Bits and Bodies

Sensation and Hysteria as Possibilities

in
Digital Remediation

© José Luis Liard

_______________________________________________________________________
Konstvetenskapliga institutionen vid Stockholms universitet
VT 2011
ABSTRACT

Institution: Konstvetenskapliga institutionen vid Stockholms universitet

Adress: 106 91 Stockholms universitet
Tel: 08-16 20 00 vx

Handledare: Hans Hayden

Titel och undertitel: Bits and Bodies. Sensation and Hysteria as Possibilities in Digital
Remediation

Författare: Monica Anjefelt

Adress: Sjötorpsv. 3
Postadress: 131 54 Nacka
Tel: 08-643 70 71

Typ av uppsats: kandidatuppsats magisteruppsats X masteruppsats

licentiatuppsats doktorsavhandling

Ventileringstermin: VT2011

In this theoretical discussion with case studies, I investigate a possible interdisciplinary

approach to examine the current flow of hybrid media and art on screens. Following Jean-
François Lyotard’s concept of the Figural that describes form as a matrix for thinking,
contemporary theorists in Art and Philosophy call for an exhibitionary mode of thought,
conveying scientific argumentation not exclusively by writing but through spatial
formation, with potential to change perception and discourse outside of linguistic
rationality. Based on Lyotard’s concept Figure, the hysteria in Deleuze, das Unheimliche in
Freud, and The Real from lacanian psychoanalysis, understood through Julia Kristeva - I
suggest that what makes art works effective, disturbing, and potentially subversive – like
for example Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – is that they offer a crack into the symbolic order,
where logic is drawn from a pre-conceptual “carnal” experience, like in dreamwork.
Key words: Aesthetic Technologies, Database, Lev Manovich, Intermediality, The
Affective Turn, Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, D.N. Rodowick,
The Figural, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Lars von Trier, Judy
Gammelgaard, das Unheimliche, Sigmund Freud.
Table of contents

Introduction 1
Purpose and questions 2
Literature review 4
Definitions and delimitations 5
Material and disposition 6
Bits and Bodies 8
Quest for a matrix outside of metanarratives 8
The Logic of Sensation 9
Art as disease 10
“A subject outwith the Other” 11
The optical unconscious and percept, affect 13
Freud according to Cézanne: When art criticizes theory 14
Articulations of the Real: the symptom, the spasm 16
“Becoming-animal” as an escape route 18
Das Unheimliche 19
Body, sensation, hysteria – resistance-strategy in the third modernity? 21
Seven Questions 25
The Logic of the Database 30
Intermedialization, hybridization, remediation 30
Linear vs. Non-Linear Structures 30
Database vs. Narrative 33
The proto-database 34
Agency of the user 35
The screen as utopian projection surface 37
Parting the sensible in digital space 39
Final discussion and conclusion 40
Literature and sources 42
Online sources 47
Pictures 48
Appendix
 Introduction

Have you ever felt that you have mastered aesthetic technologies completely in a way
that gives you total freedom of expression? However skilled you are, be it in oil painting or
in digital techniques, you could probably agree that there is no given point where one
masters technology to the full: it is an ongoing process, where humans affects technology,
and technology affects humankind. The relationship could be described as a moebius strip:
external becoming internal, inside becoming outside, institutions using early adopters, early
adopters going institutionalized. Making the avant-garde embrace any given new technique
is the first step in the marketing process.

Picture 1 & 2. Les Immatériaux, Centre Pompidou, Paris 1985. An Art exhibition displaying the latest
technology, like for instance the first e-mailing computer systems, and Walkman audioguides. Curated by
the leading postmodern theorist at the time, philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Scenography by Philippe
Délis. Photo: CCI/J.-C Plancher, 1985.

This thesis discusses if art at rare times could offer a possible escape route from the
society of information, through recouperating bodily sensations, attributing to them
abilities to influence and change theory and discoursal foundations. In a discussion about
an aesthetics of sensation according to Lyotard and Deleuze, I suggest some possible
applications.

We often tend to see simple (analogue) techniques developing into more and more
advanced (digital) techniques, leading to a notion of ever increasing, higher achievements in
all fields. But new technology tends to activate features of older technology, much in the
same way as postmodernism brings light to some tropes of modernist thinking. The
anticipation of the future and the cult of the new, hailed by the so called avant-garde (of
any given point in history), mean in fact the exaltation of the present, as Jürgen Habermas
notes.1 In Media Theory, convergence is the concept of the day, meaning that all kinds of

1 Jürgen Habermas: ”Modernity - An Incomplete Project.” In The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on

Postmodern Culture. (Ed.) Hal Foster. New York: The New Press, 1998, p. 3.

1
media supposedly converge in a digital screen culture. But is this a smooth and happy
convergence – or even a convergence at all? I would argue that underneath the notion of
convergence lies an underlying modernist aesthetics of separating genres. The idea of
mixing genres and media presupposes that well defined genres exist to be merged and
mingled in the first place. In a contemporary conception of Art, the concepts convergence and
intermedia therefore appear highly ambigous.

Utopian tropes reoccur in relation to aesthetic technologies. Much in the same way that
logarithmization bears the utopian aspirations and projections of personal artistic freedom
today, the film screen functioned as an utopian projection surface for the artistic avant-
garde of the 1920’s. These utopian tropes appear clearly in retrospect, in media-
archeology’s search for historical benchmarks. The historiography of postmodernism in
Visual Art is currently in need of an approach not just describing technical shifts in
narration, but critically examining further implications and alternatives. Awakening from
the postmodern “revolution” that supposedly got rid of institutionalized hierarchies and
universalizing grand narratives, attention is again directed to the role of bodily sensations,
the unconscious properties and the distribution of the sensible in Art. The question is how
to recouperate these tools, without evoking Kantian notions of the sublime and other
performative themes of Art discourse.

What is it that makes us return to Cézanne’s paintings, Malevitch Black Square, Francis
Bacon’s triptychs, Lars von Trier’s films Breaking the Waves and Antichrist, or Anna Odell’s
Unknown, Woman? A persistent canon – or that the works, disregarding method and
medium, each in their context, represents transgressions between known fields, between
what can be said and how it can be said? But what I try to convey is neither political
transgressions by an avant-garde, nor the artist acting as practical phenomenologist, like
Cézanne trying “to say the first word”2; but a third form of understanding; a hybrid, a
rhizome – or a bitches brew – of Lyotard’s Figure, the hysteria in Deleuze, The Real in Lacan
and das Unheimliche in Freud. Not a harmonious synthesis, but more of an ambivalent
congregation to reflect on unmentionable, radical alterities that art at its best can provide.

Purpose and questions

The purpose of this thesis is twofold: first, to examine how an aesthetics of the sensible
following Rancière, Deleuze and Lyotard can be applied in current Art History; rather than
thinking about images, thinking through images, as powerful vehicles in developing abstract

2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: ”Cézannes tvivel”, in Lovtal till filosofin. Essäer i urval.
Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2004, p. 117.

2
thinking and theory. Second, to examine scientific attitudes in current academia,
concerning digital hybrid aesthetic technologies.
An international outlook is both possible and required to deal with the flow of digital
images, crossing boundaries of traditional modes of display, interaction and interpretation.
Studying a global flow has an endless scope that goes along with the nature of the subject
matter. Delimiting phenomena within a flow seem to deter many researchers, thus making
the need to merge and chisel out analytical tools for dealing with the ever increasing
amount of artistic expressions circulating on screens even more acute.3 By scrutinizing
tropes and the theoretical frameworks that produced them, eventually it will be possible to
suggest an up-to-date, interdisciplinary approach to photographic and digital art. Following
Gilles Deleuze, my survey has a nomadic relation to borders and boundaries: “keep only
what increases connections.”4 A forthright compilation of the current scientific approaches
dealing with photographic images (covering Art Theory, Film Studies, Visual Culture
Studies) is needed. Behind this dissertation lies an initial attempt to dissect the common
ground, and to convey differences; competing preferences of interpretation. Therefore, a
questionnaire was sent to 14 prominent scholars, working the field from different vantage
points. They were asked to answer seven open questions at a length of their choice.5 It
soon became clear that the questions aroused far more sensitive and “political” issues
concerning organizational barriers within academia than I had anticipated. The survey will
be further described in the chapter “Seven questions” on page 24.

