Iconoclasm, Violence and Criticism: the Violence of Criticism

Unpublished

This was written for a lecture (October 1981) when I was thinking about the "violence" of criticism and its relation to iconoclasm, thinking of its violence, that is, as a strategic act and critique, a rebuking of criticism’s supposed secondariness to the work of art. I reproduce it here for its explanatory value, not for its intrinsic value as writing, which it lacks; but after all, it was only notes that were not pursued as an article. The value it has now is what it seems to have been attempting to do then: flesh out my notions of criticism, which are a bit more telegraphic in their published presentations. It of course relates to my published texts "Exits," "Violence and Representation," "Coming to Speech," “Breach of Promise,” “Notes on the Sumptuary Destruction of Leaders,” “Image of the Leader, Function of the Widow.”

   
Iconoclasm, Violence and Criticism: the Violence of Criticism

The most frequent cliché about the critic is that he kills the work: the critic is a murderer of art. It is as if the work of art is defenseless, as if it was not supported by a system of complex effects that we designate under the name of the museum, or as if there was no aggression in the artwork itself.  And yet what is fundamental to that set-up, what calls this act forth on the part of the critic - resistance or rivalry? Or something else that we do not want to recognize or name?

Consider the following:

This opening to presence, however, is a closing to death. It is the symbol - the painting considered as a symbolic relationship and resolution of identity - that effects this guarantee of presence and the closure to death (our proper spatiality). Symbol and temporality are inseparable - they both exist as the framework of the other's ideality. Temporality withdraws/effaces our spatiality as bodies. One is present in time, outside space, present to oneself in an ideal phenomenological reduction. Non-presence is differing spatiality, death. Gaucher's paintings deny our proper death.  They offer only the false death of identity.

The phenomenological justification of these works - their supposed turn to the body's spatiality, but a spatiality effaced within temporality, I would say - is only possible within the symbolic and ideal space of the art gallery. This promotion of the experience of temporality is only the most recent of abstractions created from the meditative space and supportive ideology of the art gallery; while outside this space, we are condemned to the political technology of our bodies, to inscribing spatiality. Phenomenology , and works based on that philosophy of perception and being , cannot ensure the "truth"of our bodies. It remains to us to find how that "truth" is/was created. As Foucault says: "The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes ... Nothing in man - not even his body is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men." ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History") In other words, self-constitution through the perceptual-consciousness system and the intersubjectivity of phenomenology are insufficient justifications for a body of work.

                                                           "Yves Gaucher: Eyesight and Temporality," Parachute , no. 16, Autumn 1979

Criticism is in a state of drift, out of control. Its loss, however, is willed; its drifting theoretical. Initially, the question is: How is criticism presently adequate t0 its object? Yet, beyond this question, how is language itself adequate, as language is the role and model of criticism? Criticism as theory frees itself from its traditional object - the work of art; it is responsible - in its theoretical irresponsibility , i.e ., in not answering, responding to the work of art - for its excess and loss. But in exceeding or transgressing the object and losing it, is not this excess and loss, for itself, jouissance, its own bliss? Desire has no object - it is outside use, want and demand; and theory similarly no longer finds its impulses in the work of art, in an object , formerly its own object. It can still nominate a work of art, and say, "That's it for me," as part of the binary "That's   it "/"So what"; but usually it says "What's in it for me?", or "How can I use this?".

Theory no longer assumes a subservience to its object (the prerequisite of a science) in a presumed secondariness of non-presence to the full presence of the work of art and the artist, the guarantor of that presence. Theory now, in a sense, is fictive. Nevertheless, as its own object, theory is not a metalanguage, which would return it to the formal, as a formal language. It is a drift. This drift is atopic, without a site: theory does not take itself to be central but peripheral (not centered in meaning, in society). Theory's displacement is the movement of its desire, the loss of its privileged site and meaning. No longer is it prescriptive or normative. It drifts towards the periphery of indifference, as an index of indifference, but positively, as the opening to differences, a s plurality, which is the condition of art.

