[the grace of writing symposium]

of obscurity and clarity: looking at artwriting

Mick Wilson (2002)

If the observers and belligerents of recent critical debates could agree on anything, it would be that
contemporary critical theory is confusing and confused. Once upon a time it might have been possible to
think of criticism as a single activity practiced with different emphases. The acrimony of recent debate
suggests the contrary: the field of criticism is contentiously constituted by apparently incompatible
activities.

Jonathan Culler (1982) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.

Introduction.

In choosing to speak of obscurity and clarity it is significant that these words are already resonant with
visual experience. The word obscurity is suggestive of that which is dark and occludes vision: that which
is seen but only darkly. The obscure is already a paradox of vision: in obscurity one sees that there is
something presenting itself, but it is something one cannot properly see. One sees a limit to one's
seeing. In a similar way the word "clarity" may be inspected for figural plays on the paradoxes of vision.
Clarity is a condition that supports seeing through: it suggests transparency. Again, a paradox of vision
emerges, whereby one can see clearly because one looks through something that is translucent, and so
it does not obstruct vision. You see through that which is clear, to something else beyond. You see
beyond that which you see through, because what you are seeing through is invisible, is transparent and
thus has clarity.

This relatively simple wordplay, while not particularly elegant or graceful, may serve here as an example
of the kind of rhetorical manoeuvre or stratagem which often appears in contemporary criticism and
which gives rise to certain anxieties: anxieties about the loss of meaningful reference, a loss of clarity
and a loss of confidence in the value of writing. This simple wordplay is used here, not to promote such
anxiety, but rather to set down some markers in respect of the themes to be explored.

Firstly the imbrication of vision in language suggested by these words, cautions against any simple or
absolute separation of word and image. Secondly, this simple play on words indicates the readiness with
which meanings can be destabilised or even reverse polarity. This is not to claim that I have produced
some profundity, or even a particularly persuasive play on these words. It is simply to note that words
and meanings are potentially slippery things, especially in the hands of readers. Thirdly, this word play is
an example of the attentiveness to metaphor (and in a broader sense, the attentiveness to the field of
rhetoric) which characterises much of the artwriting that has been critiqued for its tendency to mystify
and unnecessarily confound readers and viewers

Finally then, there is one further point that should be made before proceeding and that is to note the
Cartesian moment in the genealogy of these two terms: clarity and obscurity. Descartes famously
pronounced the importance of clear and distinct ideas in establishing the reliability of knowledge.
Correspondingly, obscure ideas, those that the mind apprehended only obscurely, were to be distrusted
and ultimately discounted. [1] Clarity and obscurity are set in oppositional play in the Cartesian system
as criteria for legitimising and de-legitimising knowledge. And so it often appears that today the call for
clarity can be a way of delegitimising knowledge. People can be very passionate as to what does and
what does not count as knowledge. So I would add that we might wish to avoid a radical separation of
cognition and affect.
Proceeding then to the remaining phrase in my title "Looking at artwriting," again the imprecation of the
verbal and the visual is clearly signalled. But looking in this context bears a further connotation of
evaluation. "Lets open it up and take a look. Let's evaluate, lets make a judgement." This suggests that
taking a look is not utterly alien and separate to the act of judging, which is to say looking is not
necessarily radically prior to the activity of criticism. Again there is an attempt to avoid the assumption
of a radical separation between visual experience and critical activity, without committing to any
specific model of their interdependence.

That which is to be judged, is here called "artwriting" rather than the more familiar "art criticism", and
so may require a short elaboration. The expression is taken from the work of David Carrier. (Carrier,
1987) Carrier uses it to refer to art criticism in an expanded sense, calling attention to rhetorical issues
over and above analytical judgements. He also appears to use it in order to set up an opposition
between academic art history and the kinds of texts produced by art critics, which he claims are not
governed by established canons of argumentation. In the absence of such rules of engagement the
"suasive" and narrative aspects of these writings becomes paramount. It is employed here not to
endorse Carrier's position, which appears to shift significantly in later works where the term artwriting
appears extended to include art history. It is used rather because it temporarily displaces the term
criticism, which may then be more carefully reinstated in the course of the discussion.

Anecdotal Evidence.

