Transformative Technologies, Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Is the avant-garde dead, defunct, an attitude belonging to a past whose bearings on the present have been lost once and for all? Or does it always await us, coming toward us from a future whose shape is as yet undetermined and open? The first option seems inevitable if we link the idea of the avant-garde to modernism as it exploded on the scene in the 1920s and 30s, and if we see it as a defined and historically circumscribed style with a definite set of questions that can surely no longer be ours within the space of postmodernity, where the artistic gestures of the early twentieth century seem hopelessly naïve. But if we try to detach the impetus of the avant-garde from what has paradoxically enough become its heritage, if we unearth its problems rather than its solutions, then we could perhaps incline towards the second option: the avant-garde is neither alive nor dead, but always there, virtually, waiting to be redefined and reinvented anew.

On the level of historiography, the advent of postmodernity above all brought about a (perhaps paradoxical) reinvigoration of the writing of modernism's history. If we have somehow detached ourselves from modernism and modernity (concepts whose earlier evident mutual implication has also been questioned), then all writing of history becomes an acute and normative investment in the present. It tells us not only where we came from and how it all began, but is just as much meant to stake out a course for the future and to prescribe certain acts and practices as more relevant, contemporary (in the sense of being cum, "with," the movement of time), and legitimate than others.

Surveying this literature with any exhaustiveness is an impossible task. I will present three different ways of perceiving the problem of the avant-garde in order to put my own argument in perspective. Two of them, Matei Calinescu's and Peter Bürger's, are fundamentally negative, whereas the third, Hal Foster's, attempts to rethink the issue of the future of the past in a new and radical way and thus prepares for my own (modest) proposal for a redefinition of the avant-garde.

Three perspectives
In his Five Faces of Modernity (1977), Matei Calinescu provides us with a detailed analysis of the historical vicissitudes of the term "avant-garde," from the French Revolution and the first use of the term with reference to art in the circle around Henri de Saint-Simon—where it denoted a fusion of artistic, scientific, and political radicality under the banner of the spearhead-artist—through its shifting uses in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. What Calinescu discerns in this process, however, is a conflict between modernism, where a viable and productive connection to the past is preserved, and the avant-garde, which attempts to disrupt the concept of art and its institutional framework. What began in the early nineteenth century as a quest for a constructive synthesis ends a century later with a furious negativity: Beginning as a promise and ending as almost a parody, avant-gardism constitutes an inner derailing of modernism and Calinescu does not regret its eventual demise and fade-out.

This rather negative interpretation, its finely nuanced analyses of many historical documents notwithstanding, still leaves us with the question of the status of the avant-garde in the present.1 As is often case in this type of analysis, Calinescu starts off with a kind of saturation of the concept under scrutiny—its essential variations, negative and positive, have been played out, the case is closed, and the owl of Minerva spreads her wings in the dusk of historiographical discourse.

For Peter Bürger, the genealogical parameters of analysis are rather different but his final analysis will remain just as negative as Calinescu's. In his pathbreaking Theorie der Avant-garde (1974), he situates the his-torical avant-garde (exemplified for Bürger by movements like Surrealism, Constructivism, or Duchamp's readymade) against the background of a gradually developing æsthetic autonomy where art only refers to itself. This was already theoretically formulated by Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790) but reached its full-blown form in the last decades of the nineteenth century in Symbolism and l'art pour l'art, with Mallarmé's poésie pure as the most obvious case. The historical avant-garde attempts to break with this situation and sublate the institution "art," not just to criticize the inadequacy of some particular medium (painting, poetry, etc.), but to reconnect art and life in a program for a new æsthetico-political life-world. Needless to say, this project failed (and some of its proponents paid bitterly for this, in many cases with their own lives), but its consequences for posterior history are limitless, since it instituted what we could call the limitless expansion and solidification of art as an institution. The historical avant-garde failed in a tragic way, but the neo-avant-garde movements that Bürger traces from the late fifties and onwards failed (or perhaps even succeeded) in another way that he calls parodic (the schema for this analysis is derived from Marx's Louis Bonaparte's 18th brumaire). The revolt is no longer aimed at art as institution, but now takes place inside the safe haven of these now fully developed institutions—the barriers between art and life are torn down inside art itself, and the neo-avant-garde is at best naïve, at worst cynical.

Bürger's model (which is obviously much more nuanced and richly detailed than comes across in this brief summary) might, however, lead to a kind of post-historical quietism. The neo-avant-garde, and with it all of the present, is condemned to an endless self-deception, and Bürger occa-sionally seems to retreat to a Hegelian position: What remains is not the produc-tion of new works, but an æsthetico-philosophical reflection on past works. At the end of the book, Bürger talks about the "limitless availability" of artistic means today, which puts into question the possi-bility of a coherent æsthetic theory in the sense it has come down to us from Kant and Hegel to Adorno. Neither art nor æsthetic theory seems to have any options left but to contemplate its own demise in the increasing leveling and repressive desublimation of late capitalist culture.

In the third perspective, proposed by Hal Foster in his Return of the Real (1996), there is still hope for a return of the avant-garde, although the sense of "return" will here render the historical evidence more complex. Against Bürger, Foster argues that we should not hypostatize any given moment as the origin of a full-blown avant-garde in relation to which all subsequent "neo" movements would be mere repetitions or representations. In fact, the moment of the avant-garde is only constituted, Foster argues, by being repeated and "comprehended," as it were, in a later phase. The major piece of evidence is of course Marcel Duchamp, who only becomes the historically decisive "Duchamp" he is for us through a series of re-readings and reappraisals begun in the late 50s and extending up to the present day. In this sense, nothing is ever fully "there," nothing is given at once together with all of its sense. The law of history becomes a deferred story, constantly told in a retroactive way.

Foster paints this rather more complex picture by way of Freud's conception of "deferred action" (Nachträglichkeit), especially as this is (re)interpreted in Lacan's 1964 seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The traumatic encounter with the Real, Lacan argues, can only be a missed encounter; we always arrive too late or too early, and the Real can only be that which returns through repetition. In the same way, the trauma caused by the irruption of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century can only be understood and its sense fully unfolded within the neo-avant-garde.

Against Bürger's rather simplistically linear model, which always perceives temporal sequence as causal and the second moment as straightforwardly derived from the first, Foster's argument is a good one. The problem is, however, that he himself hypostatizes another moment, namely the 60s and its classical conceptual strategies, as the moment of a true critical retrieval of the historical avant-garde. Even though this is not intended by Foster, his argument seems to produce the same reading of our present as Bürger's did in relation to the 60s; the moment of truth is always already past and it becomes difficult to grasp the present. Would it be possible for Foster to argue that current artistic forms "repeat" and "comprehend" those of the 60s without stretching the argument too far? He never really addresses the issue of how, indeed if, the structure of deferred action extends into our present, and perhaps this is because such an argument tends to condemn the present to a negative afterlife.

Art's sense of historicity indeed seems weak today, and most of the arguments which have propelled the avant-garde throughout modernity—a powerful historical logic premised in part on medium-specific self-criticism tending towards formal breakthroughs—seem exhausted. If there is radicality today, it is no doubt located in what Foster terms "horizontal" as opposed to "vertical" strategies, which use art as a means for intervention into specific debates and pay less attention to the dimension of art historical mediation and the inner workings of representation and of the "signifier." If we remain within vertically reflexive self-criticism, art will continue to speak of its own history and inevitably end up in an ivory tower of formalism—but if we opt for pure horizontality, we will succumb to the inverse illusion of immediacy and transparency. To take us out of this dilemma, Foster proposes the notion of "parallax" as a way to keep both of these—equally necessary—dimensions in balance. This seems however more like a way of rephrasing and circumscribing the problem than solving it. Avant-garde temporality seems exhausted and we enter into a kind of "weak thought," as Gianni Vattimo calls it, where we can only witness with melancholy (or delight, depending on one's position) the dispersal of the idea of the avant-garde.

The time of the virtual
We noted how Foster in his critique of Bürger's linear model of history and its latent Hegelianism proposed his own model of history derived from an analogy with the notion of deferred action in Freud and Lacan, where the trauma need not be (and in its most radical version cannot be) present at first, but is only registered afterwards, in repetition. Faced with the objection that modeling history on consciousness is too traditional a move, Foster turns the tables and proposes that we should use this objection as a spring-board and conceive of history on the basis of the most radical and sophisticated model of consciousness available. Thus we find Freud and Lacan usurping the place of Hegel.

It may be allowed to ask just how radical this displacement is, especially given Lacan's well-known dependence on Hegel. In fact, we might find ourselves locked in an inverted dialectic (which is of course Hegel once more), where each new moment is understood as a delayed proxy of another moment, a past reconstructed and "comprehended" (one senses the closeness to Hegel's Aufhebung in this word) in repetition. Perhaps we should attempt, especially when the idea of the avant-garde is at stake, to experiment with other ideas of time and experience more radically dissociated from dialectics. If Foster's analysis delivers us from one kind of historicism, it may lead us into another, namely a kind of infinite analysis (which also threatened Freud), where we will live in an always displaced present. When we ask the question of the avant-garde in historical retrospective, the answer seems pre-programmed: The "historical" avant-garde is, by definition, always on its way to exhaustion, even though it may be repeated and resituated and give rise to diabolically complex forms of reception and to "infinite analyses" where the transfer between analyst and patient trigger ever new problems. Put this way, the question opens onto an abyssal complexity—repetitions of repetitions, an originary scene which recedes ever further back while also insisting to be reproduced in the historian's own discourse as the mirage of the origin—but never onto the question of the present, let alone the question of the future.

But what could be the avant-garde's relation to time if we abandon both the cumulative time of Bürger and negative-dialectical time of Foster? Other conceivable temporalities could be the time of deprivation and withdrawal, which Jean-François Lyotard has attempted to unearth in Kant's theory of the sublime, or, what I will propose here: the time of the virtual. This idea has been put forth by Gilles Deleuze, partly based on a reading of Bergson but also going far beyond this original context, and has been picked up by, for instance, John Rajchman in his recent book Constructions (1998). The time of the virtual would be that which doubles the present with another untimely time, creating, as it were, a swarm of divergent possibilities; or as Rajchman puts it, "quite small 'virtual futures,' which deviate from things known, inserting the chance of indetermination where there once existed only definite probabilities." The question of the virtual would bear upon what is set free in the present, on new modes of thought becoming possible in the blank interstices of the present as it is wrested open— not just toward an art historical past, but towards a much more indeterminate field of forces, technologies, and social movements. Thought within this time of such a virtuality, the question of the avant-garde need not be posed within the history of forms or styles, since this is what immediately makes it old (awakening the demon of precursors) or turns it into a cynical quest for the "new," which turn out to be the same thing.

A problem with such a re-definition is that the very word "avant-garde" has always tended to imply linear conceptions, a troop advancing ahead, going beyond a front line stretched out before us in a terrain that is essentially already known. Already in the first century A.D., Frontinus's Stratagemata established a close connection between warfare and Euclidean geometry that has remained in our imaginary. Perhaps we need to think otherwise, the art of war having undergone tremendous changes and no longer relating to surface battles with perceptible front lines, spatially iso-lated fragments, and massings of force. Why not rethink the issue of the avant-garde based on telewars ("war in the age of intel-ligent machines," as Manuel De Landa would have it) and current models of con-flict, with the battlefield as a function of global conflicts and much of the actual contact taking place over immense dis-tances, dislocalizing the space-time of the experiencing body? This would be a multi-dimensional space, with other and highly variable geometries, differently organized surfaces, times, and velocities, all overlaid in a new way. In such a war-space, there is no obvious "ahead," no clear avant or arrière since what counts as the terrain is itself a function of strategy. The question would then be whether the very concept "avant-garde" here loses all pertinence, or if something else could be thought in this concept (and on what grounds could we be denied this right?). If we suppose that such new conceptual connections can be forged, then the sense of directionality would here be very different, just as the connection to a surrounding milieu would require a new permeability and topology. No matter how difficult this is to think, the avant-garde would no longer be thought of as advanc-ing into a terrain ahead of us and negating what lies behind it, but as the actualization of a different type of space, the kind of "smooth" space defined by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the nomadic war machine, irreducible to the "striated" and sedentary space of the imperial war machine.

On the basis of such notions, which no doubt need to be defined much more clearly, I believe another formula ought to be tested: not "what is" or "what was" the avant-garde, but what could it become? If this still involves historical repetition, re-actualization, etc., then we need to think of this as a repetition coming from a still undetermined future. As Foster says, we may repeat in order to free ourselves from a present felt to be stagnant, but it should be noted that we do so to free ourselves from both the past and the present by confronting those unknown powers that approach us from the future (as Deleuze would say, the future is not of the order of the possible, where actualization takes place in the image of the idea, but of the virtual, a becoming which doubles history with a stratum of the "counter-historical," a dimension of the "untimely").

To think the question of the avant-garde in this way would imply seeing the devel-opment of art in its different historical con-stellations as a way of acting on extra- artistic materials (technologies, social structures) which are themselves in con-stant mutation. The unfolding of the "histor-ical" avant-garde would in this sense by no means just constitute a negative response to the solidification of the institution "art" (as Bürger would have it), but rather a way of capturing, reconfiguring, and prolonging other movements in society. The autonomy of art lies precisely in its capacity to cap-ture its outside as an inside, and vice versa. The avant-garde is the name of this trans-formation, this capture whereby the respec-tive values of the inside (the æsthetic) and the outside (that which is acted upon) both change. And the important thing is the transformation, not the name.

What would be those new forces that art attempts to capture and appropriate? With due precaution, we could perhaps point to a few of these domains. The most pervasive fact throughout the history of the various avant-garde movements, as well as in the present, is the force of technological change. Each fundamental technological mutation seems to release a corresponding transformative artistic energy. An example would be Walter Benjamin's constructivist appraisal of industrial reproduction technologies and the possibility of new and "non-auratic" forms of art outside of the confines of classical æsthetics. In Benjamin, these possibilities seem to be deduced almost immediately out of the technology itself (which was also one of the charges made against him by Adorno). Thirty years later, Conceptual Art (and to some extent Pop Art as well) was to be propelled by similar motifs, less emphatically but also with an unmistakably utopian flavor. In the age of mass-mediatized reproduction, art was to be made accessible to everyone. As a dematerialized flow of information, it was to contribute to radical democracy, if not in relation to real economies, then at least within the symbolically-charged sphere of the production and circulation of artworks. These hopes were of course just as vain as Benjamin's, but perhaps we should focus less on shattered dreams than on the kind of movements they make possible—an explosion of new artistic gestures and strategies that we without doubt see as "avant-garde," and that we are still working through today (perhaps also "repeating" and "comprehending" in Foster's sense).