I have previously tried to find a fruitful way in combining theories from the affective
turn, psychoanalysis and Bourdieu’s science of social agency, in dialogue with for instance
Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, who in the 1930’s drew attention to the impact of
seemingly unimportant spatial forms in a flow of mass culture “ornaments”, unresistingly
constituting the optical unconscious that over time shapes historical knowledge.6 The nature

3
According to media professor Karin Becker all television research at Stockholm
University focuses on programs and segments – not flow – due to delimitation
problems. Also, ephemeral moving photographic images has lower status than still
photography in academia, partly due to historical reasons, partly due to the greater effort
and costs in accessing and transferring material from television archives. Monica
Anjefelt: Det optiska omedvetna, eller massans ornament och den rörliga bilden som social hieroglyf,
Department of Art History, Stockholm University, 2009.
4
John Rajchmann: The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, Massachussetts: The MIT Press,
2000, p. 13.
5
Questions, see pages 24-26.
6
The optical unconscious is first mentioned by Walter Benjamin in the essay “A Short History
of Photography”(1931), but is most often cited from the more famous essay “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”(1936). In “Plastic Space and Political
Space” (1985), Lyotard analyzes “naïve” forms, for instance posters, like they were art
objects, depicting how situations given elsewhere in lived social space become manifest

3
and complexity of the subject has inherent limitations – as in the struggle of Benjamin,
Lacan, and Lyotard to “present the unpresentable”, as Lyotard puts it7 – which in writing
will never succeed completely in a comprehensible way. One can only point out the desired
direction: towards an ambivalent, heterogenous, interdisciplinary approach in figuring out
the nature of the figural – the matrix of events located between language and perception,
discourse and figure – that eludes description, but must be depicted.

Literature review
In a draft from an upcoming book, Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Daniel Birnbaum
discusses a philosophy of the exhibition, “that would require philosophy to think itself as an
opening to a spatial practice, on the other hand to investigate some of the parameters of
contemporary art that make such a philosophical move tenable.”8 Their take on the issue is
greatly inspired by Jean-François Lyotard, who states that “the special province of art is not
to communicate, but to ‘present the unpresentable’: a between-world fueled by the
virtuality of unconscious perception, ‘the genesis of creation that has no model’.”9 Although
undoubtedly one of the key thinkers of postmodern Art, it’s taken 40 years for his Ph D
dissertation Discours, Figure to be translated into English.10 This delay might say something
about the experimental mode required to “present the unpresentable”, not through art, but
in philosophical writing. Lyotards concept of Figure has inspired film theorist D.N.
Rodowicks eminent Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media11 – an example of
thinking beyond mainstream trends in Film Theory and Visual Culture Studies.
Efforts to grasp the heterogenous research field of moving images and digital hybrid
media often result in anthologies, such as The Visual Turn. Classical Film Theory and Art
History; The Visual Culture Reader; Philosophy of Technology. 5 Questions; and Database Aesthetics.

in a political unconscious, which has some affinity to Benjamins concept.

7
Jean-François Lyotard: Discours, Figure. (1971) Paris: Éditions Klinksieck, 1985, p. 224.
8
Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein: Spacing Philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard and
the Philosophy of the Exhibition. Draft from the introduction, “The figure of thought”.
9
Jean-François Lyotard: Discours, Figure. (1971) Paris: Éditions Klinksieck, 1985, p. 224.
Quote translated from French. I have also read drafts from the English translation while
the completed edition was delayed, and unavailable in Sweden during 2010.
10
Jean-François Lyotard: Discourse, Figure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010.
11
In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham & London, 2001), D.N
Rodowick offers the rhizomic concept of ”The Figural”, originating from Jean-François
Lyotard; starting a conversation with for instance Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault,
Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, focusing on space and temporality, and the
logic of massculture itself.

4
12
In Hybrid Cultures, Yvonne Spielmann, professor of new media, suggests a critical concept
of hybridity in an interdisciplinary view, interrelating media study with cultural study
debates. She argues that hybridity constitutes a contemporary strategy to aesthetically
intervene into internationally operating media industries, creating a “third space” in
between the poles of merging.13

“The Visual Culture Questionnaire”, published in October Magazine in 1996, traced

reactions towards the emerging discipline of Visual Culture Studies. Although the questions
were actually statements, the answers displayed an array of attitudes from 19 scholars,
commenting on the “challenge” from Visual Culture Studies, and further implications of
interdisciplinary approaches in visual studies. Since 15 years has passed since “The Visual
Culture Questionnaire”, I wanted to find out what had changed since then – although I
chose a dissimilar method of inquiry, by posing open questions instead of presenting ready-
made statements to react to.
The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations is a recently published account of aleatory
encounters that might – or might not – take place between visual art and French theorists
such as Althusser, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida.14 Critical Terms for
Media Studies offers an up-to-date approach to the interaction between aesthetics,
technology, media and society, where professors from the humanities are juxtaposed with
programmers, filmmakers and designers, starting from the premise that media are
themselves mediated – constituted by exchanges among the dimensions of individual
subjectivity, collective activity, and technical capability.15

Definitions and delimitations

First, a distinction between technique and technology. The words often appear synonymous
in academia, but as Bruno Latour has pointed out, there are differences: in English,
technology often refer to tools and machines and the use thereof, but in French, this is
technique; whereas technology is the science or philosophy of techniques, much in the same

12
Angela Dalle Vacche (ed.): The Visual Turn. Classical Film Theory and Art History. New
Jersey/London: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Nicholas Mirzoeff, (ed.): The Visual
Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2002. Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen & Evan Selinger (eds.):
Philosophy of Technology. 5 Questions. Copenhagen/Rochester: Automatic Press/VIP, 2007.
Victoria Vesna, (ed.): Database Aesthetics. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
13
Yvonne Spielmann: Hybridkultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010.
14
Sarah Wilson: The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. New Haven & London: Yale
University Press, 2010.
15
W.J.T Mitchell & Mark B.N Hansen (eds.): Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, p. xv.

5
way that epistemology describes the science of sciences.16 Writing in English, I mostly stick
to the ambiguous “technology” and “technologies”, simply because it is used that way by
most of the scholars that I refer to, and since the actual techniques are not in main focus
here.
Current influential philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde, Donna Haraway and
Andrew Feenberg, have ceased to pursuit an “essence of technology” in the way that for
instance Martin Heidegger or Jaques Ellul once tried to define.17 Don Ihde states that all
technologies are non-neutral, and that this stance is fairly undebated in the field of research
today.18
The word “database” can be defined in many ways. I will use a broad definition,
meaning a congregation of items possible to navigate and combine. I will also use the
concept “proto-database”, meaning that the above definition can be extended outside of
digital and computerbased technology; for instance to archives, clipboards, installations
containing multiple choices or navigation.
This is not a survey that presents the latest technical gadgets or artistic achievements in
databased Art, made possible by logarithmization, but rather a theoretical discussion of
concepts and tendencies, as manifested in current examples from my survey, and art works.
I investigate attitudes towards a possible integration between for example film studies and
art history, since the boundaries are said to be disappearing for the last 15 years or so,
letting specialists “pick and choose the methods and principles they want”, creating a film-
and-art history outside of “academic pigeonholes.”19
The technical sciences take interest in artificial intelligence, AI and cognitive psychology,
and thereby, accompanied with Media Theory, an intersection occurs with Aesthetic
Sciences, dealing with Art, perception and mapping the senses in the digital age. My
interest in this is from the viewpoint of Aesthetics and Art History. The fact that I have
been working as a journalist for 25 years, mainly with moving photographic images
(television, documentary) and studied Media Theory has of course also contributed to my
background knowledge.

16
Bruno Latour in Philosophy of Technology. 5 Questions. Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen & Evan
Selinger, (eds.) Copenhagen/Rochester: Automatic Press/VIP, 2007, pp. 125-136.
17
Val Dusek: Philosophy of Technology. An introduction. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2006, p. 29.
18
Don Ihde in Philosophy of Technology. 5 Questions. Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen & Evan Selinger
(eds.) Copenhagen/ Rochester: Automatic Press/VIP, 2007, p. 109.
19
Donald Crafton in The Visual Turn. Classical Film Theory and Art History. (Ed.) Angela
Dalle Vacche. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003,
foreword xi-xii.

6
 Material and disposition
I will make a twofold investigation of how an aesthetics of sensation and corporality,
following Lyotard and Deleuze, can be applied in the context of Art History/Visual
Culture Studies: Based on literature studies and the film Antichrist, which I would label a
work of art, in the sense that it has extraordinary features beyond genres; second, through a
survey with seven questions directed to 14 influential scholars, asking their views on the
interdisciplinary field of research concerning the role of sensation and corporality in
globalized digital hybrid/visual/temporal media.
Examples from international exhibitions like Documenta and The Venice Biennal will also
be used. Discussion and analyzing will be interspersed along with the examples, hence no
separate account, list or hierarchy will be presented. This has to do with the overall
qualitative approach and also with the interdisciplinary features of the subject matter. The
next chapter, “Bits and Bodies”, discusses psychoanalytical and philosophical approaches
to the figural, whereas the chapter “The Logic of the Database” discusses aesthetic
technologies versus organizing and narrative principles in art, and puts the previous chapter
in relation to and polemizes with media theory.

