Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

4. Theory and Criticism

Here the subject was what counts, in this problematic, as theory and criticism. The discussion was led by Diarmuid Costello; he aimed to bring out certain features of the philosophic claims of anti-aesthetic texts, with the objective of determining what kind of conceptual relation they had to the Modernism against which they reacted. This seminar and the next one are discussions of the relation of theory to contemporary practice: here, the question regards philosophic criticism in general; in the next seminar, the subject is more specifically Adornian critical theory. Diarmuid Costello: To get things going I want to pose the question, Is critical postmodernism a deconstruction, as was routinely claimed by anti-aesthetic theorists , or is it an inversion of Modernism? That is, does it bring out Modernism ’s internal contradiction or insufficiency or reinstate its negative after-image? To get at this, I want to open with two examples: the essay “The Use Value of ‘Formless’”1 and Douglas Crimp’s response to Michael Fried in “Pictures.”2 Take l’informe first. What is the relation of the formless, as theorized by Bois and Krauss, to what they want to use it to oppose, namely the “foundational myths” of Modernism? Although it is said to desublimate or lower various central tenets of Modernism, in practice it tends to result in the valorization of whatever Modernist theory denigrates: the horizontal (together with its associations of the animal) is celebrated over the vertical (with its associations of humanity); base matter or material (the tactile or unformed) is valorized over the optical (with its suggestion of transcending the body); pulse or repetition is held up against the instantaneous (and other Modernist exclusions of temporality ); and against all systems and structure, the entropic is proposed as the great leveler. I want to suggest that insofar as this set of revaluations inverts a previous set of positive terms, it remains trapped within the conceptual space marked out by the terms against which it is pitched. This brings me to my second question. What does a text like “The Informe” do? Is it doing art criticism, or is it making a certain theoretical or conceptual move? It seems to me that as criticism, it is quite brilliant. Krauss’s reading of Pollock is compelling.3 But how would you advance debates conceptually, if that is what you were interested in doing? You would need to show that rather than merely replacing a given term, such as opticality, with its antithesis, you were 4. theory and criticism 1. Yve-Alain Bois, “The Use Value of ‘Formless ,’” in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1997). 2. The participants also read Crimp, “Pictures ,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88, and “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 91–101. 3. In addition to the section “Horizontality” in Formless: A User’s Guide, see also Rosalind Krauss, chap. 6 of The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 58 unpacking the exclusions of opticality itself. You would need to show that writers who propose a theory of opticality, without doing justice to vision’s substrate in the body and embodiment, say, have yet to secure their account of the former. That would be what I mean by an internal or immanent, rather than an external, criticism. James Elkins: It might be useful to correlate your position on the informe text with other similar ones, from 1996 to the present. Formless, the book, was widely criticized for simply inverting Modernism: that’s an argument that was there, as Hal noted, even in October.4 Diarmuid Costello: Okay, that may be, but I want to use the example to flush out what I take to be some deeper differences around this table about the relation between criticism and theory. Let me propose, somewhat polemically, a strong distinction between criticism and theory. On this understanding, theory should be well in the background. It will ultimately, if at a remove, underpin all claims about specific works, but it will not illuminate any particular work or set of works. And that is so for a very simple reason: if a theory is true, it is true in general . If Freud and Klein, say, are right about the structure of the mind, they are right about everyone’s mind all of the time, not about some people’s minds some of the time. So if either...