That today's information technologies release the same transformative energies is clear. The utopias—and the naïvetés—are analogous, as are the visions of a new "anarchism" predicated upon the dissolution of the system producer-consumer, the leveling of æsthetic hierarchies, the new metaphysics of networks, and an economy less and less focused on the materiality of the consumer object. (In fact, in their emphasis on the commodity as sign or mark, many models of the current economy that take as their framework the semiotic-psychic political economy of the sign rather than classical political economy seem to come straight out of Jean Baudrillard's early work. These theories had an almost overwhelming presence in art discourse in the 80s, but were dismissed by many as too apocalyptic and dystopian. Today they seem revived almost in the guise of normality.) An artistic avant-garde—regardless of whether it would accept such a term, or perhaps precisely because it would reject it scornfully—will no doubt insert itself into this sphere of circulation, as if both to destabilize and accelerate it, just as the avant-garde in the early twentieth century broke down traditional æsthetic form in order to adapt us to a new techno-industrial plateau (the analysis of which has been undertaken in great detail by Manfredo Tafuri). But before this is determined and made recog-nizable as critical intervention, submission, ironic complicity, or something else, it is above all a place of indeterminacy, a place where art changes, and a zone of temporary formlessness which gives rise to new modes of construction, subjectivity, and experience. On an even more speculative level, we could add recent developments in biology and biotechnology. Here we encounter the limit of traditional humanism, where the form "Man" appears more dubious than ever (as was already presaged by Michel Foucault some three decades ago). The possible convergence between a biotech-nical and informational paradigm will surely have tremendous impact on the arts, some of which have been charted by Katherine Hayles in relation to literature in her recent How We Became Posthuman (1999). A visionary forerunner would here be the exhibition Les immatériaux curated by Jean-François Lyotard at the Pompidou Center in 1985, which dealt with the new sense of "immaterials," the transformation of materiality and physicality into waves, flows, and packages of information. It is surely in this dimension that we should seek the "sublime" and the "unpresentable" that Lyotard (in his famous 1983 essay) claimed constitutes the underlying momentum of the avant-garde, and not exclusively in what made up that particular essay's examples.2

These technological mutations have to be understood as both emanating from and reacting upon the social changes resulting from multinational capitalism in its globalized phase (which was pointed out by Fredric Jameson in his classic essay on the cultural logic of late capitalism, written the same year as Lyotard's essay on the sublime). Today we are witnessing the rapid dissolution of an Occidental art historical narrative that has been at the basis of most theories of the dialectical movement of form and materials. This means not only the end of the traditional dialectic between mass culture and modernism but also of the mantra of the "dissolution" of the border between them, as it has been diagnosed, cherished, and feared since the Frankfurt School of the 30s. What we require is a new analysis of the situation and its possibilities after the breaking up of the mono-cultures that previously contained the high-low dialectic and whose downfalls mark the end of the idea of a unified public space, now mutating into proliferating sub-systems. Criticism, debates, and patterns of publishing will change as intellectual communities become less rooted in language, place, or nation. It would, of course, be erroneous to think that entities like the nation-state simply would disappear. As Saskia Sassen has demonstrated, these changes bring about a restructuring of the state apparatus, with new forms of centrality, control, and monitoring in a space of "electrotecture" characterized by new interfaces of physicality and informatics and by new urban forms and trajectories.

As Sassen argues, decentralization and centralization do not form exclusionary opposites, but rather complementary poles in a new world system that will not be more democratic than before, just characterized by new conflicts. To remain within the art world, these changes are reflected in the formation of a new elite of "curators." It would be false to downplay this change by pointing to the long tradition of museum curating. Historical analogies will not help us chart this territory because the function is new: not to preserve the old, but to organize and systematize the production of new things and symbols in the circulation of the art world. The curatorial function expresses the increasing professionalization of this world, and its increasing emphasis on self-regulatory mechanisms. The system of biennials, triennials, etc., indicates the extent to which the institution produces goods meant for internal circulation and evaluation, and dispenses with the classical notion of an "audience." (To some, this may in fact look like a perverse realization of Kosuth's 1969 statement that, like science, advanced experimental art does not have an audience since it is primarily directed towards other artists.)

It would be easy to provide moralistic comments on this situation, but it would also be misleading. There is no reason to see the loss of earlier functions as purely catastrophic, as if our capacity to perceive and grasp works of art would be uniquely tied to certain historical modes of production and distribution. Older systems of selection and presentation—from the gradual demise of jury systems and the birth of the avant-garde in its various attempts to create new systems, both democratic and elitistic—are just as much or as little repressive as current systems. Today's avant-garde faces the formidable task of inventing new situations, modes of production, and reception. Such an avant-garde no doubt exists, and it will be both like and unlike the one that once appeared as the "historic" avant-garde at the beginning of the previous century. Those outer forc­es—technologies, economies, and power relations—that it works over, appropriates, and transforms are themselves in constant movement.

1. It should be noted, however, that Calinescu systematically disregards most movements from the early nineteenth century when an avant-garde position—even though the word may not have been used as such—implied a constructive renewal and reconsidering of artistic practice rather than mere destruction.
2. The emphasis on Barnett Newman has done great damage to Lyotard's argument, since it gives the impression that the sublime would have an essential connection to certain late modernist painting, which it does not. The question Newman relays to us is that of the now ("What is now?" "Is it happening?" etc.) and even though for Lyotard these questions are registered in Newman's vertical "zips" of color, these questions need not be inscribed in these particular forms for us.

Sven-Olov Wallenstein is a philosopher and an art critic living in Stockholm. He teaches art theory at the University College of Arts and Crafts and philosophy at the University of Södertörn, both located in Stockholm. He is co-founder of the Art Node Foundation in Stockholm and a contributing editor of Cabinet.


Copied from www.cabinetmagazine.org, issue 2 "Mapping Conversations", Spring 2001

Between Agitation and Animation: Activism and Participation in Twentieth Century Art, Stella Rollig

"Down with art that aspires to be nothing more than a spot of beauty on the ugly lives of the rich. Down with art that tries to be a glittering stone in the merciless and dirty lives of the poor. Down with art whose sole purpose is to escape a life not worth living. Work for life and not for palaces, cathedrals, cemeteries and museums. Work in the midst of all and with everyone."
Alexander Rodtschenko, Slogans, 1920/21


If one is involved with art history, then the dominant theme of the nineties - the saga of radical change along with paradigm change - seems to be less radical New Art and more about refocusing on the determination of that which counts as contemporary and relevant. In fact, what is happening is an updating of the discourses and practices with which artists were involved during the entire twentieth century.

At the beginning stands the project of modernism: committed to the spirit of the enlightenment, progress-oriented, optimistic and justice-conscious. A pre-view was already staged in one of the century's first theatre plays, Chekhov's "Three Sisters," written in 1900 and premiered in spring of 1901. Even these unhappy figures, who with their rudimentary education are cut off from all intellectual discourse in their empty provincial Russian nest, still feel the utopia of the turn of the century. In the future, happy people will exist who will no longer be able to imagine how miserably those - from today's perspective pre-modern - people, lived.

When the Revolution transformed Czarist Russia into the Soviet Republic in 1917, artists were heavily involved in designing the new society. Lenin himself repeatedly referred to the significance of their role.
In their central demands, the constructivists followed the same objectives as the entire European avant-garde after World War I: to unite art and life and to break from the indifferent autonomy of the nineteenth century's bourgeois salon art.

However, different countries and movements have attached different significance to the impulses for this break and have connected it to diverse political, social, institutional-critical or individualist demands.
To clarify: Even the Italian futurist's project was a political one, although it was tied to a deep-seated elitism, nationalism and fascism. Even the futurists were calling art back into life. In the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 there is a statement similar to Rodtschenko's: "We want to destroy the museums." Yet Marinetti also goes on to state: "We want to praise militarism, patriotism and war, the only hygiene of the world." The individual exists here merely as the man at the steering wheel; the masses are cast as extras in the stage light of glorious industrialization.

The futurists are often put forward as counter examples when art as social intervention is defined as primarily a project of the left. The futurists, however, were not concerned with actual human standards of living. Umberto Boccioni wrote in 1910, in a manifesto that follows along with Marinetti: "Human suffering interests us to the same degree as the suffering of an electric light bulb, whose trembling ends with a heart-thumping screech of color."

The critical, emancipative and enlightening claim that we identify with art as social intervention leads to its assessment as a leftist project. But what is leftist? The Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio published an essay in 1994 with the subtitle "right and left." In it, he describes the twin concepts as necessities ever after the end of state communism in Europe, at a time of economic interests' unchallenged priority over political course setting. Bobbio comes to the conclusion that it is in no way obsolete to associate the left with freedom, equality and fraternity.

Of course, also in leftist theory, the claim to social shaping through art is controversial. In the philosophy of the Frankfurter Schule there are clearly divergent views. On one hand it is obvious that there is no pure consciousness and no consciousness outside of economically determined power structures. It is still, however, remarkable that in the context of the authority-critical and trial-like art of the nineties, also projects, actions, texts and other non-object forms have long serviced their own markets. Similarly, often our own ideological character is the blind spot overlooked in the process of ideological critique.

Theodor W. Adorno assumed that art in the age of the mass media and culture industry would dissolve into a popular culture that is understandable and accessible to the masses and into a thin, mysterious and retreating avant-garde, whose hermeneutics and elitism it would defend as a reservoir of resistance. In this, he denies the possibility of an emancipative-participatory practice of art which transverses art.

Herbert Marcuse, on the other hand, sees particularly in this marginality and peripheral position of art its affirmative character - as a demarcated zone in which societal problems and neuroses can be acted out without consequences. - Once again, nothing effectuating social change. Jürgen Habermas speaks of a "false revocation of the separation of art and life," in which he meets Marcuse's "repressive de-sublimation," which means the loosening of social coercion for the purpose of better economic and institutional control.

That many of the Frankfurter Schule's ideas no longer apply in the current context has to do with the changes of the media, power structures, the creation of more and more partial audiences and forms of information and communication. The kind of problem that artists of the left must confront, for example, is culturalization - the transposing of virulent conflicts into art events. What do events such as "Film Day Against Racism" or "Anti-Xenophobia Clubbing" mean?

For Norberto Bobbio, the concept of equality is central to a contemporary leftist worldview. Art's connection to leftist guiding principles can take place on various levels. For one, in the message formulated by a work: famous historical examples are George Grosz' brutal portraits of capitalists or the worker-frescos of Diego Rivera. However, the effort to make the art business less elitist is also leftist, as was attempted for example by the "Art Workers Coalition" in New York after 1969, when it took up opposition to the white-herrscher attitude of the Museum of Modern Art. Or collaboration between artists and non-artists.
In the countless manifestos of the Russian constructivists, equality is formulated as solidarity among artists, architects and writers together with workers and farmers. The professed commonality however, besides being a very generously described aim of communist society, remains unclear.

In 1920, Tatlin announced the program of the "Productivists' Group," in which he turns against the increasing individualism of the constructivists. And in 1923, the Magazine LEF (Left Art Front), founded by Wladimir Majakowski warned: "Constructivists! Beware of degenerating into a school of aesthetics.... Production artists! Beware of becoming artisans for the applied arts. Learn from the workers while you are teaching them. Your school is the factory."
Popular art history reduced Russian constructivism to Malewitsch's "Black Square," perhaps also including Tatlin's "Tower"-design. Rodtschenko is marketed today as a photographer and Warwara Stepanowa's worker's clothing is shown at art and fashion shows next to Elsa Schiaparelli. And the term "Production Art" is rarely ever used today in the sense of an interaction between artists and industrial workers on equal levels.

The problem that resurfaced toward the end of the nineties was also not solvable at the beginning of left art: equality among artists and non-artists in projects conceived of and carried out by artists remains a fiction. Alexander Rodtschenko and Warwara Stepanowa, unlike other constructivists, consciously give up painting; yet even these production artists finally see themselves as teachers and graphic designers who work for and not with the population. Their pedagogic idealism is to be seen in the image-language which they and others, among them Majakowski, developed for the illiterate and which is used as political propaganda as well as for advertising.

In the equal positioning of the fine and the applied arts, the Russian revolutionary artists are related to art producers of the nineties. With one difference: If an artist, for example a woman artist, creates graphic art today, then that is most probably for a catalogue, flyer, brochure or other means of communication within the art industry. The kind of worker's association that Rodtschenko developed in 1925, the Club for Cultural Workers, corresponds today to the "Depot - Art and Discussion" in Vienna which was set up in 1994 by the artist Josef Dabernig.

In the European/US-American writing of art history, constructivism is seen as a formal-ism among other -isms. However, in the space of time from the turn of the century until Soviet isolation under Stalin (Lenin died in 1924) there had been a flourishing exchange of political ideas between Russian and German artists. The manifesto, for example, of the German "November-Gruppe," founded after the failed revolution in November 1918, was influenced by the Russians. Their guidelines, published in 1919, could have been taken from the New York "Art Workers Coalition's" 1969 manifesto and are also consistent with current demands:

"We want a voice and an active roll in:
All architectural projects as a matter of general interest: in city planning, in new developments, in public administration buildings, industry, social constructions, in private building projects...
The reorganization of art academies and their curricula, ...the selection of teachers by artists' associations together with the students...
The transformation of museums: eliminating prejudice from collection policies, putting a stop to the purchasing of objects which are only valuable to scholars... the transformation of museums into art centers for the general public...
Accessibility of art halls: eliminating privileges and halting the influence of privilege and capitalism...
Legislation in artists' affairs: rights for artists as inventors of ideas, protection of artists' ownership, doing away with all taxes on art works."

