The MIT Press October.: Is Collaborating With JSTOR To Digitize, Preserve and Extend Access To

8/19/2019 Antivision - Rosalind Krauss.
pdf
Antivision
Author(s): Rosalind Krauss
Source: October, Vol. 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche,
Un-Knowing (Spring, 1986), pp. 147-154
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778561
Accessed: 17-08-2015 20:07 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 143.107.34.104 on Mon, 17 Aug 2015 20:07:08 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/antivision-rosalind-krausspdf 1/9
8/19/2019 Antivision - Rosalind Krauss.pdf
Antivision
ROSALIND KRAUSS
One turns he pages ofGeorges Bataille's book on Manet witha mounting

sense of disappointment. s it really Bataille who is tellingus-once again-
that Manet's achievementwas the destructionof subject matterso that in its
place, from among its ruins, should arise pure painting-"painting," as he
writes, for ts own sake, a song forthe eyes ofinterwoven orms nd colors"?'
Having turnedsubject matter nto a mere pretext or hisrelease of visual opu-
lence, for hisexperience of optical autonomy, Bataille can conclude, "I would
stressthe factthatwhat counts in Manet's canvases is not the subject, but the
vibration of light."2
So once again there s the visual model, ineluctably ied to thevisual arts.
Of course, modernism'svisual model had significantly ransformed hose of
earlier times. This is true whetherwe think of the Middle Ages' preaching
model, in which vision, seen as the most vivid and precise ofthe senses was to
be theconduit throughwhich religiousmatter ould most directly nd mosten-
duringly ffect he soul; or whetherwe take an empiricistmodel, withpainting
transcribing hat mosaic of sensation throughwhich reality nnounces itself o
a perceiving subject. Modernism transmutes these models according to its
own, altered sense of the task of visuality. To exclude the domain of knowl-
edge, both
relation moral and scientific,
to the o rewrite he visual in therealm of a reflexive
modalityof vision rather han to its contents, o savor in and for
itself ualities like immediacy,ibrancy,imultaneity,ffulgence nd to experience
theseas qualities withoutobjects theintransitive erbs of vision, as itwere
all ofthis s to enterwhat in quite anothermood we mightdescribe as the mod-
ernistfetishization f sight.
1. Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. AustrynWainhouse and James Emmons, Geneva, Skira,
1955, p. 36.
2. Ibid., p. 103. This had, essentially,been the position of the French art historical stablish-
ment since the major Manet exhibitionof 1932. In Manetet a tradition1932), Germain Bazain
had announced,
indifference oth"L'art de Manet
to invention and est en effet
to subject n pur Rend
matter. probleme de couleur," assertingthe artist's
Huyghe's Manetpeintre1932) empha-
sized Manet's commitmentto a notion of painting as a reflexiveprocess.
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/antivision-rosalind-krausspdf
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2/9
148 OCTOBER
But here'sthe strangepart-had begun his career precisely

Bataille--and
by buying out of all this.
FromtotheDocumentseriod,
dedicated an entirely ifferentthat s toofsay
eading 1929-30, comesart.
vision'srelationto a series of texts
We think f
"Rotting Sun," the essay dedicated to Picasso; we turn to the study of auto-
mutilationand the fascinationwiththe sun in "SacrificialMutilation and the
Severed Ear ofVincentVan Gogh"; orwe reflect n the highly riticalreviewof
Primitivert, book that soughtto extend developmentalpsychology's heories
ofthe genesis of representation ack to thetime ofthe caves; or again, we find
the briefmeditationon the organ of vision in the Documents ictionary ntry
called "Eye," and subtitled Cannibal Delicacy." In all oftheseBataille proposes
a scandalous relation of art to vision.
iiiT
iiii~~ii~
ii~
~ iiii
~ii liiii
~iii~i7 ii,i iiiii~iii44 iiiiii~~~
~ iiiii ,i i i~i
~~
i iiiiiiiiiiii~iii;i~ii ~~~i~iiii~iiiiiiiiiiiii~i~
. i,
?; ;;ili~iiiiiii feei
o @ t
o~ii
............ .
Lascaux.Bison,man, ndbird.
Antivision 149
Contained in the visual metaphor the grounding f art n thefundamen-

