of this struggle, its battleground, is therefore the body, this is not to deny that the performer's body (or the body of the instrument), is in itself a social construction; it is not to assert an essential biological body or a transcendence for the physical at an ontological level. On the contrary, the current conditions for the production of the music object work by removing the social body and replacing it with a homogenous, universal absence: standardized lack. The sonic topography of the body is a partial product of, but not reducible to, its cultural context. This irreducibility is more than simple "individuality" in a romantic or preordained sense.26 Studio techniques such as echo and compression work to reduce such irreducibles, to make the individual body interchangeable and the sound of its contours more manageable. ECM and its brood (Windam Hill, Private Music, etc.) are not the only companies to use compression and echo. In fact, these techniques have been in development since early in the history of recorded music, with the ostensible function of providing "presence" for the recording space. Ironically, this inscription of "absence" (of the musician) has assumed a highly codified state; it now constitutes that which sounds like music in the popular domain. Finally, just when it would seem to have perfected the construction of mufree from the body of the performer; sic as autonomous sound-production from its own noise -the free industry enacts an apparent reversal. reproduction once is reintroduced when, again playing on the hot edge between Visuality and not seeing, audiophile marketing coins a cryptic rhetoric around the seeing notion of "audio imaging." Salespeople do not encourage consumers to visualize the musicians, but they do euphemistically encourage them to "see the sound." Given the erasure that is standard practice in contemporary recording techniques, it seems reasonable to wonder what one might look for. Such is the pinnacle of audio mystification: through an invisible apparatus the listener strains to evaluate the "realism" and "fidelity" of music on the basis of an image that has been systematically removed from view.27 in the fire that burned two of guitarist Django This irreducibility may be accidental-as 26. Reinhardt's fingers, the car accident that cost saxophonist Lol Coxhill all his teeth, or the fall that paralyzed percussionist Robert Wyatt's legs. It may be sickness-as in the polio of Ian Dury, Itzhak Perlman, or the Israel Vibrations. Mick Taussig is currently developing a rich reevaluation of the RCA dog "Nipper" as the 27.

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III. Filling the Gap Replenishment and autonomy are thus obviously not mutually exclusive. They work together as part of a coordinated effort to stave off the threat of lack within the framework of capital. The purchase of music commodities represents another strategy for the pleasurable mastery of objects of absence. Record collections register visual absence and offer to control it through ownership of the objects, proof in their display that they are visually present. For the record collector, though, there is no ultimate pleasure, no orgasmic release in ecstatic collecting. Pleasure is perpetuated, the moment of release constantly deferred and translated into issues of record quality (there's always a better copy), the completion of series or sets, and the search for and establishment of "originals" (the jargon of authenticity is alive and well in record collecting). For the record collector, as they say, the thrill is in the hunt. Collections are described in terms of unities, continuity, a mythical plenitude -yet remain all the while in a state of suspended completion. Walter Benjamin, himself a voracious book collector, explicated "a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian valuestudies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of that is, their usefulness-but their fate."28 This is also the drama of the accumulation of music objects; their actual use-time is stockpiled in the collection, as is their use-value, their fetish quality. It is not that they are without utility; rather, they create their own usefulness. One might insist that not everyone is a record collector, and that even record collectors have specific areas of interest. This is true, and it is the business of the music industry to protect against such dangerous excess while ensuring the ongoing consumption of music objects. Inflecting Demand Fetishistic audiophilia addresses a term that John Mowitt has adapted from Adorno, the "listening structure" of the present discursive formation as it is dependent on a matrix of reinforcing and sublimating factors.29 This construct

intersection of two meanings of "fidelity." An obvious meaning, "faithfulnessor likeness to an original,"is implied,but Taussigassertsthe priorityof another meaningstemmingfrom relationsof dominance and obedience inferred in the word's connotation of "loyalty."After all, "man's best friend" listensto "hismaster'svoice." In Taussig'sview, this is supportedby the fact that manyearly musicboxes and phonographswere adornedwith imagesof women, animals,and "natives.""On the Mimetic Faculty,"a lecture delivered at the CulturalStudies Conference, Universityof Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,April 5, 1990. 28. WalterBenjamin,"UnpackingMy Library,"Illuminations(New York:Schocken, 1969), p. 60. 29. John Mowitt,"The Sound of Musicin the Eraof its ElectronicReproducibility,"in Musicand Society,pp. 173-197.

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provides us with a general hedge against the image of an autonomous consumer, but it is with the introduction of an ideological charge that the recorded commodity enters either the local or systemic-mode of relations. So far, the scenario is pre-Oedipal; the subject is polymorphically perverse -any record will do. It is the voice of the father, of dominant ideology, that inflects the listening subject's desire and charges certain commodities. The entry of the subject into the symbolic comes next. This has required the development of an elaborate apparatus: the music marketing industry. Attali addresses this question with a consideration of the "production of demand," a sphere no less productive in the most specific sense than that of supply. This is Adorno and Horkheimer's "circle of manipulation and retroactive need," though, as we have seen, the initial mechanism for fetishism is contained in the object of the current musical formation, diminishing the necessity for the totalitarian connotation carried in the term "manipulation." According to Attali: "In an economy in which the production price of the supply is very low in relation to the production price of the demand, continuity of expansion depends largely on the improvement of commercialization techniques."30 This is essentially correct, although "demand" in this case does not mean "need" as that is constituted in the contemporary musical text. The production of demand consists in providing a particular erotic charge for certain commodities managed by the music industry proper. Cheap Trick: "I want you to want me, I need you to need me." To unpack this a bit, I offer two specific examples. REM In 1981, the tiny independent label Hib Tone Records released a single by the American rock quartet REM entitled "Radio Free Europe." Almost immediately, the band was signed to a bigger label, IRS Records, and within months they released their first "mini-album" called Chronic Town. Between 1983 and 1988, they issued five albums of new material on IRS (with excellent distribution from A&M and MCA): Murmur (1983, which included a rerecording of "Radio Free Europe"), Reckoning (1984), Fables of the Reconstructionof the . . . (1985), Life's two collections of old material Rich Pageant (1986), and Document (1987)-and Letter The latter is an assemblage of Dead and Office (1987). (1988) -Eponymous numerous "B-sides," that is, the unreleased flip sides of their popular singles. Late in 1988, REM released its first record on Warner Brothers Records, Green. The ascendancy of REM is interesting in several respects. From the beginning they did not employ what is generally misconstrued as the fulcrum of popular music: clarity. The vocal track on the early recordings is set back in the mix, and the lyrics are very difficult to distinguish. In addition, the audible parts

30.

Attali, p. 109.

REM.Inner Sleeve,Fablesof the Reconstructionof the....

1985.

are quite cryptic, resisting simple interpretation. The very title of their 1985 release is unfixed, as it can be read as either Fables of the Reconstruction or Reconstructionof the Fables, and this ambiguity makes listing the album, talking about it on the radio, or asking for it in the store somewhat more of a task. Perhaps most involved is their construction of their visual image -suggested by their very name, which implies the visuality of dream-state sleep. While they have made music videos from the very start, the band members have rarely appeared in them (more frequently, lately), and they have vocally opposed what they perceive as mindless star glorification apparent in many videos. Collaborating with avant-garde filmmaker James Herbert, they produced what might be called a visual soundtrack for their 1984 album, Left of Reckoning.Images from this film have been used as a backdrop for them in live appearances and on the jacket of Document. Elsewhere, their cover art is also relatively uncooperative, with graphics that refer to various avant-gardes and express an informed and nuanced

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interest in issues of representation. Indeed, the inner sleeve of Fables may well provide the perfect icon of audio/visual lack: a disembodied ear is positioned at the crotch of a wooden doll, explicitly aligning the aural canal with the absent phallus. The back cover of Eponymousepitomizes REM's ironic attitude toward the production of its own promotional image, featuring a high-school photo of (unblemished) singer Michael Stipe with the inscription "They Airbrushed My Face." In the old universe of the music commodity, these are all undesirable features. They seem to undermine the unity of the musical product, the unity of interpretation and subjective identification. In this way, they are like local-mode in fact they are not. They are simulations of local-mode commodities-but commodities, systemic-commodities masquerading as heterotopia. Desire for them has been organized chiefly through the creation of demand-large-scale identification with the charged REM object. Through intense marketing pressure in terms of radio airplay, a profusion of visual accompaniment in the form of posters (both promotional and for retail sale), and an appearance on "Late Night With David Letterman," the industry has provided a reading of their resistant texts that is unified, but gives the impression of being fragmented. Eventually, according to a reciprocity commonplace in "alternative" music objects incorporated by the dominant network, the actual image and sound of the band have come to "clear up" -airbrushed, no doubt, by the logic of capital. Jackdaw With Crowbar In 1987, a record appeared in a few stores specializing in "import" and "indie" records by a group calling itself Jackdaw With Crowbar. Distributed internationally by two firms, 9 Mile and The Cartel (both formed to disrupt the hegemony of big-label distribution), Monarchy,Mayhamand Fishpaste, a four song EP (extended play), listed Ron Johnson Records as its production company, gave no information about its participants (save a guest trombonist), and made a thinly concealed invective against MTV, claiming that "Jackdaw With Crowbar still use live films. Here's to the end of the video-rodeo conspiracy." It also contained an open invitation to write to the musicians in London. Its cover features a dadaesque collage, a portion of which is reproduced on the B-side record label. There are no photos of the band, nor, for that matter, are there any music-related visuals. Musically the record is varied: a song sung through a bullhorn ("Crow"), an accordion-reggae-dub ("Fourth World"), a two-step featuring slide guitar reminiscent of Zoot Horn Rollo in Captain Beefheart's Magic Band ("The Night Albania Fell on Alabama"). The following year, another EP came forth, Sink!, Sank.',Sunk!, soon followed by a full-length album, Hot Air. The LP contains little more information, save names of band members and of filmmakers who apparently work with the band on both its live show and in constructing the collage work for their record jackets. Its music continues in the mode of the others,

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alternating between drawn-out dub reggae jams and shorter songs with political and absurdist lyrics. Exposing a hesitancy over "finished products" (a common concern for dub reggae and dada), the LP contains a completely reworked version of the song "Crow," with the vocals set back even further, the drums filtered through reverb, and a country guitar lick mixed in (accounting for its new name, "Travesty of C(ro)W"). After one inclusion on a compilation late in 1988, the group, with no promotional trail, no interviews, and no clear group "persona," has slipped away virtually without a trace. Now out of print (and with Ron Johnson Records defunct), the brief appearance of Jackdaw's records exemplifies the local-mode commodity at its most seductive and its most politically volatile. It is interesting to compare these two bands in terms of their workings, the that they are held separate by dominant ideology despite bold similarities in way their general approach. They share some basic concerns: making rich visual accompaniment for their records and live concerts, a general murkiness of vocal production, distrust of music video as it has been codified by MTV, and a playfulness with language. To be sure, the outrightness ofJackdaw's song "Fuck America" is more strongly countercultural than the mild antiestablishment irony of REM's "It's the End of the World as We Know It (I Feel Fine)." But there is nothing essentially unmarketable about Jackdaw, just as REM did not skyrocket to success by virtue of their absolute gratification of a preexisting popular need. "To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary" (Guy Debord).s3 Thus it is the activity of the industry that produces the charge and that inflects popular demand (already, in part, generated by the music object itself), compelling both the acquisition of individual identity through local-mode objects and acquiescence to conformity through systemic-mode objects.