7
 Bits and Bodies

Quest for a matrix outside of metanarratives

Since the emergence of visual culture studies, the idea of style is no longer the unifying
concern of the history of art.20 Postmodern thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard evoke a
discussion concerning the “Figural”; a way of thinking through and from pictures,
perceiving them as a visual matrix rather than as objects belonging to a certain style or
school.21 Nevertheless, in this effort to put spatiotemporal issues above the linguistic or
semiotic theories dealing with written or spoken word, critics claim to track a neo-Kantian
longing for the sublime in Lyotard’s thinking.22 I would argue that this critique stems from
a misconception. To acknowledge inherent or subversive qualities in art does not
necessarily mean wishing for a nostalgic (obsolete and impossible) return to a unified and
centralized canon. Notions of arts’ subversive qualities can be based either on the postulate
of certain consistant metanarratives, (like in some versions of psychoanalytic theory, which
Lyotard critizises, for instance the grand narrative of the Oeidipus Complex) – or by
acknowledging that the ego lacks sovereign control, and that subversive artistic
accomplishments can arise from lack of conscious control, like for example Deleuze’
“hysterical wave”, or through ambivalent encounters with das unheimliche.23

The figural is a transgressive force, much like Sigmund Freuds notion of artistic potential
through das unheimliche, the uncanny, and the transgressive forces in dreamwork. I will soon
offer some examples from visual art.
Generally speaking, psychoanalysis has been of tremendous importance for practically

20
Keith Moxey: ”Nostalgia for the Real: The Troubled Relation of Art History to Visual
Culture”, in The Practice of Persuasion. Paradox and Power in Art History. Cornell University
Press, 2000, p. 104.
21
Jean-François Lyotard: Discours, Figure (1971) Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1985. See also
David Norman Rodowick: Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 2001.
22
See for example Andreas Huyssen: ”Mapping the postmodern”, in The Art of Art History:
A Critical Anthology. Ed: Donald Preziosi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.
329-337.
23
The concept comes from Freud´s essay ”Das Unheimliche”, 1919, and is most often
translated into “The Uncanny” in English; “Det kusliga” in Swedish. Both translations
lack the many connotations of the German word. Unheimlich can be something not
“heimlich”, something not familiar and homelike, but in German also connotes to
“hidden” and “secret”. Thus, when something is un-heimlich it becomes not-secret, not-
hidden, e g rises to the surface, threatening the known context; destabilizing language,
which is part of the Father´s Law and the symbolic order, in Jacques Lacan’s
terminology.

8
all French philosophers active during the 1960’s, like Lyotard involved in a fierce but
creative struggle with Freud’s theories of the unconscious, not to mention the polemizing
on Jacques Lacan in Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari.24 Today, after decades of Foucauldian awareness of social constructions,
psychoanalysis comes back as an important sounding-board, in recouperating the sensible,
the body and the spatial in Art discourse.

The Logic of Sensation

In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze derives a way of thinking, not
through analyzing representation or narrative features, but from the impact of Bacon’s
paintings on the senses and nervous system.25 The assumption that there would be
elements in life that could occur on a pure consciousness is a speculative, autonomous
idealism that presupposes a pure consciousness; a self that remains the same, even if the
world is changing. But beyond that which at first glance resembles a formalistic or even
romantic way of thinking, lies a radical view of art based in a defence of the eye, the figural,
the sensation; an aspiration of nerves and synapses that upgrades the potential of sensation
and sensibilities, and an art that can act directly on the nervous system.
How can we convey this “becoming of another world”, where there is neither sign nor
signified, but just the sort of confused and chaotic sensations that we experience as new-
born babies?26 A question very close to Jacques Lacan’s: How can we experience the Real
without actually being in the primary process, or in dissolution of the ego? If perception
itself stylizes, if the three orders (Real, Imaginary, Symbolic) presuppose one another in a
borromean knot – how can we ever sense an unmediated materiality, and reach the
“Sahara”, which is the place of the sensous?

24
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London:
Continuum, 2004 (1972, 1984). Key texts by Sigmund Freud often used in this context
are for instance “The Uncanny”, “Society and its Discontents”, “The Interpretation of
Dreams”, and essays on painting, theatre and literature, all collected in the Swedish
edition Sigmund Freud: Samlade skrifter I-XII, especially important is book XI.
Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 2008. Lyotard refers to and argues with Freud
continuously, for instance in “Freud enligt Cézanne”, (“Freud according to
Cézanne”,1971) where he uses Cézanne’s paintings as a point of departure to criticize
linguistic and narrative boundness and lack of attention to form and the figural, in
Sigmund Freud’s work.
25
Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981). London/New York:
Continuum, 2010.
26
Deleuze 2010, p. 71. Deleuze cites the metaphor of the chaotic impressions in a
newborn from Cézanne.

9
 It is this extreme point that will have to be reached in order to allow a justice to prevail that will no
longer be anything but Color or Light, a space that will no longer be anything but the Sahara. 27

Gilles Deleuze’s passion for painting as a medium28, a devotion he shares with Jean-
François Lyotard, at first glance gives the impression of two arch-modernists possible to
connect to the formalist line that runs from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology to Clement
Greenberg’s ideas about media specificity; heroizing the Ego, a cult of the genius and his
abilities to break through the stiffened surface of mass culture, and through unique,
authentic works of art create a domain where the world appears anew to us. According to
this view, Immanuel Kant is the first real modernist, and self-critical operations in
modernism follows on the critical stances of the Enlightenment. According to Clement
Greenberg, levelling can only be avoided through purification of each art form, equal to the
medium of that specific art form whose constraints are the essence of modern art,
something positive to openly affirm.29 Modernism is no clean break from the past, and as
old value judgements remain intact, modernism can actualize artists like Piero della
Franscesca, Vermeer, or Watteau.30
If modernism could be traced back to Kant’s ideas of the beauteous, the theoretical
pedestal of postmodernism is Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of Kant’s concept the sublime.
But while the sublime is linked to a tradition that speaks of strength and power, Lyotard’s
purpose is another:

[...]to stress the imperceptible violence done to the senses by that which comes before their constitution
as a unity, an ungraspable touching that eludes consciousness and can only be grasped in
retrospect[...]31

Art as disease
The hope lies in the art work as symptom, disease, hysteria – “a disease that affects the
organic nature and the figuration that mimics nature’s dynamis”, writes Jacques Rancière.32

27
Deleuze 2010, p. 20.
28
The passion for painting above other art forms is clearly apparent in Gilles Deleuze: A
Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London/New York: Continuum, 2004, and
in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. (1981). London/New York: Continuum, 2010.
29
Clement Greenberg: ”Det modernistiska måleriet” (1961), in Konsten och konstbegreppet,
Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Skriftserien Kairos Nr 1, Stockholm: Raster förlag, pp. 28-29.
30
Greenberg 1961, p. 37.
31
Sven-Olov Wallenstein: “Re-reading the Postmodern Condition”, in Site Magazine,
28/2009, Stockholm, p. 4.
32
Jacques Rancière: ”Deleuze och estetikens bestämning”. In Deleuze och mångfaldens veck.
Eds.: Helena Mattson & Sven-Olov Wallenstein. Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008, p. 97.

10
 Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is therefore, contrary to what most reviews claim, an
extraordinarily hopeful and invigorating film. Few contemporary works of art have
succeeded so well in hysterizing the work, or to make a work out of hysteria; destroy the
organic and put the viewer and the work jointly in the position of a symptom. Here, we
come very close to the anorganic body – the concept that Deleuze borrowed from Artaud.33
Just like Lyotard uses Cézanne’s art work to criticize the theoretical framework in which
the art works are inscribed (in this case by Freud)34, Antichrist can challenge and undermine
the base of the ”rational” technological information culture that defines it as ”a horror
movie, sado-masochistic gyno-horror”, and Lars von Trier as anti-feminist. By completely
emptying the contemporary self-help therapy language of all content, the movie grinds to
pieces the world view offered by the commercially viable hybrid of simplified Buddhism
and cognitive behavioral therapy. Catchphrases as “acceptance”, “atonement”, “healing
powers”, are emptied and found, in fact, to be synonymous with violence and death.

“A subject outwith the Other”

In Antichrist Lars von Trier has not portrayed a nightmare. The film is a nightmare – or
even the conditions of nightmares; “nightmareness of nightmares”, as a phenomenologist
might put it, although what we are talking about here is more like going below the
phenomenological boundary. Lars von Trier does not push boundaries, he does not exceed
the limits – he breaks down the line in its fundamental aspects, giving a sense of the
impossible resolution of boundaries, where the Father’s Law ends and the Other is missing:
“[...] where the Symbolic is linked directly to the Real without the intermediate link of the
Imaginary.”35 If the protagonists in Francis Bacon’s paintings are trying to escape from
themselves through various body orifices, or if Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in his beetle-
metamorphosis begins an escape from the ”bourgeois” Oedipal scheme, then the escape
has already occurred in Antichrist: there is no one there, the meaning of language has ended,
the borromean knot is dissolved and replaced by a fourth ring: we find ourselves in the
position of a symptom, “a subject outwith the Other”.36 Antichrist manages to convey a
crack in the symbolic order, a kind of visual unmediated materiality, like in dream work,
which makes the work hard-hitting and innovative – euphoric stimulant for some viewers,

33
Antonin Artaud: “The Body is the Body”. (1977) Cited in Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon:
The Logic of Sensation (1981). London/New York: Continuum, 2010, p. 32.
34
Jean-François Lyotard: ”Freud enligt Cézanne” (Freud according to Cézanne), In Kris,
1991:43/44, pp. 55-62. Originally published in Encyclopedia Universalis, dec. 1971.
35
Judy Gammelgaard: “Like a Pebble in Your Shoe. The Point of Irritation in Lars von
Triers Films Breaking the Waves and Antichrist”.” Lecture at Nordiska Psykoanalytiska
kongressen in Helsinki, 2010 (not yet published, cited with the author´s permission).
36
Parveen Adams: “Art as Prosthesis: Cronenberg´s Crash.” In Art: Sublimation or Symptom.
London: Karnac Books, 2003, pp. 147-164.

