Struggles with the Image (1988)
Struggles with the Image: Essays in Art Criticism, Toronto: YYZ Books, 1988.
Design: Bruce Mau & Micah Lexier
Struggles with the Image was published in 1988 and collected a selection of my writing from 1980 to 1984, that is, the period when I was most active as an independent writer.
Or scroll to read Introduction below
Scroll below for book reviews by Donna Lypchuk and Andrew Payne
Introduction
To write is to incur debts. But to make this introduction a reading of my writing and not a history of writing-having-read (Bataille, Derrida, etc.) is to project a trajectory where these names in the texts punctuate a conceptual strategy and critical structure. My overarching intent here is not to provide a content or continuity to these essays, let alone a justification, so much as to display certain moves, which is to say criticism is always an issue of displacement. The choice of articles reflects those in which moves took place. These articles are primarily critical, theoretical as we used to say, rather than expository or descriptive. Yet the structure of the book indicates a change of tactics: the articles in Parts I and II literally displace each other’s positions; while those reprinted in Part III attempt to develop a pertinent project from article to article.
What is “outside” the texts gathered here is a beginning—an orientation that marks a stance and sets the writing, initially, against the work of art (in the form of a critique), and sends it off on its own, as a drift from art in an excess of writing: an exit. This set-up reacted against the positional logic, in viewing or interpretation, the one mirroring the other, of the spectator in front of the image/work and of writing as secondary commentary to the full presence of the work of art. Formed initially on Derrida’s critique of presence and Adorno’s principle of nonidentity, this critique of identity (and structure) led to a contract between writing and viewer against the work (as its exclusions), each of which was to become performative (against its exclusions). The position of the viewer coming to speech became the model for criticism. Hence the concentration on “effect,” on the “body” and “speech,” and on the demand for a “content” that issued from this fissure of structure. Hence an enactment in Peripheral Drift and the articles “The Death of Structure,” “Terminal Gallery,” “Reading and Representation in Political Art” of the language of“eccentricity and difference,” and of a concept of criticism verging on iconoclasm and opening to a recognition of the violence of criticism. These articles and effects, then, pre-figure the essays from 1980 that begin this collection.
If “Exits” condenses this history, even to the spacings of its writings, “Violence and Representation” leads to a return: exit and return through a renewed convention of representation. With a shift of terms from “content” to “representation,” a passage is made from a critique of representation to its valuation. Violence unexpectedly played a role. Both René Girard and Georges Bataille forced a recognition of the mutual grounding of violence and representation in each other as a means of realizing representation’s necessary social nature and “activist” (in Bataille’s words “contagious”) qualities. Representation can lead to action, “action” understood as an inducement of the excluded viewer to the social register. On the analogy of the individual magnified to the level of the “crowd,” this potential of representation fulfills itself in a public “iconoclasm”—a type of critique—directed against the images and spectacles presented to it by capitalism. Since every spectacle implies a specific political formation, representation has a political dimension. And since struggles with the image is also a struggle over the image, this project saw its continuation in the articles “Notes on the Sumptuary Destruction of Leaders” and “Image of the Leader, Function of the Widow,” which, however, are not republished here.
If the occasional essays “Exits,” “Violence and Representation” and “Breach of Promise” are “examples” of a fictional facing or speculative arrest before the work of art, they were, all the same, turnings in my writing that underlie all my other criticism. The contemporaneous theoretical articles of the section “From Drift to Dialogue” chart their same passage.
That subtitle, “From Drift to Dialogue,” indicates a narrative from Barthes to Bakhtin channeled through Bataille’s excess, Lyotard’s “death instinct,” Deleuze’s machinic set-ups, and Austin’s speech acts. The critique of identity passing through the issue of content arrives at a more formalized study of representation (“Language and Representation”). That formalism, however, is bifurcated on every level. Value resides in the validation of a local practice; it also calls for the type of critique acted out in “Editorials.” That is, on the one hand, concern for the role of the viewer on the part of criticism ends in attention to the nuances of representation; on the other hand, critical license pursues a path that culminates contradictorily in the demand for “work at its word.” Representation carried over to the local resulted, as well, in research on reference and reception, terms under which a preliminary history of contemporary Canadian art was attempted. Against all the evidence of the critique of the referential fallacy and the“structural revolution of value,” reference was seen to be a means of relay of work and audience to some sort of real social dimension.