At the outset of this essay I expressed optimism concerning resistance. In a musical world devoid of experience viva voce (and this is thankfully not yet completely the case), listening pleasure expresses a specific relation of consumers to commodities and of consumers to each other as articulated by commodities. Nonetheless, this does not entirely preclude the possibility of response or resistance on the part of either listener-consumers or musician-producers. There is room for counterattack, both using and opposing popular music as a form. Indeed, I think these sorts of negotiations are presently quite widespread in recorded music and may involve excorporation, mimicry, subversion, misreading, recontextualization, and a number of other tactics. Mayo Thompson wryly

31.

Guy Debord, The Societyof the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977), p. 20.

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states that "Capitalism still has progressive life in it,"32 and his work as a producer with Rough Trade Records and as a member of the band Red Crayola supports him. Sharply political groups like Crass and the Ex have constructed alternative production and distribution routes. In a more genteel manner, the Pacific Northwest's International Pop Underground and New Zealand's Flying Nun Records are but two examples of the innumerable grass-roots recording conspiracies currently on the periphery of the mainstream music conglomerate. Overlapping this is another important element that highlights the political valence of popular music: the ubiquitous smaller music industries in worldwide local markets, each of which continuously produces corresponding local-mode music objects. These in turn represent a potential wellspring for the dominant industry's exotic postcolonialist "World Music" category.33 From within the dominant industry, groups such as the Fall, the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Boogie Down Productions, Ice-T, Digital Underground, and Queen Latifah have chosen to try to stretch the limits of the existing central industrial structure, making use of its tremendous power of dissemination and attempting to point out some of its internal contradictions while playing on the edge of their own incorporation and potential defusion.34 At the technological level, dub reggae has transgressed the standardized use of echo by pushing it beyond its naturalized limit. Similarly, rap sampling and scratch have reintroduced vinyl surface noise into the mainstream musical picture, even on CD.35 Finally, the increased possibility for subversion provided by the ever-cheapening technology of cassette tape (the audiophile industry seeming temporarily to turn against the recording industry) opens up further opportunities for listeners to recontextualize pieces of music. It thereby enables listeners to bypass the proper course of capital through the industry by "home taping" and allows underground producers to set up piecemeal local cassette networks.36

32. Mayo Thompson, "What," Durch 3/4 (November 1987), p. 5. See Roger Wallis and Krister Malm, Big Soundsfrom Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small 33. Countries (New York: Pendragon, 1984). "You need only think of John Heartfield, whose technique made the book cover into a 34. political instrument" (Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), p. 229). For connections between Heartfield and the English punk band Crass, see Douglas Kahn, John Heartfield: Art and Mass Media (New York: Tanam, 1985), pp. 131-132. For two glowing examples of recent music shaking the standardized technology of recording 35. and playback to its epistemological roots, hear Mark Stewart and the Mafia's LP As the Veneer of DemocracyStarts to Fade (Mute Records, 1985) and Public Enemy's "Terminator X to the Edge of Panic," on It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (Columbia, 1988). Conceptual artists Milan Knizak and Christian Marclay have also created an important body of works that take the music object as their point of departure. This so frightens the music industry that it has taken to printing a disclaimer on record sleeves 36. (as if from the Surgeon General) featuring the silhouette of a skull and crossbones over a cassette

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Material conditions do not entirely define or delimit the sound of popular music or its politics, but capitalist music production has seized upon, developed, and refined this industrial form of music-a pervasive, unfixed, highly flexible matrix through which potentially antagonistic texts of all sorts may be retrieved and recast. As we have noted, all musical forms are now latent expressions of "the popular." This leads Lyotard to suggest that there is no "stable sound filtering system" in popular music.37 The basic conditions of recording and playback do, however, constitute a strategically unstable system, a malleable (even reversible) structure through which all recorded music must pass. Given such a treacherous environment, the task at hand is to expose the danger of investing in the supposition that any resistance to or via this system will ever be permanent, that it will always be successful, or for that matter, that it is at every level possible. In other words, we must remind ourselves that opposition is not inherent in musical situations, but is subject to power shifts and the emergence of newer, more insidious strategies of institutionalization. These changes necessitate vigilant critique. The context for our critique includes the recent awakening of a dangerous myth of "free, single, and disengaged" music consumers, a notion that has surfaced both within the academy (in the proliferating excitement over "popular culture" in general) and in a wider discourse that responds to recent developments in the music industry. In its current stand, this formulation positions audience members as "free" (to choose), "single" (that is, "individual"), and "disengaged" (from the influence of dominant ideology) by virtue of their access to a seemingly limitless variety of music objects and a corresponding multiplicity of readings. In scholarly circles, versions of this myth have arisen both under the sign of the pessimist (Kroker's "panic" mentality) and under the sign of the optimist (Ross's defense of popular pleasure as "autonomous").38 In the music industry, the myth appears in the newly centralized "alternative music industry," which deploys a rhetoric thick with "independence." At the same time, it is also integral to the dominant industry's "new bohemianism," which plays on sexy notions of nonconformity and otherness even as it engenders an implicit uni-

tape, which is accompanied by the warning: "Home taping is killing musicl" On the wall of a small, alternative record shop in New York City, a sarcastic response recently appeared: "Home fucking is killing pornography!" A forthcoming book promises to discuss cassette counterculture: Cassette Mythos:Making Music at the Margins, ed. Robin James (New York: Autonomedia, due 1990). 37. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 13. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York and London: Rout38. ledge, 1989), p. 193.

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formity and consensuality.39 As we have seen, local-mode objects are not impervious to being simulated or recuperated as systemic-mode objects (REM, Talking Heads, U2, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, The The, The Cure), and even in their "post-Fordist" incarnation, legitimate local-mode music commodities are still fetish objects, always engaged in a complex way with issues of visual loss and reconstitution. These objects in turn entertain an ongoing relationship with a constantly changing audiophile industry, which creates new technical modes and sells equipment that is as centralized, stratified, and standardized as any systemic-mode music commodity. As we have seen, the industry continues to invent subtle new ways to capitalize on this interplay, adapting to and creating more markets and mandating consumption of more music objects. As a producer of local-mode commodities, the alternative music industry demonstrates the precariousness of any opposition to the dominant industrial apparatus. This "independent syndicate" -within which Jackdaw constructs its considerably abrasive music and from which it obtains its pleasurably contrary status -must also be seen as a potential source for the industry; it is both a farm-team and a cottage industry. Husker Du's journey from SST Records to Warner Brothers, where it was commercially disenfranchised and eventually disbanded, is as much a part of this story as is Elvis Presley's move from Sun to RCA, where he was enshrined and for whom he made the true fortune. The alternative music industry, and local-mode commodities in general, must be seen not as merely antagonistic toward the dominant industry, but as its abeyant partner. To this end, the dominant music industry has at its disposal a radically exploded and blurred definition of "popular" and a medium that situates its basic mode of creation, exchange, and reception on both sides of the image line, in the oscillation between the renunciation of the visual in music and its resurrection as the site of its own highly eroticized visual advertisement. Recorded music has taken on a very specific kind of existence in this "culture of stimulation," consisting of objects, scenarios, and practices that produce the conditions for their own fetishization in the pleasurable mastery of their inherent audio/visual gap. Any critique of this mechanism will have much in common with Adorno's analysis (however problematic in an American reading) of the adoption of a myth of spontaneism in the institutionalization of jazz in 1930s Germany.40 For us, it is not the "taint" of popularity that drives this, but the question of the music object as a multivalent fetish in a popular culture of commodity association. REM is interesting precisely because they seem so out of keeping with the traditional 39. An A&R man on an episode of the record company sitcom "Throb" epitomized this in pitching a new group: "They're young, they're fresh, they're different . . . they're just like the Talking Heads!" 40. Adorno, "On Jazz" (originally published 1936). SeeJamie Owen Daniel's new translation and her excellent introduction in Discourse 12, no. 1, (Fall/Winter 1989-90), pp. 39-69.

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conception of what can function as popular. But rather than step back from the analysis and proclaim the inapplicability of critical theory due to the independence of the consumer ("See, people aren't misled into stupor-they must have chosen this!"), it is necessary to push the critique further, to explain how an industry can capitalize on a product that would seem to be so intent on impeding its own salability. Unlike Adorno's, then, what is needed is a critique that would not seek to impose on popular music the "silence of domination,"41 guilty pleasure stifled by the hush of negative dialectics. Instead, it should be very noisy, a theoretical racket, the grating sound of Mulvey's "destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon." Most appropriate would be a Katzenmusikritique,a clamorous, disquieting analysis dissonant with the prevailing uncritical abandon, but also strident to those who would dismiss popular music out of hand; a wary, suspicious critique, it would do something like what Public Enemy calls for from its highly conflictual space deep within the belly of the industrial beast: it would "bring the noise!"

41.

Lyotard, "Several Silences," in Driftworks(New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), p. 108.

Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition*

WOLFGANG TRANSLATED

KEMP BY JOYCE

RHEUBAN

One of our most remarkable cultural acquisitions, surely, is our capacity for an aesthetic attraction to objects and situations that document decay. When I say "our," I am also qualifying my statement. This disposition toward images of decay cannot be generalized in a simplistic fashion. It depends in large degree upon other aesthetic traditions that have to do with particular circumstances of education, social position, and of the cultural sphere. Three hundred years of Western painting had taught us to perceive and appreciate signs of decay, of age, even scenes of neglect and impoverishment from a distanced perspective. Then photography took up this task-and with such eagerness and sense of purpose that we may assume there was something about it that was, and is, of special concern to photography's own interests. Decay was not always considered an appropriate subject for painting. On the contrary, at a time when no less than nine-tenths of the population lived outside as much as inside sod, thatch, and wooden structures, and the few stone structures in the cities rose from muddy, filth-covered streets and a nest of squalid shops, shacks, and stalls, it was the task of painting to depict magnificent, ornamented stone structures, with streets and squares paved with beautiful marble slabs, gardens, and smooth, uniform brickwork. These tidy, always finished interiors and exteriors of the finest materials are familiar from the time that painting gave up the language of the symbolic and dedicated itself to the description of possible ensembles of elements - that is, since Giotto. Dilapidated or unfinished subjects do have a symbolic significance; in the artistic realm of the artifact, they inevitably symbolize the idea of evil or of something which has been conquered. The only way the pictures of perfection which appeared after Giotto could be called realistic would be to regard them as an architect's utopian sketches. Even Dutch painting of the fifteenth century did not depict reality as it was, but the potential perfection of reality, reality as it should be. * This is a translation of "Bilder des Verfalls: Die Fotographie in der Tradition des Pittoresken," from Wolfgang Kemp's Foto-Essays (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1978 1978), ? Schirmer/Mosel.