Not long thereafter, the "November-Gruppe" was attacked by "Opponents of the November-Gruppe" for being false revolutionaries. Today, their challengers are more prominent: Otto Dix, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch. And with this it was possible to move on to dada: to the dada movement which of course can only be understood with a much more anarchist political concept than constructivism, which dada associated mainly with the rejection of the bourgeoisie.

The ideology of constructivism had already begun to fade in the inter-war period. As of the late twenties, three concepts became the three main coordinates of art: abstraction, realism and surrealism.

Popular art historical works are picture books. Since art, through to the present, has for the most part produced images and objects, its content continues to be falsified through the convention of illustration. Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes and Roy Lichtenstein's paintings of typeset copies are reproduced in art books' chapter on the sixties. What is not shown? For example the neighborhood projects that Stephen Willats has carried out since the mid-sixties with tenants of English housing developments in which he examines, together with them, their living conditions.

The picture book as form of mediation is the side effect of an art system whose core functions through tradable goods. All major institutions within this system need an art that is transmittable through individual objects: the museums, art halls, auction houses, galleries, the accompanying magazine, etc. As soon as artists produce something other than transportable and representable objects or installations, they fall out of art historic mediation and canonization. Their visibility and with it the extent of their effectiveness is limited.

Only recently has the historical phase of concept art been dealt with by museums - the exhibition "Reconsidering the Object of Art" on the period 1965 - 1975 took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1996. In 1997 Catherine David designed a documenta with a conceptual-political focus. Yet the transmission of the history of ideas is always insufficient. Why is Jeff Koons known but not Dan Graham; why is Anselm Kiefer a star while no one has ever heard of Robert Smithson?

A history of activism and participation in twentieth century art: an 'other' art history with a focus on participatory interventions with critical-emancipative intention. It is clear that the constructivists and productivists can only be credited as pre-participatory art, after which they must form the base for such a story.

Why is it at all necessary to rewrite art history? Must the established canon be changed?

Shedding a new light on the historical bases and writing critical artistic practices into art history: only on this basis can art history carry weight and find a new, sustainable definition. Without this historical consciousness, it remains possible to attack socially and politically motivated art, by which authority is legitimated by turning back to an aesthetically oriented art history. In autumn of 1998 in Austria, one such attack was made by the former dean of the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst. Art's capabilities consist, Rudolf Burger wrote, "only of sensually sympathizing with individual problem moments, of symbolic or allegorical illustration, and this only in retrospect." Everything else is deemed nonsense. Or non-art.

Between agitation and animation. Activism and participation in twentieth century art:
The Duden dictionary for German foreign words and phrases explains agitation as a compelling advertisement for certain political views, animation as invigoration and excitement, activism as the emphasis of purposeful behavior and participation as (temporary) involvement.
Like agitation, activism is usually based on some pre-formulated, mostly politically defined goal, while participation claims to be nothing more than someone playing a role in some process, some event, some business that could also be at a profit or loss in an economic sense. Participatory practices in art are developed fundamentally as a result of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Whatever artists are dissatisfied with is followed by a characteristic offering of participation and enabling the participants a degree of self-determination. Participation can be based on the equality of rights and competencies and can be distributed in the sense of the allocation of social capital (knowledge, skills) to real or presumed underprivileged groups. Or animation: whereas animation - in an entertainment-oriented Club Med style, in which artists guide free-time activities - is a somewhat crude description for art projects. Art's recent 'festivalization' has offered us a number of such spectacles.

After World War II, a participatory concept of art found further development, above all in interdisciplinary collaborations.
At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, USA, the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the musician John Cage and the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, among others, met each other. They developed - partly together and partly individually - works with participatory approaches. In 1952 Cage composed "4' 33''", a piece which consisted only of sounds from the concert hall. The same year, Rauschenberg painted his "White Paintings," whose integral component is the shadow of the observer. In both works, the audience was quasi instrumentalized and not individually active. That may appear insufficient by today's standards, yet historically it was a preliminary step. These examples are also interesting for a more precise definition. Without an audience, neither "4' 33''" nor "White Paintings" can exist at all, exist completely or make any sense. The extent of audience participation in projects is a question that has been very current in Austria since the early nineties. When does an artwork become an artwork? Was it when the artist Christine Hill opened her second-hand boutique - as she did in Berlin and then at the documenta X - or was it when someone first bought an article of clothing there? In any case, Hill does not define her "Volksboutique" as an installation but as a realm for social communication.

Even fluxus events and happenings were oriented on participation, yet the amount of audience participation followed lines that had been predetermined by the artist. As a result, participation sometimes meant touching the art objects and rearranging them. The German Franz Erhard Walther displays objects, often textiles with choreographic instructions - which is related to Franz West's concept of sculpture in which significance is first given by handling the objects.

This concept of participation does not of course necessarily open up a social realm.
In the sixties, the emancipation movement made an immediate dynamic impact on art. In North America, above all in the USA, the civil rights movement influenced the art scene decisively: the women's movement, the protests against the war on Vietnam, the struggle for the rights of ethnic minorities, black power. Grassroots organizations were formed, citizens organized. In 1969 artists founded the "Art Workers Coalition" after a conflict with the Museum of Modern Art. Soon the coalition organized protests and events on museum policies, the representation of women and persons of color in the art world, the neglect of the socially disadvantaged in terms of cultural offerings and last but not least, also against the Vietnam war. These actions were however not declared to be art works. The members - among them Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Lucy Lippard - also carried out their work individually. At the same time, Vito Acconci was staging participatory actions with underlying political content. He spent every night for four weeks in spring 1971 on a lonely pier on the Hudson and invited the public to visit him between one and two in the morning when he would then tell them a secret. The visitor became an ally, at the mercy of the artist.

One consequence of the emancipation movement was in the cultural field of integration with less privileged groups. They were encouraged to formulate their own ideas and to find their own cultural expression. "Giving a voice" is the corresponding parole. In 1978 in a slum in South Bronx, the artist Stefan Eins founded his art studio "Fashion Moda," which became a cultural pressure cooker in which graffiti, rap, popular culture and high art were all steamed together.

Numerous related projects and initiatives can be cited: in the beginning of the eighties, the "Group Material" from the store gallery on the Lower Eastside or Tim Rollins and his collaboration with the black ghetto youths under the label "K.O.S." (Kids of Survival). In the mid-eighties, the social pressure under conservative Reagonomics and the tragedy of the Aids epidemic politically remobilized the US art scene. With "ACT UP," the "Aids Coalition to Unleash Power," artists, cultural workers and other activists worked together on strategies against the repression of the Aids crisis by the government and the increasing hysterical homophobia and art-xenophobia among politicians. "Art is not enough," proclaimed the artist-activist collective "Gran Fury."

Art or not art - in the urgency of activism, these questions were the last to be asked and would first resurface when Aids activists' propaganda posters turned up in museums.

The dominant figure of the art-politics-participation debate in Germany never doubted the status of art. With Joseph Beuys, everything was art: from his enigmatic objects to his candidacy for the Green party, from his autistic-seeming performances to the founding of the "Freien Internationalen Hochschule für Kreativität und interdisziplinäre Forschung" ("Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research") in 1974.

Art - art concepts - political practice: When is something considered art? When is it accepted and by whom? In the New Genre Public Art, or art in the public interest, as it has been practiced in collaboration with representatives of special audiences and interest groups since the eighties in the USA, the insistence on the status of art is tied to the claim of a struggle. This is also true of the seemingly endless applications of art practices in the nineties in Europe, where everything, from a charitable measure to a party, from a lecture to an interview, can be defined as art.

Since February 2000, or since the right wing, national-populist government took office in Austria, artists have played a significant role in the resistance. Interestingly, the status of art in these projects and initiatives is not even an issue.
Is it necessary to draw the conclusion that political practice by artists is only considered art when it's about nothing serious? Even within a progressive scene, the absence of a sense of history has its drawbacks. What was initially called the re-politicization of art in the nineties was rejected by various sources as a fading trend at the end of the decade - not only for conspicuously conservative reasons. The demand for an 'other' art history is also directed against this.


Further literature in:
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (ed.): "Art in Theory. An Anthology of Changing Ideas" (Oxford/UK, Cambridge/USA 1992, 1993)
Norberto Bobbio: "Rechts und Links. Gründe und Bedeutungen einer politischen Unterscheidung" (Berlin, 1994)

Above copied from:http://eipcp.net/transversal/0601/rollig/en

After the End of Art, Arthur C. Danto

Introduction: Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary

At roughly the same moment, but quite in ignorance of one another's thought, the German art historian Hans Belting and I both published texts on the end of art.(1) Each of us had arrived at a vivid sense that some momentous historical shift had taken place in the productive conditions of the visual arts, even if, outwardly speaking, the institutional complexes of the art world--the galleries, the art schools, the periodicals, the museums, the critical establishment, the curatorial--seemed relatively stable. Belting has since published an amazing book, tracing the history of devotional images in the Christian West from late Roman times until about A.D. 1400, to which he gave the striking subtitle The Image before the Era of Art. It was not that those images were not art in some large sense, but their being art did not figure in their production, since the concept of art had not as yet really emerged in general consciousness, and such images--icons, really--played quite different role in the lives of people than works of art came to play when the concept at last emerged and something like aesthetic considerations began to govern our relationships to them. They were not even thought of as art in the elementary sense of having been produced by artists--human beings putting marks on surfaces--but were regarded as having a miraculous provenance, like the imprinting of Jesus's image on Veronica's veil.(2) There would then have been a profound discontinuity between artistic practices before and after the era of art had begun, since the concept of the artist did not enter into the explanation of devotional images,(3) but of course the concept of the artist became central in the Renaissance, to the point that Giorgio Vasari was to write a great book on the lives of the artists. Before then there would at best have been the lives of the dabbling saints.

If this is at all thinkable, then there might be another discontinuity, no less profound, between the art produced during the era of art and art produced after that era ended. The era of art did not begin abruptly in 1400, nor did it end sharply either, sometime before the mid-1980s when Belting's and my texts appeared respectively in German and in English. Neither of us, perhaps, had as clear an idea as we now might have, ten years later, of what we were trying to say, but, now that Belting has come forward with the idea of art before the beginning of art, we might think about art after the end of art, as if we were emerging from the era of art into something else the exact shape and structure of which remains to be understood.

Neither of us intended our observations as a critical judgment regarding the art of our time. In the eighties, certain radical theorists had taken up the theme of the death of painting and had based their judgment on the claim that advanced painting seemed to show all the signs of internal exhaustion, or at least marked limits beyond which it was not possible to press. They were thinking of Robert Ryman's more or less all-white paintings, or perhaps the aggressive monotonous stripe paintings of the French artist Daniel Buren; and it would be difficult not to consider their account as in some way a critical judgment, both on those artists and on the practice of painting in general. But it was quite consistent with the end of the era of art, as Belting and I understood it, that art should be extremely vigorous and show no sign whatever of internal exhaustion. Ours was a claim about how one complex of practices had given way to another, even if the shape of the new complex was still unclear--is still unclear. Neither of us was talking about the death of art, though my own text happens to have appeared as the target article in a volume under the title The Death of Art. That title was not mine, for I was writing about a certain narrative that had, I thought, been objectively realized in the history of art, and it was that narrative, it seemed to me, that had come to an end. A story was over. It was not my view that there would be no more art, which "death" certainly implies, but that whatever art there was to be would be made without benefit of a reassuring sort of narrative in which it was seen as the appropriate next stage in the story. What had come to an end was that narrative but not the subject of the narrative. I hasten to clarify.

In a certain sense, life really begins when the story comes to an end, as in the story every couple relishes of how they found one another and "lived happily ever after."(4) In the German genre of the Bildungsroman--the novel of formation and self-discovery--the story is told of the stages through which the hero or heroine progresses on the way to self-awareness. The genre has almost become a matrix of the feminist novel in which the heroine arrives at a consciousness of who she is and what being a woman means. And that awareness, though the end of the story, is really "the first day of the rest of her life," to use the somewhat corny phrase of New Age philosophy. Hegel's early masterpiece, The Phenomenology of Spirit, has the form of a Bildungsroman, in the sense that its hero, Geist, goes through a sequence of stages in order to achieve knowledge not merely of what it itself is, but that without the history of mishaps and misplaced enthusiasms, its knowledge would be empty.(5) Belting's thesis too was about narratives. "Contemporary art," he wrote, "manifests an awareness of a history of art but no longer carries it forward."(6) And he speaks as well of "the relatively recent loss of faith in a great and compelling narrative, in the way things must be seen."(7) It is in part the sense of no longer belonging to a great narrative, registering itself on our consciousness somewhere between uneasiness and exhilaration, that marks the historical sensibility of the present, and which, if Belting and I are at all on the right path, helps define the acute difference, of which I think that awareness only began to emerge in the mid-1970s, between modern and contemporary art. It is characteristic of contemporaneity--but not of modernity--that it should have begun insidiously, without slogan or logo, without anyone being greatly aware that it had happened. The Armory show of 1913 used the pine-tree flag of the American Revolution as its logo to celebrate a repudiation of the art of the past. The Berlin dada movement proclaimed the death of art, but on the same poster by Raoul Hausmann wished long life to "The Machine Art of Tatlin." Contemporary art, by contrast, has no brief against the art of the past, no sense that the past is something from which liberation must be won, no sense even that it is at all different as art from modern art generally. It is part of what defines contemporary art that the art of the past is available for such use as artists care to give it. What is not available to them is the spirit in which the art was made. The paradigm of the contemporary is that of the collage as defined by Max Ernst, with one difference. Ernst said that collage is "the meeting of two distant realities on a plane foreign to them both."(8) The difference is that there is no longer a plane foreign to distinct artistic realities, nor are those realities all that distant from one another. That is because the basic perception of the contemporary spirit was formed on the principle of a museum in which all art has a rightful place, where there is no a priori criterion as to what that art must look like, and where there is no narrative into which the museum's contents must all fit. Artists today treat museums as filled not with dead art, but with living artistic options. The museum is a field available for constant rearrangement, and indeed there is an art form emerging which uses the museum as a repository of materials for a collage of objects arranged to suggest or support a thesis; we see it in Fred Wilson's installation at the Maryland Historical Museum and again in Joseph Kosuth's remarkable installation "The Play of the Unmentionable" at the Brooklyn Museum.(9) But the genre is almost commonplace today: the artist is given free run of the museum and organizes out of its resources exhibitions of objects that have no historical or formal connection to one another other than what the artist provides. In some way the museum is cause, effect, and embodiment of the attitudes and practices that define the post-historical moment of art, but I do not want to press the matter for the moment. Rather, I want to return to the distinction between the modern and the contemporary and discuss its emergence into consciousness. In fact, it was the dawning of a certain kind of self-consciousness that I had in mind when I began to write about the end of art.

