Compulsive Beauty / Hal Foster, P

Third printing, 1997 First MIT Egress paperback edition, 1995 © 1993 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Bembo by DEKR Corporation and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foster, Hal. Compulsive beauty / Hal Foster, p. cm. “An October book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-06160-0 (HB), 0-262-56081-X (PB) 1. Surrealism. 2. Erotic art. 3. Psychoanalysis and art I. Title. N6494.S8F66 1993 709'. 04'063—dc20 93-19023 CIP For Elizabeth Foss Foster C o n t e n t s Preface xi 1 B eyond the Pleasure Principle? 1 2 C ompulsive B eauty 19 3 C onvulsive I dentity 57 4 Fatal A ttraction 101 5 Exquisite C orpses 125 6 O utmoded Spaces 157 7 A uratic T races 193 8 B eyond the Surrealism Principle? 209 N otes 215 L ist of I llustrations 299 Index 305 Interpretive delirium begins only when man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols. —Andre Breton, L ’Amour fou (1937) Max Ernst, The Swan Is Very Peaceful, 1920. P r eface In 1916 Andre Breton was an assistant in a ncuropsychiatric clinic at Saint- Dizier. There he tended a soldier who believed that the war was a fake, with the wounded made up cosmetically and the dead on loan from medical schools. The soldier intrigued the young Breton: here was a figure shocked into another reality that was also somehow a critique o f this reality. But Breton never developed the implications o f this origin story o f surrealism, and the usual accounts o f the movement do not mention it. For these accounts present surrealism as Breton wanted it to be seen, as a movement o f love and liberation, and this story speaks rather o f traumatic shock, deadly desire, compulsive repetition. M y essay is an attempt to see surrealism from this other side, in a way that might comprehend such a crazy scene. In this respect it is the origin story of my text as well.1 Over the last decade surrealism has returned with a vengeance, the subject o f many exhibitions, symposia, books, and articles. Lest I merely add another line to the list, I want to begin my essay with a reflection on the past repression and present recovery o f this movement. For not so long ago Preface surrealism was played down in Anglo-American accounts o f modernism (if not in French ones). In effect it was lost twice to such art history: repressed in abstractionist histories founded oh cubism (where it appears, if at all, as a morbid interregnum before abstract expressionism), it was aiso displaced in neo-avant-garde accounts focused on dada and Russian constructivism (where it appears, if at all, as a decadent version o f vanguardist attempts to integrate art and life). In Anglo-American formalism surrealism was considered a deviant art movement: improperly visual and impertinently literary, relatively inatten tive to the imperatives o f form and mostly indifferent to the laws o f genre, a paradoxical avant-garde concerned with infantile states and outmoded forms, not properly modernist at all.2 For neo-avant-garde artists who challenged this hegemonic model three decades ago, its very deviance might have made surrealism an attractive object: as an impense o f cubocentric art history, it might have exposed the ideological limitations o f this narrative. But such was not the case. Since this formalist model of modernism was staked on the autonomy o f modern art as separate from social practice and grounded in visual experience, its antagonist, the neo-avant-garde account o f modernism, stressed the two movements, dada and constructivism, that appeared most opposed to this visualist autonomy—that sought to destroy the separate institution o f art in an anarchic attack on its formal conventions, as did dada, or to transform it according to the materialist practices o f a revolutionary society, as did constructivism.3 Again surrealism was lost in the shuffle. To the neo-avant-gardists who challenged the formalist account in the 1950s and 1960s, it too appeared corrupt: technically kitschy, philo sophically subjectivist, hypocritically elitist. Hence when artists involved in pop and minimalism turned away from the likes o f Picasso and Matisse, they turned to such figures as Duchamp and Rodchenko, not to precedents like Ernst and Giacometti.4 Obviously times have changed. The formalist ideal o f optical purity has long since fallen, and the avant-gardist critique o f categorical art is fatigued, at least in practices that lim it “ institution” to exhibition space and Preface ‘‘art” to traditional media. A space for surrealism has opened up: an impense within the old narrative, it has become a privileged point for the contem porary critique o f this narrative. And yet for the most part art history has filled this new space with the same old stuff.5 Despite its redefining o f the image, surrealism is still often reduced to painting; and despite its confound ing o f reference and intention, surrealism is still often folded into discourses o f iconography and style. One reason for this art-historical failure is a neglect o f the other principal precondition for the return o f surrealism as an object o f study: the dual demands o f contemporary art and theory. Again, in the 1960s and 1970s minimal and conceptual artists concerned with the phenomenological effects and the institutional frames o f art turned to dada and constructivism for support. However, in the 1970s and 1980s these concerns developed beyond such historical tropisms: on the one hand, into a critique o f media images and institutional apparatuses, and, on the other, into an analysis o f the sexual determination o f subjectivity and the social construction o f identity—an analysis first prompted by feminist cri tiques and then developed by gay and lesbian ones. Although the surrealists were hardly critical o f heterosexism, they were concerned with the imbri cation o f the sexual in the visual, o f the unconscious in the real; indeed, they introduced this problematic into modern art in a programmatic way. Feminist and gay and lesbian critiques have compelled such questions to be asked anew, particularly in a psychoanalytic frame, and to do so historically was to turn to surrealism among other sites.6 Similarly, as a blind spot in the Anglo-American view o f modernism, surrealism became a retroactive point o f reference for postmodernist art, especially o f its critique o f repre sentation. In the 1980s this critique was often advanced through allegorical appropriations, especially o f media images. Like the troubling o f identity by sexuality, this troubling o f reality via the simulacrum was also undertaken by surrealism, and to be involved in this problematic was to become inter ested in this art.7 Although I only touch on these contemporary concerns here, they are immanent to my approach, and this leads to another incentive to rethink X III Preface surrealism today. Especially when extended to such figures as Duchamp and Bataille, surrealism is a site o f an agonistic modernism within official mod ernism—again, a crucial reference for a critical postmodernism. Today, however, this particular battle appears won (the greater war is another matter), and if formalist modernism is not the totalistic Blue Meany it was often made out to be, Duchamp, Bataille and company are no longer the betes noires they once were.8 And yet this countermodernist status is not the only surrealist claim to critical value now. For surrealism is also the nodal point o f the three fundamental discourses o f modernity— psychoanalysis, cultural Marxism, and ethnology—all o f which inform surrealism as it in turn develops them. Indeed, the great elaborations o f these discourses are initiated in its milieu. It was there that Jacques Lacan first developed the Freudian concept o f narcissism into the famous model o f the mirror stage, i.e., o f the emergence o f the subject in an imaginary situation o f (mis)recognition, o f identification, alienation, and aggressivity.9 (Along the way I w ill also suggest the deferred action o f surrealism on Lacanian con ceptions o f desire and the symptom, trauma and repetition, paranoia and the gaze.) It was there too that Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch first developed the Marxian notion o f the uneven development o f productive modes and social relations into a cultural politics o f the outmoded and the nonsynchronous—o f a critical reinscription o f old images and structures o f feeling in the present. Finally, it was there that Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiris first developed Maussian accounts o f the ambiv alence o f gift exchange and the collectivity o f la Jete into a radical critique o f the equivalence o f commodity exchange and the egotism o f bourgeois self-interest. These elaborations are important to much postwar art and theory— which points again to the genealogical connections between sur realism and recent practice, even as it also suggests a triangulated set o f concepts with which to map surrealism. Contemporary criticism has treated such concepts, to be sure, but not in concert.10 As a result, no general theory o f surrealism has emerged that does not rehearse its partisan descriptions or XIV Preface impose alien ideas upon it.

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