11
disturbing and confusing for others. It is achieved in Antichrist by denying phallic jouissance,
by unheimlich-making every ingredient, including one’s own flesh and blood; the intensity
differences never goes out, but are maintained; a concept from thermodynamics, used by
Deleuze to denounce equilibrium states in which the differences have disappeared.37 The
raw meat is suffering indeed, and there are no sentimental or redeeming features of nature.

Picture 3. Francis Bacon, “Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X”, 1953.

Just as Francis Bacon painted the scream, not the fear of Pope Innocent X, so it is the
sensation, not the sensational that interests Lars von Trier. The horror label on Antichrist is
therefore misleading, and those looking for causal relationships and explanations on a
narrative, iconographic level are hopelessly lost in their effort of interpretation.38 Although
one should be skeptical of artists’ statements about their own work, it can be noted that
von Trier himself stubbornly stresses that he makes pictures to influence the senses – not
stories targeted to the intellect.

37
Manuel de Landa: ”Deleuze och formens genes.” In Deleuze och mångfaldens veck. Eds:
Sven-Olov Wallenstein och Helena Mattson. Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008, p. 49.
38
This doesn’t contradict that Lars von Trier also plays with genres and display misleading
tracks, which are possible to interpret as well-known narratives, as in the antique drama
of Sofokles, Oidipus Rex; and films like Roman Polanski´s Rosemary´s Baby, in which the
mother’s own child is found to be Satan. Lars von Trier’s films also contain multiple
references to martyrs and the suffering of Christ, as in the highly strung pathos in the
“Golden Heart Trilogy”.

12
 Picture 4 & 5. Film stills from Antichrist, Lars von Trier (2009).

Deleuze aspiration of the sensation as a hysterical wave, a sensation’s genes in the body
without organs, therefore appears analogous to von Trier’s ambitions in Antichrist.
This “aesthetics of hysteria” entails another big advantage by circumventing the whole idea
of art as autonomous, mimetic, authentic, representational. As in Bacon’s paintings the
formal elements constitute an arena for combat; the becoming-animal-process that
dissolves the human figures, a chaos that brings with it all its forms: “Chaos reigns!”, as the
talking fox hisses in Antichrist.

The optical unconscious and percept, affect

On a more general level can be said that the paradox of fictional film is being obviously
deceptive, but still managing to trick censorship of the self, due to temporality: the flow of
sensory impressions that shatters any attempt at contemplation, making it very suitable for
an aesthetics of hysteria in the way Deleuze points to, as a radical option. In the cinema, we
think the film’s thoughts, as Walter Benjamin says.39 Although Benjamin was optimistic
concerning the film’s potential to raise awareness among the masses in an urban
metropolis, it is not as Marxist-based critical cultural theory of resistance towards
fetischising commodities in all domains, including art, that gives Benjamin’s stance major
import – but as a theory of the optical unconscious, a flow of sensations – or with Deleuze’s
terminology, percept and affect, that held together in composite constitutes art works.40 Film

39
Walter Benjamin: ”Konstverket i reproduktionsåldern”, (“The work of art in the age of
mechanical reproduction”) in Bild och Dialektik, Stockholm/Skåne: Brutus Östlings
bokförlag Symposion, pp. 83-84.
40
Gilles Deleuze: “Percept, affekt, begrepp” (“Percept, affect, concept”, 1991) in Deleuze
och mångfaldens veck, Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008. In ”A Short History of Photography”
(1931), Walter Benjamin compares portraiture and photography, stating that while the
interest in a painting fades away quickly, the photography circumvents the censorship of
consciousness, giving direct passage to the unconscious without passing the enlightened
human consciousness. The technical features of the camera (capturing milliseconds,
slow-motion, zooming in details, and so on.), reveals secrets and opens up the optical
unconscious, which Benjamin compares to the ability of psychoanalysis to lay bare

13
Professor David Norman Rodowick, who draws on Lyotard’s term Figure and “rhizomatic”
conditions (described in the early works of Deleuze and Guattari) – give prominence to
film as an art form that comes closest to the “logic” of dream work:

[...] which is closest to articulating the logic of unconscious thought with its mechanisms of
condensation, displacement, and considerations of representability.41

But the potential of film does not stop here, as a stage with all sorts of semiotic enigmas
and complications on display for Freudian analysis. It is also possible to fall below and
exceed models of linguistic signification, Rodowick points out with reference to Julia
Kristeva’s distinction between phenotext and genotext, where the former is the
phenomenological form for a system of significations, while the genotext both opposes
and exceeds the phenotext, “as those primary processes that traverse the so-called rational
space of predicative syntax and stable or singular meanings.”42
D.N. Rodowick has compared Lyotard’s and Lacan’s thinking concerning visual language;
how the unconscious is conveyed in image and shape, such as occurs in the dreamwork.
Although they have different starting points – Lyotard, for example, unlike Lacan, holds a
strong opposition to linguistic and semiotic models based on Ferdinand de Saussure – they
ultimately arrive at an understanding regarding how the unconscious is manifested in the
visual representations, and how important “figure” or figurations are, as manifestations
from an elusive matrix, where the work is not understood as an object, but as a way of
thinking about the very separation itself. Lacan’s gaze theory demonstrates this insight,
which is one reason why it has come to be used extensively in film theory.

Freud according to Cézanne: When art criticizes theory

Lyotard elegantly illustrates his own theses about letting the artwork act on the same
critical level as verbal linguistic theory, by inverting the relationship between language and
images. Instead of using theory to analyze art, he uses art to criticize theory: Cézanne’s
paintings are invoked to analyze and criticize Freud’s view of art, which Lyotard claims
reduces visual art to passive objects, and privileges an art based on the representation;
denying the visual arts the kind of disruptive libidinal force possessed by drama and
tragedy. “For him, art works are screens as to rip apart,” writes Lyotard on Freud.43 I have

things hidden in the unconscious, like a surgeon cutting open bodily organs. Benjamin
(1931), ”Liten fotografihistoria” in Bild och Dialektik, Symposion (1991),
Stockholm/Skåne, p. 47.
41
D.N. Rodowick: Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham & London:
Duke University Press, 2001, p. 83.
42
Rodowick 2001, p. 83.
43
Jean-François Lyotard: ”Freud enligt Cézanne” (Freud according to Cézanne), In Kris,

14
previously examined Freud’s view of art, and found Lyotard’s assumption reasonable,
when claiming that Freud makes narrative demands on art: an art work must tell a story,
which can then be interpreted.44 For this reason Freud didn’t enjoy music, since music for
him was emotional in an inexplicable way.45 Freud’s way of looking at the ”language” of
dreams supports the same argument about his emphasis on narrative, story, rebus.46 In
dreamwork, the unconscious wraps up messages so that problem solving can be done
without sleep being interrupted due to strong emotions. Through various displacements,
symbols and disguises, dream content is masked in order to sneak past the self censorship.
Freud was interested in dream interpretation, but for him, this was mainly a question of
deciphering symbols, not analyzing the dream-form as such:

I think that we are dealing with a difficulty in Freud when it comes to understanding form as an
intermediary – form as content. This difficulty also characterizes his relationship to the arts. It is clear
how Freud went about understanding art by searching for the substantive in a very concrete sense; a
novel, a painting, a sculpture should tell you something – the story in turn can have many possible
interpretations.47

Ernst Kris points out that Freud was about to describe the unconscious processes of
artistic creation in the same way as he has described the pun, but that Freud never drew the
parallel himself. The joke allows logic to be circumvented – just as in dreams – in a way
that can be described as childish, and in the absurd gap arises comedy. Caricature is a form
of pun (with aggressive undertones) and has parallels to the child’s way of depicting reality.
The small child’s drawing lies close to the primary process, characterized by emotions and
the unconscious, whereas the adult can choose style and technique consciously.48
While Jean-François Lyotard criticizes Freud’s linguistic dependence and blindness of
form and the figural, he also demonstrates that there is a significant positive aesthetic
potential in Das Unheimliche, where new opportunities, new ideas can come out from what
previously escaped representation. There is reason to wonder whether Lacan’s
radicalization of Freud’s theories may lead us further in interpreting art, than Freud himself
was able to do. The practice of “das unheimliche” should not touch on a recycling of the

1991:43/44, pp. 55-62. Originally published in Encyclopedia Universalis, dec. 1971. Quote is in
my translation from Swedish.
44
Monica Anjefelt: Freuds konstsyn. Essay (proseminarieuppsats), Konstvetenskapliga inst.
SU, 2008.
45
Samlade skrifter av Sigmund Freud, del XI. Volymansvarig: Clarence Crafoord. Stockholm:
Natur och Kultur, 2007, p. 247.
46
Jean-Francois Lyotard:”Rebus”, from Discours, Figure, Èditions Klincksieck, 1985, pp.
295-307.
47
Lars Sjögren: Freud. Mannen och verket. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1989, p. 180. The
quote is in my translation from Swedish.
48
Ernst Kris: Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: The International Universities
Press, 1952, p. 178.