"Seriousness and Difficulty in Art Criticism" is the title of an essay produced by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
about a decade ago in which he recounts the following anecdote. A lecturer delivering a course in
literature at Queens College in New York, at the end of his first class meeting, was approached by a
student. The student asked if this was a class in which one would have to read books. Infinitely patient,
as all college lecturers like to imagine themselves to be, the lecturer explained that since it was a
literature class, an encounter with books, with both fiction and non-fiction texts, was both implicit and
unavoidable. Gilbert-Rolfe retells this anecdote to illustrate a basic point. He claims: we have reached a
historical moment where the innocent feel that it is reasonable to expect access to cultural
production without effort, and specifically without engaging the peculiarities of the cultural form in
question. (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1995)

Of course we are not obliged to accept this diagnoses of an historical moment, especially one framed in
such a slight and anecdotal manner. However, it is perhaps more broadly arguable, on the evidence in
our contemporary media-scape, that there is a lively, though not all-encompassing, antipathy for
complexity and intellectual challenge in most areas of our shared public communication and expression.
The currency of the phrase "dumbing down" is both descriptive of, and in its own way demonstrative of,
the reduction of all significance down to the facile soundbite.

In concert with Gilbert-Rolfe's anecdote I should like to introduce one of my own. Attending a
conference in the UK some years ago, I was fortunate enough to be collected and driven from the train
station by one of the students helping to run the event. As we drove I asked him about the nature of his
studies, what kind of emphases were there on the programme in fine art that he was pursuing and so
forth. He responded enthusiastically with a list of authors. "We have read Barthes and Foucault on
authorship, and Baudrillard on the political economy of the sign, and we were just getting into Lacan."
This was said with a certain pride and a sense of reverential importance in the magical potencies of this
list of author-names. This may be construed as an instance of a generalised and uncritical enthusiasm
for "difficult" ideas or "theory."

An enthusiasm for new and radical ideas has at various times characterised avant-gardist ambitions
since their inception. There is a recurrent avant-gardist desire to be on the cutting edge, which is often
perhaps indistinguishable from a desire to be fashionable. However, in recent decades the word
"theory" has come for some to suggest a heightened fetishism of intellectualism for-its-own sake. It has
on occasion seemed that a parodic repetition of the 18th century discourse of taste and social status has
been enacted in the form of a late 20th century discourse of critique and ideological positioning. This is
to suggest an analogy between two practices. Practices, which entail conspicuous displays of refined and
considered consumption, that often prove strategic in achieving social legitimacy and realising
professional ambition.

Even accepting that there is a retreat from what Gilbert-Rolfe calls "seriousness and difficulty" there
remains a significant social and professional cachet to be had in wielding the jargons of "advanced" or
difficult thought. This holds both inside and outside the artworld. It holds even where these jargons are
lightly mocked or casually consumed in the summarised, codified and repackaged by-lines of Sunday
supplements. This is arguably already consistent with the contemporary retreat from intellectual
difficulty.

Calls for Clarity.

In scholarly controversies over obscurantism such as the Sokal affair it is apparent that a part of the
stakes in the conflict is the persistence of some value, however compromised, invested in intellectual
difficulty. The Sokal affair refers to a set of rancorous exchanges between scholars and commentators
set in play by the appearance in 1996, in a cultural studies journal Social Text, of a hoax article. The
article entitled "Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum
gravity" was immediately revealed as a hoax by the author and the Sokal affair was set alight. (Sokal,
1996) In the Sokal affair there was an attempt to discredit intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze,
Guattari, Irigaray, and Baudrillard precisely by denying their claim to intellectual rigour and difficulty.
Thus Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont define their agenda in their 1997 book Intellectual Impostures:

Our goal is precisely to say that the king is naked (and the queen too). But let us be clear. We are not
attacking philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general; on the contrary, we feel that
these fields are of the utmost importance and we want to warn those who work in them (especially
students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism. In particular we want to `deconstruct' the
reputation that certain texts have of being difficult because the ideas in them are so profound. In many
cases we shall demonstrate that if the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that
they mean precisely nothing. (Sokal and Bricmont, 1998, 5; see also Lingua Franca, 2000.)