This book opens with essays from 1980, a year that marked the intersection of a double “crisis.” One was the problematic play between art and criticism: the exit from art.The other was a recognition of the unequal exchange of an art community on the edge of the discourse of power, the periphery of its reception, in other words, the crisis of a culture of reception. This second “crisis” did not immediately announce itself; instead it worked itself through other demands. Theoretical “intensities” operate on different registers and move along trajectories at different speeds. No more is this true than in the conflict in one body of writing between the theoretical and “non-theoretical,” the latter which was to become the basis for a local history. “Crisis” operated as a code word to indicate a lack: the lack of a history of contemporary Canadian art. As a recurring structure, this lack was to be articulated in the very real terms of crises of socio-economic cycles (Mandelian and Innisian) in which Canada was very particularly set. A local history was to be constructed, but it could be constructed only under certain constraints which were the conditions of our history. I labelled these conditions the “semiotics of reception.” “Colony, Commodity and Copyright” set the direction, which was followed through in “Editorials” and “Axes of Difference,” even though those articles addressed other issues as well. While being a culture of reception, Canada was so positioned historically that the negative features of reception allowed a positive comprehension of the economic conditions of late capitalism and the semiotic conditions of postmodernism. We could treat both a logic and a history; but since this history is a lack, semiotics partakes of a symptomology. This lack is registered through its symptoms: its images. Hence a shift of attention from the language structuring of the institution of art (for example, in “Editorials” and elsewhere) to the image under the conditions of ideology and communication (“Subjects in Pictures”).
Curating called a halt, both to these projects and temporarily to my practice as a critic. With that shift of practice, the object itself is changed. If curating, however, could be seen to be a type of writing, a writing with objects, then one has the concrete means to demonstrate that history which is lacking. But it is not simply a matter of the presentation of objects. What became an interrogation in my writing, complementary to this history, can be seen in curating to be this: the practice of the (re)constitution of the event.
Donna Lypchuk, “Educational criticism”
Now Magazine
STRUGGLES WITH THE IMAGE: ESSAYS IN ART CRITICISM
Philip Monk’s Struggles with the Image: Essays in Art Criticism is the first of a series of books published as part of YYZ’s Critical Works project. It is unnerving to think that the responsibility for publishing criticism collections has fallen by default to the board of a parallel art gallery that probably cannot afford the distribution and promotion that this book deserves.
Struggles With The Image appears to be an essential educational volume of considerable historical value. It reflects the volatility of the period from 1980 to 1988 and by virtue of its flaws, reflects the problematic nature of some issues that have made writing about art a real bitch for most critics over the last 10 years.
Philip Monk, who is probably best known as the curator of contemporary Canadian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, began his career as a critic. Struggles with the Image literally takes its on a tour of some of the issues confronting the critic from 1980 to 1988. Struggles with the Images includes examples of Monk's writing at its most eccentric. Worth a look is “Exits’, which juxtaposes marginal text with the copy in a spectacular example of subjective/objective schizophrenia. Equally hokey is “Breach of Promise’, which is written like a 1921’s manifesto. The book proceeds from these examples of art criticism as quasi-poetry/fiction/advertising (very popular way to write as a critic at the time) to the more sober strains in the chapter entitled “From Drift to Dialogue”. As an essay, “The Zero Machine’ is one of the most nifty examples of structural closure I have ever read.
As Monk proclaims in his unassuming, and unapologetic introduction “Criticism is always an issue of displacement”. What Monk is trying to say is often displaced by the neurotic beauty of the writing itself, which is at times funny, charming, witty, caustic, obscure, inexact, nihilistic, frustrating and infuriating. Not an easy read, but a worthy one, Struggles with the Image is a must for all artists, art students, professors, anthropologists, linguists and poets.
Andrew Payne, “Philip Monk: Struggles with the Image,” (YYZ Publications, Toronto, 1989)
C Magazine, 22 (Summer 1989), 70-72
In the preface to Struggles with the Image, Monk suggests that his work as a curator, far from displacing the critical program put in place by writing, represents a practical ‘demonstration’ of the local history for which that writing has argued. Moreover, as the organization of these essays indicates, this move toward the practical, the demonstrable, would be consonant with a trajectory already at work in the writing itself (from general speculation to local representation). It would be interesting to ask how the terms of this history have altered in the passage from critic to curator, from private voice to public representative. The task I undertake here is however, a more circumscribed one. Restricting myself to the essays, I wish merely to suggest that their progress is in no simple sense a movement from general to particular, theory to practice. Far from representing the application of a politics elaborated in the early works, the appeal to the ‘local’ that characterizes Monk’s later essays comes to buttress an entirely different theory or model of community. The final effect of this revision is, I would suggest, a suturing over of that gap, that moment of violence or difference, that the early writing represents as constitutive of any community project.