In my own field, philosophy, the historical divisions went roughly as follows: ancient, medieval, and modern. "Modern" philosophy was generally thought to begin with Rene Descartes, and what distinguished it was the particular inward turn Descartes took--his famous reversion to the "I think"--where the question would be less how things really are than how someone whose mind is structured in a certain way is obliged to think they are. Whether things really are the way the structure of our mind requires us to think they are is not something we can say. But neither does it greatly matter, since we have no alternative way of thinking about them. So working from the inside outward, so to speak, Descartes, and modern philosophy generally, drew a philosophical map of the universe whose matrix was the structure of human thought. What Descartes did was begin to bring the structures of thought to consciousness, where we could examine them critically and come to understand at one and the same time what we are and how the world is, for since the world is defined by thought, the world and we are literally made in one another's image. The ancients simply went ahead endeavoring to describe the world, paying no attention to those subjective features modern philosophy made central. We could paraphrase Hans Belting's marvelous title by talking about the self before the era of the self to mark the difference between ancient and modern philosophy. It is not that there were no selves before Descartes, but that the concept of the self did not define the entire activity of philosophy, as it came to do after he had revolutionized it and until reversion to language came to replace reversion to the self. And while "the linguistic turn"(10) certainly replaced questions of what we are with how we talk, there is an undoubted continuity between the two stages of philosophical thought, as is underscored by Noam Chomsky's description of his own revolution in the philosophy of language as "Cartesian linguistics,"(11) replacing or augmenting Descartes's theory of innate thought with the postulation of innate linguistic structures.

There is an analogy to the history of art. Modernism in art marks a point before which painters set about representing the world the way it presented itself, painting people and landscapes and historical events just as they would present themselves to the eye. With modernism, the conditions of representation themselves become central, so that art in a way becomes its own subject. This was almost precisely the way in which Clement Greenberg defined the matter in his famous 1960 essay "Modernist Painting." "The essence of Modernism," he wrote, "lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence."(12) Interestingly, Greenberg took as his model of modernist thought the philosopher Immanuel Kant: "Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist." Kant did not see philosophy as adding to our knowledge so much as answering the question of how knowledge was possible. And I suppose the corresponding view of painting would have been not to represent the appearances of things so much as answering the question of how painting was possible. The question then would be: who was the first modernist painter--who deflected the art of painting from its representational agenda to a new agenda in which the means of representation became the object of representation?

For Greenberg, Manet became the Kant of modernist painting: "Manes's became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted." And the history of modernism moved from there through the impressionists, "who abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots," to Cezanne, who "sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit his drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas." And step by step Greenberg constructed a narrative of modernism to replace the narrative of the traditional representational painting defined by Vasari. Flatness, the consciousness of paint and brushstroke, the rectangular shape--all of them what Meyer Schapiro speaks of as "nonmimetic features" of what may still have been residually mimetic paintings--displaced perspective, foreshortening, chiaroscuro as the progress points of a developmental sequence. The shift from "premodernist" to modernist art, if we follow Greenberg, was the shift from mimetic to nonmimetic features of painting. It was not, Greenberg asserts, that painting had to become itself nonobjective or abstract. It was just that its representational features were secondary in modernism where they had been primary in premodernist art. Much of my book, concerned as it is with narratives of the history of art, must perforce deal with Greenberg as the great narrativist of modernism.

It is important that the concept of modernism, if Greenberg is right, is not merely the name of a stylistic period which begins in the latter third of the nineteenth century, the way in which Mannerism is the name of a stylistic period which begins in the first third of the sixteenth century: Mannerist follows Renaissance painting and is followed by the baroque, which is followed by rococo, which is followed by neoclassicism, which is followed by the romantic. These were deep changes in the way painting represents the world, changes, one might say, in coloration and mood, and they develop out of and to some degree in reaction against their predecessors, as well as in response to all sorts of extra-artistic forces in history and in life. My sense is that modernism does not follow romanticism in this way, or not merely: it is marked by an ascent to a new level of consciousness, which is reflected in painting as a kind of discontinuity, almost as if to emphasize that mimetic representation had become less important than some kind of reflection on the means and methods of representation. Painting begins to look awkward, or forced (in my own chronology it is Van Gogh and Gauguin who are the first modernist painters). In effect, modernism sets itself at a distance from the previous history of art, I suppose in the way in which adults, in the words of Saint Paul, "put aside childish things." The point is that "modern" does not merely mean "the most recent."

It means, rather, in philosophy as well as in art, a notion of strategy and style and agenda. If it were just a temporal notion, all the philosophy contemporary with Descartes or Kant and all the painting contemporary with Manet and Cezanne would be modernist, but in fact a fair amount of philosophizing went on which was, in Kant's terms, "dogmatic," having nothing to do with the issues which defined the critical program he advanced. Most of the philosophers contemporary with Kant but otherwise "precritical" have dropped out of sight of all save scholars of the history of philosophy. And while there remains a place in the museum for painting contemporary with modernist art which is not itself modernist--for example, French academic painting, which acted as if Cezanne had never happened, or later, surrealism, which Greenberg did what he could to suppress or, to use the psychoanalytical language which has come naturally to Greenberg's critics, like Rosalind Krauss or Hal Foster,(13) "to repress"--there is no room for it in the great narrative of modernism which swept on past it, into what came to be known as "abstract expressionism" (a label Greenberg disliked), and then color-field abstraction, where, though the narrative did not necessarily end, Greenberg himself stopped. Surrealism, like academic painting, lay, according to Greenberg, "outside the pale of history," to use an expression I found in Hegel. It happened, but it was not, significantly, part of the progress. If you were snide, as critics schooled in Greenbergian invective were, it was not really art, and that declaration showed the degree to which the identity of art was internally connected with being part of the official narrative. Hal Foster writes: "A space for surrealism has opened up: an impense within the old narrative, it has become a privileged point for the contemporary critique of this narrative."(14) Part of what the "end of art" means is the enfranchisement of what had lain beyond the pale, where the very idea of a pale--a wall--is exclusionary, the way the Great Wall of China was, built to keep the Mongol hordes outside, or as the Berlin Wall was built, to keep the innocent socialist population protected from the toxins of capitalism. (The great Irish-American painter Sean Scully delights in the fact that "the pale," in English, refers to the Irish Pale, an enclave in Ireland, making the Irish outsiders in their own land.) In the modernist narrative, art beyond the pale either is no part of the sweep of history, or it is a reversion to some earlier form of art. Kant once spoke of his own era, the Age of Enlightenment, as "mankind's coming of age." Greenberg might have thought of art in those terms as well, and seen in surrealism a kind of aesthetic regression, a reassertion of values from the childhood of art, filled with monsters and scary threats. For him, maturity meant purity, in a sense of the term that connects exactly to what Kant meant by the term in the title of his Critique of Pure Reason. This was reason applied to itself, and having no other subject. Pure art was correspondingly art applied to art. And surrealism was almost the embodiment of impurity, concerned as it was with dreams, the unconscious, eroticism, and, in Foster's vision of it, "the uncanny." But so, by Greenbergian criteria, is contemporary art impure, which is what I want to talk about now. Just as "modern" is not simply a temporal concept, meaning, say, "most recent," neither is "contemporary" merely a temporal term, meaning whatever is taking place at the present moment. And just as the shift from "premodern" to modern was as insidious as the shift, in Hans Belting's terms, from the image before the era of art to the image in the era of art, so that artists were making modern art without realizing they were doing anything different in kind until it began to be retrospectively clear that a momentous change had taken place, so, similarly, did it happen with the shift from modern to contemporary art. For a long time, I think, "contemporary art" would have been just the modern art that is being made now. Modern, after all, implies a difference between now and "back then": there would be no use for the expression if things remained steady and largely the same. It implies an historical structure and is stronger in this sense than a term like "most recent." "Contemporary" in its most obvious sense means simply what is happening now: contemporary art would be the art produced by our contemporaries. It would not, clearly, have passed the test of time. But it would have a certain meaning for us which even modern art which had passed that test would not have: it would be "our art" in some particularly intimate way. But as the history of art has internally evolved, contemporary has come to mean an art produced within a certain structure of production never, I think, seen before in the entire history of art. So just as "modern" has come to denote a style and even a period, and not just recent art, "contemporary" has come to designate something more than simply the art of the present moment. In my view, moreover, it designates less a period than what happens after there are no more periods in some master narrative of art, and less a style of making art than a style of using styles. Of course, there is contemporary art in styles of a kind never before seen, but I do not want to press the matter at this stage of my discussion. I merely wish to alert the reader to my effort to draw a very strong distinction between "modern" and"contemporary."(15)

I don't especially think that the distinction was sharply drawn when I first moved to New York at the end of the forties, when "our art" was modern art, and the Museum of Modern Art belonged to us in that intimate way. To be sure, a lot of art was being made which did not as yet make an appearance in that museum, but it did not seem to us then, to the degree that the matter was thought about at all, that the latter was contemporary in a way that distinguished it from modern. It seemed a wholly natural arrangement that some of this art would sooner or later find its way into "The Modern," and that this arrangement would continue indefinitely, modern art being here to stay, but not in any way forming a closed canon. It was not closed, certainly, in 1949, when Life magazine suggested that Jackson Pollock might just be the greatest American painter alive. That it is closed today, in the minds of many, myself included, means that somewhere between then and now a distinction emerged between the contemporary and the modern. The contemporary was no longer modern save in the sense of "most recent," and the modern seemed more and more to have been a style that flourished from about 1880 until sometime in the 1960s. It could even be said, I suppose, that some modern art continued to be produced after that--art which remained under the stylistic imperatives of modernism--but that art would not really be contemporary, except again in the strictly temporal sense of the term. For when the stylistic profile of modern art revealed itself, it did so because contemporary art itself revealed a profile very different from modern art. This tended to put the Museum of Modern Art in a kind of bind no one had anticipated when it was the home of "our art." The bind was due to the fact that "modern" had a stylistic meaning and a temporal meaning. It would not have occurred to anyone that these would conflict, that contemporary art would stop being modern art. But today, as we near the end of the century, the Museum of Modern Art has to decide whether it is going to acquire contemporary art that is not modern and thus become a museum of modern art in the strictly temporal sense or whether it will continue to collect only stylistically modern art, the production of which has thinned down to perhaps a trickle, but which is no longer representative of the contemporary world.

In any case, the distinction between the modern and the contemporary did not become clear until well into the seventies and eighties. Contemporary art would for a long time continue to be "the modern art produced by our contemporaries." At some point this clearly stopped being a satisfactory way of thinking, as evidenced by the need to invent the term "postmodern." That term by itself showed the relative weakness of the term "contemporary" as conveying a style. It seemed too much a mere temporal term. But perhaps "postmodern" was too strong a term, too closely identified with a certain sector of contemporary art. In truth, the term "postmodern" really does seem to me to designate a certain style we can learn to recognize, the way we learn to recognize instances of the baroque or the rococo. It is a term something like "camp," which Susan Sontag transferred from gay idiolect into common discourse in a famous essay.(16) One can, after reading her essay, become reasonably adept at picking out camp objects, in just the same way it seems to me that one can pick out postmodern objects, with maybe some difficulties at the borderlines. But that is how it is with most concepts, stylistic or otherwise, and with recognitional capacities in human beings and in animals. There is a valuable formula in Robert Venturi's 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: "elements which are hybrid rather than `pure,' compromising rather than `clean,' `ambiguous' rather than `articulated,' perverse as well as `interesting.'"(17) One could sort works of art out using this formula, and almost certainly you would have one pile which consisted pretty homogeneously of postmodern works. It would have the works of Robert Rauschenberg, the paintings of Julian Schnabel and David Salle, and I guess the architecture of Frank Gehry. But much contemporary art would be left out--say the works of Jenny Holzer or the paintings of Robert Mangold. It has been suggested that perhaps we should simply speak of postmodernisms. But once we do this, we lose the recognitional ability, the capacity to sort out, and the sense that postmodernism marks a specific style. We could capitalize the word "contemporary" to cover whatever the disjunction of postmodernisms was intended to cover, but there again we would be left with the sense that we have no identifiable style, that there is nothing that does not fit. But that in fact is the mark of the visual arts since the end of modernism, that as a period it is defined by the lack of a stylistic unity, or at least the kind of stylistic unity which can be elevated into a criterion and used as a basis for developing a recognitional capacity, and there is in consequence no possibility of a narrative direction. That is why I prefer to call it simply posthistorical art. Anything ever done could be done today and be an example of post-historical art. For example, an appropriationist artist like Mike Bidlo could have a show of Piero della Francescas in which the entirety of Piero's corpus was appropriated. Piero is certainly not a post-historical artist, but Bidlo is, and a skilled enough appropriationist as well, so that his Pieros and Piero's paintings could look as much alike as he cared to make them look--as much like Piero as his Morandis look like Morandis, his Picassos like Picassos, his Warhols like Warhols. Yet in an important sense, not easily believed accessible to the eye, Bidlo's Pieros would have more in common with the work of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine than with Piero's proper stylistic peers. So the contemporary is, from one perspective, a period of information disorder, a condition of perfect aesthetic entropy. But it is equally a period of quite perfect freedom. Today there is no longer any pale of history. Everything is permitted. But that makes the historical transition from modernism to post-historical art all the more urgent to try to understand. And that means that it is urgent to try to understand the decade of the 1970s, a period in its own way as dark as the tenth century.

