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Political Transformations and the Practices of Cultural Negation in Contemporary Art Theory Gail Ann Day the University of Leeds

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Political Transformations and the Practices of Cultural Negation in Contemporary Art Theory Gail Ann Day the University of Leeds Political Transformations and the Practices of Cultural Negation in Contemporary Art Theory Gail Ann Day Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD The University of Leeds Department of Fine Art September 1996 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own work and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. ABSTRACT This dissertation follows the theme of negation, negativity, and “practices of negation”, through a selection of writings on art in the post-war period, and, in particular, from the 1960s to the present. Although the term negation is widely used, most prominently with lespect to the histories and analyses of art-historical categories like avant-gardism, neo­ avant-gardism, modernism, and postmodernism, very little attention has been paid to the concept itself, 01 to its role within art-historical methodology. The main art-theoretical texts which I select for examination are characterised by a suspicion of figures of identity, plenitude, or affirmation. I explore the borderlands between dialectical and nihilistic methodologies which these suspicions seem to provoke, and I argue that the attention to negativity has a particular importance for considerations!of art because of its implications for the question of representation. Chapter 1 outlines the key accounts on avant-gardism and modernism, and looks at the impact of the Left Hegelian tradition on recent art theory. I argue that the claims that negativity has become compromised or ineffectual, lead, in fact, to a reassertion of negativity. The second section of this chapter tracks some of the methodological implications through a case study of the writings of T.J. Clark, and develops the question of negation as a fundamental problem of representation. Chapter 2 analyses the writings of the Italian architectural theorists/historians Manfredo Tafuri and Massimo Cacciari. These authors elaborate their arguments from German critical theory, and their attention to negativity is tracked into an account of “completed nihilism”. Chapter 3 starts from the association - advanced, in particular, by writers associated with the journal October - made between modernism/postmodernism and the rhetorical figures of symbol/allegory. I argue that allegorical negativity is not straightforwardly disjunctive, and, by reading it as a degenerative dialectic, the argument returns to representational debates. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION j CHAPTER 1 THE PAIN OF THE UNATTAINABLE BEYOND 19 Section One: Negation, Avant-Gardism & Modernism 27 I. Capitalism’s Gravediggers & Permanent Negation 27 II. Negation as Alienation & as De-Alienation 40 III. Negation as Critical Distance Under “Total Reification” 46 IV. Autonomy as a Practice of Negation or Affirmation 58 V. Atrophy & Ends 64 Section Two: T.J. Clark’s Practices of Negation 72 I. Practices of Negation 76 II. Searching for a Method 82 III. The Mediation of Metaphor 88 IV. The “Permanently Unresolved Dialectic” 94 CHAPTER 2 LOOKING THE NEGATIVE IN THE FACE 104 Section One: The MeU'opolis, The Plan & the Avant-Garde 107 I. The Metropolis, or, “The Intrinsic Negativeness of the Large City” 107 II. The Plan, or, “A Positive Realization of the Dialectic”, “The Negative... Inherent in the System” 112 III. The Negation of Sense and Syntax: Signs Reduced to Zero & “Things Devoid of Significance” 124 Section Two: “The Negative Assumes Within Itself... The Tragedy of the Given’” 134 I. Form Without Utopia 134 II. “Only Through a Total Alienation” & The “Total Introjection of... Nothingness” 143 III. Negative Thought 148 IV. Completed Nihilism 151 CHAPTER 3 PERMANENT DIALECTICAL UNREST, OR, THE DIZZINESS OF A PERPETUALLY SELF-ENGENDERED DISORDER 161 Section One: Allegorical Negativity, Symbolic Positivity & Premature Synthesis 167 Disruptions and Impulses 167 II. Some Disjunctions 171 III. Some Problems 180 Section Two: Anxious Becomings 187 I. Ideas Evaporating in Images & Remnants of Meaning Lurking in the Depths of Language 187 II. “Charity Devoid of Charity” 197 III. Negative Knowledge, Permanent Parabasis & Unrelieved Vertige 203 IV. The “Negative Capability” of “Infinite Regressions” 2 11 V. Signs, Symbols & Some Strange Turnings 220 CONCLUSION 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY 237 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Fred Orton, my supervisor, has supported this project throughout - his combination of rigorous thinking and intellectual generosity, and his refusal to take the easy or seemingly obvious options, has provided the environment which has allowed my work to progress. Participation in his postgraduate seminars and reading groups has been immensely influential. Fred has also allowed me to cite from unpublished material, enabling me to develop my argument at crucial - and, significantly, advanced - points. John R.R. Christie, joint-supervisor in the early