Monk’s analysis of a violence endemic to the social relation is of course indebted to a reading of Hegel that has dominated French thinking since the lectures of Alexander Kojève. What Kojève emphasized was the struggle for recognition that grounds the social relation, a struggle that is, for Hegel, resolved in the developmental history of The Phenomenology. (The normativizing tendencies of the Hegelian system would reduce ‘violence’ to a mere moment in a progress whose telos would be a transparency of subject to subject). One way of getting at the point of the French revision of Hegel is through the work of René Girard, a thinker who stands as the inspiration for the second of Monk’s essays. For Girard, there can be no definitive overcoming of the violent indifferentiation that founds the community relation because such an aufhebung will always require recourse to a representation that is itself violent. The model for this violence would be the pharmakos or scapegoat figure who facilitates in her or his exclusion, the differentiation and exchange of identities necessary to the constitution of any community.
This violence of the image, precisely that violence entailed in the becoming image of the other, is given a specifically sexual inflection in the third of Monk’s essays, ‘Breach of Promise’. But this sexual inflection is perhaps less significant than the historical one that accompanies it: for what distinguishes the work in question here (Picasso’s Desmoiselles), what marks its exemplary modernity, is the way it refuses any totalizing identification of self and other, image and viewer, the way, in other words, that it recognizes violence at the very origin of the social:
The passage of one image to the other, from The Entombment to The Demoiselles, is a narrative transformation: from the presence of promise to its absence. On my side, the narrative is the representation of fascination — putting its drives in motion. To represent the ‘breach’ between the two images — the breach and the space between — is to register the gap between me and them. Representation leaves an absence in its origin.
But, and herein lies the paradox to which Monk’s work incessantly returns, to ‘represent this “breach”’ is already to have forgotten it; difference itself will not be identified. It is for this reason that there can be no simple passage from The Entombment to Les Desmoiselles, only an endless vacillation between a death that is at once loss and exaltation and the compensations of narrative:
The breach of promise is a breaking of the symbolic: the breach strands me in the gap between these two images.
In his second chapter, Monk extends the terms of the analysis described above. Here the pharmakos (as excluded term) returns as the ‘zero sum’ that organizes a differential system of signification. As Lévi-Strauss and others have suggested, its function is to organize the signifying order while remaining itself immune to any specific signification:
To explain the “supplement” of signification of notions like hau and mana, Lévi-Strauss conjectured a “zero symbolic value”, based on the linguistic hypothesis of the zero phoneme, and whose function “is to be opposed to the absence of signification without entailing by itself any particular signification.”
But if Monk borrows the terms of this structural model, he also displaces them, displaces them in the name of a desire / content that remains irreducible to the value system of exchange:
As much as Lévi-Strauss’s analysis gives us a structural understanding ... does it not repress that mechanism in an equalized exchange that forbids the supplement of content: and reduce dialogue “in conformity with the initial relational character” of dialogue, to a static and closed system of oppositions as equivalents, whereby each speaker is restricted to this form and identity? Does it not reduce the unconscious to an empty form where even desire is absent? Desire and content are extrinsic to the immanent field of his analysis — the illusional superstructure in conformity with the “real” structure of the unconscious.
Content then, far from anchoring the interpretive process, is for Monk that ‘excess’ which prevents the communicative event from resolving itself in an equivalence of subject to subject. In place of the structure, we are given the Deleuzian machine, a machine that produces desire, not in relation to a transcendental signifier / signified but rather within what Monk calls ‘an unlimited field of immanence.’
This insistence, more or less Deleuzian, on the irreducibility of content to a formalist system of exchange, is in no way dissonant with Monk’s earlier theoretical pronouncements. It is, however, a rather different content that is appealed to in the last of the essays in this section, ‘Language and Representation’. Here the point is precisely to anchor the interpretive process in a referent (‘the social real’) that would be at once the origin and the end of every act of signification. This circuit of reference is asserted over against the ‘self-referentiality’ of both modernist aesthetics and its semiotic posterity:
Modernism’s critique of representation in favour of the immediate, concrete and irreducible established the limits of representability by using the methods of a discipline to criticize itself ... Similarly, semiotics, as a continuation of the modernist project, has had to exclude the referent as a disturbance to the purity of the theoretical model. In all cases, reference, representation and the real have been condemned in favour of a material formalism.