The seventies was a decade in which it must have seemed that history had lost its way. It had lost its way because nothing at all like a discernible direction seemed to be emerging. If we think of 1962 as marking the end of abstract expressionism, then you had a number of styles succeeding one another at a dizzying rate: color-field painting, hard-edged abstraction, French neorealism, pop, op, minimalism, arte povera, and then what got to be called the New Sculpture, which included Richard Serra, Linda Benglis, Richard Tuttle, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, and then conceptual art. Then what seemed to be ten years of nothing much. There were sporadic movements like Pattern and Decoration, but nobody supposed they were going to generate the kind of structural stylistic energy of the immense upheavals of the sixties. Then all at once neo-expressionism arose, in the early eighties, and gave people the sense that a new direction had been found. And then again the sense of nothing much so far at least as historical directions were concerned. And then the dawning sense that the absence of direction was the defining trait of the new period, that neoexpressionism was less a direction than the illusion of one. Recently people have begun to feel that the last twenty-five years, a period of tremendous experimental productiveness in the visual arts with no single narrative direction on the basis of which others could be excluded, have stabilized as the norm.

The sixties was a paroxysm of styles, in the course of whose contention, it seems to me--and this was the basis of my speaking of the "end of art" in the first place--it gradually became clear, first through the nouveaux realistes and pop, that there was no special way works of art had to look in contrast to what I have designated "mere real things." To use my favorite example, nothing need mark the difference, outwardly, between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes in the supermarket. And conceptual art demonstrated that there need not even be a palpable visual object for something to be a work of visual art. That meant that you could no longer teach the meaning of art by example. It meant that as far as appearances were concerned, anything could be a work of art, and it meant that if you were going to find out what art was, you had to turn from sense experience to thought. You had, in brief, to turn to philosophy.

In an interview in 1969, conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth claimed that the only role for an artist at the time "was to investigate the nature of art itself."(18) This sounds strikingly like the line in Hegel that gave support to my own views about the end of art: "Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is."(19) Joseph Kosuth is a philosophically literate artist to an exceptional degree, and he was one of the few artists working in the sixties and seventies who had the resources to undertake a philosophical analysis of the general nature of art. As it happened, relatively few philosophers of the time were ready to do this, just because so few of them could have imagined the possibility of art like that being produced in such dizzying disjunctiveness. The philosophical question of the nature of art, rather, was something that arose within art when artists pressed against boundary after boundary, and found that the boundaries all gave way. All typical sixties artists had that vivid sense of boundaries, each drawn by some tacit philosophical definition of art, and their erasure has left us the situation we find ourselves in today. Such a world is not, by the way, the easiest kind of world to live in, which explains why the political reality of the present seems to consist in drawing and defining boundaries wherever possible. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1960s that a serious philosophy of art became a possibility, one which did not base itself on purely local facts--for example, that art was essentially painting and sculpture. Only when it became clear that anything could be a work of art could one think, philosophically, about art. Only then did the possibility arise of a true general philosophy of art. But what of art itself? What of "Art after Philosophy"--to use the title of Kosuth's essay--which, to make the point, may indeed itself be a work of art? What of art after the end of art, where, by "after the end of art," I mean "after the ascent to philosophical self-reflection?" Where an artwork can consist of any object whatsoever that is enfranchised as art, raising the question "Why am I a work of art?"

With that question the history of modernism was over. It was over because modernism was too local and too materialist, concerned as it was with shape, surface, pigment, and the like as defining painting in its purity. Modernist painting, as Greenberg defined it, could only ask the question "What is it that I have and that no other kind of art can have?" And sculpture asked itself the same kind of question. But what this gives us is no general picture of what art is, only what some of the arts, perhaps historically the most important arts, essentially were. What question does Warhol's Brillo Box ask, or one of Beuys's multiples of a square of chocolate stuck to a piece of paper? What Greenberg had done was to identify a certain local style of abstraction with the philosophical truth of art, when the philosophical truth, once found, would have to be consistent with art appearing every possible way.

What I know is that the paroxysms subsided in the seventies, as if it had been the internal intention of the history of art to arrive at a philosophical conception of itself, and that the last stages of that history were somehow the hardest to work through, as art sought to break through the toughest outer membranes, and so itself became, in the process, paroxysmal. But now that the integument was broken, now that at least the glimpse of self-consciousness had been attained, that history was finished. It had delivered itself of a burden it could now hand over to the philosophers to carry. And artists, liberated from the burden of history, were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes they wished, or for no purposes at all. That is the mark of contemporary art, and small wonder, in contrast with modernism, there is no such thing as a contemporary style.

I think the ending of modernism did not happen a moment too soon. For the art world of the seventies was filled with artists bent on agendas having nothing much to do with pressing the limits of art or extending the history of art, but with putting art at the service of this or that personal or political goal. And artists had the whole inheritance of art history to work with, including the history of the avant-garde, which placed at the disposition of the artist all those marvelous possibilities the avant-garde had worked out and which modernism did its utmost to repress. In my own view, the major artistic contribution of the decade was the emergence of the appropriated image--the taking over of images with established meaning and identity and giving them a fresh meaning and identity. Since any image could be appropriated, it immediately follows that there could be no perceptual stylistic uniformity among appropriated images. One of my favorite examples is Kevin Roche's 1992 addition to the Jewish Museum in New York. The old Jewish Museum was just the Warburg mansion on Fifth Avenue, with its baronial associations and connotations of the Gilded Age. Kevin Roche brilliantly decided to duplicate the old Jewish Museum, and the eye is unable to tell a single difference. But the building belongs to the postmodern age perfectly: a postmodern architect can design a building which looks like a Mannerist chateau. It was an architectural solution that had to have pleased the most conservative and nostalgic trustee, as well as the most avant-garde and contemporary one, but of course for quite different reasons.

These artistic possibilities are but realizations and applications of the immense philosophical contribution of the 1960s to art's self-understanding: that artworks can be imagined, or in fact produced, which look exactly like mere real things which have no claim to the status of art at all, for the latter entails that you can't define artworks in terms of some particular visual properties they may have. There is no a priori constraint on how works of art must look--they can look like anything at all. This alone finished the modernist agenda, but it had to wreak havoc with the central institution of the art world, namely the museum of fine arts. The first generation of great American museums took it for granted that its contents would be treasures of great visual beauty and that visitors would enter the tresorium to be in the presence of spiritual truth of which the visually beautiful was the metaphor. The second generation, of which the Museum of Modern Art is the great exemplar, assumed that the work of art is to be defined in formalist terms and appreciated under the perspective of a narrative not remarkably different from the one Greenberg advanced: a linear progressive history the visitor would work through, learning to appreciate the work of art together with learning the historical sequences. Nothing was to distract from the formal visual interest of the works themselves. Even picture frames were eliminated as distractions, or perhaps as concessions to an illusionistic agenda modernism had outgrown: paintings were no longer windows onto imagined scenes, but objects in their own right, even if they had been conceived as windows. It is, incidentally, easy to understand why surrealism has to be repressed in the light of such an experience: it would be too distracting, not to mention irrelevantly illusionistic. Works had plenty of space to themselves in galleries emptied of everything but those works.

In any case, with the philosophical coming of age of art, visuality drops away, as little relevant to the essence of art as beauty proved to have been. For art to exist there does not even have to be an object to look at, and if there are objects in a gallery, they can look like anything at all. Three attacks on established museums are worth noting in this respect. When Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnick admitted pop into the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in the "High and Low" show of 1990, there was a critical conflagration. When Thomas Krens deaccessioned a Kandinsky and a Chagall to acquire part of the Panza collection, a good bit of it conceptual and much of which did not exist as objects, there was a critical conflagration. And when, in 1993, the Whitney compiled a Biennial consisting of works that really typified the way the art world had gone after the end of art, the outpouring of critical hostility--in which I am afraid I shared--was by an inestimable factor unprecedented in the history of Biennial polemics. Whatever art is, it is no longer something primarily to be looked at. Stared at, perhaps, but not primarily looked at. What, in view of this, is a post-historical museum to do, or to be?

It must be plain that there are three models at least, depending upon the kind of art we are dealing with, and depending upon whether it is beauty, form, or what I shall term engagement that defines our relationship to it. Contemporary art is too pluralistic in intention and realization to allow itself to be captured along a single dimension, and indeed an argument can be made that enough of it is incompatible with the constraints of the museum that an entirely different breed of curator is required, one who bypasses museum structures altogether in the interests of engaging the art directly with the lives of persons who have seen no reason to use the museum either as tresorium of beauty or sanctum of spiritual form. For a museum to engage this kind of art, it has to surrender much of the structure and theory that define the museum in its other two modes.

But the museum itself is only part of the infrastructure of art that will sooner or later have to deal with the end of art and with art after the end of art. The artist, the gallery, the practices of art history, and the discipline of philosophical aesthetics must all, in one or another way, give way and become different, and perhaps vastly different, from what they have so far been. I can only hope to tell part of the philosophical story in the chapters that follow. The institutional story must wait upon history itself.

(C) 1997 the Trustees of the National Gallery of Art All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-691-01173-7

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Semiotics of Art, Life, and Thought. Göran Sonesson

Semiotics of Art, Life, and Thought.
Three scenarios for (Post)Modernity
Göran Sonesson

“Postmodernism” is nowadays a term so commonly heard that we are hard pressed to realise its paradoxical character. In fact, it contains a double paradox. Like more familiar words, such as “I”, “here” and “now”, Modernity is a kind of shifter, taking its meaning, at least in part, from the very moment of its pronunciation. As defined by Jespersen and Jakobson, a shifter is a word, the meaning of which refers to the act (for instance the time and place) of its own enunciation (cf. Jakobson 1963; Sonesson 1978). Thus, the time span included in the domain of reference of the word “modern” must comprehend the moment at which the word is pronounced. Modernity is always on the point of running ahead of us, unavoidably lagging behind by one inch. In this sense, there is no place in the history of enunciation for “Postmodernity”.

This is the first paradox. Some Modernisms, however, become objectified in history: this no doubt is what happened to the new philosophy of the Middle Ages, the via moderna, to Modern Times in general history as starting out during the Renaissance, to Perrault’s moderns struggling against les anciens, even perhaps to that Modernity of Baudelaire and Rimbaud which must be embraced unconditionally. The Modern Times of Chaplin may already be objectified, but probably not as yet that of Bob Dylan (announced at the time of writing). The Modernity, which was once upon a time relative to the moment of enunciation, can now only be defined in relation to some earlier moment of enunciation, which is quoted, or, “mentioned”, by our enunciation.

This brings us to the second paradox. Even if Modernism, in the sense of art history, as well as that of general civilisation, may perhaps nowadays be considered to relay objectified shifters in this sense, they have acquired a further meaning of continuity beyond the instance of speaking. The other kinds of Modernities mentioned above appear to happen once in history. At a certain moment, a border is crossed, and we go on from the time before Modernity to the time after its initiation. But in Art history, Modernity means much more: it means steady innovation, that is, a state in which we continuously cross new borders to that which is ever more modern. In a way, the same thing may be said about the general history of civilisation: the Modernity of the 21st century is, so to speak, even more modern than that of the 1960ies. And the Modernity of the 22nd century is destined to be even more modern (There is no better way of realising this than looking at old science fiction movies, for instance Godard’s Alphaville). But this means that, while there is a time before Modernity, there is no time after it. There is a way into Modernity, but there appears to be no way out of it.

The Mechanism of Modernism in the Visual Arts
In the visual arts, those who claim that Modernism has come to en end (or is in the process of meeting its end) take Modernism to be a particular movement in Art, with specific aims and contents. Connecting Modernism in the arts with some ideas of Modernity emerging in other quarters (to which we will turn later), they claim Modernism is a rationalist enterprise, which it is trying to realise some kind of progress, and even that it is part of some heroic story of the advance of civilisation. All this is misleading. Modernism is better considered to be a huge rhetorical device projected onto world history.

If Modernism had a particular content, then it might reasonably be maintained, as Lyotard has often suggested (see, for instance, Appignanesi, ed., 1989), that Postmodernism originates before, or at the same time as, Modernism. But then, Modernism would not be Modernism. Lyotard’s paradoxical observation, and the claims of Postmodernism, become understandable in the North American context, where the image of Modernism was very much influenced by the conception of Clement Greenberg writing mainly on the Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and William de Kooning. According to Greenberg, the Modernist work of art was essentially a critical discourse applying to earlier works of art, and its methods required it “to avoid dependence upon any order of experience not given in the most essentially construed nature of its medium” (quoted in Rorimer 1989:129). Indeed, more recently, Greenberg himself has set up an opposition between Modernity and Postmodernity, quoting, in the latter case, in part the same persons and movements as are the heroes of Lyotard, many of which are contemporaneous with, or anterior to, his Modernists: Duchamp and other Dadaists, certain aspects of Surrealism, and Pop art (see Tomkins 1988:7f).

The result is a curious amputation of the Modernist movement, two of the most important early constituents of which were Dadaism and Surrealism, both of which left their imprint also on such an emblematic European Modernist as Picasso, the Modernist of popular opinion. Yet, it may perhaps be said that there were two, in some respects divergent, ingredients of early Modernism: on one hand, an inward movement, a tendency to reduce art to its smallest denominator, to highlight, under “aesthetic focus”, in Prague school terms, the minimal properties of the art work as a thing; and on the other hand, an outward movement, tending to include ever further properties, objects, and spheres into the world subjected to the aesthetic function. Marner (1995) has suggested that we should term these two tendencies, first described in Sonesson (1993; 1998), the centripetal and the centrifugal moments of Modernism, respectively. What came to evolve, under the name of Modernism, in the United States, was mainly the first endeavour (with the exception of Pop art). When the second tendency began to predominate in the United States (and, thanks to the cultural hegemony of USA, in the rest of the Occidental world), it was baptised Postmodernism.

No one has better described Modernism in the visual arts, as a historical phenomenon, than the Russian formalists, except perhaps their followers in the Prague school, although in both cases the model was misconstrued as involving Art in general. In spite of what is usually taken for granted, a theory of history – of the history of perception, to be more specific – is clearly implied by the Formalist conception, well before the late socio-historical paper by Jakobson and Tynjanov (1978 [1928]), which is usually seen as forming the bridge to the Prague school. This theory emerges already from the central thesis of Formalism (as formulated by Sklovskij and, more in particular, Jakubinskij), according to which the habits of perception, which are acquired in our ongoing everyday experience of standard language and other standardised media (as, in the case of pictorial art, “non-artistic” pictures), thus being “automatized”, are disrupted by artistic creation, and thereby “made strange”, or “actualized”, for us; and which, when they have hardened into standardised artistic forms, are again transgressed by the invention of new ways for making of art. The Prague school, which had a more clear-cut relation to history and society, suggested that norms are set up, within the domain of art, only to be transgressed, the transgression giving rise over time to another norm, which then again has to be overstepped.