The accusation that the emperor has no clothes is perhaps more vehement in the arenas of cultural
criticism. One reviewer sarcastically caricatured the situation in a Village Voice supplement of the early
1990s, where he claimed:

Everybody knows that literary and cultural critics, who were once genteel independent, plain-talking
men of letters…are now a bunch of academic jargon spouting technodroids who've purchased their
disciplinary legitimacy simply by making up languages so difficult that no one but a specialist can
understand them. (Berube, 1993, 29)

As Gilbert-Rolfe points out elsewhere in his essay, the suspicions of intellectual difficulty are not
restricted to any one political position or to those who see only charlatanism. Even sympathetic critics
see problems, to cite one editor on the left:

Given the overt aim of democracy, the left has to be very careful not to mystify, not to make its claims in
a manner that is nearly impossible to verify or clarify. For mystification has had a number of negative
effects: It has led to a partial isolation of this work on the borders of scholarship and public debate, and
its marginalisation has grown because of the arcane quality of some critical work, its tendency not to
take sufficient time to clarify its basic concepts, or to write clearly cannot help but limit its impact.
(Apple, 1988, 4) [2]

Recently Maurice Berger introduced an anthology of art-critical essays pointing to the risks of obscurity
by noting that:

There is no question that post-structuralist, psychoanalytical, feminist, and neo-Marxist theories have
inspired new and radical forms of critical practice - by exchanging unexacting, naïve, and fundamentally
descriptive criticism for sophisticated arguments that offer new ways of looking at culture and of
exposing the complex ideologies and myths that inflect every cultural artifact. Yet, if political analysis
and persuasion is the goal of such criticism, the theoretic critic must begin to take a more realistic and
informed look at the social and cultural scene he hopes to influence. The increasing adeptness of the
radical right at political and cultural debate and the seepage of reactionary positions into the cultural
mainstream…call into question the alienating obscurity of theory and the elitist provincialism of the
academy. (Berger, 1998, 9-10)

Finally I should like to present as a further example an article that was gleefully presented to me by a
final year fine art student. My student had culled the article from a 1999 issue of the journal Art Review.
It is sufficient here to merely cite the title of the article "A Beginners Guide to Art Bollocks" in order to
indicate the degree to which there is resentment of the specialist languages of artwriting. (Ashbee,
1999) [3]

What purpose do these examples serve? They hopefully operate to call to mind the at best problematic
valuation of intellectual work. They indicate the increasing alienation of intellectual difficulty over the
last decade, especially where enquiry is conducted outside the approved modes of journalism and
science. This needs to be remarked so that as the questions of obscurity and clarity are engaged in the
context of artwriting, there will be an alertness to the recent ideological, social and professional
conflicts that have to some extent de-legitimised, or at least rendered intellectual difficulty suspect.
They further demonstrate that the calls to clarity and the condemnations of obscurity do not correlate
with one set of ideological positions. These calls have been made from the right, the left, the centre, the
politically non-aligned and the politically naïve. The call has come from professional intellectuals as well
as others. These are, furthermore, calls for clarity that insistently call us to the question of language.

The Question of Language.

Language is both the target of specific invectives and critiques and at the same time the object invested
with the power of rescue. That is to say there is a recurrent appeal for the substitution of a clearer
uncluttered vocabulary in order to reinstate an assumed-to-be already given canon of clarity and
transparency. Even as Sokal and Bricmont denounce obscurantism they claim that they will speak
"clearly" and "demonstrate" what is already "manifest." In this way the claims for an already given
obvious and undeniably clear language are installed by a rhetorical strategy rather than by argument or
analysis.

There are, of course, other dimensions to this debate than just the question of language. Notably there
is the question of bad faith. It is a recurrent accusation levelled at the jargon-spouters that they are
seeking professional status, tenure, or some other venial end in cynically marshalling a battery of
theory-speak without regard for the generality of readers. Worse, it is suggested that it is with an active
pursuit of unintelligibility as proof of their intellectual achievements that these charlatans write and
speak. But, pivotally, it is the question of language, rather than bad faith, which is most consistently
invoked in relation to the call for clarity.
While anxieties about mystifications and jargons are not new, there is a particular inflection to the
current calls for clarity. They coincide, and indeed collide, with some of the most sustained challenges to
the presumed neutrality or potential transparency of language. Terms such as deconstruction,
postmodernism, theory, and identity politics have served for some, as catch-all type headings with
which to designate these various challenges. Thus these terms are often construed as referring to a
singular monolithic assault on truth or meaning. But this serves to eradicate the specific questions,
challenges and enquiries that are placed or proceed under these different headings. The variety of these
enquiries, which seek to undermine the apparent obviousness and fixity of meaning, is thus reduced to
an homogenised singular sabotage of reason and reasonableness.