What is most questionable in this critique is perhaps the assumption that modernism ever represented a formalism, a simple evacuation of meaning or of content. It would be more accurate to say that it rethought ‘meaning’ as a function or effect of the signifying process, an effect that is not only mystifying (and therefore in need of critique) but irreducible. To recognize this is to recognize in the self-remarking structure of the modernist work no immediacy of that work to itself, but rather the very site of its constitutive alterity. If certain tendencies in modernism militate against such a recognition, then it remains for us not to take ‘the work at its word’ (a labour that can only forget the non-identity that marks the work in the beginning and upon which any specification of intent must founder), but rather to examine the ways in which such an alterity continues to insist on itself, continues to produce meaning effects that elude the intentionality that apparently governs them. From within the discourse of philosophy, this has been the task undertaken by ‘deconstruction’: to reveal the other not as a problem posed to thought as its external limit (not in other words, as something that philosophy has simply excluded or neglected) but as that which displays itself out of the very principle of speculative unification.
Whatever the problems raised by Monk’s return to the referent, it remains the authority upon which his ‘local’ history has been based. The clearest example of this is ‘Editorials’, a work that reverses the model of ‘violent’ communication given in the early essays. Here, language appears not as that which opens the image up to an originary moment of transport or violation but as the mark of a specifiable intention: it produces a ‘limit effect’, defining a position or program which can then be evaluated. It is telling that this evaluation takes the form of an ideological critique, the very critique put in question by ‘The Zero Machine’: General Idea, as text, is reduced to a series of social motivations of which it remains more or less unconscious. I point this out not to save General Idea from evaluation. There can be little doubt that their work trivializes what is in fact a rigourous investigation (advanced on multiple fronts) of the relationship between politics and textual production. My point is rather that Monk, in eliding the difference between General Idea and its theoretical antecedents, comes to implicate the very models that motivated his early work. Under the guise of evaluating a local phenomenon, Monk presents us with a potted history of French theory, a history that now sees in that theory not a questioning or displacement of the assumptions of a dominant ideology but their reproduction.
This tendency away from the real, however problematic the term “real”, is the mutual point of my critique of General Idea and my comments on French theory ... The points I wish to make are that inhabitation is the creation of a formal system; that it has a tendency to distance itself from the real in instituting its own operations as a system of value; and that consequently its critique reproduces the existing order it attempts to subvert.
Subtending this critique is an appeal to ‘use value’ as the horizon of all human activity. And although Monk does not thoroughly elaborate its consequences, this invocation of Marx’s theory of value must of necessity carry with it, a certain revolutionary imperative, a belief not only in the desirability, but also the inevitability of a dissolution of the commodity form and its alienating system of exchange. Politically responsible representation would then resist the flows of capitalist exchange, causing local use values to ‘stand’ in their discreteness and integrity. But, as Baudrillard has shown, use value is itself a function of the value system of exchange:
In fact, the effect of quality and of incommensurability once again partakes of the apparent movement of political economy. What produces the universalization of labour in the eighteenth century and consequently reproduces it is not the reduction of concrete, qualitative labour by abstract, quantitative labour, but, from the outset, the structural articulation of the two terms. Work is really at the base of this “fork”, not only as a market value but as human value ... Henceforth there can only be labour — qualitative and quantitative. The quantitative still signifies only the commensurability of all forms of labour in abstract value; the qualitative, under the pretext of incommensurability goes much further. It signifies the comparability of all human practice in terms of production and labour.
— The Mirror of Production
This ‘textualization’ of the use-exchange-surplus chain can only serve to drive a wedge between the ethical imperatives of Marxism and their cognitive legitimation. As Gayatri Spivak has suggested:
The radical heterogeneity entailed in that presupposition (that the subject is structurally superadequate to itself) is dealt with only very generally by Marx from the early economic manuscripts onwards. Indeed, it may be said, that, in revolutionary practice, the “interest” in social justice “unreasonably” introduces the force of illogic into the good use-value fit — philosophical Justice — between Capital and Free Labour. If pursued to its logical consequence, revolutionary practice must be persistent because it can carry no theoretico-teleological justification.
— “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value”
With regard to the problem of representation, this superadequation of the subject must imply that if every political enunciation involves a certain finitude, a specificity by reason of which translation or exchange is resisted, it is also constituted in the very possibility of such a translation, such an iteration. Displacement, exchange, all that for Monk comes under the category of appropriation, would be then, not a strategy whose effects can be contested but a fact of language. As I have suggested, this is the fact from which Monk’s later work turns. But how, in face of such a fact, is the local to be affirmed, how are we to represent those differences that make, for this time, this place, a difference? If this is a question raised to Monk’s work, it is also a question raised by it, by its blind spots as much as by its insights.