Ansel Adams. Window, Bear Valley, California. 1973.

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One must therefore conclude that in the period of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries what was considered "painterly" was that which was finished, splendid, and clean. The question of how it came about that shabby beggars, ruins, and crooked alleys became the embodiment of the painterly cannot be undertaken in the present essay. We note, nevertheless, a turn in this new direction, or, better, a broadening of the aesthetic spectrum in the seventeenth century. Referring to Rembrandt and his students, Jan de Bisshop complained in 1699 that an old, wrinkled man, a ramshackle house, a beggar, or a peasant was regarded as more painterly (more apt for depiction) than a vigorous young man, a new house, a nobleman, or a king. If this attitude were to became standard practice, sneered de Bisshop, then everything that had formerly been banished from view would now be regarded as special, as the sanctified subject of painting and drawing.' All the efforts of the classicists to stem these tendencies were to no avail. In the eighteenth century, the painterly, the picturesque - which had previously been regarded as a technical term in the studios and in the literature itself as an aesthetic category in its own right, alongside the on art -established beautiful and the sublime.2 The great theoreticians of the picturesque were the English. It is they, the in English landed gentry and art enthusiasts among the bourgeoisie -dilettantes we must thank for endless volumes gardening, painting, and drawing-whom on the subject. The term picturesquetoday, of course, means more than the small subject area of ruins. Today we think of the picturesque as anything especially well suited for reproduction in painting, whereas the eighteenth-century theoreticians thought of it as a specific tradition of painting: the rugged landscapes and ragged shepherds of Pietro Mola and Salvatore Rosa, Tiepolo's "Capricci," with their classical ruins and scenery peopled with Arcadian figures. From this, the picturesque became generalized to that which is multifarious, irregular, unevenly lit, worn, and strange. Everything that appeared smooth, bright, symmetrical, new, whole, and strong, on the other hand, was placed in the categories of the beautiful or the sublime. According to this system of classification, whatever was in the process of decay was potentially picturesque, because one could detect in it more, and more obvious, signs of wear and irregularity. The beautiful, deduced one theoretician, depends "on ideas of youth and freshness," while the picturesque depends "on those of age, and even decay."3 Lists were compiled of Cited in Jan Ameling Emmens, Rembrandten de regels Van de Kunst (Utrect: Haentjens Dekker 1. and Grumbert, 1968), p. 125. The literature on the subject of the picturesque has since greatly increased. Three collections 2. on the subject are: Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque:Studies in a Point of View(Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1967); Walter John Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-CenturyBritish AestheticTheory(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957); and Carl Paul Barbier, William Gilpin: His Drawings, Teaching and Theory of the Picturesque (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Sir Uvedale Price, Essay on the Picturesque (1794), cited in Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime 3. and the Picturesque, p. 210.

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picturesque subjects: "Willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things," wrote John Constable in a letter of 1821.4 "Gothic cathedrals and old mills, gnarled oaks and shaggy goats, decayed cart horses and wandering gypsies," are recommended by another author,5 who rounds out the list with: well-worn paths through field and forest, embankments and sluices covered with moss; and above all, backyard nooks filled with junk, crude thatched cottages, and ramshackle cabins. The principle of the picturesque presented a fundamental problem for the aesthetic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We live at a time in which the highest aim of art is not to disengage itself from such notions as perfection and suitability, or such functions as moral enlightenment and edification. The picturesque, on the contrary, is based on an over-functionalization of the aesthetic. The first conflicts arose over where the picturesque should be realized. 4.

John Constable, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, ed. Charles Robert Leslie and Andrew

Shirley(London:The Medici Society, Ltd., 1937), p. 118.

5. Hippie, The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque, p. 210, describing Price's Essay on the Picturesque.

John Constable. East Bergholt Church. c. 1817.

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The landed gentry, who would gladly arrange their environment according to painterly prescriptions, were tempted to preserve the broken-down houses in their villages in this painterly condition. Sir Uvedal Price, author of Essays on the Picturesque of 1794, warned these enthusiastic aesthetes against this by reminding them that morality must take precedence over the principle of the picturesque.6 But Lord Price's publisher, Thomas Dick Lauder, was not in complete agreement with such a clear-cut distinction between morality and aesthetics. For Lauder, it was understood, for example, that a thatched roof would no longer do. But tile roofs, though they certainly satisfied building requirements, were aesthetic only if the roof inclined steeply. The best way, Lauder suggested, would be to cover the roof with tiles, and, in addition, overlay that with picturesque thatching. William Gilpin, a country clergyman by profession, was one of the most important theoreticians of the picturesque. Gilpin makes a similar distinction between industrious factory workers, who present a picture that is morally pleasing but not one that is suitable for a painting, and idly loitering peasants as the only figures that satisfy the aesthetic requirements of those who seek the appeal of the picturesque.7 Most commentators on the picturesque avoided difficulties and doubts of this sort, however, refraining from any discussion of the fundamental issues they suggested. John Ruskin was the only exception to this rule; he led the first attack on the picturesque with a critique that is still valid today. Ruskin criticized the way in which, "in a completely picturesque object, as an old cottage or mill, there are introduced, by various circumstances not essential to it, but, on the whole, generally somewhat detrimental to it as cottage or mill . . . elements of sublimity . . . belonging in a parasitical manner to the building."8 The impression of painterliness arises from "merely outward delightfulness," which has little or nothing to do with the thing itself and, indeed, actually diverts us from the thing itself. Thus, the thatched roof of a cottage is perceived as painterly when it is in such a state of disrepair that it reminds one of a craggy rock formation. To look for the picturesque is to engage, in a literal sense, in superficial perception. Ruskin nevertheless rejects purely aesthetic apperception: it is the purpose of art to teach us "to see and feel." For Ruskin, limiting one's perception of art to a purely painterly aspect signifies an abandonment of one's own engagement with humanity. Ruskin calls this "heartless": In a certain sense, the lower picturesque ideal is eminently a heartless one: the lover of it seems to go forth into the world in a temper as

6. Ibid., p. 220; cf. p. 361. 7. Francis Donald Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, ed. and rev. Arthur Elton (New York, Schocken Books, 1970). 8. Cited in George P. Landrow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 225. Landrow gives an excellent account of the general subject areas in Ruskin's work.

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merciless as its rocks. . . . The shattered window, opening into black and ghastly rents of wall, the foul rag or straw wisp stopping them, the dangerous roof, decrepit floor and stair, ragged misery or wasting age of the inhabitants -all these conduce each in due measure, to the fullness of his satisfaction. What is it to him that the old man has passed his seventy years in helpless darkness and untaught waste of soul? The old man has at last accomplished his destiny, and filled the corner of a sketch, where something of an unshapely nature was wanting.9 Thus, one concludes, according to Ruskin, that the picturesque demands a perception of reality that only functions when all associations with utility and morality, along with historical and political issues, are kept out of consideration for the sake of aesthetic effect. Ruskin wrote this critique in the mid-1850s, about eighty years after the formulation of the great theories of the picturesque. This was a time when this artistic principle was still prevalent, above all, in European landscape painting and in the artistic practice of dilettantes. It was also a time when photography was keeping the preference for picturesque themes alive. Before examining the first encounters of photography with the picturesque, we will briefly consider the matter of its continuous popularity. Two reasons, above all, have been responsible for this success. 1. Because it is more demanding to value something worn or decayed than like to wholeness, what sparkles, what is acknowledged as beautiful, a preference for the picturesque must be regarded as a sure sign of good taste and aesthetic training. In a sense, the picturesque provides a test of whether the spectator is always able to assume the perspective of "disinterested pleasure" that Kant designated as a precondition of the aesthetic attitude. Cultivation of the picturesque also indicated the possession of a heightened aesthetic culture and was thereby a means of distinguishing oneself socially. The admirer of the picturesque sets himself apart from the standards of taste of the average consumer of art. He adopts a distanced relation to the object of his look by consciously disregarding the object's utilitarian value. 2. Theoreticians of the picturesque often take pains to legitimate their approach with a sentence from Cicero: "Quam multa vident pictores in umbris et in eminetia, quae nos non videmus." ("Painters see much in shadow and light that we do not see.") Focusing one's attention on the picturesque means being attuned to a certain appeal that remains inaccessible to everyday perception. The picturesque offers no ready symmetries, no easily identifiable compositional schemes. The picturesque is the art of small, hidden aesthetic qualities. Recognizing and appreciating these qualities is an important achievement for the adepts of the 9.

John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1906), pp. 9-10.

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picturesque, perhaps even the decisive achievement in the process of learning to see. In short, the picturesque is also a didactic principle. From its detached perspective, it identifies specific aesthetic conditions as well as ways of seeing them in the everyday world. This pedagogical intention of the principle of the picturesque was not always adhered to in its implementation, for instruction in the picturesque was frequently reduced to checklists of picturesque conditions and objects, like those cited above. Yet these compilations of elements, which could easily be learned, were the very basis for the success of the picturesque. Whether painterly subjects came before the first cameras intentionally or unintentionally cannot always be firmly established. At first, the early photographs fixed everything in the picture from a great distance, including dirt, holes in the masonry, or a broken window. "A crack in the plaster, a withered leaf lying on a projecting cornice, or an accumulation of dust in a hollow moulding of a distant building, when they exist in the original, are faithfully copied in these wonderful pictures,"10 commented John Robinson in 1839, the year in which Daguerre made the photographic process known to the public. The same year, Alexander von Humboldt wrote about Carus: "One drawing [!] encompassed a five-story building in a space of about three-quarters of an inch. You could see in this picture that one of the panes in a skylight - what smallness!!- was broken and had been covered over with paper."" Contemporary observers were astonished that all these details had been recorded so impartially. When we look at early photographs today, we are amazed, even shocked, by how seedy, dirty, and neglected many of those scenes are. This applies to rural as well as urban scenes. The decay of the Parthenon sculptures during the present century was recently documented in an alarming fashion by a comparison of photographs taken over the years. Yet, when we look at the photographs of Baldus, Le Secq, Le Gray, and others from the 1850s, the picture they present of the condition of French cultural monuments from the period prior to monument preservation is just as disturbing. These photos can only mean that photogwere everywhere. raphers did not have far to look for signs of decay-they Environmental pollution is not only a contemporary problem. The conditions that these photographs of the 1840s and '50s convey to us-the unpaved streets and squares, the unspeakable dirt and excrement that littered the streets, the neglected exterior of the old town and village centers -all are an indication of a reality that had remained virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, however, in addition to this, came new, less easily discernible sources of dirt and poison, of human misery, and new objects and situations of decay. Were these also new subjects for photography? Cited in Beaumont Newhall, "Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization," 10. The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1944), p. 40. 11. Wolfgang Baier, Queilendarstellungen zur Geschichteder Fotografie (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1977), p. 116.