                                                                         Peripheral/Drift: a Vocabulary of Theoretical Criticism, 1979

To put the object under erasure is an excessive act for the spectator and criticism. This act is not dismissive or contentious; it is, simply and affirmatively, a displacement. Yet, it finds itself referred once again by convention to the work of art, to a structured site and meaning, from which it desires to force a break. It exceeds the structure of the work of art; it refuses the containment of its force; and it continues its wasteful expenditure outside the exchange and signification demanded by the work of art, outside the use and end to which its own excessive interpretations are repressively directed.

(Outdistancing is displacement by indifference and excess [transgression] of limits. But this excess is a loss for the audience; we face an absence when we expected something else - a subject, a meaning, a whole; but we accept that loss affirmatively, taking that absence even so far as to outdistance and displace [erase] the work and face the solitude and silence of our own bodies, i.e., our death.)

The formal system of a work does not stop at the work 's physical boundaries; its meaning is integrated into a larger formal structure of theory, art history and the museum/gallery, a system for the production of value, in which criticism plays a part. Criticism must bring this structure to articulation; and through this process of meaning, criticism undermines the larger formal system as well as itself. Without this bringing to consciousness by criticism, the system will continue to "interpret" meaning, ultimately by creating it, and in the end producing future work whose internal structure and resulting experience mirror that of the institution. Criticism's violence attempts to break that structure; its destructiveness sides with that of the excluded viewer: the viewer is absent from this formal structure, while still playing a function for the work within it .

                                                    "Hurlbut/Martin/Massey/Singleton ," Parachute, no. 23, Autumn 1981

These three texts reveal a process, a process of criticism's own necessary operation - traversing its own trajectory, towards the recognition of its "truth".  That is, there is both a logic and a narrative displayed here.

The first (Gaucher) , is based on the structure of the critique. Whether in identity or confrontation, the critique is bound to its object - to its terms, just as the spectator is detained in presence in front of the work of art.

The second is excessive - in the sense of both going too far and beyond, that is, leaving or exiting. Criticism begins to register its own effects and puts its drives into motion (the narrative of the synchronic into the diachronic , the metaphorical into the metonymical, to take the model of structural linguistics). That is, criticism becomes a process of writing: criticism in motion.

(This explains the attraction of critics to the model of "performative utterances" or "speech acts" where there is more of a concern (outside of the artwork as example) for the force of an utterance, outside of a referent and truth value. But the critic's discourse is contradictory - it must be performative and discursive at the same time (it must effect itself and describe what it is doing at the same time).  We come to recognize that this language can only effect itself (as a rhetoric) within a discourse established by critics - that is to say, a conventional language. (Criticism here is the manipulation of a code. Originality rests within the manipulation of tokens understood formally by other critics.) This is why we should consider criticism as representational and re-examine the concepts of production and the materiality of the sign as applied to criticism.) Performance is the acting out of the critic's desire; it is the scene of the critic's desire, outside of examples, outside of historical contingencies - i.e., it is theatricality itself.)

The third quotation marks a return of sorts; but it declares the conditions of its return - mutual recognition, but not rivalry. Its return to control, to order - to the symbolic order - is a return to representation. What do I mean by representation? Simply this: that criticism is a representational discourse where the work of art is represented within a separate and different discourse. But the work of art is also representative of a larger system of meaning referred to in the last quotation (standing for), and thus presumes to offer a representation of the viewer. In representation we take advantage of a dual reference to art and politics: art and politics meet in that word; and every artistic practice contains a representation of the viewer on the model of political representation.

The recognition I spoke of is not to displace a master-slave dialectic, where criticism is secondary as commentary to the presence of the work of art, to one of rivalry of equals - although rivalry points to something that underlies that exchange. This recognition is the violence of criticism.