tal properties f vision is the commitment o productiveness nd to mastery,
to the acquisitiveness nd accomplishment f sight, o itsusefulness, tsprowess,
its determinedbusy-ness.Miming thisproductivitywas - for he psychology f
the 1920s-the veryprojectthat nitiatedman intothe act of art, where repre-
sentation s, simply,a way of appropriating hings.To draw an animal on the
wall of the cave is to possess it, to have already succeeded in hunting t. The
psychologist harts purposivemovement n the part ofthe primitive raughts-
man that s propelledby thisneed to create an equivalent to the purposefulness
of sight. The modern scientist ees that paleolithic, infant rtistprogressing,
over the course of thousands of years, from he babble of an inchoatescrawl to
the search fromwithinthat linear meander for somethinghe will "recognize"
and, once having seen it there, man or animal, he learns to repeat this sign.
Gradually he perfects t. And his masteryof it repeats the masterythat it, as
likeness, will exercise on the world he sees.
Bataille never denies this scenario of productiveness,which he titles ap-
propriation." He simply points out that this account has chosen to omit
another,parallel course, charted ike the first, n the wall ofthe cave. It is this
second course, delirious,destructive, hatcannot be thoughtby science. From
the very same period that the walls reap theirharvestof
hooved, horned declare aanimals--delicate-
owards the
person oftheir
shaggy-backed,ferociously
wn creator.The Aurignaciandepictions
they fman fury
are caricatural,
ignoble, debased. They neverseem to rise above those nitial,early scrawlsthe
motiveforwhich seems, despite the psychologists' cenario, dubiouslyproduc-
tive. Rather theforcepropelling heseformless etworks f ine comes across as
destructive, s a markingwhich dirties,defaces, disrupts he ground on which
it appears, a markingwhose impulse seems purelysadistic. So arthas an alter-
native beginningat least as faras man's self-image s concerned. It begins with
what Bataille calls "a refusal o represent" nd instead projectsself-depiction s
autodefacement.
Two this tructure f
The first akes
mythic yclesproject
in
place darkness, in the
self-)defacing
chthonic representation.
obscurity f the cave, where
no man leans over the luminous reflection fhis own image, givingrise to the
beginningsof art in the rapt, self-admiring estureof Narcissus. Instead, the
Minotaur presides in thisdarknessand substitutes he blindness and terror f
the labyrinthforthe transparencyof the mirror.The representation f man
withinthis site must be collectedunder the nonproductive erms destruction"
or "decomposition," s opposed to the productiveform hat undertakesthe ob
of appropriation.
The second cycle eaves thecaves and is performed recisely n relationto
3. Georges Bataille, "L'art primitif,"Oeuvres omplktes,ol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, pp.

247-54.
150 OCTOBER
the sun, thatembodimentofthe zenithand of ightwhich formost ofmankind