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When the early photographers consciously sought picturesque scenes, they observed the prescriptions and rules of the relevant treatises. In The Pencil of Nature (1844), Talbot shows us two views of Queens College in Oxford, not in order to display its dilapidated condition, but to present a picture of a famous building- that is, to take the opportunity to illustrate the applicability of photography to architectural reproduction. To this end, he selects a photographic point of view of his subject one which an architectural painter would never take. When Talbot arranges ostensibly painterly scenes, he understands his work as a continuation of the work of the Dutch or English painters who were identified with the genre of the picturesque. His study The Open Door, which depicts a broom leaning against a weathered, stone doorjamb, explicitly links Talbot with the Dutch school, which was famous for the way in which the "painter's eye will often be arrested where ordinary people see nothing remarkable. A casual gleam of sunshine, or a shadow thrown across his path, a time-withered oak, or a moss-covered stone may awaken a train of thoughts and feelings, and picturesque imaginings."12 Talbot's reliance upon standard artistic practice was therefore William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844; reprint ed., New York: De Capo Press, 12. 1969), n. p. Cf. "Notes on Aesthetic Relationships between Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting and Nineteenth-Century Photography," in One Hundred Years of PhotographicHistory: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, ed. Van Deren Coke (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), p. 19.

WilliamTalbot.The Open Door. 1844.

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intentional even though he did not adhere to it dogmatically. It never would have occurred to him to limit photography to the production of picturesque images. This restriction was not attempted until the 1860s when, thanks to the introduction of the wet collodium process, a large number of dilettantes who had previously practiced the conventional techniques of drawing and watercolor became interested in photography. We encounter the entire repertoire of the English lay aesthetic in Henry Peach Robinson's Pictorial Effectin Photographyof 1869. This text takes a decisive position: It is an old canon of art, that every scene worth painting must have something of the sublime, the beautiful, or the picturesque. By its nature, photography can make no pretensions to represent the first, but beauty can be represented by its means, and picturesqueness has never had so perfect an interpreter.13 This sentence appears in the chapter on "The Faculty of Artistic Sight." Robinson wants to teach the reader the most important requirement for becoming a good photographer -the ability to perceive the beauties and picturesque effects in objects and in settings "which others overlook without noticing." He wants to teach the skill of seeing the artistically significant subject and the artistic image that resides within it. Two years before Robinson, A. H. Wall had already taken a similar position in an essay entitled, "On Taking Picturesque Photographs": No two trees or rocks are alike; light and shade changes with every hour of the day, and with every such change the scene becomes a new one; different effects of atmosphere produce the most rapid and entire changes in the appearances of natural objects. A scene which is tame and uninteresting now may become picturesque and beautiful . . . when the flying clouds may have cast parts into shade, leaving other parts in brilliant light.14 Wall and Robinson caution their readers against expecting good pictures from familiar subjects, and warn that picturesque subjects do not in themselves guarantee that picturesque photographs will be made from them. In a sense, the picturesque is everywhere, since it is not a matter of an objective condition, but of camera position, of the right moment, of framing. According to Wall: The finest and most beautifully-varied scenery in the world may make, and does commonly make, the most uninteresting photographs, sim13. Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effects in Photography (1869; reprint ed., New York: Arno Press, 1973), p. 15. 14. Cited in Michael Hiley, Frank Sutcliffe, Photographer of Whitby(Boston: D. R. Godine, 1974), p. 100.

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ply because the photographer knowing nothing of the picturesque in either art or nature has neither chosen his point of view, his light and shade, nor his atmospheric effect with a proper care.15 Advice such as this fell on deaf ears among amateur and professional photographers alike. At any rate, we have to assume this to be the case when we observe that this discussion was pursued no further during the remainder of the nineteenth century. As in the past, photographers sought the picturesque in its objective form. And, as in the past, their tutors recommended the artistic rendering of inconspicuous subjects. In Whitby, for example, a mecca for English photographers, one photographed only the ruins of the old abbey. Frank Sutcliffe, who lived in Whitby and who took more pictures of its harbor scenes, back alleys, and fishermen than of its famous sights, wrote about the obsession with a single motif in 1890: Is it because we have been so in the habit of going only for the labeled objects that our eyes are not sufficiently alert and our senses properly tuned to respond to the greater charms of the rarer beauties? The man who labeled all these old ruins "picturesque" in the first case could not have known that a picture must have a pattern. And it is this pattern most of them lack. It is this pattern, or pleasing combination of line and mass, that the artist considers of greater importance than any historical facts which may be found in his subject, and he does not hesitate to sacrifice the latter to the former.16 Sutcliffe, who, incidentally, bore the impressive title "Photographer to Mr. Ruskin," thereby confirmed once more the core of that definition of the picturesque which had been criticized by his one-time mentor - the primacy of the aesthetic over all historical, political, and social implications. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to dismiss the interest in the picturesque on the part of nineteenth-century photography as mere aestheticism. Originally photography, which espoused the charms of the insignificant and the destroyed, collaborated in the great artistic project of the nineteenth century known as the "democratization of the subject." In 1894, Sir Howard Grubb, President of the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom, interpreted the development of photography since 1839 in terms of this process of democratization: In the early days of photography a photographer never thought it worth his while to point his camera to any object that had not some particular interest connected with it. .... what photographer of that time would have thought of wasting his plates (as it would have been

15. 16.

Ibid. Ibid., p. 101.

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considered) in pointing his camera at those little bits of moor or fen, or some nameless brook, out of which the modern photographer has produced his most exquisite pictures?17 We must not regard the aesthetic appreciation of the trivial, remote, and unknown as a mere side effect of the realistic movement. The picturesque sensibilall, it performed a pioneering service for ity accomplished much more-above art with a socially critical program by helping to moderate and, ultimately, repudiate the hierarchy governing subject matter and modes of expression. Within the context of efforts such as these, though not necessarily to this end, a form of photography developed that was less interested in the attractiveness of the painterly subject than in the reasons for its painterliness. In one respect, this pioneering effect established the significance of the principle of the picturesque in the history of photography. In another respect, it helped to prepare the process whereby the structures of the object would become the structures of the image. In the second part of this essay, I show how the subjective selection of slices of reality, which originally purported to be evidence of the personal point of view of the observer, later developed into a display of autonomous compositional studies. In terms of the definition given above, the picturesque is simply a matter of optical/subjective positioning. When, in the form of weathered planks of wood, crumbling masonry, or furrowed tree trunks, the picturesque requires a closer view, the tendency seems almost inevitably to be to abandon the objects themselves in favor of the "pattern" (Sutcliffe). Four different approaches of photography to the theme of decay will be examined in the pages that follow. They may be considered essentially ahistorical options because they lay out, in a distinct form, the problematic of the picturesque as a photographic subject. Various epochs in the history of photography are indicated in all four segments. The widely varying lengths of the treatment of each of these four approaches is not a reflection of qualitative standards nor of the quantitative dissemination of the individual types. 1. After all that has been said thus far, we may begin this typology with those works that are concerned only with the superficial appeal of objects in a picturesque state of decay. This type need only be considered briefly since its primary motifs have already been identified, and individual instances are highly consistent with these. This variation on the theme of decay will come up again in subsequent segments, as it does throughout this essay, as a basis for comparison. The topics tree and wall are its leitmotifs. The old, gnarled, bristly tree has been one of the privileged subjects of picturesque art at least since the eighteenth century. These images move us still today through their depiction of the magnificence of the natural monument and the power of time. Nineteenth-century

17.

Ibid., pp. 101-102.

Paul Nash. Detail of a Tree Trunk. c. 1939.

photographers sometimes approached their subject so closely that the only outward signs of the tree's age were the cracks and crevices of the bark. Close-up studies of this kind can be seen earlier in works by Constable. Toward midcentury, these close studies turn up increasingly in the work of English landscape artists and in the genre of realistic French landscape art, which had preferred to keep its trees at middle distance, where they would serve as an enclosing device or as the central focus of an intimate landscape. Gustave Le Gray was the first to photograph trees in a systematic way. In the 1850s, he made a series of photographs in the forest of Fontainebleau. These photos focused primarily on the trunks and the networks of branches of old, gnarled trees as a way of foregrounding their picturesque quality.18 One may regard the innumerable studies of trees by Atget, which are similarly positioned at close range and sometimes taken at the same location, as a direct continuation of the studies by Le Gray. 19A comparison of a drawing of a tree trunk by Menzel and a photograph by Paul Nash of the same subject-images separated by an

18. Cf., for example, Nifepce to Atget, in The First Century of Photography:From the Collection of Andre Jammes (Exhibition catalog, Chicago, 1977), pp. 80, 82. The complete set of Atget's tree series still awaits publication. See John Szarkowski, "Atget's 19. Trees," in Coke, ed., One Hundred Years, p. 161.

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: I

:I 1.11

V,- y

Brassai. Wall of a House, from Graffiti. After 1932.

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interval of sixty years- supports the supposition of photography's enduring fascination with picturesque subjects through the influence of painterly themes. As the example of Paul Nash reveals, detailed views such as these also served as stimuli for artistic fantasy. Nash read formal allusions as well as allusions to the demonic, to Alrauns, etc. -into content-to decomposing logs, knobby roots, and dried-out driftwood. Nash's intention to invest his photographs with allusions is clear in the way these objects are presented, in the titles of the photographs, and in the anecdotal use he makes of the figurations of his found objects. Another artistic consequence of this close examination of the attraction of materials was its direct quotation in collage and frottage. "I was surprised at how irresistibly my eyes were drawn to the grooves engraved in the floor from a thousand scrubbings, and how this irritated me."20 This is how Max Ernst begins his account of the discovery of frottage. Along with the weathered grain of trees, floors, and walls, the stone wall may also be included as a classic catalyst of formal meaning. In this regard, one need only recall Leonardo's recommendation of a thorough study of the surfaces of walls, advice which has not only not been forgotten in the history of art, but has, indeed, been eagerly pursued in the newer forms of non-objective art.21 In the history of photography, Leonardo's lesson was revived by Brassai, who, after 1932, pursued the "inspiration of the walls" and documented the natural and artificial alterations of the walls of Paris in his Grafitti series. Of all these media that intervene between what is real and what is dreamed, the wall is without a doubt the richest source of inherent images. To begin with, beneath its outer coat, the wall, built up of sand, mortar, plaster . . . is just like a surface prepared for painting, waiting for the breath of creation. It anticipates a life full of changes. No sooner have the plasterer and the whitewasher finished their work, than the wall is given over to the work of deterioration. . . . Every element affects and assails the impressionable, grainy plaster coat. The frosts contract it, the heat stretches it, the humidity swells it. Wind, smoke, gasses, rain mold it with soot and dirt. The color begins to peel off and earlier layers of color show through. . . . Scarcely visible at first, these alterations become more and more noticeable, and, finally, the original wall is barely recognizable. The plaster coat is furrowed with a network of crevices, cracks, and fractures. The wall is covered by fissures and gaping wounds. All that remains to complete the

Cited by J. Wissmann, "Collagen oder die Integration von Realitat im Kunstwerk," in Imma20. nente Asthetikund dsthetischeReflexion, ed. W. Iser (Munich: W. Frank, 1966), p. 347. Cf. ibid. and H. W. Janson, "The 'Image Made by Chance' in Renaissance Thought," De 21. Artibus Opsula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (Zurich: Buehler Buchdruck, 1960).