This violence, however, is not just the mark of ambivalence passing to destruction, as if the critic was a bored delinquent. But in some very real way, criticism is tied to iconoclasm - by which I mean of course the destruction of images (criticism as crisis; Bakhtin). This violence of iconoclasm perhaps is not gratuitous - for the image may call for its destruction. In fact, representation may be intimately bound to violence. Thus criticism is violent, and because it is so it must end through that process of violence in representation. It must be understood that its drives are not against the work of art itself, but that art and criticism share a common ground. Thus criticism is violent, not because it is secondary as a commentary to the work of art, but because it is representational and representation is violent. What we follow in criticism then is this move from violence to representation .

I am talking of a particular language practice as it developed during the '70s, an historically and politically bounded period, a work in language , a practice that involves the relation of language to an object - but what object - theory as displacement strategy. I am talking about a certain value that criticism gave to language to its own practice, but also in recognition of how objects, systems and institutions are sustained , produced and reproduced by language even though they may suppress and suspend language - which therefore becomes its unconscious (in a sense they too are representational). But more importantly perhaps, in giving this value to language, criticism restores the position of the spectator in art: work in language establishes and problematizes a relation to the object and introduces the position of a speaking subject. Criticism is violent for itself and for the viewer (it is both a strategy and tactic).

In emphasizing language here, I could say that there have been three dominant notions in art and writing of the past twenty years: language as lack, production or representation. For each there is a corresponding position for the viewer :

(1) standing in front (brought into identity with the work - the perspective of reproduction);
(2) standing before and beside - peripheral drift;
 (3) standing for - representation - thetic - mimetic.

It is in terms of the viewer that I wish to speak (still a question of writing, or approached through writing).

I am talking here about what one can refer to as the "speaking subject," and the process as a "coming to speech"in art. In the first case that I outlined, both viewer and writer are considered as a lack. In both cases, the viewer and writer are reduced to the identity of the work (the viewer fulfilling its mechanisms, filling the gap in its structure; the writer fulfilling its intentions). How could a "speaking subject" enter our discourse given this reduction to the work within the suspensions and transparency of the modernist gallery and even the minimalist assault on that transparency. Briefly: at a point, body and language entered art very specifically. This disruption, at first formal, could not escape a slide to the body and speech of the viewer. This entry was the introduction of the perceiving and motile body in minimal art. And yet Minimalism resisted the viewer. A s well, minimalism resists language; yet, language underlies, structures and brings it into meaning in its presence within a suppressed context. It is temporality, brought about by the introduction of the body in minimal art, not language and hence interpretation by the viewer, that is thought to allow the possibility of the viewer's active participation. While being a condition for interpretation, temporality in minimalism - as a repetition of the form of a presence - is merely another means to bring the viewer into identity with the work through a process that reduces the viewer to the same apodicticity - positivity, immediacy and certitude - as the object , a process of reduction to the sign articulated on one level only. There is no gap for interpretation that the viewer brings to the work.
(Gaucher quote - modernist temporality; function of the viewer within, for, the work; the structure of the museum; a fight against the constitution of art by the museum - surrender)

The rupture of coming to speech is the violence of production - the second notion of language and writing. What position does the viewer take within this production? This strategic position was articulated in post-structuralist theory in its three manifestations:   
(1) Theory of the Text: death of the author and birth of the reader (Barthes);
(2) deconstruction:  put work into question, by playing structure against itself (Derrida);
(3) schizo-politics/capitalism: force, intensity, drift, singularity (new modes of attention/inattention, motivation, displacement (Deleuze-Guattari; Lyotard);

Reading and writing became a critical production that put the subject into question. The constituted identity of the bourgeois subject (and its institutions, of which the museum is the last refuge) was put into question. Rather the subject was put into process, regulated by a Freudian symptomatics and Marxian heterogeneous contradictions. The viewer (as a subject in process) becomes the subject of reception of the work, but not as a passive receiver - the viewer is acted upon, inscribed violently. It is in this sense that the viewer's body becomes the subject of art and provides a performative, interpretative force to the event of art. (Foucault: " ... but rather the immediate emergence of historical contents. And this is because only historical contents allow us to rediscover the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle that the order imposed by functionalist or systematizing thought is designed to mask.")