functions o symbolizeelevation of both mind and spirit.The sun functions s
themost abstractof objects, Bataille explains, "since t s impossibleto look at it
fixedly."But if, he argues, "one obstinatelyfocuseson it, a certain madness is
implied, and the notion changes meaning because it is no longer production
that appears in light,but refuseor combustion . . . In practicethe scrutinized
sun can be identifiedwitha mental ejaculation, foam on the ips, and an epilep-
tic crisis.4 t is just such a crisisthat tied Van Gogh to the sun, the constant
deityof his paintingfrom he timeof Arles and Saint-Remy, the deitytowhich
he made the sacrifice f his ear.
To stare at the sun is to go mad, to go blind, and thus to performwhat
Bataille calls automutilation.But this automutilationby which the body is de-
filed s the veryact of mimesis throughwhich one attempts o identifywith an
ideal-the sun, the gods-by imitating t. Ancient sacrificialritual-Bataille
speaks of Mithraic cults in "Rotting Sun," or Aztec ones in "ExtinctAmerica"
- as well as modern
pathological behavior, fixpreciselyon that aspect of the
sun or the sun god that embodies waste and destruction:"It is nothingbut
radiation, igantesque loss of heat and light,flame,explosion," ataille writes,
calling the sun "this greatcataclysm."5And it is this deal which in the eyes of
an idealist culture would only be an anti-ideal, this deal of a nonrecuperable
of a oss that forms he basis of mitation
when
expenditure,
identificationsupreme
with"apower
solar through
god who tears and rips out his own organs"
issues, inevitably, n automutilation.6
Withinthisautomutilative ct, an identification iththe sun thatdefines
itself s a self-blinding, he circle s squared and the darkness ofthe cave fuses
withthe blaze ofnoon. The two mythic ycles are the same cycle and have the
same story o tellof representation, fart'sdepictionofman himself.From the
1937 essay "Van Gogh as Prometheus"comes another image of thisfusionof
dark and light. Bataille imagines Van Gogh trying o look directly ntothesun
by holdinghis hand beforehis face as a screen,or blinder. In such a momentof
both and Death in a sortof
seeing henot-seeing,
sun through appeared transparency,
blood of a living hand, in the interstices ike the
fthebones outlined
in the darkness."7
Representation s born, then, at the limit:where lightturnsto darkness,
where ife urrenders n image ofdeath, where sight s extinguished n a revela-
torymomentwhich s the same as blindness.And it s thisother,nonappropri-
4. Georges Bataille, Visions fExcess, trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis, University of Min-
nesota Press, 1985, p. 57.
5.
6. Bataille,
Bataille, OC, vol.fI,
Visions p. 498.
Excess, p. 66.
7. Bataille, OC, vol. I, p. 499.
VincentanGogh. he Sower. 1888.
VA
-74't~"
ggf
4''.0
ative, nonproductive orm f representation hatBataille resurrects nce again

in a strangely ubversive mage withinthe very pages ofhis book on Manet.
Manet, he had written, s the beginning of modern art, an art that
celebrates the silentautonomyofvision. But behind thisbeginning s another,
wholly alternatebeginning,which opens up to us in the followingpassage:
In that vision of a man about to die, flinging p his arms with a
shriek,which we call The ShootingsftheThird fMay, we have the
very mage of death, such as man can hardlyeverknow it, since the
event itselfwipes out all consciousness of it. In this picture Goya
caught the blinding, instantaneousflashof death, a thunderbolt f
sight-destroyingntensity, righter han any known light. The elo-
quence, the rhetoric f paintinghas never been carried further, ut
here its effects thatofdefinitive ilence, an outcry mothered efore
it can rise.8
8. Bataille,Manet, . 51.
Antivision 153
art to whichBataille subscribesthroughout he restof the book. For the whole

ofManet s an exercise n the aestheticparadigm we associate with theEnlight-
enmentand the name of Lessing: the paradigm that differentiateshe artistic
genresby means of the modalities of consciousness of realityproper to each,
disassociating an art oftime from ne of space and therebygroundingeach of
the arts in the perceptual fieldproper to its own experience: speech linked to
temporality nd sectionedoff y definition rom ight, inked to space.
Wholly within this framework,Bataille then repeatedlydefinesManet's
contributionas a breaking of rhetoric'sgrip on painting, as a silencing of
speech in order to discover the preeminence of vision as such.
The interest f the Goya episode as an alternative, n factcontradictory,
beginning is preciselythat it challenges the aesthetic paradigm vision/lan-
guage through which painting is understood to define itself,by offering
thirdterm/blindness/which can be seen as undoing or foiling hat paradigm.
Outside thestructuralaw thatorganizes thearts n relationto the positivecon-
tents of sense, blindness- which in its sensory malfunction s precisely the
refusal o appropriate is an irregular hird erm,not deducible from heother
two. Following Barthes's descriptionof the operations of Bataille's heterology
we could say, "It is a termthat s independent, full,eccentric, rreducible:the
termofa (structurally)awless seduction."10 nstead, blindnessbecomes a term
that forms ts own pairing with the pole of opticalityby constructing nother
paradigm-vision/blindness-on theverybody oftheperceiver, n all ofhis or
her physical, material existence.
In so doing, the work of the heterologicalbecomes obvious, because it
forces one to see that it was always on, in, and through the body of the
perceiver that the aesthetic paradigm operated; that these operations were
merely ublimated by an idealist subterfuge hat wants to describe the workof
art as a function f the disembodied modalitiesofsense. But Bataille invites he
body to reassert tselfnto thestructuralaw by whichmodernismmasquerades
painting as the experience for tself f the contentless ontentsof vision. The
paradigm vision/blindness eturns ight o ts seat in the affective,roticground
of thebody, thebody convulsedin either utoappropriationor automutilation.
It is only lately that one has learned, in this country,to attend to this
alternativemythologicalpractice, to thisconstruction f a whollydisorienting
and disruptivethirdterm that unravels the neat categoriesof a too formulaic
modernism. Looking around the edges of Bataille's own circle in the days of
Documentsne findsa group of practices that are as extraordinary s theyare
disregardedwithin he official istories fmodernist rt. On the one hand there
is the disruptivepractice of the early Giacomettias he began to think he body
10. Roland Barthes, "Les sortiesdu texte," n, Bataille, d. Philippe Sollers,Paris, 10/18, 1973,
p. 58.
154 OCTOBER
of sculpturethrough he Bataillian categoriesof abyrinth,necropolis, and the