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"picture" are the fortuitous nicks, children's scribbling, heavy-handed brushstrokes, scrawled lettering, and leftover scraps of posters.22 What Picasso is saying here is: time, nature, the wall make the "picture." No art form is more qualified, therefore, than photography to preserve these pictures in their "incomparable beauty." The photographer may not only boast of the privileged status accorded his art by Picasso, he can also, almost patronizingly, cite Poliakoff's warning about abstract art: "Painting on the wall is fine, but keep in mind that the wall itself is no more beautiful for it."23 The efforts of photography in the realm of the picturesque appear to have paid off. Photography has gradually come to displace painting in this domain; what is more, it has claimed new subject areas, and it has led painting, the former mistress, to give up a share 22. George Brassai, Graffiti: Textes et photos de Brassai et deux conversationsavec Picasso (Paris: les editions du temps, 1961), p. 17. 23. Ibid., p. 18.

Arnold Newman. Wall and Ladders, Allentown, Pennsylvania. 1939.

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of her possessions. Wols, like Brassai, worked in the 1930s, photographing the walls and sidewalks of Paris prior to transferring their figurations and textures to painting. 2. Along with the picturesque in nature, photography developed another thematic genre, this time essentially without the collaboration of painting. This genre is devoted to the decay of the objects of civilization. Didn't Van Gogh write in 1880 about a garbage can with a levered lid which he saw in Amsterdam: "My God, that's beautiful! This collection of covered pails, baskets, kettles, bowls, oil cans, wire, street lights, clay pipes. . . . For an artist, it's a paradise!"24Yet, Van Gogh's appreciation seems not to have elicited any lasting response, either in his own work or in that of other painters. In the 1920s and '30s, photography began to devote itself intensively to this repertory. The most popular leitmotifs were scrap heaps, wrecked automobiles, and demolished buildings. There was such a 24.

Cited in H. Alth6fer, "Fragment und Ruine," Kunstforum (1977), p. 79.

Wynn Bullock. Old Typewriter. 1951.

boom in these subjects that only an overview is possible here. Two examples displaying two distinctive features will have to suffice to illustrate this type of "modern picturesque." Arnold Newman discovers a nearly abstract composition in the traces left behind by a demolished building on the adjacent wall of a neighboring house. Wynn Bullock captures the almost morbid fascination of a typewriter that has been consumed by nature. These images, as well as those more directly influenced by painterly traditions, gladly assume the alterations that the destructive action of human beings and of nature have impressed upon artfully finished cultural objects. In a sense, the objects are preliminary studies for the images. These photographers want to show us something that eludes the utilitarian eye of everyday perception. To read in these images a cultural critique or a melancholy reflection on the mutability of earthly things is to over-interpret them. 3. In the past few years, there have been increasing numbers of images of decay whose intention is antithetical to the approaches described thus far, yet which display little difference in their choice of subjects and formal strategies. These images, contrary to the principle of the picturesque known to photographers since the 1920s, do not trace the decay of the new, or of products of industry. Neither, then, is the cycle of restoration a topic of concern in these images. They are concerned, rather, with traces of a civilization already overtaken and ultimately doomed. Atget, who captured the last remnants of medieval EugeneAtget.Churchof Saint-Maclou,Pontoise. 1902.

Paris and its destruction in a series of photographs, may be regarded as the forefather of this movement. More recently, the publications of David Plowden have had a decisive impact on many photographers. A 1971 collection of his photographs called The Hand of Man on Americais the product of ten years' work. The Hand of Man is the name of a 1902 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. It shows a landscape of railroad tracks in a railroad yard and a locomotive energetically spewing black smoke as it moves toward the spectator -an image intended to express the power of progress. In his book, Plowden depicts the decline of the traditional nineteenth-century transit system - railroad and ship traffic - and juxtaposes this with the disfiguring mark of the automobile upon the landscape. He sees our civilization as a combination of active destruction and passive neglect of historical and natural values. Unfortunately, nothing more comes of his approach than an emphatic critique of culture. He is not systematic enough, and the ubiquity of the phenomenon he portrays amounts to nothing but a reprimand. He talks about processes but fails to document them. We only know from marginal notations that this or that building, scene, ship, and so forth no longer exists. In his book Commonplace,Plowden promotes his method of observing the American hinterland from a train; and this is typical of his photographs-they are testimony to a passing interest. Plowden's numerous successors were also more concerned with the melancholy appeal of decaying cultures which were never experienced as active and are always only dealt with in decline. The young photographer Marc Ghwisoland AlfredStieglitz.The Hand of Man. 1902.

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writes of his photo series on the Bounages, a Belgian coal region whose mines are closing down one by one: "Since then the landscape has grown poorer and begun to drowse. The young people are moving out, and what is left has a ghost-town atmosphere about it that fascinates me."25 Karl Rainer Miiller, writing in 1951 about his photographs of condemned buildings, expresses a similar sentiment: "All these photographs are of houses that have since been pulled down; they have been replaced by grey and, to my mind, ugly residential blocks. Of course, the old houses weren't beautiful either, but they had a fascination for me."26 This type of photography of decay only disengages itself from a superficial fascination with nostalgic relics when it takes the threat of the loss of the object so seriously that it focuses its interest on a detailed reconnaissance and recording of that object's functional modes and use value-that is, when the object comes to be seen as a bountiful hoard of archival material about a rich past. As an example of this approach, Hartmut Neubauer offers a photodocumentation of a twohundred-year-old colliery, Poerting Siepen, three years after its closing. In Neubauer's work, the distance gained through the dissipation of the object's function is not a pretext for promoting the grotesque charm of obsolescence, but an occasion for developing a model of continuity from diversity, as in a didactic scheme. 4. A fourth photographic approach, which will now be examined in some detail, does not document the decay of objects as sole survivors of a bygone era, but presents dirt, destruction, collapse, and functional failure as the conditions of human life. This approach therefore conforms to Ruskin's view of the picturesque not as merely an enhancement of the aesthetic charms of something made for human use, but as an impairment of that object. The problem presented by this approach, however, can certainly not be resolved through such a simple either/or formulation. It raises a highly volatile issue in the context of art history. Every photograph made with a social documentary intent has to assert its intention within a spectrum of contradictory possibilities. The statement made by a photograph can thus be most reliably understood if the photograph takes an active position toward whatever detracts from its intent. This kind of approach presupposes knowledge of the photographic event and of photographic history. In Paul Strand's From the Bridge, we have become acquainted with one such example of applied photographic history, and we have also seen that the impaired never negates, but, in a positive sense, can only be "superseded." Social documentary photography actually began as a form of the "picturesque" that was produced by the industrial revolution at the time of Manchestercapitalism. I do not refer to the collections of Mayhew (1849) and Thomson/ Smith (1877), which capture in genre pictures London's Lumpenproletariat, the

25. 26.

Camera (January 1971), p. 28. Ibid., p. 34.

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poor, the outcasts, and the metropolis's marginal trades. The formal iconographic conception of Mayhew's and Thomson/Smith's series of photographs, and the motivation for it, belong to a precapitalistic tradition of imagery -the actual industrial worker and his living conditions do not yet appear in these photographs.27 At first, photography devoted itself to these subjects in a mediated way by setting its sights upon factual circumstances pertaining to industrial workers and their lives. The results of labor were depicted: completed productsmachines, ships, buildings with groups of workers arranged in an artistic fashion around them. The workers' home life-the most familiar after-hours side of existence -was also proletarian depicted, though far less often. More often it was those endless rows of hastily assembled factory houses in the industrial districts that were the subject of these photographs. The photographers were probably totally unaware of what monotony their photographs were capable of capturing. Ruskin, who, of all the critics of the picturesque, knew well what belonged in a proper picture, at one point warned the amateur sketch artist against attempting to draw these as yet unfamiliar examples of modern architecture. No, social documentary photography developed in the torturous passages and ramshackle structures of the old center of the city, which served as the first living quarters for the masses of workers pouring in from the country. The first linking of the word social and the word photograph occurred in this context when a description of the old city by someone writing under a pseudonym appeared in Glasgow in 1858 with the title Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs. These "photographs" were actually only texts, not pictures.28 A perceptual style schooled in the picturesque still thrived here in the overcrowded old city center, though accompanied now by the certainty that it could not maintain its claim to aesthetic stimulation much longer. The early photographs of the English slums are not that different from those popular views of the narrow alleys and courtyards of the fishing villages that on some days, according to Sutcliffe, were teeming with photographers.29 But it is one thing to put fishermen's wives who were accustomed to photographers in front of a camera, and quite another to barge into the innermost courtyard of a Glasgow tenement, which, normally, no one except those who live there enters. A subject that is risky, which can not completely be kept at a distance, can cause a photographer to reflect upon his methods.

27. Cf. W. Ranke,"Zursolzialdokumentarischen Fotografieum 1900," KritischeBerichte5 (1977), p. 9. 28. A. V. Mozley, "Introduction,"in Thomas Annan, Photographsof theOld Closesand Streetsof Glasgow1868/1877 (New York: Dover, 1977), p. xiv. 29. Hiley, FrankSutcliffe,p. 214. Compareto Streetin Whitby(1880s) and Nancy Wynne Newhall,

P. H. Emerson: The Fight for Photography as Fine Art (New York: Aperture, 1975), p. 225: Street in Yarmouth(1890s).

ThomasAnnan. Close No. 118, High Street. c. 1868-77.

The first photographic campaigns in the slum sections of English cities did not originate in the personal initiative of the photographers. One must distinguish in this respect between France and England. The French photographers (one need only recall Marvilles's documentation of old Paris) worked shoulder to shoulder with newspaper artists, engravers, and journalists in a concerted effort to obtain the last pictures of those quarters threatened by demolition and decay. The mandate for such an endeavor was the collective one of public interest. Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame had aroused the interest of Parisians not only in the town's medieval cathedral but also in its old squares and houses. Even Atget and Brassai participated in this task of documentation. In England, though, this type of photographic documentation came about through a more task-oriented, official route. Social pressure and the sheer weight of factual events were relevant factors in this development. The face of English cities changed even faster than that of Haussmann's Paris. Between 1847 and 1864, the English Parliament passed ten acts dealing with public health policy that attempted to bring the catastrophic hygienic conditions in the large cities under control. The Public Health Report of 1866 concluded, "It is not going too far to say that life in many parts of London and Newcastle is hellish."30 Capitalistic commercial expansion concentrated the bulk of the work force in the less respectable sections of the old city centers without making any fundamental alterations in their architectural structure. Every square meter of ground, which had previously been used for gardens, stalls, and, above all, for workshops, now served as living quarters-if that's what one chooses to call the stockpiling of human bodies in dank, stifling compartments. It was not unusual to find 125,000 to 250,000 people per square kilometer in these districts. The process of resettling people from the overcrowded inner-city areas to the outskirts of the city was instituted after midcentury. There can be no doubt that life in conglomerations of buildings that sometimes dated back to the Middle Ages had become unbearable. The "improvements," however-as the demolition and reconstrucnot instituted for purely humanitarian tion of the inner cities was called-were reasons. The new space gained in this way was necessary for the expansion of the city into outlying areas and for the improvement of transportation lines -the railroad, in particular. The extension of the railroad lines through the center of old Glasgow was built with the claim that this line would bring with it "the kind of improvements so much needed. It will pull down the poor class of house and ventilate that part of the City which is very much overcrowded."31 In addition, these measures safeguarded middle-class neighborhoods from the danger of epidemic. As far as the direct recipients were concerned, the "improvements" brought genuine improvement only to a portion of working and poor people.