In this respect, as in many others, Formalism no doubt has formulated, not a theory of art outside history, but of the art of its time: emerging Modernism, created, among others, by friends of the Formalists, such as Malevitch, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Chlebnikov, Brik, Majakovskij, Meyerhold, etc.; and even by the Formalists themselves in another incarnation, as in the case of Eisenstein and early Jakobson (cf. Steiner 1984). The Prague structuralists, who took over, specified, revised, and extended the theories of Russian Formalism, certainly entertained similar connivances with the contemporary Czech avant-garde (cf. Deluy, ed. 1972). Thus, the Formalist model, as well as its later Prague school version, is implicitly, if not overtly, historical, not only because it supposes a sequence of changing perceptual habits, but more fundamentally, it is historically dated, because of its reproducing the conception of art presupposed, and even explicitly formulated, by the exponents of Modernism. If the dialectics of art described by Formalism is really identical to the Mechanism of Modernism, there must have been a time when it was not yet a correct description of art; and we may thus be justified in asking whether, as the prophets of Postmodernity submit, it could also cease to be such a description.

It should be clear that Modernism, and thus the applicability of the Formalist model, has a beginning, not, perhaps, as far as the divorce from the standard medium is concerned, but at least as to the ever-repeated dialectics of “struggle and reformation” (in the terms of the Prague theses) applied to established artistic forms. It is not only that “the character, direction and scale of this re-formation vary greatly”, as Jakobson and Mukar&ovsky¤ express it in the Prague theses, but, although re-formations must have taken place before the advent of Modernism, they were not the order of the day: the breaking of the norms did not constitute the meta-norm of all artistic work. In the case of painting, for instance, there appears to have been a guiding idea, a common endeavour, since the Italian renaissance, aspiring to render ever more perfectly the appearances of the visual world. In other terms, change was geared to a specific goal. “Progress in art”, in the terms (misleadingly) applied to Modernism by Susy Gablik (1977), was thus conceivable – before Modernism. But it is wrong to think that there could be a similar progress in abstraction, as Gablik suggests(1): rather, in accordance with the dialectics formulated by the Formalists, each new generation of Modernists found themselves, in Michael Fried’s terms (as quoted by Singerman 1989: 158), under the obligation to work through the problems “thrown up by the art of the recent pasts”, thereby creating new problems for the future generation to work on.

Duchamp, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and contemporary Postmodernists, also have to work through the problems “thrown up by the art of the recent pasts”, but these problems are now created, not by an ever finer isolation of the intrinsic properties of the artwork, but by the outward expansion of the art sphere, and the ever more comprehensive absorption of other objects, events and sphere into it. For the inward-going, or centripetal, tendency of Modernism, the problems “thrown up” involve the material by means of which the art work is constructed, that is, the mere spatiality of the painting, as Greenberg misconstrues Lessing, over any suggestion, not only of temporality, but of a world beyond the canvas. For the outward-going, or centrifugal, tendency of Modernism, on the contrary, art is destined to expand ever further into other spaces, if not other times, overrunning the boundaries between art and life, art work and creator, artist and art public, as well as the gallery and the world, and the aesthetic sphere and society.

In both its varieties, however, Modernism has no specific goal that can one day be attained. Its goal is to always change its goal. Whereas Classical art, from the Renaissance onwards, had the clear goal of (among others things) perfecting the capacity for mimicking the appearances of the visual world, the Modernist norm in time came to require the abandonment of pictorial representation, and thus, by implication, the central role of the human figure, thus denying another norm in vigour (in the Occidental world, but not, for instance, in the Islamic one) since prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs. This description, to be sure, is particularly apt as an analysis of Greenberg’s conception of Modernism. As Frank Stella has testified (cf. Tomkins 1988:141ff), it was simply unimaginable, at the time of his art studies, to make a painting that was not abstract. Indeed, when de Kooning started painting female figures, however caricatured, Georges Mathieu demanded his expulsion from the Artist’s Club in New York for having betrayed the abstract cause, that is, broken the norm of American Modernism (cf. Tomkins 1988:137ff). That fact that he was apparently not excluded illustrates Mukarovsky’s claim that not all norms acquire the force of law.

But, even before abstraction became the norm (itself broken by de Kooning, Pop art, etc), Modernism, in its heroic beginnings, put the artist under obligation to give up a particular mode of pictorial rendering, which has been the norm in the Occident, at least since the Renaissance(2): the striving to render the appearances of the perceptual world ever more perfectly, and the value attributed to progress in this endeavour, which, no doubt together with over values, has been a regulatory idea of most Occidental art, unto, and in a way including, Impressionism. Thus, the two “giants” of European Modernism, Matisse and Picasso never, or only in passing, gave up depiction entirely, but the value regulating the kind of art they produced, and for which their works became exemplary, did not require any perfect rendering of visual appearance, but, on the contrary, laid stress on the reinterpretation and resegmentation of perceptual reality. No doubt, Surrealism, Hyperrealism, and Pop Art never gave up depiction as a norm; but there ceased to be a value for them in striving for further rapprochement to perception. Indeed, with the exception of Surrealism, they all depict other depictions, or simulate their effect.

As Mukarovsky (quoted by Galan 1986:36) notes, every work of art contains an affirmation of some (aspects of) earlier works of art, together with a negation of others. This observation is also verified by later Modernist movements: Frank Stella’s abstraction is even more studied than that of Rauschenberg and Johns; as for the more confirmed Minimalists who followed him, such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Sol LeVitt, their work may even appear to retain the simple geometrical forms found in early European abstraction (notably that of Malevich, Arp, etc.), yet without the claim to convey a higher symbolism which was essential to the latter. At least at the level of intentions, there is a curious contrast between, for instance, the esoteric conceptions of Malevich and Kandinsky, and Stella’s saying, that his work is “based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there” (quoted in Tomkins 1988:31). Interestingly, this is the same opposition which is found between two groups of poets using meaningless phrases which were contemporary with the Russian Formalists, the zaum’ poets, for instance Chlebnikov, sharing Malevich’s ambition, while others, such as Krucenych only relied on the sound effect as such (cf. Steiner 1984:144ff). No generalization is of course entirely true: this means that, for early Modernist, such as Malevich and Kandinsky, there was more to Modernity than simply the Machine of Modernism being kept going.

The use of ordinary, functional objects, and the inclusion of photographs and written texts, found in Conceptual Art, Pop art, and other transitory movement, may be said to hark back to Dadaism, Futurism and Cubism: yet the strictly regulated manner of their appearance in the former art forms would seem to owe something to Minimalism, and contrasts with the apparently chaotic and random character of their appearance in collages and as ready-mades. Order vs disorder is a fundamental distinction, as Lévi-Strauss knew well: as least as fundamental as identity vs alterity, embodied in the isotopy concept; and Gibson (1982) used it to distinguish surfaces which are picture or ornaments from others which are covered by dirt (Cf. Sonesson 1989). It is easy to see that “pattern painting” reacts to, but complies with some of the norms set up by, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism: as against the asceticism of all these movements, they reclaim the right to create more complex and more prolific ornaments, inspired in textile decoration, calligraphy, and Islamic art; yet they often remain abstract. To the extent that they retrieve the possibilities of depiction, they do not follow the lead of the Western tradition, but prefer a more awkward, to our eyes rather caricatured rendering, deriving from the styles of Persian miniature and Chinese Vase painting (Brad Davis) or Mayan sculpture (like Joyce Kozloff).

In this way, it can be seen that much of the newness of art under Modernism, is in fact only a newness to art, while being well known already in some other domain. Thus, for instance, Duchamp’s scribbled-over copy of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, does not constitute anything new in an absolute sense: caricatures of Mona Lisa, with a moustache and a pointed beard had appeared before, notably in the comic review “Le rire”, a few years earlier; what was new with “L.H.O.O.Q.”, was that is was included in the sphere of art. In this respect Modernism is aptly described by the Tartu school model, if we substitute the opposition between art and non-art for that between culture and non-culture. The same rules of inclusion/exclusion, translation, impossibility of translation, and translation as deformation, will then be found to obtain.(3) In one important respect the Tartu model must however be complemented: non-culture, in this
case non-art, is not only progressively absorbed into culture, that is, art, but some elements forming part of earlier culture, or art, are later excluded. This, for a long time, was the case of the pictorial function in Modernist art, as it continues to be the case of the rendering of visual appearance, and the predilection for the human figure.

In a sense, all versions of Modernism involve the inclusion of earlier non-art into art. Stella used house painter’s paint. Metal, wood, and plastic, have been employed by other Minimalists in shapes and manners that were before inconceivable. Duchamp urinal, Man Ray’s iron, and other ready-mades, were literally transferred from another, practical sphere to the world or art. Such functional objects may also be transmuted, by being remade in another material, as Jasper John’s bear canes moulded in bronze or Jeff Koon’s metal casts of kitsch objects (Tomkins 1988: 37); or even Sherrie Levine’s recasting of Duchamp’s urinal in bronze. The material of art has even been extended to include the artist’s own body, either physically present, as in happenings and performances, and in the “singing sculpture” of Gilbert & George; or photographed, as when Duchamp appears as Rrose Selavy, Cindy Sherman figures in different disguises in film still format, or Jeff Koon’s makes love to la Cicciolina.

This does not contradict the observations that there are two tendencies in Modernism, an outward, progressively more encompassing movement, transforming everything, with its Midas touch, into art, and an inward movement, reducing art to its smallest denominator. Thus, while Abstract expressionists and Minimalist may have used new materials and other new resources, this may simply be a consequence of their endeavour to explore new possibilities for art, conceived as a formal procedure of exploration. Duchamp and the other Dadaists, the Surrealists, Pop art, and contemporary “Post-Modernists”, however, are more directly dedicated to the transgression of the artistic sphere, with the passage from art to non-art and the reverse. While both tendencies of Modernism may involve inclusions of earlier non-art into art, the dominant, in the Prague school sense, i.e. that which is not only most important, but also organizes other features of the work according to its proper purposes, is differently located: in one case it is found in the formal exploration, in the other in the strategy of inclusion itself. What has changed, however, since the time of Duchamp, even inside the latter movement, is that the sphere most directly neighbouring the art world is now clearly seen to be inhabited by the mass-media, by the different instances of the universal information society, which is also, predominately, as society dedicated to the transmission of pictures. And this should explain way contemporary artists are so much more conscious than those of earlier times of using signs, that is, socially defined units, which they are often content simply to reproduce, select and combine.

The Meta-norm of Modernism: The Perpetual Return of the New
Once the machine of Modernism gets going, there is no escape from it, and there can be no Postmodernism, if not as a (mis-named) phase of Modernism. It is not only that once we get to Modernity, we have crossed the border into a new domain, but also this domain consists of ever-new borders, which have to be crossed. Postmodernity thus appears as only one of these numerous boundaries within the domain of Modernity which has no end in itself. The Mechanism of Modernism can never cease functioning, once it has started to work. Precisely in trying the break out of the “tradition of the new”, the art work confirms to the very mechanism of that tradition, which consists in transgressing the norms set up by the art-forms preceding it.

Even if Postmodernity consisted in returning to the ways in which art was created before Modernism was invented (which is only true, and only to some extent, of Postmodernist architecture, and of some particular cases of visual art), this could only be understood, after Modernism, as a break with the earlier, temporary, Modernist norm, and thus as a new phase of Modernism — that is, it could only be so interpreted, as long as Modernism was remembered, and not lost too far back in the past. Of course, there are uncompromising ways of bring the Mechanism of Modernism to a stand-still, when society invades art, much more radically than art may ever be able to invade society, as happened during the long ideological night of Stalinism, which followed upon the Russian avant-garde, and was on the point of happening also in Nazi Germany. But the Mechanism of Modernism could only be halted because of factors outside of art.

Perhaps it is possible for the Mechanism of Modernism to be based, not on the Occidental model of progressive time, but on that of cyclical time, familiar from decidedly pre-modern societies dominated by myths. Indeed, invoking the Prague school model of the norms and its transgression, Gopnik (1983) once suggested that fashion could be seen as a cyclical back-and-forth of loose-fitting and straight-fitting garments. Such a model clearly may be applied to fashion using more specific descriptive terms, such as the clothing styles of the sixties returning in later decades of the 20th century, as well as in the beginning of the 21st century. In the same way, early Postmodernism, in the art historical sense, appears in many ways to be the last remake of Dadaism.

What I have termed the Mechanism of Modernism may be conceived as a particular application of what Husserl (1966: 331) has termed Time consciousness, in which, at each moment of time, some earlier moment is retained, while another is expected to occur, or as Husserl terms it, is protained. This model has been used, and revised, by Mukarovsky (1974) and Veltrusky (1977), in their studies of literature and drama; and by myself, when endeavouring to render the working of a perceptual hypothesis filling in the lacking details of everyday experience (Sonesson 1978). I have lately used it even more generally, as a substitute for the much too limited notion of isotopy, to render the idea of an interpretational scheme, present in the work of Schütz, Piaget, Bartlett, and contemporary cognitive psychology (cf. Sonesson 1988; in press). In this sense, the dialectics of the norms and their transgressions is a simple extension of time consciousness. To the extent that the Mechanism of Modernism anticipates, not the confirmation of the expected sequel, but its lack of fulfilment, it appears as a rhetorical device spanning space and time.