15
Kantian sublime, in which we are moved by art works that are able to evoke conflicting
feelings of fear and fascination. The revolutionary and subversive potential of “das
unheimliche” is not about a return of something that might have been: it is about pushing the
limits of what is possible to express.49 In other words, to verge on the matrix – or the Real: a
facticity of existence, and yet the aspect of existence that “offers an insurmountable
obstacle to my project in that it imposes on me a restriction which will remain stubbornly
intractable.”50 Or as Carin Franzén clarifies:

The unconscious takes place in the gap between a chipped Being and an incomplete language, which
prevents any totality – whether it is linguistic or ontological.51

The above lack of totality is valid for all individuals, but is further complicated in the
female experience: feminists as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva discusses whether it at all
could exist a representation of female experience in the symbolic order, which according to
this view is a patriarchal order. Nevertheless, Kristeva assumes Lacan’s thesis that language
gives birth to the human subject, but simultaneusly cleaves it. Art is always carrying an
unpaid debt to the maternal body by a sublimation sprung from the moment when the
child separates itself from this bodily universe.

The satisfaction in artistic creation, as well as the enjoyment of those who look at the
artwork, is that this limit is stretched, played on and exceeded.52

Articulations of the Real: the symptom, the spasm

The woman, without access to the Word, with only the body to put at stake, is the
theme of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. In the film, the female protagonist is trying to
express herself, desperately shouting out questions to God in the church – an emblematic
image of patriarchal context – and being brutally silenced by a “Women shall hold their
silence in church!”, whereupon she begins a Calvary-walk with the body as the only
possible way of communication and way to “salvation”: a road that is destroying her, at
least her physical body. This I would describe as a double bind, or a “Catch 22”: She

49
Elizabeth Wright: Speaking Desires can be Dangerous. The Poetics of the Unconscious.
Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 1999, p. 24.
50
Jurgen Reeder: Tala/Lyssna. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion,
1992, p. 57. The quote is in my translation from Swedish.
51
Carin Franzén: ”Om det omedvetna hos Lacan.” Stockholm: Divan, nr 1-2, 2003, p. 18.
The quote is in my translation from Swedish.
52
Stabat Mater. Julia Kristeva i urval av Ebba Witt-Brattström. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur,
1990, p. 16. The quote is in my translation from Swedish.

16
cannot/will not articulate herself in the symbolic order, but in that silence there are
outbursts – like neurosis, psychosomatic symptoms, or a deleuzian hysterical spasm – in
desperate attempts to represent her experience. Which is virtually impossible, because there
is no representation for the female experience in the symbolic order, and therefore it
cannot be spoken, and not even be experienced.

Picture 6. Emily Watson in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996).

Similarly, women artists, particularly in the 1970’s ”offered” themselves as dumb, ritual
sacrifice in painful bodily performances. Take for example Marina Abramovic’ legendary
performance Thomas Lips (The Star), where the artist carves a star in the skin around the
navel with a razor blade, eats one kilo of honey, drinks one liter of red wine, then whipping
herself until she no longer feels pain, and finally lies down on a cross of ice.

Picture 7. Marina Abramovic,”Thomas Lips (The Star )”. Performance, 1973. Still from video, 1975-1993.

17
 The Real needs to be lived and addressed, if by “second hand reorganization”.53 My
conclusion is that visual art works in which women act wordless, dumb victims can be seen
as hysterical articulations, (although on a narrative level, metaphorical connotations of
Christ suffering on the cross can exist simultaneously); where the real possibly can be
experienced as a border phenomenon, eg by pushing against the limits of what the body is
capable of: a rambling into an unknown darkness, where…

…life expresses its force when it runs a special ability to its limit. For Deleuze, this is life’s greatest
power: to run an ability to the point where it meets its limits: where sensuality meets the invisible
(insensible?), where memory meets that which can be incorporated into it, when thought meets its
own natural ‘impotence‘. What happens at the moment when this meeting takes place? It is precisely
where the creation takes place.54

When Carolee Schneemann in a performance unfolds a long text-scroll out of her

vagina, “a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries”55, it
literally becomes a metaphor for a “hysterical” attempt to draw “text” directly from the
body.

Picture 8: Carolee Schneemann, “Interior Scroll”, Performance (1975).

“Becoming-animal” as an escape route

In photography, good examples of an aesthetics of hysteria can be found; where the self
is dissolved and a metamorphosis in becoming-animal exists, which contradicts Deleuze’

53
Jurgen Reeder: Tala/Lyssna. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion,
1992, pp. 59-60. My translation from the Swedish word ”andrahandsrekonstruktion.”
54
David Lapoujade: ”Förnimmelsens kropp.” In Deleuze och mångfaldens veck. Red: Helena
Mattson & Sven-Olov Wallenstein. Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008, p. 126.
55
Carolee Schneemann’s own description of her performance, 1975 in East Hampton,
New York and the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado.

18
pessimism concerning photography as an art form: “[...] ready-made perceptions,
memories, phantasms.”56 This statement raises the suspicion that Deleuze’ notion of
photography is either as solely mimetic representation, or as a surface on which popular
cultural clichés are projected. Today it seems out of pace with a contemporary conception
of art to maintain that great painting would have an advantage over photography, as an
artistic approach to reach the “Sahara”. It is true that photographic clichés and stereotypes
are initial working material when artists like Cindy Sherman and Orlan go about to deform,
desintegrate and “become-animal”, just as Bacon uses photography in his painting, but
only to destroy it, tear it apart. The result exhibits radical alterity: abjection and dissolution
of the self in Cindy Sherman’s images of decay, the becoming-animal of the plastic surgery
women; the metamorphoses of Orlan, that radically resists idealization of physicality in
favour of an unheimlich creature.

Picture 9, 10 & 11. Orlan, “Omnipresence – Surgery”, 1993. One out of totally nine plastic surgery-
performances, and results after operations. ”Carnal Art is a self-portrait in the classical sense, yet realized
through the technology of its time. Lying between disfiguration and figuration, it is an inscription in flesh,
as our age now makes possible”. From Orlan’s Carnal Art Manifesto, 1989.

Das Unheimliche
The concept of das unheimliche is also applicable to many of Cindy Sherman’s images. We
see something familiar: dressed up women with makeup – but with exaggerations,
displacements and boundary crossing in stereotypical female attributes: Is the nose a result
from plastic surgery – or the nose of an animal? Sherman creates an eerie feeling of cracks
in the commonplace, where the known context, the linguistic, symbolic regime is being
destabilized.

56
Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981). London/New York:
Continuum, 2010, p. 61.

19
 Picture 12, 13 & 14: Cindy Sherman, “Untitled (Woman in Sun Dress)”, 2003. “Untitled (Cosmo Cover
Girl)”, 1990-91. “Untitled nr 408”, 2002.

Hal Foster and Johanna Burton points out that Sherman’s “cut up” women in various
stages of decay should be interpreted as an attempt at turning away from and questioning
of the male gaze, and even the very basic validity of the linguistic system and the Father’s
Law.57 Sherman’s pictures with soiled women, murder victims with glassy eyes surrounded
by putrefactive larvae, can also be interpreted based on Julia Kristeva’s concept abject;
neither subject or object, but a presence before individuation, or in the dissolution after
death.
Kristeva’s interest is transboundary situations of meaning, where meaning is not yet, or
no longer can be expressed.58

57
Cindy Sherman. (ed.) Johanna Burton. Cambridge: MIT Press, The October Files, 2006.
58
Stabat Mater. Julia Kristeva i urval av Ebba Witt-Brattström. Stockholm: Natur och
Kultur, 1990, p. 16.

20
 Picture 15. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled nr 153”, 1985.

Between the artist and the audience a game that seeks to trick the eye (trompe-l’oeil) is
at work, “what I wish to look at is never what I wish to see”, as Lacan says.59 The artistic
image nurtures the eyes, but doesn’t give much satisfaction to the gaze, according to Lacan.
Rather the artist subjects (dompte-regard) the audience – and this is very much applicable
to Cindy Sherman’s œvre where the viewer has few options other than to lay down the
gaze.
In Lacan the visual arts tames, rather than comfort and cure, as in Freud.60

Body, sensation, hysteria – resistance-strategy in the third modernity?