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Cited in Karl Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/Berlin, 1969), p. 609. Cited in Annan, Streets of Glasgow, p. ix.

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measure concerning health conditions that . . . drove the workers from one district because of the razing of unfit housing, only served to force the workers together in some other, even more congested area."32 Photodocumentation of this process, which originated in 1868, also played a part in the aporia of early capitalistic urban development. It was at this time that Thomas Annan was commissioned by the "Glasgow City Improvement Trust" to photograph the courtyards and passageways of Glasgow's old inner city. Just what the trustees had in mind when they bestowed this commission is not exactly clear. It is certain that Annan did not take these photographs to facilitate or to justify the large-scale demolition of the old city center by illustrating its inhuman condition. Sociological and medical inquiries, along with descriptions by travelers, had long since identified this super-slum as the scandal of Scotland. The Commissioner'sReport on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain of 1842 went so far as to call the Glasgow slum "the worst of any we had seen in any part of Great Britain."33 In 1868, the laws designed to implement the "improvement" of Glasgow had already been passed; the buildings that Annan photographed had already been condemned for razing. As soon as they were gone and new structures and streets had taken their place, interest in the photographs arose. In 1878, several copies of the series' first edition, bound in Moroccan leather(!), were given as gifts to city representatives. At the same time, the Trust brought out an edition of one hundred copies of the series in charcoal renderings. The primary interest of the photographs at this time was as local history. Citizens of a city that, since these photographs were taken, now seemed "as young as Chicago," wanted to recall again the "many and interesting landmarks" -as the forward to the 1878 edition put it. We have only his photographs to go by in determining how Thomas Annan, middle-class proprietor of an established photographic studio, set about his unfamiliar assignment, and whether or not he prevailed in imposing on the subject a conception different from one suggested by his clients when they granted the commission. The preponderance of architecture in the series is striking. In the 1878 edition, only one picture contains a grouping of people whom the photographer not only tolerates, but arranges to his liking. Other than that, there are pictures with occupants of the inner courtyards who take advantage of the photographer's long preparation time to get into the picture. A large number of these figures are blurred, which is not surprising, considering the long exposure time required in the dark, enclosed courtyards. There are also many pictures that contain no people at all. In short, Annan's photographs do not give the impression of a terribly overpopulated slum; instead we are given the feeling that the people are there to animate the scenery. Yet, one cannot say that these 32. Marx, Kapital, vol. 1, p. 610. Cited in Annan, Streets of Glasgow, p. vii. Mozley gives a very informative overview of Glas33. gow's urban renewal project.

Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition

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photos document architecture for its own sake. There were other medieval architectural gems that were not rediscovered in this process. Instead, Annan allows us to experience the volume of this gigantic living-machine through a succession of many similar images of deep, dark alleyways. He leaves more of the life that is crammed into these abysses to the spectator's imagination than he shows of it. Perhaps he was aware that human beings and their living conditions - these very intimate things - only appear in the image in a supplementary, almost anemic, proportion. Annan's photographs bear no resemblance to those popular pictures which conveyed cliches of folkloric life, nor is there any chance of Southern artistic practice intruding into the gloomy back alleys of Scotland. Nor, certainly, is Annan a socially critical, agitational artist, as were the graphic artists working at this time for the periodical, Graphic (established in 1869), and as was Dore, who, in 1870, invoked an apocalyptic vision of London after dark.34 The strategies of snatching bits of life, revealing contrasts through constant changes of scene and perspective -in a word, that fluidity which is the most prominent characteristic of socially critical graphic art of the second half of the century -do not appear in Annan's work. He composes his images on the principle of concentration, attempting to secure the most precise recording possible even when the views obtained are nearly identical. It must be noted here that Annan avoided the Scylla of picturesque depiction of the life of the poor, only to oblige the Charybdis of painterly forms. This was the price to be paid for approaching slum dwellings with the same documentary scrupulousness heretofore applied to works of art and monuments, subjects which had been Annan's specialty. Thirty years after Annan, Zille practiced the same method in Berlin's Krogel district and consequently intensified the issues raised by this approach. When this sketch artist of character types went to take photographs in the destitute Krogel neighborhood, it was the crumbling walls of buildings, the worn-out doors and windows, the dim crannies and back alleys that interested him. Human figures reappear in Zille's images and are more prominent than in Annan's. The people who appear in the photographs seem to have so thoroughly adapted themselves to the drab monotony of their daily environment that often one does not notice them at first glance. The fact that Zille did not publish his photographs leads one to the conclusion that he used them as studies of ambience for his scenes of Berlin. When we see the same architectural details in the graphic work, we are surprised how ephemeral they seem in comparison to the impressive photographs. Zille's images seem to confirm the position of social documentary photography that the human condition and the living conditions of individual human beings should be treated separately, as well as the claim of social

34. Cf. Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 459, and P. Hogarth, The Artist as Reporter (London, 1967).

documentary photography to the latter as its prerogative. Without a doubtlike photographers before and after him (Menzel had probably already been here) Zille was also attracted to this neighborhood by a fascination with the picturesque. Once again, however, one must caution against casual use of this term. With all his attention to detail, Zille did not immortalize details of deterioration; they simply did not fit, so to speak, with the format of his images. Zille's deliberately asymmetrical, unbalanced, overlapping framing prevents unseen things, which the image may suggest to the spectator, from unfolding spontaneously. The effects of Zille's images did not come about arbitrarily or by chance; they are the result of his method: whatever cannot speak for itself is recorded from several points of view.35 This does not mean that the individual image is necessarily less valid apart from the series. Rather, the method, as far as possible, leaves its imprint in the image. The effect of this method is to make the theorizing of the images' tenuous relation to the overly aestheticized category of the picturesque the most promising strategy for resolving the conflict over the proprietary claims of social documentary photography. In July and August, 1936, the author James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans shared the life of three cotton farmer families in the American South. The result of their infiltration of "a region of unimaginable existence"a few hundred photographs and the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939) 35.

Cf. Ranke, "Sur sozialdokumentarischen Fotografie," p. 30.

Heinrich Zille. Am Krogel.

Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition

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-is regarded today as a key work in the field of social documentary. The great renown of this project, which, of course, also encompasses the similarly motivated photojournalism of the other photographers of the Farm Security Administration, should not keep us from pursuing a brief discussion relevant to our topic or from studying the methods of these documentarists as exemplary of their school. As the introduction to his book, Agee uses a quotation from a farmer child's grade-school primer. This passage talks about how food, shelter, and clothing are the three essentials of human life. For Agee, this banal passage amounts to a working plan for his text. He reports to us on the minutia of the ingredients of the meager meals, the few types of clothing, and the building style and furnishings of the three families' homes. It is the houses, above all, that constitute the undeclared central theme of the book. It is not out of fear of emotional involvement that Agee speaks over and over again about these things and not about the people. In these houses he is able to grasp the meaning of their life. The houses surround him, and in them he becomes aware of the difficulties of his situation -that of the outsider, the intellectual who has a particular task to fulfill. The tenant farmers' houses are one-story wood frames, resting on stone foundations. The walls are made of boards with openings between them that, out of necessity, are filled in with all kinds of materials. The roof is covered with shingles, and the floor is made of boards. Everything in these houses except the oven, tableware, and iron beds is made of wood. Within these four walls, the boards that people are directly exposed to all kinds of weather conditions -pine are two centimeters thick are no protection against cold, wind, heat, humidity, and insects. And all those who live in these houses share in all the smells, sounds, and activities that go on inside them. Connections to electric, water, and sewage lines are rare here. Agee's powers of observation and sociological fantasy do not overlook any functional failure in these wooden barracks. Yet, he speaks in a parenthetical reflection, and almost without mediation, about the "beauty," as he says, the "extraordinary beauty" of these houses. In their extreme economy, in their exclusive use of local materials, and in their link with the primitive, local tradition of constructing such houses, they meet the standards that constitute a classical building style. To those who own and create it this "beauty" is, however, irrelevant and undiscernible. It is best discernable to those who by economic advantages of training have only a shameful and thief's right to it: and it might be said that they have any "rights" whatever only in proportion as they recognize the ugliness and disgrace implicit in their privilege of perception. The usual solution, non-perception, or contempt for those who perceive and value it, seems to me at least unwise. In fact it seems to me necessary to insist that the beauty of a house, inextricably shaped as it is in an economic and human abomination, is

Heinrich Zille. Krogelhof.

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at least as important a part of the fact as the abomination itself: but that one is qualified to insist on this only in proportion as one faces the brunt of his own "sin" in so doing and the brunt of the meanings, against human beings of the abomination itself. But consider this merely as a question raised: for I am in pain and uncertainty.36 Agee is describing a behavioral mechanism through which the unaffected Other in the presence of ugliness and wretchedness can observe himself. George Orwell, who visited and described the English coal mining region at the same time as Agee and Evans traveled South, wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), "I find that anything outrageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it."37 Orwell maintains that a smoking chimney and a slum, when looked at "from a purely aesthetic standpoint . . . may have a certain macabre appeal." The reward for these authors consists in their having reflected self-critically on their position. They are neither taken in by the superficial charm of the picturesque, nor do they deny this aspect of their own apperception. The only question is which of the consequences described by Agee follows from the production of the literary account; and, of primary interest in the context of this essay, whether or not we may assume the same degree of conscious problematizing on the part of Walker Evans, the photographer who accompanied Agee. Agee's brief remarks about the photographic medium deserve our attenis often the case when viewing something from a tion because in them-as distanced perspective -he absolves the unfamiliar medium in order to make a better case for his own. If one grants the overwhelming superiority of reality over art, then photography comes closest to the task of reproducing the wealth, the intensity, and the identity of the original "for its own, not for art's sake." In its own realm . . . and handled cleanly and literally in its own terms, as an ice-cold, some ways limited, some ways more capable, eye, it is, like the phonograph record and like scientific instruments and unlike any other leverage of art, incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth.38 Literature, on the other hand, does not command the "language of reality" to such a degree, nor in any comparable fashion. For this reason, photography has to free itself from the compulsion to want to be only documentary and must therefore absorb the subjective, reflexive, scientific appropriation of the object. Thus, in Agee's view, literature has a more difficult time because it does not have this direct access to reality. But literature also has it easier because it can explain 36. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), p. 203. 37. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), pp. 100-101. 38. Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, p. 234.