stages, helped me to focus my concerns, and, indeed, to identify “negation” among the host of issues that I initially raised. Adrian Rifkin’s advice - especially at a point where my last word was always the 11th Thesis - encouraged me to look further into philosophy. Tim Clark has been very patient while his work was under my scrutiny, generous in sending me unpublished material, and provided the opportunity for me to work-up material for presentation. The experience of doctoral research has been shared with Chris Riding throughout. Catherine Lupton, Giles Peaker, Gavin Butt, Malcolm Barnard, Stanley Mitchell, John Roberts and John Penny, have provided references, friendship, and intellectual dialogue. I must also thank Peter Osborne and Stanley Mitchell specifically for their helpful comments on earlier and related papers. Dieter Beulshausen raided his personal library for my benefit, helped to develop my German language skills, and - in German - prompted me to formulate my main arguments. Julia Welboume and John X. Berger have provided friendship and a good deal of advice - without their printer, this thesis would have remained virtual. Julia must also be thanked for her editorial help, and, as Director of the Research Centre for Cultural History and Critical Theory at the University of Derby, for fostering an exciting intellectual culture, for providing research costs, and for transmuting money into time. I would also like to thank Melissa McQuillan for her consideration and patience in the final month of completion. Help from the staff of the Arts Library at the University of Derby has been excellent. The support of my family, and their encouragement for my education, even as it extended well beyond what was anticipated, has been taken for granted, but should not have been. Steve Edwards has given so much help, encouragement, constructive criticism, and love, that it is hat'd to recall what things were like before we met, and impossible to imagine the project without him. 1 INTRODUCTION To many people, it seems obvious now, and did so when this project commenced in 1990, that concepts like the avant-garde and modernism had become severely compromised, and, more particularly, that their often cited “practices of negation” had been rendered redundant by the transformations in post-war society - transformations which included factors like expansion of the art market (particularly in the United States and in Germany), changes in the nature of capital accumulation, and the conviction that the “shock of the new” had become the “tradition of the new”, l As we look back from the far side of postmodernism - a debate still raging in 1990, but itself somewhat outmoded in 1996 - such questions of avant-gardist negation, however much disputed and contended, seem to have settled in the dust and to hover on the verge of the arcane. My point here is stronger than the long-habitual claims that resistance has become appropriable, indeed marketable, by capitalist society (late capitalist, post-industrial, post-Fordist, post-etc...). We seem to be presented with an inversion of Walter Benjamin’s reclamations of the past for the present, the traces of the long-gone for now­ time, and instead face the prospect of the just-gone receeding rapidly into the far past. This prospect makes Benjamin’s point the more forceful rather than redundant, and we 1. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic o f Late Capitalism, Verso, 1991, p.49 (the original essay, of the same title, appeared in New Left Review 146, July/August 1984. pp.53-92). The notion of the “tradition of the new” can be found in Harold Rosenberg, “The Tradition of the New" (1962), The Tradition of the New, Paladin, 1970, pp.23-26: “the famous ‘modern break with tradition' has lasted long enough to have produced its own tradition. Exactly one hundred years have passed since Baudelaire invited iugitives lrom the loo-small world of memory to come aboard for his voyage in search of the new”, ibid., p.23. The idea of “shock” in modernity is deep-seated, and has been most popularised by Walter Benjamin in Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Verso, 1983, and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Illuminations, Fontana, 1973, pp.219-53. Benjamin draws on: Sigmund Freud’s “theory of shock”, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1914). Sigmund Freud. On Metapsychology: the Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin, 1984, pp.269-338, especially p.303; Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Lilc (1903), On Individuality and Social Forms, The University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp.324-39. The phiase shock ol the new became the title of the television series and book on the avant-garde by Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, Thames & Hudson, 1980. 2 might require such interventions into our own yesterday.2 As much as the modernisms it initially sought to challenge, today postmodernism has been championed, attacked, categorised, analysed, marketed and curated - note the category of “early postmodernism” which has recently found its way into print.3 Not so long ago, people didn’t know postmodernism was coming.
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