vertiginous allfrom he verticalaxis ofthemonumentto the horizontalaxis of
the base.I On the otherhand there s theproductionofa kind of photography
associated withboth Bataille's magazine Documentsnd withMinotaure, he one
to whom he gave its name.
As thisphotographydevelops what are undoubtedlythe surrealistmove-
ment's most inventiveand searing images, it does so less under the sign of
Breton's convulsive beauty than under the sign of Bataille's automutilation.
There we find he body inscribed n a mimeticresponse to externalforces;the
body bursting ts bounds as it is assaulted fromwithout; the body assuming
both the signs of castrationand the forms f the fetish.12
The termsthat Bataille invented to shake the certainty f various nor-
mative paradigms in all their ogical symmetry terms ike informe,ciphale,
basesse, utomutilation,and blindness these termswork to release the affect
that has been available all along in a whole body of work which, for many
decades, has been unassimilable by us.
They are terms hatmightbe expected as well to organize and restructure
our understandingof more recentpractices,beginning n the 1940s with Du-
buffet's arly materiological xplorations,or umping forward o watch the ex-
tinction f ight n late Rothko, or to witnessthe alignment f the body withthe
earth in the of the last two decades and t in termsof
the abyrinth's
sculpture
omplicationof forms nd of horizontality's
understanding
ndless multiplying
of point of view. It is not clear what an alternativeview ofthe history f recent
art one operated throughBataille's disruptionof the prerogatives f a visual
system-would yield. It is my assumption that n gesturing owardanotherset
ofdata, in suggesting nothergroup ofreasons, anotherdescription fthe goals
of representation, nother ground forthe very activity f art, its yields will be
tremendous.
11. See
Garde my treatmentof
nd Other this in "No More Mass.,
Modernist yths,Cambridge, Play," collected
MIT Press,in my,
1985.The OriginalityftheAvant-
12. See my "Corpus Delicti," October, o. 33 (Summer 1985), pp. 31-72.

The MIT Press October.: Is Collaborating With JSTOR To Digitize, Preserve and Extend Access To

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The MIT Press October.: Is Collaborating With JSTOR To Digitize, Preserve and Extend Access To

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

8/19/2019 Antivision - Rosalind Krauss.

One turns he pages ofGeorges Bataille's book on Manet witha mounting

But here'sthe strangepart-had begun his career precisely

Contained in the visual metaphor the grounding f art n thefundamen-

3. Georges Bataille, "L'art primitif,"Oeuvres omplktes,ol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, pp.

the sun, thatembodimentofthe zenithand of ightwhich formost ofmankind

VincentanGogh. he Sower. 1888.

ative, nonproductive orm f representation hatBataille resurrects nce again

art to whichBataille subscribesthroughout he restof the book. For the whole

of sculpturethrough he Bataillian categoriesof abyrinth,necropolis, and the

You might also like