The Political Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Art

Author(s): Linda Nochlin

Source: Art Journal , Winter, 1987, Vol. 46, No. 4, The Political Unconscious in
Nineteenth-Century Art (Winter, 1987), pp. 259-260
Published by: CAA

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/776995

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 Editor's Statement:
The Political Unconscious
in Nineteenth-Century Art

By Linda Nochlin

The session on the Political Uncon- sition between iconographic and formal and often provocative texts that it did.
scious in Nineteenth-Century Art analysis entirely.
at the 1986 Annual Meeting of the The original call for papers for the Fredric Jameson, who served as our
College Art Association,which served as session on the Political Unconscious respondent in absentia, pointed out
the basis of this issue of Art Journal,stipulated proposals dealing in novelin orhis response that he had "intended
owed its genesis to two rather different innovative ways with the intersection TheofPolitical Unconscious, or at least its
sources. First, the notion of an uncon- art and politics, particularly cases in first chapter, not to be a systematic
scious as opposed to a conscious inscrip- which concrete historical relations of presentation of my thoughts on the
tion of the political in the work of art or class, sex, nationality, or race were structure of the work of art, or on the
in artistic institutions or within the pro- veiled, transformed, or even erased, thusproper methods for analyzing artistic
cesses of art making seemed to me to functioning as an unconscious ground- texts; but rather as a way of sorting out
provide a necessary antithesis to those ing for the production under consider-the claims of competing arguments and
consciously formulated political pro- ation. By "art," I meant to imply the methods in this area. I did not want to
grams or commissions which had been discourses of art, modes of art produc-propose a system," he continued,
considered in the volume Art and Archi- tion, and art institutions such as
but rather to demonstrate that a
tecture in the Service of Politics, edited museums and academies, as well as
by Henry Millon and myself in 1978 works of art per se. Investigations of certain number of polemics on the
left and between radical methods
(Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T Press). Sec- photography, print-making, and anony-
ond, I had been inspired by a reading ofmous visual production, as well as the and approaches were not produc-
Fredric Jameson's magisterial text, Themore conventional painting and sculp- tive ones, because in reality they
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a were based on different objects of
ture, were invited. More than fifty pro-
Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, Cornell posals were submitted for consideration, study. I wanted to show how cer-
University Press, 1981). many of them excellent and provocative.
tain approaches to the text-some
It was not my intention to attempt a For purposes of consistency, papers in terms of social class, some in
wholesale translation of Jameson's com- dealing with French art were given terms of immediate political
plex work into the realm of the visual events, some in terms of tenden-
priority, with the exception of Douglas
arts-a project that would have been Crimp's piece on the Altes Museum, cies of capitalism itself as a mode
impossible in any case-but rather to which seemed to set the stage-both of production-constituted their
see what would happen if one made the theoretical and material-for the whole objects of study distinctly and
therefore did not in that sense
attempt to articulate such a problematic undertaking, despite the fact that the
venture for the field of art history. In the museum in question was a German overlap. You cannot fight over
case of art consciously designed to serve rather than a French one. An additional findings which are drawn from
a political cause-for example, Repin's piece, by Michael Orwicz, which radically distinct objects of study;
They Didn't Expect Him, representing seemed entirely appropriate to the gen- can certainly eventually go on
you
the return of a Siberian exile, or Rude's erally French tenor of the issue, was to discuss the political choices
heroic statue of Napoleon-the politics added to the papers presented by Doug- reflected in constituting the aes-
in question were often made manifest in las Crimp, Leila W. Kinney, Stephen F. thetic text in this way or that-but
the terms of iconographic, rather than Eisenman, Christopher J. Robinson, in might be better to become more
formal analysis. It seemed to me that in Jane Kromm, and Jeffrey J. Rosen at self-conscious about how those
the case of the presence of unconscious the 1986 session. objects of study were first consti-
political presuppositions a different sort I see now that my conception of the tuted, before we go on to the more
of methodology would be necessary, one political unconscious was in fact rather immediately political consider-
that avoided displacing the political onto nafve and too all-embracing. Yet it ations, which clearly depend on
the realm of subject matter and, indeed, seemed to me to serve a real purpose in our assessment of American
one that avoided the stereotypical oppo- generating the methodologically various culture today and its "current
situation."

Winter 1987 259

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What Jameson was insisting on was a
certain clarity, indeed a self-conscious-
ness about method, which, although
fairly common in literary criticism or, to
some degree, in history, is notably lack-
ing in the practices of mainstream art
history. Such an awareness is, I believe,
present to a greater or lesser degree in
all the papers in this Art Journal issue,
and as such constitutes an important
part of their value. The interpretation of
the "political unconscious" in each text
is invariably different, having to do with
the difference in the subject under inves-
tigation, how that subject is constructed,
and, perhaps most important, how the
very notion of unconsciousness in rela-
tion to the political is to be construed.
Jameson in his response made an impor-
Linda Nochlin is Professor in the Art
tant distinction between the search for
History Ph.D. Program at the City
political meanings that have in some
University of New York Graduate
sense been "lost" to the contemporary Center.
viewer and that therefore have to be
recuperated through careful examina-
tion of the historical situation in ques-
tion, as opposed to that area of study
which he stipulated as involving contra-
dictions, and where it seemed to him
that "something on the order of Freud's
model of the unconscious" might be
extremely pertinent. Some of the texts in
this issue belong on one side of this
distinction, some on the other; for some,
the distinction is itself of little relevance:
all of them, I believe, are interesting not
merely in what they come out with, but
in how they go about this task of explo-
ration, recuperation, or the setting forth
of contradictions.

Finally, I should like to point out that

almost all the contributors to this
volume are what might be called
"younger art historians," a term that
has something to do with physical age,
of course, but also with the fact that
most of them are at or near the begin-
ning of their careers, a fact that gives me
hope for our discipline. And I should
also like to give my heartfelt thanks to
Fredric Jameson, whose work provided
the inspiration for the session as well as
the critique of its accomplishment.

260 Art Journal

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