In what Scott Lash calls the third modernity, limit and distinction, ”difference” or
”ambivalence” is no longer central, but replaced by ”indifference”: total indifference
regarding boundaries, distinctions, creases, inside and outside. Technology does not
constitute the place of presence, and death the place of the other, of absence. Technology,
death, desires have themselves become signals, ”bits”, information units equal to microbes
and genetic information, ”caught up in the swirling vortex of indifference.”61

59
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. New York/London: W.W Norton & Company, 1998 (1981), pp.
101-103.
60
Elizabeth Wright: Speaking Desires can be Dangerous. The Poetics of the Unconscious.
Cambridge/ Oxford: Polity Press, 1999, p. 73.
61
Scott Lash: Another Modernity, A Different Rationality. Oxford/Malden: Blackwell
Publishers, 1999, p. 11.

21
 If we agree upon Lash description of this third, current modernity: what are the
implications of a defense for the eye, for sensation, for the spatial, following Lyotard and
Deleuze?
One of many possible basic questions is whether to consider Deleuze’s texts as an
elaborate systematic aesthetics, a theory of art – or as a theory of thinking, an engine for
creating new philosophical concepts.62
Another issue is whether we should believe that art’s revolutionary potential is
connected to the primary process, the Real – or is a different kind of force acting in a
political forum or a zone of experimentation where both the artist and the philosopher are
able to act. 63 According to Lyotards’ subterrainean logic, philosophers must submit writing
and start spatializing their arguments – at the same time as reality is dematerialized and
increasingly transformed into communication.64
I send and receive – therefore I am.
What is the status of the body and sensation in a placeless technology? What strategies
of resistance are possible at all, if the commodity society is active in our bodies already on
the amygdala level, through the rhythm of television images, advertising soundtracks, ”In
the hertz waves, in the telematic networks”; an offered opportunity that is in fact an
authoritarian slogan in the form of seduction.65
If already perception stylizes, in the name of what could we resist? Starting out from
perception always leads into this problematic dualism, as Heidegger has pointed out. If
nothing determines will, it is irrational – if it is determined, it is not a free will: a classical
paradox. According to Heidegger’s view, there is no causal relationship between stimulus-
response in the simplified behaviouristic sense, and every situation therefore demands an
active intentionality, making choices. Like Edmund Husserl we can try to experience a
plentitude of contours that brings back the genesis of things, in the infinite sum of
sensations. In Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, there is an ultimate
harmony in the world, la chair du monde, that can be revealed to us, through our perception.
This import attributed to perception is questioned by Derrida, Heidegger and Lyotard
among others, meaning that the world lacks coherence, and a constant struggle is raging in
the unconscious, the desires: the matrix – just as Antichrist succeeds in conveying. If we

62
Sven-Olov Wallenstein: Deleuze och mångfaldens veck. Red: Helena Mattson & Sven-Olov
Wallenstein. Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008, p. 191.
63
Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein: Spacing Philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard and
the Philosophy of the Exhibition. Draft of chapter. 4, not yet published.
64
Interventions using exhibition spaces as a discursive medium, conveying arguments
spatially, has for instance been used by the feminist theorist Griselda Pollock. The Two
Art Histories. The Museum and the University. Ed. Charles W. Haxthausen. New
Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2002. Introduction, XV-XXI.
65
Maurizio Lazzarato: “Struggle, Event, Media.” (2003)
www.republicart.net/disc/representations/ lazzarato01_en.pdf , p. 3. (2010-11-27).

22
were to use the film Antichrist to criticize theory (in the way Lyotard uses Cézanne art
works to criticize Freud), we cannot agree with Merleau-Ponty’s ultimately religious belief
in a higher harmonious order in nature and “the flesh of the world”.

What is at stake is ultimately the competing political, psychological and philosophical

debates on formation of the subject. It would be far beyond the scope of this survey to
dwell on this, but I will just comment on the stance of Deleuze. According to writings of
Deleuze and Guattari, the unconscious does not exist prior to the moment of its
production: “…the unconscious must be produced and it must be produced politically,
socially, historically”.66 Gregg Lambert wonders whether Deleuze and Guattari are
psychoanalytical enough when they simply displace the site of the unconscious from the
family to classes, peoples, races and masses, bypassing the entire question of this formation
altogether.67

We may further ask how, if infants are born and nursed by mothers who…transmit to them the most
rudimentary ethics of otherness, do these infants gain access to, and a sense of, classes, peoples, races
and masses? Aren’t that access and sense at least initially enfolded in the early culture, aesthetics, and
ethics of care? While the collective political unconscious may be decisive for processes of
subjectivation, isn’t it always initially mediated through the early culture and politics of infant care?68

Combining unconscious and political properties is what Walter Benjamin did, 1931 in
”Small History of Photography”: How visual technology passes censorship of
consciousness and over time forms the optical unconscious.69 He further writes that it is only
the optical unconscious, as it works in a wide variety of images, which can mark the
difference between technology and magic, and visibility as a historical variable. Benjamin
uses the term “magic” in a way related to his general thinking on the problem of the
product’s fetishization. In Das Kapital Marx ascribes the product – a seemingly easy to
understand, trivial thing – sensual, yet non-sensual (sinnlich übersinnlich) properties.
Commodities seem to have a life of their own; they become autonomous beings who are
related to each other and to humans. They are objects made by human hand, which seems
to have supernatural or magical powers, and thus are able to obtain power over people and
act just like fetishes. Commodities exert a detrimental effect on the human perception and
intellect. Benjamin calls these networks of goods, a kind of culture and mass society
illusion, phantasmagoria. The photograph, according to Benjamin, can identify

66
Gilles Deleuze: L’ile déserte et autres textes. Paris: Minuit, 2002, p. 382.
67
Gregg Lambert:”De/Territorializing Psycho-analysis”, in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychonanalysis.
Ed. Gabriele Schwab. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 208.
68
Gabriele Schwab: Derrida, Deleuze, Psychonanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press,
2007, p. 28.
69
Walter Benjamin: “Liten Fotografihistoria” (“A Short History of Photography”) in Bild
och Dialektik, Stockholm/Skåne: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1991.

23
phantasmagoria and unveil its magical effect. The photograph can thus help breaking the
spell; by visibility unraveling stupidity in humans and human interaction. Benjamin suggests
that all photographs have the potential to provide access to the optical unconscious. Here’s
an utopian expectation linked to the photographic image not only as revelation, but also as
a liberator who will solve man from the enslavement of the consumer society that turns
everything into ”commodities”.70
Today, we need to extend the question of phantasmagoria and desires beyond the
physical object’s fetishization to include the intellectual products of information society;
social relationships and life forms. The question whether there is a possibility to resist, is
discussed by Deleuze and Guattari as noology, noopower and noopolitics. But there comes the
paradox of perception again: How can one resist something that is not even conscious? “In
the name of what should we resist, and what resources could be mobilized if our bodies
and cognitive faculties are formed and sculpted all the way down to the neural substratum
by forces that exceed consciousness?”71 Lyotard circumvents this problem, meaning that
we still, after Benjamin and Adorno, are stuck in ”an aesthetics of the passion of meaning”,
”the pathos of objectivity”, mourning that the artwork is at risk in a dangerous era of
dissolution.72 At the same time Lyotard ascribes great importance to the most naive plastic
forms of popular culture, such as posters and typography, as items reflecting other objects
that manifest expression of a social and political space; important to diagnose the political
unconscious.73 Sometimes it seems Lyotard’s response to the lax journalistic discourse on
globalization and postmodernity is a return to Kant – sometimes an interest in the
information culture and ”techno science.”74

We are dealing with a huge delimitation problem: where does art begin and end in the
digital age? To regard communication as art, and art as communication in a placeless flow
in a global information culture, sets up lots of problems. Art’s special domain is not
communicate, but as Lyotard says, ”to present the unpresentable. A between-world fueled

70
Walter Benjamin: “A Short History of Photography”, 1931. Monica Anjefelt: Det optiska
omedvetna, eller massans ornament och den rörliga bilden som social hieroglyf. Essay (C-uppsats),
Dept. of Art History, Stockholm University, 2009.
71
Sven-Olov Wallenstein: “Noopolitics, life, and architecture.” In Cognitive Architecture.
From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information.
Eds. Deborah Hauptmann & Warren Neidich. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010, pp. 46-
64.
72
Jean-François Lyotard: “Favoring the Figural” from Discourse, Figure. Draft from the
English translation, published in 2010.
73
Jean-François Lyotard: “Plastic Space and Political Space.” boundary 2, Vol. 14, No. ½
(Autumn 1985 – Winter 1986), p. 212.
74
John Rajchman: “Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics”. October, Vol. 86 (Autumn, 1998),
pp. 3-18.