A complex set of differing positions on the question of representation in language is reduced down to
one clearly identified "ism" or another. Furthermore, critiques of the assumed "giveness" and
unproblematic transparency of language from within the anglo-American philosophical tradition are
seldom acknowledged as sharing any common ground with controversial figures such as Derrida and
Foucault, except to mock any claims to original insight these authors might wish to make.

There are fundamental conflicts about the nature of language in general, and the legitimate language of
knowledge in particular, that are implicated in the various calls to clarity. This controversy over
legitimate language is not without precedent. One strategy then, that may serve to undermine the
assumption of obvious criteria of clarity, might be to trace the genealogy of legitimacy conflicts in
language use. [4] Establishing the historicity of such struggles over language might help to expose the
contingency of contemporary claims about what is and what is not clear. Another strategy might be to
pick specific calls for clarity and attempt to unmask the underlying ideologies and the ignoble
motivations for the attack on complexity. Yet a further strategy would be to adopt a deconstructive
relation with these calls for clarity and by close reading and playful re-reading cause them to dissolve
into a mush of paradox, incoherence, aporia and contradiction. None of these options will be adopted
here today. However, they each have some merit as many other writers have demonstrated. [5] Instead
I will proceed in a much more haphazard and vulnerable manner and employ two examples of
artwriting, which for me provoke questions of clarity and obscurity, and which hopefully open up a
pathway beyond the present impasse.

Two Examples.

Consider firstly an extract from Andrew Bejamin's essay on Object Painting in which I experience a play
of obscurity and difficulty, and which I have on more than one occasion put aside in favour of an easier
life. [6] It reads in part:

The movement from work both construed and located within an ontology of stasis towards work taken
as an activity, in opening up the actative in lieu of the substantive, repositions, or perhaps reworks, the
ontology of the art object in terms of becoming. …Art will inevitably be concerned with the question of
its own objectivity and thus with its own being as art. The question, of course, is the question of that
being. How is the being in question to be thought? In sum, what will be at stake is the object understood
as the becoming object of the work of art. By repositioning the question of the ontology of the art object
it will become impossible - except through the nihilism of a staged and deliberate forgetting - to avoid
the question of the object, since the consequence of that repositioning is that art continues, as part of
its work and as part of being art, to address the question of its being. In other words it will emerge that
it is only by retaining the centrality of ontology, albeit a differential ontology, that the propriety of the
object can be located. (Benjamin, 1994, 13)

This extract is already made difficult by being lifted out of its context. The obscurity I find here is in part
the stylistic obstacle provided by the repetition of words in close proximity with shifting emphasis or
sense. Most especially, the obscurity for me resides in the general rules of the game at play in this text. I
recognise, or feel myself to recognise a Heideggerian language with elements of Nietszche, Hegel and
Lyotard also resonating in the game. I expect on occasion to encounter difficulty and obscurity, I am
partly habituated to it and have various strategies for partially negotiating it. Even so I am still suspicious
of this obscurity. I wonder could this be done in an easier way. It is a question made legitimate by the
text itself.

The text seems to allow that what is written can be written in a number of different ways. It suggests a
choice from among alternative terms, it repeats "in other words." It supplies parentheses by way of
substitution, alternate wordings. The author seems to indicate in this way a possibility that he could
deploy his language differently and still produce the text that he seeks to construct. He provides
substitutions. He paraphrases himself here and there. At one point the text declares such and such a
thing is "of course" such and such another thing. This rhetorical exclamation of the obviousness of the
equivalence of two terms ("The question, of course, is the question of that being.") is in tension then
with the other rhetorical strategies which allow that what is being conducted here is difficult and
potentially obscure. This may have little bearing on the logical consistency of the argument, it rather
points to a rhetorical inconsistency. What are we to make of this rhetorical inconsistency? How does it
bear on the questions of clarity and obscurity?