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the ways reality works and the complex system of interrelations between objects. Whether Agee's assertion, in this inverted form, provides a sufficient description of photography is doubtful, and seems to have confused Agee himself. He says in the passage where he declares the insufficiency of verbal language compared to the language of reality, "For the camera, much of this is solved from the start: is solved so simply, for that matter, that this ease becomes the greatest danger against the good use of the camera."39 That is to say, the direct reproduction of things "in their own terms," which Agee regards as the correct, suitable form of expression for photography, cannot be established as a timeless, self-evident norm of the medium. Even though, from the outside, Agee's commentary appears in the guise of a comparative analysis, it makes an internal statement by clarifying the relation of his project to other forms of photographing and other ways of reading the object (compare Agee's comments here to those quoted above). In other words, photography manages the extremely difficult task of providing commentary and object in one concentrated image, whereas the author is able to elucidate the object and his relation to it in consecutive order. The only picture I have selected from the series of photographs that Walker Evans made during his stay with the tenant farmer families shows the kitchen wall in the Fields family's wooden house in Hale County, Alabama. This photograph has, justifiably, become well known, not the least for its inclusion in the popular series of Time-Life books, in the volume Documentary Photography. The commentary accompanying it is as follows: Making the most of the fine detail that is attainable only with a large view camera set at a small aperture, the photographer recorded the spare beauty of line and texture on this rude cabin wall, where a tenant farmer's wife has hung her meager assortment of kitchen utensils against the rough splintered boards.40 Does this mean that the picture is a failure? How can a photograph of a rough, rotten, unpainted, greasy kitchen wall, which also serves as cupboard and shelf, automatically congeal into an image of "spare" or "starkly evocative beauty" (Time-Life), indeed, "extraordinary beauty" (Agee), when it is presented in the direct and straightforward manner that Evans employs? Naturally, viewing these images in retrospect tempers our perception of them. Today, these photographs only recall the past and no longer appeal to us for their own sake. Of course, the photographer can not anticipate the way greater distance from an image will influence aesthetic interest in it; nor does he want to do this. Evans's picture was intended to have an effect in the present. Must one, however, completely disqual-

39. Ibid., p. 236. The Editors of Time-Life Books, Documentary Photography (New York: Time-Life Books, 40. 1972), p. 69.

Walker Evans. Kitchen Wall, Fields House. 1936.

Charles Sheeler. White Barn, Pennsylvania. 1917.

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ify the mode of reception of the waning decade of the 1930s that is adopted in the Time-Life books? In order to answer this question, it must be determined what value Evans gave to the theme of these photographs. The photograph of the kitchen wall belongs to an iconographic tradition that is peculiarly American. Just as the thatched cottage was the picturesque subject par excellence in Continental art and photography, so in North America it was the wooden house, the shed, the cabin. In saying this, one must add that American photography is not interested in a house as a functional structure, but only in its details, which ultimately evoke the crude wooden structure. Charles Sheeler initiated this tradition when he began in the midteens to photograph the architecture of rural Pennsylvaniamore for the purpose of documenting local history and customs than out of aesthetic motivation. We see in Sheeler the first studies of weather-worn, naturally stressed wood, already photographed in that straightforward manner which would not become the prevailing style for another ten years. It may have been these very photographs that prompted Alfred Stieglitz to classify the popularly known Sheeler along with Schamberg and Strand as the most important photographers of the period following "pictorialism." I consider the photograph Barn, Lake George, taken in 1920, to be one of Stieglitz's most important contributions to the new photography. A long succession of works on this theme, which has yet to run its course, can be traced to Stieglitz's photo. There is also the very close study, Boards and Thistle, by Ansel Adams, taken in 1932. Fourteen years later, in 1973, Adams published Window, Bear Valley, a picture of a broken window in a weather-beaten wooden wall. Adams's photograph derives unmistakably from a picture by Paul Strand, Ghost Town, Red River, taken in New Mexico in 1930. In general, this subject appears to have been very popular in the 1930s. Brett Weston's famous photograph The Broken Window dates from 1937.41 In 1938, Ben Shahn photographed wood plank walls and barn windows in the context of his work for the Farm Security Administration.42 Paul Strand worked into the war years on very close, detailed studies of tie-beams and mended areas of wooden walls. Torn and tattered tar paper, nail-studded lath strips, and rough lumber come together in these photographs to form abstract compositions.43 This survey would not be complete without mention of the fact that the signal character that the wall and window motif attained through its proliferation made possible its use in other contexts

41. John Szarkowski, Lookingat Photographs(Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1973), p. 122. Szarkowski's claim that Weston was the first to photograph a broken window is invalidated by the evidence of Strand's work. Ben Shahn, Ben Shahn, Photographer:An Albumfrom the Thirties, ed. Margaret R. Weiss (New 42. York: Da Capo Press, 1973), fig. 46. Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall, Paul Strand Photographs 1915-1945 (New York: The Mu43. seum of Modern Art, 1945), pp. 137, 141.

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and for other purposes. It occurs as a framing device and dramatic counterpoint, for instance, in the action photos of Wynn Bullock and other photographers of the 1950s and '60s. Co-opted by the photographer as art director, the weatherbeaten wall and window has become high kitsch.44 In his richly detailed description of farm houses, Agee has elevated the crude wooden wall to the level of literary distinction: . . . and every surface struck by light is thus: such an intensity and splendor of silver in the silver light, seems to burn, and burns and blinds into the eyes almost as snow: yet in none of that burnishment or blazing whereby detail is lost: each texture in the wood . . . is distinct in the eye as a razor; each nail-head is distinct: each seam and split; and each slight warping, each random knot and knothole: and in each board, as lovely a music as a contour map and unique as a thumbprint, its grain, which was its living strength, and these wild creeks cut stiff across by saws; moving nearer the close-laid arcs and shadows even of those tearing wheels.45 This hymn to pine is four pages long. Are we to imagine that, while Agee wrote, Walker Evans was roaming about these houses with his camera? If one considers Evans's other work, his approach to the subject of this project might be called timid in comparison. He does not focus on the more or less self-evident expressiveness of the structure of the wood, nor on the painterly appeal of decay, nor on the formal echo of window and photo frame. On the contrary, he is wary of these facile effects. When he shows windows, doors, parts of wooden walls, it is from a distance that at least partially acknowledges the functional nature of the structure. Thus, he does not renounce the monumentalizing effect engendered by symmetrical composition, borderless framing of objects, and right-angle point of view. Yet, this kind of composition does not actually result in a distancing of the object, but in a preparation of the object toward improving its readability. Only once does Evans approach his subject so closely that the structure of the wood begins to exert an effect, and this is the picture of the kitchen wall. It is on this very point - where the apparent continuity between Evans's work and that of his the differences between them are predecessors and contemporaries rests -that foregrounded so drastically. Evans's photograph appears, first and foremost, to be that of a subject seen from within. One can just as easily trace the cracks and grooves in the wood in Evans's photo as in other studies of wood plank walls and this one has something more: marks left by hands reaching for utensils and These examples are only a small sampling from a collection of about fifty examples. A perusal 44. of American magazines for amateur photographers would probably raise this number to infinite proportions. 45. Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, p. 142.

stains where grease has splattered during cooking. In this case, however, the material charms of the object have taken on the cast of the socially critical document. Not nature, but history has left its mark here. In other words, Walker Evans forces the spectator into exactly the same bind that Agee, Orwell, and other socially conscious authors have described as the dilemma of their position. Aesthetic experiences cannot and should not be excluded from an encounter with poverty, but such experiences must be purchased at the price of a heightened awareness and perception of these conditions. The picturesque has become instrumentalizedby consciously imposing the weight of the (art-) historical, one invokes the burdensome conditions of the present. On reviewing the cycle of motifs described in this essay, one is struck by how small the scope of the photographic medium is -it can be spanned by the thickness of a board. I close with a few observations on the naturalistic or "objective" tendency in photography during the period between the wars by way of summarizing the argument of this essay. The naturalistic photography of this period did not actually respond in a reactionary way to its predecessors as is generally assumed, and as the period's own self-interpretation suggests. Nor did it give us "the thing itself," without any relation to history and iconography. In its most compelling achievements, this naturalistic photography addresses itself to those visual cliches and aesthetic models established by photography and art, and reworks them in a productive way-in a way that realizes the greater openness and accessibility of a mass medium, as compared to the traditional arts. The example of naturalistic photography between the wars may hold some interest for the present situation. For now it seems quite obvious that photography expects that a new beginning will come from a survey of its properties as technology and media rather than from a practical reflection on its history. Paul Strand. Ghost Town, Red River. 1930.

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Craig Owens, 1950-1990 Craig Owens died of AIDS on July 4th, 1990. He worked at Octoberas an associate editor from 1979 to 1980, and his articles in this journal contributed to the critical debate surrounding postmodernism. During the 1980s he continued his engagement with contemporary theory as a critic, as an editor for Art in America, and as a teacher. The editors of Octobershare the sense of loss felt by the critical and artistic community at his untimely death.

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The Woman in Question M/F edited by ParveenAdams and Elizabeth Cowie "The contributionof m/f to feminism was, and continues to be, of immense significance. The only feminist journalin England consistently devoted to the development of theory, it created - in the face of many orthodoxies - the space for an important new form of work. At the vital interface of social theory, representation and psychoanalysis, m/f provoked intense debate among feminists, raising issues which still act as a crucialpoint of reference for much feminist thinkingto this day." - Jacqueline Rose 400 pp., 29 illus. $25.00

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Painting as Model Yve-Alain Bois Informed by both structuralism and poststructuralism, this first collection of essays by art critic and historian YveAlain Bois seek to redefine the status of theory in modernist critical discourse. 400 pp., 89 illus. $35.00 Originalin Paperback

The Destruction Tilted Arc

of

Documents edited by ClaraWeyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk Introduction by Richard Serra Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, a 120-foot curved Cor-Ten steel structure in New York City's Federal Plaza, was destroyed in the spring of 1989 by the federal agency that had commissioned the sculpture. These documents from the public hearing and the court proceedings provide a complete and moving record of censorship in the arts. 304 pp., 16 illus. $16.95 paper

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Availableat fine bookstores or directlyfrom

55 Hayward Street

The MIT Press

Cambridge, MA 02142

SEVENIIEENTH ANNUALCONFERENCE llIth-l4th April, 1991

at THECOURTAULD INSTITUTE OFART,LONDON FRAMEWORKS Thematerial andconceptual frames of reference by whichartis defined andinterpreted. AcademicSections: Thevaluesandpoliticsof display. Carnivalandfestival:artandpopularculture. Notionsof decorumin Renaissance narrative. Handmaids to Religion:festivals,imagesandsacredobjects. Theviewerin the frame. thegenres1500-1900. Inventinganddiscovering Anti-academicism beforetheavant-garde. Artcriticismafter1890:authors,texts,contexts. TrainingandEducationin theplasticarts. Arthistorywithinandwithout:arthistoryinsideandoutsideformalinstitutions. Whystudytechnique? Feministarthistoryandacademicinstitutionstoday. frameworks in Britain. Contemporary Museumswithoutobjects:television,filmandthenewvisualtechnologies. Marketvaluesandaestheticvalue:past,present,andfuture. Plenarysessions MarkFisherM.P.,Oppositionspokesperson fortheArts, NeilMacGregor, Director,NationalGalleryand NickSerota,Director,TateGallery, EasternEuropeanForum. Furtherdetails: Convenors: JoannaWoodall,JohnNewman Administrator: LyndaStephens CourtauldInstituteof Art,SomersetHouse,Strand,LondonWC2RORN. Tel:071 873 2777 Conference Office:071 873 2518 Fax:071 873 2772