24
by the virtuality of unconscious perception, the genesis of creation that has no model.”75 But
can the distinction between the domains of art and information be maintained? It is
certainly easier to study paintings (or photography), framed and motionless, than a flow of
forms in a global digital environment, in which art is also present. I wanted to know how
researchers in current academia confront this issue and therefore I constructed a
questionnaire.

Seven Questions
The questions below were e-mailed to 14 prominent scholars (listed in the appendix) in
order to investigate current scientific attitudes in academia concerning: 1. The possibilities
of an aesthetics of sensation in visual/temporal/digital aesthetic technologies, and 2. If this
field would benefit from interdisciplinary cooperations.
I refer to “technology” in the sense of modern/postmodern times, that is the late 19th
century and onwards.

Out of the 14 respondents, several commented in different ways on the questionnaire,

but only one scholar replied in writing to the actual questions; Angela Dalle Vacche, who
specializes in the intersection of Aesthetic theory, Art and Film history, at Georgia Institute
of Technology, Literature, Communication and Culture, Atlanta. She is also the editor of
The Visual Turn. Classical Film Theory and Art History (2003). Angela Dalle Vacches (ADV)
answers follow directly after each question.

1. Where would you start to define what role body, corporality and sensation can play
today in a global, placeless digital technology? Which theorists’ have the most interesting
take on this issue, in your opinion? What challenges to science do “disembodied
images” bring, compared to traditional objects? To what extent are the particularities of
material specificity of any importance?

ADV: The question of the body has come up in reaction to the disembodied Cartesian model of the
subject which has been central in post-structuralism, even if cultural studies has taught us how to
interrogate images in terms of class, race and gender. Now, in reaction against or moving beyond
post-structuralism, we are reading Merleau-Ponty for whom embodiment, namely the nexus
perception and sensation is important. It is up to the digital media specialist to design new
technologies that are more sensitive to how the mind is always embodied, and even embedded in the
material context of daily life. There are two kinds of specialists in new media: people trained in
computer studies who know a little about the humanities and people trained in the humanities who
teach media but have no engineering background. The analytical language of colleagues from new
media/computer studies is always based on a solid object (the computer) whereas the analytical
language in new media/humanities derives from film studies, comparative literature, visual studies, art

75
Jean-François Lyotard: Discours, Figure. Paris: Editions Klinsieck, 1985, p. 224.

25
 history, etc etc, and it sometimes refers to moving projected images, other times to solid objects like a
photograph in an archive, or a piece in a museum. It seems to me that people with engineering
background should work only on industrial applications and people with humanities background
should research much more carefully the genesis of digital images and systems, so when they write,
they explain things correctly. It is a question of consulting primary sources and getting the
information right. As far as challenges to science, it is too early to say, right now we are still in the
middle of a lot of babble and jargon. Interdisciplinariness is good but it can also lead to superficiality,
banality, and confusion.

2. Which theories, if any, could be said to have been derived directly from
images/corporality/spatiotemporality/audiovisual culture (as opposed to written text?)
What role would you attribute to a dichotomy between image/text today?

ADV: Well your question is so broad that I will just remind you that comp. lit dept started theory, and
then it went to Cultural studies mixing image and text analysis. The best people for me are the ones
who work with new forms of art history, and with early cinema. They have been doing very careful
work. And it is these two crowds who should be imitated in the future.

3. Which current tropes (utopian, dystopian or “neutral”) concerning technology as a tool

or means in art and narration are most interesting at the moment, in your opinion? (for
example concerning user agency, power, democratic development, distribution of the
sensible, enabling new kinds of narrations). Would you say that similar tropes
concerning technology in the Arts reoccur through the last centuries (from about 1850
up til today)? Which (if any) changes can you see in the tropes concerning visual
aesthetic technologies?

ADV: This question is also huge, but I think that the most stimulating trope is Otherness, given what
is going on in the world and the constant and recent rearrangement of geographies everywhere with
even more to come.

4. How updated is your scientific field at the moment in dealing with the flow of moving
images on screens (the Internet, social media, television, global digital networks, new
ways of distribution and displaying on ever-new types of screens, etc.) – where art, film
and other kinds of temporal hybrid media appear in a mixed context? In what ways do
current media technology challenge the main theorists and thinkers of your field?

ADV: New media is the talk of the moment but it is still a baby discipline, the way film studies was 50
years ago. Yes they are the hot item of the day, but the scholarship has just begun, sure there are a lot
of books out, but how many will last the test of time in terms of the power of their ideas, and how
many will become outdated? A new discipline needs at least 50 years to begin to walk around with
some dignity among older ones, and even after 50 years, there is room for improvement. On the other
hand, it is also true some disciplines die. I wonder what will happen across art history, film studies and
new media studies, we might all end up in a general dept. with clear-cut subunits in dialogue, but the
official name will be media.

5. In your opinion: Should the “classic” boundaries be maintained in academia (separating

Art History, Cinema Studies, Media theory, Visual Culture Studies, etc.) – or can you

26
 outline a fruitful interdisciplinary approach beyond current divisions? How likely is it
that current digital technology development propels a quest for interdisciplinary
scientific approaches? (although other motives, for instance economic and strategic,
might exist parallelly).

ADV: In American academia, they constantly restructure, they are obsessed with change, I do not
know about Europe, but here, I only wish everybody took the time to reflect a bit longer.

6. To what extent are these interdisciplinary issues already covered by for instance Visual
Culture Studies, or, Philosophy of Aesthetics, or Philosophy of Technology?

ADV: Visual Studies is a subgroup of College Art Association in the USA, so for art historians who
do visual cultural studies but no moving image, no film studies, all these other labels you propose are
very trendy, but this is not what you read in the school booklet for the parents and they are such
ephemeral labels that in two years, there will be new ones.

7. Which would be the ideal cooperation – if such a thing exists – in investigating the
issues above? Which research gaps need to be filled (if any) in your opinion?

ADV: Well people in film should know more about the history of photography, people in modern art
should know more about early cinema, and in the future I see science studies and the history of
technology becoming really important for everybody.

I will soon comment on the answers, and I am certainly most grateful that Angela Dalle
Vacche took the time to answer my questions; but without diminishing her effort, it must
nevertheless be considered a major disappointment and failure to receive answers from
only one respondent out of 14. Method problems such as the potential complexity of open
questions, and the fact that not all respondents are native English-speakers, may explain
some of the drop-outs. A week after distributing the questionnaire, I had only received
feedback from three respondents: two were willing to answer the questionnaire, if they
could find the time; one was rather annoyed by what was considered to be a daring attempt
to contact prominent scholars, by somebody who was not a personal friend. The questions
were also considered by the latter to be “wrapped up in postmodernist ideology”. A
puzzling comment, since the questions are open, and thus possible to interpret and answer
in a plentitude of desired directions.
After one more reminder, I received four “very sorry, I cannot participate due to lack of
time”, in “this rather extensive questionnaire”, as one scholar replied. One person was
willing to meet to discuss things further.
Six respondents did not return my e-mails at all.
What did this silence convey?
Was my approach to be blaimed? Could it even be a breach of academic decorum to ask
these questions? Did I simply ask to much, being a master student, inferior in rank?
Certainly, open questions can be demanding, since complexity in answers are potentially

27
enormous, according to the respondents’ level of knowledge and pedagogical ambitions.
Given that all the respondents are highly competent and have written books about the
subject matter, I however calculated that they would be able to sample from their
experience and œvre without making a huge effort.
I also received forthright comments on how the questions pinpointed current and
urgent issues in academic organization. Since these e-mails on unwillingness to speak
publicly about strategic issues were sent to me personally, outside the questionnaire, “off
the record”, I will quote one comment anonymously:

Your questions are of great political importance regarding relations between disciplines, at a time
when the university is about to be reformed – and maybe I should address these issues in another
forum. But let me once more stress the paramount importance of the questions that you pose!

Although this survey obviously suffered from method problems, I still do believe that
the questions are valid, but needs to be posed in another forum.

A brief summary of Angela Dalle Vacche’s answers could be “back to basics”; that the
efforts to meet the galloping development of digital hybrid temporal media result in some
trendy labels that might turn out ephemeral. She stresses the importance of getting the
sources right, reading for instance Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and also acquiring more
knowledge of the adjacent fields in academia, engaged in similar issues, as Angela Dalle
Vacche puts it in answer nr 7: “Well, people in film should know more about the history of
photography, people in modern art should know more about early cinema, and in the
future I see science studies and the history of technology becoming really important for
everybody.”

I totally agree, and in my opinion, theorists with insight into a aesthetics of sensation –
like the scholars I tried to summon in my survey – need to be given prominence, since
regrettably an ahistorical, asocial, apolitical technology-utopian description – with some
notable exceptions – puzzling enough dominates today’s most influential media theories.76
If we all according to Angela Dalle Vacche’s prediction will end up in one general academic
department labelled “Media”, this might be an issue for art historians to tackle.
There seems to be several unbridgeable gaps between the engaged disciplines.
For instance, according to D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s relative inaccessibility for
those who are not familiar with his entire œvre, hinders the availability of his thoughts
where it really has much bearing, for example in terms of temporality, interval, sequence,
along with several organizational principles in the area of film and other moving images.