I must defer a response for the moment and jump to yet another text: Therry De Duve's "The Paths of
Criticism." In this essay on Clement Greenberg's criticism, having quoted the full text of a 1949 review by
Greenberg of an exhibition by Jackson Pollock, De Duve exclaims:

I repeat: who writes like that today? Who, and what's more in the popular press, practices art criticism
that way? The critics of the dailies or weeklies most often explain contemporary art, laboriously,
professorially, with a good will equalled only by their reticence to pass for people who judge. I will be
told (as I have often been told) that between Pollock's time and our own there has been a break, that
art today is theoretical in a way that Pollock ignored (and Greenberg sought to ignore) …*I+ wish that
others might dust off the laurels of a style of art criticism - and also an attitude before art, and an ethics
- in which Greenberg for a time was exemplary. *…+ The fact that contemporary art does indeed appeal
to an intense intellectualisation, very specialised and at times even esoteric, does not to my mind
prohibit it from being appreciated aesthetically, on the strength of feeling. (De Duve, 1996)

This in part may appear to be yet another call for clarity, but it is perhaps better described as a call for
judgement and a declaiming of the substitution of explanation for the activity of criticism. It is also an
exemplary display of rhetorical devices. (Indeed in this one paragraph all three modes of classic
rhetorical oratory as identified by Aristotle are present: the judicial, the deliberative and the
demonstrative.) It may not be immediately obvious, but it is similar to the Benjamin extract in that it
proposes a model way of writing about art.

Benjamin proposes to transform the terms in which the art object is written so that instead of art object
as fixed presence the art object is presented as becoming: De Duve proposes to transform the terms in
which the object is written so that instead of the art object as occasion for explanation we have the art
object as occasion for judgement. It may appear at first blush that Benjamin's extract is decidedly
obscure and De Duve's is expressively direct and clear, employing as it does the first person so
prominently. Both texts converge on the necessity for discussing the appropriate terms of criticism. So
that even as De Duve decries the failure of nerve on the part of journalistic critics to provide judgement
on the work of art, he himself is detained from that activity by the need to produce an extended piece of
criticism about criticism and because he is, by his own admission, "slow to judge." Benjamin struggles to
achieve the proper terms for criticism as preliminary to a discussion of a range of art works. This
common preoccupation with the question of the appropriate way to write in relation to the art work,
shared by these two texts, may also serve to justify placing these two examples together. Having done
so, the temptation may be to jump right in here and take sides. However, the point about the
compromised valuation of intellectual work which was so laboured earlier in my presentation needs
now to be activated, so that we also may be slow to judge.

Criticality.

There is an aspect of the process of criticism that will be called here "criticality." Criticality is used to
name the perhaps most troublesome quality of critical activity, which is the unrelenting call to attend to
the contingency of judgement in the very act of judging. Criticality is tinged with a sense of its own
impossibility. This impossibility may perhaps (although somewhat awkwardly) be likened to the putative
impossibility of an adequate memorial to the shoah. It has been suggested (by the artist Christian
Boltanski among others) that any public commemoration, would have to be in the form of a thing so
fragile, that it required continuous reconstruction each day anew .One day lost in this sequence, and the
shared net of memory, collapses and unravels. Criticality is similarly fragile, and fraught with the
possibility of ruination, because of a lost or compromised moment of attention. Criticality is a process of
attending to the contingency of the critical act and the judgement that thus proceeds.

For De Duve this process has been displaced onto Greenberg, who in turn displaces it onto Kant. By this
displacing the task of criticality, De Duve achieves a clarity, which covers over a problem, which obscures
a deferral. For Benjamin this process is partly displaced, halted in the moment of intiation of his critical
project, to re-conceptualise the work of art. This is then the significance I read in his inconsistent
rhetoric; his text is caught in the implausibility of grounding his project. The occasion of his criticism, the
canon of late twentieth century international contemporary art, is an un-interrogated given.

By criticality is meant a double movement. A movement of reference, which attempts to reach out or
open onto the work or the occasion of criticism and another movement back, reaching into the
foundations or bases of criticism. As one writes, one writes out toward the work but one also worries
that this writing is appropriate, that it might not be proper. Thus criticality is always incomplete, always
almost there and never quite there.