The notion of norm suggested, on the basis of Husserlean time consciousness, by the Prague school, could be used to interpret the norm, as understood in the rhetoric of Groupe µ, if a social and historical dimension is added. This would allow us to go beyond the simplistic notion of isotopy, introduced by Greimas, and used, among others, by Groupe µ (1977, 1992): According to the critique of the notion of isotopy, which I have set out in detail elsewhere (Sonesson 1978; 1988; 1996), this concept presupposes the return, at time t2, of an event expected at time t1, which, at some level of abstraction, is identical to the event occurring at time t1. There is a break of norms, according to this conception, if instead, another event, categorically different from the event at t1, occurs at time t2. To my mind, rhetoric, as the art of transgressions, should be much broader: it should also include the occurrence, at time t2, of an event which is identical to the one occurring at time t1, when what is expected is an event different from the earlier one. The rhetoric of Modernism is really of the latter kind: it makes us expect, at time 1, that the work of art created at time 2 will be different from that existing at time t1. Of course, even the expectancy of something different occurs inside a framework of familiarity and things-taken-for-granted: we expect, among other things, that the new work of art, however different, will be of the kind to which Modernism has accustomed us. Thus, the real surprise would be the occurrence, at time t2, of an altarpiece of the style painted during the Middle Ages, or even of a painting like those which won awards at the French salons during the last century, when, at time t1, a Modernist work of art is expected to appear.

What the Formalist model says, then, is, in sum, that every new event at time t1 will tend to become the norm in vigour at t2, which is applied and obeyed, only to be transgressed at t3, when a new event occurs, which is then made the norm at t4, and subsequently contested by yet another norm at t5, and so on indefinitely. Clearly, this mechanism has a beginning, but no conceivable end.

What happens in the end, however, is that newness itself becomes something well known and familiar: in terms of isotopy theory, non-iterability is iterated, the non-expected is expected. That which, on a lower level of generality, is forever new, is, higher up on the ladder of abstraction, always the same. It is perceived, not as this particular new event, but a newness repeatedly instantiated. Thus, at last, that particularly modern sentiment, diagnosed by Berman (1982), and before him, of course, by Marx, that “all that is solid melts into air”, tends to disappear. Newness becomes a frozen gesture. The habits of perception are never really upset. All that changes is the particular modification of the attribute “newness”.

Yet I think there is a way in which Postmodernity is a fact of the visual arts, not as a conception, but as a condition, of art, using Lyotard’s (1979) familiar term in a rather different sense.(4) Postmodernity started out, it seems to me, following the cyclical model, as a remake of Dadaism, but, contrary to Dadaism not as a brief and turbulent moment of art history, but as something almost infinitely distended. But Post-Modernism, like earlier on Modernism, has refused to go away, not because it all the time throws up new problems to be treated, but because it completely ceases to produce anything new. It is a condition, because it definitively shifts the level of perception from the new event, to the return of the effect of meaning termed “newness”. Is has not broken out of the Mechanism of Modernism, but the machine appears to go on working without anybody caring about it.

The Advent of Postmodernity in the Modernist City
The Modernity that so much fascinated artists – and in particular writers and film-makers – in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, was not the Modernity of art, but that of life, which was identified, in particular, with city life. It started out in the coffee house, and went on with the passages and the boulevards. Before Baudelaire, Poe wrote about the view from the café table. Gogol pondered the infinite possibilities of Nevskij Prospect, and Dostoevsky surveyed life in Saint Petersburg during the white nights. Numerous films by Eric Rohmer, from L’amour l’après-midi to Les nuits de la pleine lune are basically about life on the boulevards, and this is also largely the case of Robert Bresson’s Quatre nuits d’un reveur. Curiously, the Modernity of Poe and Gogol still appears to be the Modernity of Rohmer and Bresson. If the Modernity attributed to the city is still a shifter, referring to the moment of enunciation, it does not seem to involve the ever new transgressions of past Modernity characteristic of Modernism in art. Postmodernity therefore only seems to give rise to the first paradox of Modernity.

Unlike the road, the thoroughfares of the city are already some kind of information highway: they serve communication, in the double sense of displacement, and conveyance of meaning. From my point of view (which is also that of the writers and filmmakers mentioned), it is not, as Benjamin (1983) suggests, the Paris passages and department stores, with their abundance of products for sales, which constitute the principal spatial manifestation of Modernity, but rather the boulevard (and, as we shall see, the café). In contrast, the passages, and in particular the department stores, puts the emphasis on the display of goods for sale. The boulevard is a public place, as is, of course, the market place, better known from the work of Mikhail Bakthin. Spatially, however, the boulevard is a place of passing, while the market place, like the passages, are first of all places of display, and only secondary meeting places. On the boulevard,
itineraries run in parallel (at least partly), but on the market place they tend to cross rather incidentally, following the order of display. Another implication of the same observation, however, is that the market place, as well as the passage, is basically static, whereas the boulevard stands for dynamism: the continuous thrust forward. And as it goes forwards, the boulevard opens up into ever-new cross-streets.

Elsewhere, I have suggested that the boulevard, as a particular kind of meaningful space, could be analysed using the paraphernalia of time geography (Sonesson 2003). In time geography, both space and time are finite; therefore, they are considered to be scarce resources. Space-time is inhabited by individuals, each one of which is characterised by his own trajectory, starting at a point of birth and ending at a point of death (see Hägerstrand 1970:15). Indeed, each point in the geographic now is best understood as a bundle of processes, that is, “in terms of its double face of graveyard and cradle of creation” (Hägerstrand 1983:23). Trajectories may be visualised as continuous paths inscribed in co-ordinate systems. If such a trajectory parallels the x-axis, it will describe an individual moving in space, but not in time, which is of course impossible; but a trajectory, which follows the y-axis, is quite feasible, and in fact indicates a stationary individual.

The boulevard is a place in which individuals whose lifelines start out and finish at very different places permit them to run in parallel for a shorter or longer duration. This is really be central topic of Gogol’s short story “Nevskij Prospect”: the soldier and the painter, who come from different social classes, and who live in different parts of the city, walk together for a moment on the boulevard. So much for the different points of departure. However, they part again, when each one of them discovers a woman on the boulevard whom he decides to follow, which brings them both away from the boulevard, to new parts of the city where they have never been before. In Poe’s short story, “The man in the crowd”, such a lifeline starts out abruptly from the café window, and ends in the void 24 hours later.

Implicit is this description is a second property of the boulevard: its capacity for giving access to the whole of the city, being the stage for which all the rest forms the behind-stage. The soldier and the painter both leave the boulevard to go to other parts of the city, but the itineraries that they choose are only two out of many potential ones. In this sense, the boulevard is the starting point for numerous potential trajectories. This explains the sentiment, always expressed in the fiction of the boulevard, of the possibilities being infinite.(5)

Another particularity of the boulevard it that it puts emphasis on one of the fundamental laws of time geography: that two persons cannot occupy the same space at the same time. When you find yourself on the sidewalk, in particular on one being as crowded as that of the modern boulevard, it is essential to steer free of other people. As Ervin Goffman (1971) observes, it takes a lot of largely unconscious manoeuvring to avoid bumping into other persons. Each encounter on the sidewalk involves a negotiation about who is to step out of the way, or, more ordinarily, the degree to which each of the participants it to modify his trajectory. However unconscious, such a transaction supposes a basic act of categorisation: we may negotiate with somebody whom we have recognised as a fellow human being, but not with a lamppost, a statue, or even a dog. Indeed, when this process of interpretation becomes conscious, and the
other is not simply seen as a stranger whosoever, but as an individual person, or even as a person of a particular class or other social group, negotiations may brake down. This is exactly what happens to Dostoevsky’s Cellar man at the start of the story: neither the hero, nor his opponent wants to give way.

But trajectories are important mostly for the kind of access they allow. Time geography, as such, has nothing to tell us about this. When those that follow the trajectories are human beings, each particular use of the limited temporal and spatial resources gives rise to potential trajectories, which are not displacements in space and/or time, but perceptual and/or semiotic exchanges between the persons occupying the trajectories. Different positions in space and time, connected by trajectories, do not only open up into other trajectories (as the cross-street beginning on both sides of the boulevard), but also affords the permeability of the other for sight, touch, smell – and speaking. The negotiation for space on the sidewalk described above already supposes this exchange, but it does not exhaust it. It is not the trajectories as such, but what they offer, which gives rise to the feeling of Modernity characteristic of city life.

It is the square, at least if it can be identified with the market place, which is the pivotal image of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, although the Modernity to which he ascribes it starts manifesting itself already during the Middle Ages. Curiously, Bakhtin did not construe the market place as an encounter of bodies in space, but as a cacophony of voices, epitomised by the cries of the different street vendors, giving rise to such concepts as dialogicity and polyphony and, when being projected to different social groups, heteroglossia.(6) The boulevard, as it may still be experienced today in Paris, as well in many other (particularly Latin) big cities, is not predominantly a polyphony of voices, but a tangle of gazes. Indeed, the primary function of interpretation, telling us that another person is approaching for whom we must give way (as noted by Goffman), is overdetermined by a secondary function of interpretation, normally at a higher level of awareness, which is aesthetic, as least in the old sense of involving “pure contemplation”. As such it does not only pick up information but also gives it out: it conveys messages such as “I observe you” and “I find it worthwhile to observe you”. The hero of Eric Rohmer’s film L’amour l’après-midi, who spends his life on the boulevard, expresses this double function of the gaze very clearly, when he says life on the boulevard is basically a question of “trying oneself out on another”.

The gaze, in this case, as in those of Baudelaire and Gogol, is exchanged between men and women. Frenchmen still unabashedly conceive this as a mutual interchange between the sexes. For Americans, on the other hand, this is something men do to women, and consequently, they talk about “visual rape”. The metaphor is adequate, at least in the sense that it describes the crossing of the visual barrier. In fact, the trajectories of the boulevard are peculiar, in that they do not only allow for movement, but create virtual access to looking, and no doubt also to smelling, touching, and, more rarely, speaking.(7) At least this is what Rohmer’s hero hopes for.

Before the boulevard there is the square, not in the sense of the market place, but as the central place of the village, not the zócalo, but the alameda or parque, to use the Latin-American terms. There is a Mexican folk song the refrain of which consists in telling the girl to go once again around “el parque” in circle in the hope that this time she will meet someone who will marry her. I have never seen anything like that in Mexico, but not long ago you could still experience something of the kind in the small villages on the Greek islands: every evening, all the inhabitants, including new-born children, assembled on the central square (which, on the islands, is often the harbour), walking up and down over and over again. The trajectories, which are here strictly parallel, although having opposite direction, are always the same: they do not open up to other potential trajectories away from the square; they certainly permit an exchange of gazes and also often of speech. But all this follows a well-known, repetitive, pattern.

However predictable, the village square is still a public sphere of exchange, that is, what Habermas calls a “bourgeois” public sphere. As such it is opposed to the official square, used for parades, which incarnates the representative public sphere, which is more or less equivalent to the theatre. A case in point is not only the official parade of the king and his nobles, the wedding of the crown prince, but also, for instance, the dismemberment of Damien (as described by Foucault 1975). In a way, of course, all public life is theatre, as Goffman maintained, and as Debord and other situationists have claimed about capitalist society. In fact many components of daily life exist in order to be perceived by others: this is true of all clothes and body decorations, not only different varieties of “piercing” and tattoos, which recently have become popular again, but also the more customary earrings and other adornments familiar in Western culture. To a greater degree, this is true of the market place, the town square, the popular festival, the boulevard, the café, and similar spatial configurations. But these are not exhausted by representativity, as is the theatre and the representative public sphere.

As I have pointed out elsewhere (cf. Sonesson 2000b), the spectacular function can be described as an operation resulting in a division applied to a group of people, and separating those which are subjects and objects, respectively, of the process of contemplation; but, in fact, the subjects and objects of contemplation are often the same, at least temporarily. In the market, on the square, the boulevard, etc., observation is (potentially) mutual, as well as intermittent, but this is not true of the official parade or the dismemberment of Damien, nor of the sport event or the theatre. In ritual, there is a difference between those who only observe, and those who, in addition to observing, are also observed.8 As a contrast, on the boulevard, but also already on the town square, the spectacular function is symmetric and continuously changing. However, contrary to what happens in other parts of everyday life, it is certainly dominant, in the sense of the Prague school: it does not only retain the upper hand, but it uses everything else for its purpose.

As a spatial object endowed with meaning the street-side café has a story of its own, but it cannot be left out of the story of the boulevard. The café occupying part of the sidewalk, or turning one of its pane covered walls to the street, is part of boulevard life, a place where you may stop up for a moment, taking an outside stance on the stream of movements on the sidewalk, not as a man in the crowd, but enjoying the view from the café window. In Bakthinean terms, this is the glance of the Other, which is the only one who can take in the Ego in full, not the vantage point of the Ego, who is absorbed in the stream of behaviour that is boulevard life. By sitting down of the café table, the Ego steps out of the flow, observing, not himself, but his earlier neighbours on the boulevard, from the point of view of the Other. But it would be wrong to think of the café table as being merely at the active end of the spectacular function, equivalent to the auditorium for which the boulevard is the scene. At least as I know boulevard life from Paris, the occupants of the café may very well also play the part of actors to which the people on the boulevard are the spectators. But, in contrast to the boulevard people, the café visitors tend to make up some kind of tableau vivant.

Although the anecdotal evidence from literature and cinema certain suggest so, the scenery presented by the boulevard does not only allow for the categorical perception of men and women. From the male point of view, which has certainly until recently been the point of view of written history, woman has no doubt long been the foremost inner other of “Culture” (in the sense of Cultural semiotics), accompanied, in certain societies, by slaves, domestics, Jews, gypsies, and others: someone being present in the territory of “our culture” who does not share in the ownership of that territory (cf. Sonesson 2000a, 2003: 2004). Indeed, in many historical societies, and some contemporary ones, women are not allowed on the street, or only once completely covered up in a burqua, which means that they have been excluded or, if one prefers, preserved from the mutual exchange of the boulevard.(9) Such conventions serve to void the spectacle of the boulevard, as conceived by Rohmer’s hero in L’amour l’après-midi.