GENDERS Editor: Ann Kibbey University of Colorado,Boulder Genders is the first majorjournal in the humanities to make theories of gender and sexuality its focus. The journal carries essays on art, literature, history, and film that relate sexuality and genderto political, economic,and stylistic concerns. From time to time, Genders will focus an entire issue on a single topic. These special issues providefresh insight and perspective on areas of particular concern to gender and sexuality. Genders #7, Spring 1990 examines The Politics of the Sexual Body. Genders #10, Spring 1991 wil focus on Theorizing Nationality, Sexuality and Race. Genders # 9, Fall 1990, contents: Judith Butler, Lana's Imitation: MelodramaticRepetition and the Gender Performative Helena Michie, The Greatest Story (N)ever Told: The Spectacle of Recantation Michael Selig, HollywoodMelodrama,Douglas Sirk, and the Repression of the Female Subject (Magnificent Obsession)

Margaret Werth, Engendering Imaginary Modernism: Henri Matisse's Bonheur de vivre

Sarah Schuyler, Double-dealingFictions Joseph Bristow, Nation, Class, and Gender: Tennyson'sMaud and War Alan Sinfield, Closet Dramas: Homosexual Representation and Class in Postwar British Theatre

Genders is published triannually in Spring, Summer and Fall Single copy rates: Individual $8, Institution $12 Foreign postage, add $1.50/copy Yearly subscription rates: Individual $21, Institution $35 Foreign postage, add $3/subscription University of Texas Press Journals, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713

Critial

Inquiry

the currents of criticism and culture Probing discourse through lively, intelligent

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The Spring 1990 issue features The Canonization of Canadian Literature: An Inquiry into Value by Robert Lecker Canadian Canons A critical response by Frank Davevy Response to Frank Davey bv Robert Lecker

Also appearing in Spring 1990: Pierre Hadot on ancient philosoph~y Mieke Bal on de-disciplining the eve Daniel Boyarin on the eve in the Torah Cheryl Walker on feminist literary criticism .Marilynn Desmond on feminist literary hiistory Vicente L. Rafael on nationalism andi imatgery Gerald L. Bruns on Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare Richard Rorty and Thomas McCarthy in an exchange on truth, freedom, and politics Edited by W J. T. Mlitchell, Arnold I. Davidson, Robert E. Streeter, Joel Snydler, Fran9oise Meltzer, Robert von Hallberg, Elizabeth Helsinger, and Harry Harootunian Published quarterly by

The University of Chicago Press Single copy rates: $6.50 Inidividuals; 815.5() Institutions. Oittside the USA, please add 75C per issuefor postage. Regular one-year subscription rates: Individuals $29.00; Students (with copy of validated ID) 820.00; Institutions 562.00. Ouitsitle thzeU"SA,please (ItdtI84.50 per x'ear,for postage. Visa anid MiasterCardpayments accepted. To order, send complete charge card information (including account no., expiration date, and signature) to The Uni,versity of Chicago Press, Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005, Chicago, IL 60637 USA. Or, order through your local bookseller.

MIT Press Journals Presents

OCTOBER/Back Issues Available 7 Featured Articles OCTOBER 6 Beckett's... but the clouds. . . , Kristeva, Pleynet, and Sollers on the U.S., and texts by

Michael Brown, Tom Bishop, Octavio others others Armand,Armand,

7 !!! SPECIAL SALE !!! I Receive Back Issues at over 40% Discount! I Pay only $10.00 per Back Issue. To order, see bind-in card. This offer expires on July 1, 1991. L _ OCTOBER 28

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Discipleship: A Special Issue on

HerbertDamisch on Duchamp,Lyotardon

Psychoanalysis Texts by Laplanche, Roustang, Bersani, Homi . Perry Bhabha, Jennifer Stone, Joan Copjec, Stone, Perry Bhabha, Joan Copjec, Jennifer

RobertSmithson

OCTOBER 29

OCTOBER 10 '1-.*', Daniel Buren, interviews with Trisha Brown and Richard Serra, texts on Dan Graham and

OCTOBER 14 Eisenstein's 1947 notebook, notebook, Eisenstein's Maya Deren's Deren's 1947 Maya letters from Mexico, interview with Pierre , . Boulez, Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Annette Michelson on the centennial Ring at Bayreuth

OCTOBER 17 The New Talkies: A Special Issue Jameson on Syberberg, Copjec on Duras, Frampton, Wollen, Rosler on filmmaking, and texts by Philip Rosen and Mary Ann Doane

OCTOBER 23 Issue FilnmBooks: A^i Arthur D pjec, Fredric Jameson, Stuart t9^N :ickBrowne, Noel Carroll i books on new

OCTOBER 24 John Rajchman and Jean-Marie Alliaume on Foucault, Marc Chenetier on Debray, interview with Beth and Scott B, poetry by Marinetti

OCTOBER 26 Louise Lawler's photographs, Pierre Rosenstiehl and Yve-Alain Bois on Barthes, Christopher Phillips on calotype aesthetics

Michelson on the Eve of the Future,YveAlain Bois on Serra, Georges Didi-Huberman Jonas on the Shroudof Turin,interviewwithJos t Me, Mekas, texts by Georges Melies and Joseph Rykwert

OCTOBER 30 Walter Grasskamp on Hans Haacke, Haacke interview, Crimp on the art of exhibition, Buchloh on Productivism, Bois on late Picabia

OCTOBER 31 Roger Caillois on mimicry, Denis Hollier on Caillois, Caillebotte dossier, Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Ryan on East Village gentrification

OCTOBER 32 Hollis Frampton: A Special Issue Texts by Annette Michelson, Barry Goldensohn, Hollis Frampton, Christopher Phillips, Bruce Jenkins, Peter Gidal, Allen S. Weiss, Brian Henderson

OCTOBER 34 Shklovsky on trans-sense language, Malevich's autobiography, Hal Foster and Homi K. Bhaba on colonialism

OCTOBER 37 Symposium on originality as repitition with Buchloh, Fried, Krauss, Nochlin; recent art history books reviewed by Bois, Herding, Marin; tribute to Leroi-Gourhan

OCTOBER 41 Jacques-Alain Miller on Panopticon, Friedrich Kittler on writing machines, Ann Smock on Duras, Patricia Mainardi on the Musee d'Orsay, interview with Steve Fagin

OCTOBER 42 Broodthaers: Writings, Interview's, Photographs Essays by Rainer Borgemeister, Benjamin Buchloh, Yves Gevaert, Michael Oppitz, Birgit Pelzer, Anne Rorimer, Dieter Schwarz, Dirk Snauwaert

OCTOBER 44 Leo Steinberg on Picasso's Les Demoiselles, Denis Hollier and John Rajchman on Foucault

OCTOBER 45

OCTOBER 49 Tania Modleski on some functions of feminist criticism, Eric Michaudon Van Gogh, Denis Hollier on Chateaubriand,D. A. Miller reviews Susan Sontag OCTOBER 50 GertrudKoch on censorshipand pornographic film in Germany,Slavoj Zizek on nostalgia, the gaze, and the death drive in film, Jonathan Craryon the spectacle, Copjec on G. G. de Clerambault OCTOBER 51 Crimpon mourningand militancy, Michael Moon on the films of Jack Smith, Jacques Lacan's "Kantwith Sade,"LaurentJenny on automatism OCTOBER 52 Stephen Melville on postmodernityand art history, Michelson on Vertov's ThreeSongs of Lenin, Tinh T. Minh-haon documentary, Krausson SherrieLevine, Thierryde Duve on Marcel Duchamp

Stefan Germer and Eric Michaud on Beuys, Shoshana Felman on Lacan, Jonathan Crary on the making of the observer

OCTOBER 47 Rosalyn Deutsche on public art, David Lurie and Krysztof Wodiczko on the Homeless Vehicle Project, Walter Benjamin on art history, Thomas Y. Levin on Benjamin

OCTOBER 48 Andreas Huyssen on Kiefer, Benjamin Buchloh on Richter, Gertrud Koch on Shoah, Eric Rentschler on Riefenstahl, Hans Haacke and Werner Fenz on the Stvrian Autumn

Prepayment is required Back issues are $18.00. For delivery outside of the U.S.A., please add $5.00 postage and handling per issue. Make check or money order payable to OCTOBER and mail to: MIT PRESS JOURNALS 55 HAYWARD STREET CAMBRIDGE, MA 02142 USA

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Editor:.EnochBrater Coeditor:W.B.Worthen

Announcn pcial issue of Theatrefora WomenAnd> 'InThrama(VIof.42 #3, Oct. '90) *:*Wordscapesof the Body: PerformativeLanguageas Gestus in MariaIreneFornes'Plays, DeborahR. Geis 46Staging Infanticide:The Refusal of Representationin Elisabeth Robins'Alan's Wife,CatherineWiley *:*KarlMarx'sYoungest DaughterandA Doll's House, BernardF. Dukore *:*The Politics of the Body: Pina Bausch'sTanztheater,David W. Price **"Scrittura femminile":Writing the Female in the Plays of Dacia Maraini,Tony Mitchell **"Hush'd on Purposeto Grace Harmony":Wives and Silence in MuchAdo AboutNothing, Michael D. Friedman

TheatreJournalis publishedquarterlyby The Johns Hopkins University Press in cooperationwith the Association for Theatre in HigherEducation. Annualsubscriptions:$18.50/individualsand $44.00! institutions. Postage outside the U.S.: $3.80 Canadaand Mexico, $11.40 outside NorthAmerica.Mlarylandresidentsadd 5% sales tax. Single issues: $7.00/individualsand $ 13.00/institutions. The JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress JournalsDivision

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OCTOBER is funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and from the New York State Council on the Arts. The editors would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the following. individuals and foundations: Benefactors: Pentti J. K. Kouri The Pinewood Foundation Patrons: Leo Castelli Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf Sponsors: Phoebe Cohen Mr. and Mrs. Walter Thayer Bagley and Virginia Wright Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen Contributors: Sam Francis Robert Shapazian

OCTOBER 55 Theodor Adorno

The Curves of the Needle

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions

Manthia Diawara

Reading Africa through Foucault: V. Y. Mudimbe'sReaffirmation of the Subject

Denis Hollier

On Equivocation

Douglas Kahn

Track Organology

Thomas Y. Levin

Adorno on Music in the Age of Technological Reproducibility

OCTOBER 56

High & Low A Special Issue

Essays by Norman Bryson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jonathan Crary, Hal Foster, David James, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Molly Nesbit