If as I speak to you here, I am also listening to myself speaking, and worrying as I do so that my speech
may need to be otherwise than it is, then my speech may become awkward, difficult and halting. My
attention to my own speech renders it alien and strange to me. Thus, as speaking or writing folds into
itself an ongoing reflexive movement it risks becoming difficult.

De Duve's seeming obviousness, the easy legibility of his text is driven by his displacement of criticality
in favour of exhortation and pronouncement. It is also supported by an assumed relationship with a
tradition of writing. Benjamin's text appears to hold greater critical weight; greater attention to the way
of writing, to the precise terminology, but it refuses a fundamental problem of criticality and that is the
attention to the occasion of criticism. In his text the works discussed are presented as already given in
their fixity and identity as art, anchored by artist-names in an already established canon of the great and
good in contemporary art. [7] Benjamin struggles to achieve the right terms of art but casually adopts a
contingently given body of works and artists as the apropriate examples for his thesis.

Conclusion.

This somewhat slender theme of criticality has been introduced by way of underlining a central aspect
of criticism: the alertness to the provisional nature and contingency of the bases of criticism. While it is
suggested that criticality carries with it the necessary risk of obscurity and difficulty, it does not carry a
necessity of obscurity. Clarity and obscurity have been presented here as contingent valuations of texts,
not determined by the achievement of criticality. These judgements then as to whether a given text is
claimed as obscure or clear should be treated cautiously. These judgements are themselves contingent
and call for critical reading and attentiveness. Part of this attentiveness must be directed to the
prevailing conditions of antipathy toward intellectual difficulty. Given the technocractic imperatives of
today, it may be that criticism qua criticism, and not for its putative obscurities, is approaching a state of
disgrace.

Notes

[1] Descartes claimed in his Discourse on Method, just after producing the cogito: "So I decided that I
could take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true."
Jonathan Ree, the great Descartes biographer and commentator has argued: " the main difference
between scientific and unscientific ideas, according to Descartes, was that scientific ideas were both
clear, as opposed to obscure, and distinct, as opposed to confused *…+ Descartes used the concepts of
clarity and distinctness and their opposites carelessly. Sometimes he applied them to ideas, sometimes
to perceptions or judgements *…+ Descartes explained his notion of clarity by saying, 'I apply the word
clear to what is present and apparent to an attentive mind …' " (Ree, 1974, 87-88.)

It is interesting in this context to note Leibniz's critique of Descartes position in this respect. "Leibniz
considers this rule useless unless criteria of clearness better than those proposed by Descartes are
given." Leibniz might even be seen to rehearse a criticism that appears again and again in the critical
responses to what I have termed "calls for clarity", that is basically to call attention to the non-
obviousness and unreliability of any putative criteria of clarity. See (McRae, 1995).

[2] See note [7] below.

[3] These calls for clarity have been around for some time is attested to by the 1991 article "The Politics
of Clarity." (Giroux and Aronowitz, 1991)

[4] The work of Raymond Williams is perhaps particularly instructive in this respect. In a very different
tradition the researches of Paul Oscar Kristeller may also be of interest in establishing a framework for
examining the historical contestation of terminologies etc.

[5] Although the famous exchange between Derrida and Searle, in respect of Austin's discussion of
performatives, is not strictly framed as an argument about clarity and obscurity. It is possible to see in
Derrida's "Limited Inc a b c …" a model of this now classic, if somewhat controversial, strategy (see
Derrida, 1988).

[6] It has proved strategic at this point to invoke a notion of subjectivity, in order to underline the highly
specific qualities of reading in relation to the experience of subjectivity. It may well be that the anxiety
generated by the obscure text is bound up with the intimacy between reading and subjectivity. See
(Manguel, 1996) especially the section on "Private Reading" (149-162) for a suggestive discussion of the
highly personalised, intimate and dream-like qualities of certain forms of reading.

[7] In this context it may be worth recalling Rosalind Krauss's call to arms: "Can it be argued that the
interest of critical writing lies almost entirely in its method? Can it be held that the content of any given
evaluative statement - "this good, important," "this is bad, trivial" - is not what serious criticism is,
seriously, read for? But rather, that such criticism is understood through the forms of its arguments,
through the way that its method, in the process of constituting the object of criticism, exposes to view
those choices that precede and predetermine any act of judgement?" [Emphasis added] ("Introduction",
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1985.
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