But the categorical perception of the man in the crowd does no doubt take account of many other types and degrees of Otherness. Here it is useful to return to the time geographical metaphor of trajectories spanning the cradle and the grave. The past time lines sedimented on the persons figuring on the boulevard go beyond their projection on the street. The past of the friends in Gogol’s tale coming together on the boulevard from different parts of the city can still be staked out on the streets of the city, but in the case of many people on the boulevard the times lines must be extended to different villages and countries. Part of the fascination of the big cities, of which the boulevard is the central scene, no doubt consists in the coming together of people from different parts of the country, from smaller cities and villages. That may have been true of the Paris of Baudelaire, but the Paris I knew in the 1970ies and 80ies brought people together from wider spaces, from many countries, continents, and cultures. At the time, the spell of Modernity consisted in this bringing together in a limited space of people who’s past time lines extended to numerous cultures, far from the boulevard and foreign to it. In the streets, on the great boulevards, and at the courses and seminaries that I frequented, you could meet people from all parts of the world (or so it seemed me). Every casual stroll along the boulevards seemed an adventure, a passage through the entire world. In Paris restaurants could also be found that served all kinds of cooking, as well as stores that sold products from all countries all over the world.

If this is Modernity in city life, one may wonder what is takes for Postmodernity to dawn on the city. It seems to me, that, in this context, Postmodernity means only more Modernity everywhere. First of all, the foreignness of the foreigners coming together on the boulevards augments, because people from more places in the world congregate in the big cities. In the second place, the phenomenon of the inner other takes on a new importance, because it is no longer merely a fact of the big cities.

In Malmö, Sweden, where I lived before going to Paris, not only there were no restaurants serving food from other countries (with the exception of some Chinese restaurants and some pizzerias), but on the main all the people in the streets looked more or less alike: all boringly blond and white-skinned. Now Malmö has changed totally: it looks like Paris did before. One third part of the inhabitants of Malmö are immigrants or children of immigrants, from Latin America, from Eastern Europe, from Africa and Asia, and not least from the Middle East. The city is full of restaurants and stores whose offers stem from all imaginable cultures. Just like in the Paris in the seventies, there is even on numerous corners the characteristic shop owned by an Arab, which, against local customs, never seems to close.

Moreover, the coffee house, which was a feature of political Modernity in England, before it took the more permanent form of the Paris café, now seems to be a staple of our culture everywhere. In Sweden, it has arrived at long last, and with a vengeance: there are now street-side cafés everywhere. It has often been predicted that the trajectories of television, and later of the Internet, which are virtual in a more definitive sense that those of the boulevard, should take over from the latter. So far, this certainly does not seem to be happening. There is only one way in which the Postmodernity of the city seems to go beyond its Modernity, and then rather as a overlay than a substitute: the flaneur on the boulevard, now equipped with his always accessible cell phone, is permeable to other experiences, from a parallel space, while he
follows his trajectory. There can be no doubt that this affords him further potential trajectories, not accessible from concrete city space. It is not clear, at present, to what extent this new permeability is also an impermeability to the city itself.

Sirens at the café table. A final cheer for rationality
In the ideology of post-modern theory, Modernism in art, as well as in life, is somehow connected with the illusion of steady progress, itself associated with a continuous extension of rationality. Both progress and rationality are seen as “great narratives” and thus, I take it, as some kind of fiction. So far, we have seen that there is no progress in Modernist art, but only the eternal return of the new. The fascination with the city no doubt had something to do with progress at the beginning, but it has survived that reputation. Modernist theories of art are not notable for their rational underpinnings. In fact, they are largely mystical. The Modernity of the city is basically an experience of the senses. It has to do with the psychology of crowds. Whatever is offered by boulevard experience, its primary determination is certainly not rationality. It therefore seems that it is Postmodernist theory itself that is a great narrative, in the sense of a figment of fiction.

Modern thought, if it is dated back to the period of the great scientific breakthroughs in the natural sciences, attributed to thinkers like Galileo and Newton, certainly has something to do with progress, and at least a bit with rationality. Much more rationality, and a clear notion of progress, is connected to the Enlightenment, pioneered in Great Britain, but then reaching is acme in France, where it took on a decidedly social character involving more the conduct of life than the sciences. Modernity in this sense also has its roots in city life. This kind of Modernity antedates that of Baudelaire, but it is considerably more recent than that of Bakhtin, and its locus is the coffee house. Public man, the person taking part in a discussion about the means and ends of the state and other aspects of public life, and beyond that about all essential intellectual preoccupations, first came to his own in the English coffee houses in the 17th century, and then flourished in the French cafés before and during the revolution (Habermas 1962: Sennett 1977).

A semiotics of modern thought may take its point of departure in Jürgen Habermas’ theory of a “public sphere”, which, from being merely “representative” (of court authority) during the Middle Ages, beginning in the Age of Reason came to involve the reasoned, critical, interchange of rational opinion. In this “bourgeois” public sphere, rational discussion becomes possible, because persons coming from different social groups and classes, as well as from all parts of the country, can meet on an equal footing, without their individual history or personality having any importance. The coffee house is similar to the boulevard, and perhaps to the market place, in bringing together individuals from different social and professional spheres, permitting an interchange in which earlier trajectories and details of life history are irrelevant. In relation to the coffee house, the boulevard permits a less sustained exchange of signs, it involves many more individuals coming together for much shorter duration, and the exchange is rarely verbal, but more often visual and perhaps tactile: gazes and touch rather than words. Moreover, it might be argued that, on the boulevard, if not also in the coffee house, earlier trajectories and their sedimentations are relevant.

To the extent that emotions are not taken to be expressions of something else, for instance a personality, they do not have to be disciplined and rendered passive: Richard Sennett (1977) has argued that, with the “Fall of public man”, the disappearance of the ritualized behaviour characteristic of the coffee houses of the ancien régime (until the 18th century), we lost the possibility of having a authentic public sphere, where intersubjective issues could be discussed, and arguments advanced, in an impassive, non-sentimental way. Contrary to the diagnosis of Riesman and other sociologists, Sennett submits, Western societies are not moving from an inner-directed to something like an other-directed condition, but instead from public life to self-absorption, epitomised by the values of civility and personality, respectively. Television and other mass media, which render real public contact unnecessary, also indulges in sentimentality and the values of personality.(10) According to Sennett’s analysis, therefore, it seems that Postmodernity has dawned on the café long ago.

And yet, the cafés played an important part all through Europe in the emergence of the different Modernist movements of Art, and even later on, in the culture of popular music (cf. Bradshaw 1978); and at least in France, they have continued to this very day to have a very important role in intellectual life, giving rise Existentialism, and then to Structuralism (and thus to semiotics), as well as Poststructuralism and Postmodernism In Sweden, as no doubt in many other places, coffee drinking never acquired this public character: it essentially took place in the private homes of friends and acquaintances; it was associated with gossip rather than with serious discussion; and, traditionally, it was mainly considered to be a practice characteristic of women.(11) Even traditional cafés in Sweden fail to manifest the public character they have in many other countries: they do not open up onto the streets, but are found behind the counter where pastries may be bought for home consumption. Curiously, it is in the age of the Internet that public cafés, turning their front to the street, have finally emerged also in Sweden, being at the same time transformed into as meeting-place mainly for young people. Also in this sense, the putative Postmodernity really shows itself to be as a kind of hypermodernity.

If the talk of contemporary youth cafés is no doubt not very much concerned with politics, nor with art, but rather with everyday life, it is probable that this was also the predominant theme of the English coffee house and the Parisian café. One of the pioneers of social psychology, Gabriel Tarde (1910), already noted the importance to public life of the kind of conversation having no fixed purpose that took place in the Parisian cafés. Conversation, in this sense, I take it, is opposed to instrumental talk that we may imagine being used by the more or less mythical pre-historical hunters pursuing their game together, and even at latter-day working places, where the exchange may be stereotypical to the point of being reducible to very simple gesture systems or “kinesic codes” (cf. Kendon 2004:284ff). Conversation, on the other hand, would involve gossip, rumours, small talk, and deceit.(12) It may start out from what students of human origins call Machiavellian intelligence, which pertains to the ability to state that which is not, that is, to lie. The Modernity of conversation remounts very far back in time. But it might be argued that is could only really come to its own with the emergence of the city. Some “cities” described by archaeology have been dated as far back as 8000 years B.C. But they do not appear to be cities in our sense, because they lack public spaces, be the market squares, streets, or cafés (cf. Sonesson 2003). The Modernity of conversation may therefore not be as old as it first seems.

Habermas is wrong, I believe, in giving so much importance to the nature of the content that is exchanged in public life, and in reducing this exchange to the verbal kind. It is true that, in Habermas’ (1982) later work, an idealtypical speech situation, which presupposes rational argumentation, is said to be taken for granted by all verbal exchange in the public sphere. It therefore is part of the form of the exchange, not its content. But this idealtypical speech situation is far removed from the way real world conversation occurs in the extant cultures of the human world, where truth and sincerity can certainly not be taken as givens. Indeed, in many cultures, it is more important to show willingness to help than to tell the truth or only to talk about things you know anything about, which means it is quite normal to promise things you do not intent to do and to describe the way to a place you have never heard of. Veridical, sincere and rational discourse is only a small artificial island, which may be precariously set up in the big ocean of conversation. In the full sense, it can only take place in small communities of researchers who aspire to attain truth by accepting the regime of fallibility, as Peirce can be taken to say.

On the other hand, the dialogicity posited by the Bakhtin circle very rarely takes on the trappings of a true dialogue. Whereas Habermas sees conversation as a rational advancement of arguments and counter-arguments, Bakhtin and Voloc&inov’s present it as a mere contiguity of voices, as the incidental intermingling of the street vendor’s cries on the market place. Literary dialogicity, better known as intertextuality, is not a conversation, but the fortuitous encounter of quotations from different sources in a single text. As a definition of conversation, Habermas’ characterization demands too much, and that of Bakhtin too little. The act of conversation is aimed at a partner to the conversation who is expected to answer back. What first and foremost defines the act of questioning is the expectancy of an answer, not any condition of sincerity and the like (cf. Sonesson 1978). In a much more general sense, every act of conversation contains within itself the anticipation of a response, of one kind of other. There may be no rationality in the exchange, but there has to be an (potential) anticipation of the other’s voice. This basic sense of dialogicity is curiously absent from the work of Bakhtin and Volocinov.

The only discussion of examples approaching a dialogue in the work of Volocinov are the paragraphs dedicated to “Well” and “H’m” (1983: 10ff, 124ff), where they are said to signify very different things depending on the circumstances. In the former case, both the participants know that they are in Russia, that winter lingers on, etc. In the latter case, depending on what is taken for granted, the response of the other may be to rush away ashamed, or to look pleased (Cf. Sonesson 1999). I have observed above, that both the boulevard and the café depend on the reunion in a single space of people having lifelines with different origin and perhaps different
continuations. According to Habermas and Sennett, this is what permits objective, rational discourse. This means that the presuppositions of the conversation will not be as widely shared as Volocinov claims. The situation has to be defined more explicitly. Perhaps this explicitation is at the origin of rationality as a social norm. It may be argued that, in the coffee house, there is a new set of norms which are shared among the participants, partly along the lines suggested by Habermas, but there will certainly be others, more generally applicable to café discourse, also that which is not so very rational. In other words, when the presuppositions due to shared life experience are shattered, the coffee house presuppositions take over.

The city, which renders possible the boulevard and the café, would seem to guarantee the Modernity of such norms. Just as it was said above about the boulevard, Postmodernity really seems to offer only more Modernity. But if the advent of Postmodernity is taken to be synonymous with the globalization of the public sphere, we should perhaps expect it to give rise to a further breakdown of common presuppositions (Cf. Sonessson 2004). What is more, if the public sphere, as it originated in the coffee house, brought with it own homogenizing structures, there seems to be no reason to suspect that globalization will not do the same. The
globalization presuppositions will take over. Indeed, contrary to what is taken for granted by Postmodernist ideology, globalization really seems to amount to a homogenization of the structures of the public sphere. There may be any number of radio stations, television channels, and even web sites, but they all become increasing alike. Trajectories become more diversified, but the structures by means of which they are conveyed tend to be one and the same. As for rationality, it will probably always remain that little artificial island in the ocean of conversation.

So again, there is no escape from Modernity. The night came, and a new day has dawned, but we are still out there rowing.

(1) In particular, it is of course absurd to compare the progress of abstraction in art with the
different stages in child development according to Piaget. Supposing abstraction to develop in the child, it is already there for the artist.
(2) But not before that time, and not in all countries and domains of picture production; cf Uspenskij 1976.
(3) Such a use of the Tartu school model is obviously reminiscent of the so-called institutional
theory of art, but even in its recent, sociological rather than philosophical, variety (see Becker
1982), the latter appears to be a much less potent theory, with much less conceptual machinery
available.For other uses of the Tartu school model, see Sonesson 1992a och 1993b.
(4) This is were the present text diverges from the conclusions of Sonesson 1993; 1998.
(5) Perhaps a more pregnant image for this virtuality of trajectories is the tree describing the logic of action (e.g. von Wright 1968) or the narratological model of Bremond (1973).
(6) Actually, an even better image of such a polyphony may be the street vendors going up and
down one parallel street after the other, as they did in ancient Rome (cf. Archard 1991), and as
they still do in the biggest city in the world, Mexico City. In that way, their cries really seem to
weave a tissue of “intertextuality”.
(7) As women in Mexico City and other places know well, the best chance for not so virtual touching is nowadays the subway wagon.
(8) However, there is probably nobody in the rite who is not a subject but only an object of
observation, for also the officiator partakes in the experience of the rite; he performs it for
himself, in the same sense in which he does so for the others (unlike the actor).
(9) Cf. Hammad (1989: 77; 2002: 102) about the female body having been for a long time a privatised space controlled by the male.
(10) As I have argued elsewhere (in Sonesson 1995), there is really no contradiction between
Riesman’s and Sennett’s theses: sentimentality may very well be the form projected onto the
abstract social relations simulating an intimacy which is no longer there. In any case, the process of compensation is not found on the boulevard, nor in the coffee house, but it is well
known from television, but so far, I believe, absent from the Internet.
(11) This observation was first made (in Sonesson 1993a) as a generalisation from the present
state of Swedish society, but I later discovered that Swedish ethnologists (notably Valeri 1991)
have demonstrated the historical correctness of this surmise.
(12) I do not mean to endorse the rather unwarrent view expressed by Dunbar according to which language takes it origin as a substitute for grooming.

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