Body and speech, of course, reintroduce us to the art of the '70s and to performance in particular.

-formal and disjunctive content
-dance – Rainer
-autobiography and narrative
-performance and video
-extralinguistic – extraformal

performative, effective - anti-representational Felix Guattari, "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist"
"Collective dispositions of enunciation produce their own means of expression - it could be a special language, a slang, or a return to an old language. For them , working on semiotic flows is one and the same thing. Subject and object are no longer face-to-face, with a means of expression in a third position; there is no longer a tripartitie division between the realm of reality, the realm of representation or representativity, and the realm of subjectivity. You have a collective set-up which is, at once, subject , object , and expression. The individual is no longer the universal guarantor of the dominant meanings. Here, everything can participate in enunciation: individuals, as well as zones of the body, semiotic trajectories, or machines that are plugged in on all horizons ... An individual statement has no bearing except to the extent that it can enter into conjunction with collective set-ups which already function effectively: for example , which are already engaged in real social struggle . . . The individual enunciation is the prisoner of the dominant meanings. Only a subject group can manipulate semiotic flows, shatter meanings, open language to other desires and forge other realities."

It is here that criticism appears most violent, at its most terroristic. But given this language, and given the historical and political change where the field of the symbolic is now the real, how do we prevent the schizo-capitalist from becoming a Fascist because the same flows are released (General Idea; schizo non-representability and Fascist representation )? Can we still use this language?

It seems that these models have taken over too much of capitalism: mimesis and representation (along with convention and symbolic exchange) enter to combat the simulation of the code - autonomous structural value - indifference and indetermination - capitalist exchange of signs. (In so far as there is a search for value , it can only be through representation. Revaluation of representation is that passage from socialized to social desire. Presumably this will have a force, or the value of a force, brought about by representations.
The modernist critique of value, however, has lead to the destruction of all values without being able to institute any new value except that which is a formal law. Value is short-circuited by the incessant repetition of this critique, by the constant consumption of signification and evacuation of meaning by critical writing and an art that forms itself on this writing: the equivalence and interchangeability of contemporary theories, their critiques of limits and representations, show that in the end theory has taken capitalism's nihilism as its model.)

It seems that we have to return to the concept of representation and revitalize it - that is a return to the conditions where something stands for something and to somebody and where the relation of a representation to its "object" and "user" introduce the semantic and pragmatic dimensions to a work (reference, "content", history, etc). A revalued convention of representation, as an affirmative rather than negative value, may take us beyond the reductive exclusions of formalism and the critique-bound orthodoxies of ideological analysis. Rethinking representation even so far as a theory of action may show how, contrary to materialist thought (production , materiality of the sign), representation leads to the social.

But our analysis cannot stop here - we must recognize the violence of representation.
Girard: "Violence and Representation"

[3 pages missing?]

Perhaps what I did not take into consideration enough is the iconoclasm of thepublic - its destruction of the images presented to it by capitalism.

How does the work of art and the spectator function in this set-up and within society: what violence is marked there (mutual or otherwise): "For any society we expect to find a relation between the representation of violence , the image of the body, and social control of the body." [PM] (Exits - effects to representation - body)

But beyond the specular and speculative investigation of this function of representation that we may pursue with individual images (Barthes on photography, referent and death), criticism could examine the larger symbolic and representational systems, that still accommodates this violence in a very real way:

-revolution
-Fascism
-assassination

(Bataille talks of the "necessarily contagious and activist character of representation'', sacrifice-representation.   Collège de sociologie; Jean Pierre Faye; Girard )

Question of effect - acting on the body - modernist

capitalist industry (Lukács; Foucault - political technology of the body)
symbolic versus capitalistic

Eisenstein : scapegoat and massacre - the difference between scapegoat/festival: proletarian, and massacre: capitalism
proletarian/society can work with/through a symbolic representation; capitalism must act on the body itself - (power) death - work

(neoconservatism)