Category: Articles

Just as external light is reflected on the surface of enamel until it becomes a blinding highlight, so too does the beholder’s retrospective view of the painting’s production. The insights into the painting process that pentimenti and other phenomena of reworking seem to provide are put to the test and prevented from entirely penetrating Matisse’s procedure. So, my argument is that the very insight we acquire from paintings like Nasturtiums (II) is an acknowledgment of the limits of interpretation. Such paintings help us to understand the challenges and the responsibility of interpreting art.

Whether social or biological, the point of race, as Schapiro argues, is to provoke “powerful divisions within the masses of the people” at the moment when workers are beginning to organize around “demands for a decent living and control over their own lives.” For those “economically frustrated citizens” race provides capitalists with a tool to divert their “blind rage” away from them and towards “innocent and defenseless minorities.” If the central battle was between worker and capital, then the invented battle between “races” diverts the conflict “into channels of racial antagonism, which weakens and confuses the masses, but leaves untouched the original relations of rich and poor.”

These borrowings raise the issue about what she marks as her own, and what she tells us comes from others. Beginning in a work like the 1951 Sightseers, in which she wrote her name—and continuing in abstract paintings with the self-inscription of the artist’s moving hand—the sense of her-painting-herself is echoed in some paraphrases of Old Master paintings, including her first, the 1956 Venus and the Mirror.

Between the VW by the water tower and the masked chicken processor, then, there seems to me a deep connection. The one prepares the ground for the other. Labor under capitalism can eventually proclaim its full visibility because labor is now so thoroughly elided and misrepresented, left behind as a lived conflicted reality—because it has been fully subsumed into the order of the commodity. Or such is the claim. I am with Castoriadis, needless to say, in believing the claim to be necessarily—or at least, empirically—false. We would all like to know what day-to-day detailed struggle of labor against capital goes on in the Deda Processing Plant.

Suther’s goal is to establish new “methodological imperatives.” His way of going about it is characteristically inflationary in terms of proposing new notions, inventing new terminology, and redescribing life itself. But the real test for any new theory is not whether it can offer a structure of thought, but whether that structure has purchase on reality: that is, whether there are things that need to be conceived of in this way. On this front, Suther ultimately fails.

The ordinary-language assumption that such metaphysical questions are resolved as soon as I raise my hand in a classroom or hug a friend when he tells me she has finally left him is given the lie by its own tacit metaphysics: a picture of reality as comprising two independent orders, one mechanical and complete in itself, the other normative and merely supervenient upon it. This is not a neutral description of our world, but a substantive—and historically specific—way of carving it up. By ordinary language’s own lights, moreover, the modern historical situation in which we experience ourselves as estranged from our own bodies, subject to economic mechanisms we do not control, generates a justified skepticism about the intentionality of our own bodily acts.

Bewes’ commitment to the (Deleuzian) “cinematic apparatus”—replacing “the unity posited by a human action together with its motivations, causes, and intentions” with “a nondetermined, acentered and decentered perception”—involves the opposite of immanent purposiveness. The point of the wave poem was that you saw the marks on the beach as a poem because you saw in them the act of writing. But the point of Deleuzian immanence is “the rupture in the very relation between the image and action,” that is, between what you see and any action. The achievement of the cinema apparatus is not that it accomplishes the feat of embodying the intention in the work but that it accomplishes the feat of keeping the intention out of the work.

What if Michaels, in some small part of himself and irrespective of what he maintains on the page, believes that this forty-year scholarly project might equally have been pursued not in the direction of an ever-expanding notion of intention but in the direction of an ever-diminishing one, a direction whose end would be its elimination altogether?

During the Vietnam War, Allan Sekula sought to renovate social realism, a practice he associated with Lewis Hine, whom he called a “realist mystic.” Sekula objected to representations of social misery that make reference to religious iconography. Against Sekula, I argue that Hine’s practice illuminates the indispensability of idealizing means to political identification with or confrontation by a solidaristic “we.” The question remains: How to secure the benefit of a beatifying tradition of religious representation without world-transcending implications? How to produce an adequate social analysis without the dispassion of objectivity?