76
I am referring to media theorists like for instance Henry Jenkins and Lev Manovich, who
are active participants in fan-culture, among other bloggers and gamers.

28
Deleuze’ two books on cinema, The Movement-Image and Time-Image created confusion in
field of film theory, but has had little impact, simply because too few film theorists are able
to take them on board.77 While phenomenological philosophy gives lacanian psychoanalys
– cherished in film theory – a thorough review, the attention is not reciprocal. Perhaps
there are distances that cannot or should not be bridged.
However, Lyotard’s creative ways to mangle and collide phenomenology and Freud
stands out as an affirmative act, as do the grinding of lacanian psychoanalysis by Deleuze
and Guattari.

77
D.N. Rodowick: Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1997, and D.N. Rodowick: Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

29
 The Logic of the Database

Intermedialization, hybridization, remediation

The idea of intermedialization is a mixing of genres, which in turn presupposes the
existence of well-defined genres that can be merged and mingled in the first place. This is
basically a modernist aesthetics of separating genres. Fluxus artist Dick Higgins says that
“Intermediality … remains a possibility wherever the desire to fuse two or more existing
media exists.”78 But: “The content of a medium is always other media”, as Marshall
McLuhan stated several decades ago.79 New media always activates features of older ones.
The widespread discussion of intermedialization and hybridization therefore has features of a
side track or a circular reasoning. Instead of talking about intermedialization, we can say
remediation – and that is no history of development to higher, more refined or inventive
levels. It’s just different. Not even always new. Moreover, any attempt to blur the medium
instead strengthens it, the focus really sticks to the medium: in a word, hypermediacy; the
desktop interface that in the words of William J. Mitchell “priviliges fragmentation,
indeterminacy and heterogeneity and...emphasizes process or performance rather than the
finished art object”.80 Exhibiting what on the surface looks chaotic, is in fact a sort of
strategy or narrative as well. The logic of hypermediacy.
The hybrid is just one of many narrative approaches to mark distance to the tradition –
which fits well into postmodern discourse, where art who stands for tradition becomes
negative value-laden.
These narratives became common in the postmodern condition, when universal
authority was declared dead. The pissoar of Marcel Duchamp in 1917 was one early sign.
But according to art theorist Leo Steinberg a radically new organizing principle in art
comes with Robert Rauschenberg’s combines. We will look into this.

Linear vs. Non-Linear Structures

Even the most modest tinkler with software has an attitude that’s somehow “artistic”, an attitude of a
kind of astonishment. The idea of the artist as “creator” is one of strictly limited utility today.

Jean-François Lyotard, in Bernard Blistène,: “A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard”, 1985.

78
Dick Higgins: ”Intermedia” (1965) in Leonardo. Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 52-53. MIT Press,
2001.
79
Marshall McLuhan: Understanding media: the extensions of man. (1964), London: Routledge,
2001.
80
Cited in Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin: Remediation. Understanding New Media.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, p. 31.

30
 Picture 16. Robert Rauschenberg in his Lafayette Street Studio, New York, 1968. Photo: Henri Cartier-
Bresson.

Theorists like Lev Manovich claim that databases can provide completely new artistic
expressions.81 However, according to Leo Steinberg it was Robert Rauschenberg who, with
a pair of scissors, introduced the flatbed picture plane:

…which makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin
boards – any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which
information may be received, printed, impressed – whether coherently or in confusion.82

Here, the centrifugal flow of the desk is narrative principle and individual items do not
consolidate meaning through a centripetal narration, but rap out meanings in all directions,
reminiscent of a messy desk – like in the metaphor “desktop”, early to be used by
MacIntosh. An organizing principle different from the one previously reigning throughout
the centuries: drawing its logic and proportions from nature and the human body. Even
abstract art is made by reductions from corporal dimensions and nature; Piet Mondrian for
example reduced trees.
But the combines are not constituted from the logic of the body. Instead, centrifugal
flow and the “cut-and-paste-metaphor” is at work, evoking the joy of childish playing with
scissors and paper.83 The cut-and-paste technique of any of todays software programs may

81
Lev Manovich states: “Database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the
same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of
the world”. “Database as Symbolic Form”, in The Language of New Media, 2001, p. 225.
82
Leo Steinberg: Other Criteria: Confrontations in Twentieth-century Art. London: Oxford
University Press, 1972, pp 61-98.
83
Grahame Weinbren: ”Ocean, Database, Recut”, in Database Aesthetics. Art in the Age of

31
simplify the work process, but a pair of scissors would also do the job – like in the combines
of Robert Rauschenberg.
The idea thus seems more crucial here than the actual technique. Although artists can
show great talent in pinpointing current ideas, it is seldom a mere question of artistic
inventiveness or skilful use of tools, but of what can be formulated, by words or form, at
any given moment in time: the logic that lead to a specific form.
Another view on the non-linearity of technological forms is that they are compressed, in
making sense of abbreviated units of information; and also that breaks of linearity involves
speed-up. Technological time outpaces Newtonian time, as well as the logic of cause-and
effect. 84 Could we not apply this logic to Rauschenberg’s combines? The combines can be
perceived as abbreviated units of information, speeded-up or condensed non-linear
narrative, without any given storyline.
Is it a sign of syncronicity that Rauschenbergs early combines and the first computers
appear simultaneously, in the 1950’s?
Then again, we could refer to much earlier cut-up techniques, like Aby Warburgs
Mnemosyne-Atlas; a sort of clipboard arranging pictures and news items in visual clusters,
arranged by the principle of free association rather than linearity: ordered by the
artist/theorist, but free to browse and interpret according to the preferences of the viewer.
The collages of Picasso and Braque, as well as assemblage in early photography and film,
can be considered to meet the same kind of function: A representation which is not
allegorical or symbolic, but non-conceptual, particular, and acting in a field of tension
between art and research: “Exact imagination”, in Adorno’s words.85

Information Overflow, ed. Victoria Vesna, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota

Press, 2007, p. 67.
84
Scott Lash: Critique of Information. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2002, pp. 18-19.
85
Gregory L. Ulmer ”The Object of Post-Criticism”, i The Anti- Aesthetic. Essays on
Postmodern Culture. Hal Foster (ed) New York: The New York Press, 1998, pp. 107-113.

32
 Picture 17. Aby Warburg: “Mnemosyne-Atlas”, 1924-29. Photo of collage/installation, mixed media.

Database vs. Narrative

Database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each
claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.

Lev Manovich: “Database as Symbolic Form”, in The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

To theorists like Lev Manovich, the database represents the world like a collection of
items, without imposing an order, whereas crucial to the very idea of a narrative is order,
structure, sequence, and so on. Manovich argues that the database through navigating and
searching provides multiple choices, and hence, less formal ways in representing the world
is possible; thus the drastic juxtaposition of narrative and database as quoted above. In
reluctance towards hierarchy and universalizing ideologies and principles, parallells are
drawn between “the narrative” and traditional linear structures. I would argue that
Manovich’ dichotomizing approach is problematic. Even a messy or non-linear narration is
a sort of narration. As soon as two pictures are put together, or two objects are placed in
line, you have a storyline, an order, a narration. Lev Manovich dichotomy of database vs.
narration is therefore impossible, and Manovich himself actually provides an example of
successful merging of database and narrative into a new form. It is Dziga Vertov’s film
Man with a Movie Camera from 1929, which is labelled a database by Manovich. This film
displays the act of filmmaking in numerous ways, treating issues of space and time.
Manovich ends up saying that database and narrative can be combined after all.

33
 Narrative time – of a novel, a life, or the metanarrative of progress itself, is faster than
cyclical time, but technological time is much faster:

Technological time doesn’t so much refuse metanarratives; it outpaces them. Technological time does
not so much question progress; it is too fast for progress. It believes in progress, yet is too fast for it.86

When determinacy and causality is outpaced, what we face is the risk society, bringing
radical indeterminacy and chronic insecurity. In the technological age, capital accumulates
by investing in future welfare, through radical insecurity and genetic engineering.87 When
Manovich applies a logic of modernity and the classical welfare state onto global digital
technological time, a problem of temporality and dimensions appears: It’s like measuring
data-bits with a ruler.

The proto-database

Picture 18. Hans-Peter Feldmann, “Schattenspiel (Shadow Play)”, 2002-2009. Mixed media, dimensions
variable. Photo: Monica Anjefelt, 2009.

Look at the above art installation from the Venice Biennale of 2009. Some would call
this analogue congregation of household items and everyday junk a “proto-database”. In
any major contemporary Art exhibition, you will encounter installations that could be

86
Scott Lash: Critique of Information. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2002, p. 19.
87
Lash 2002, p. 19.

34
labelled proto-databases; the ironic version of the Cabinet of curiosities. They consist of
hundreds of “items”: everyday objects, highlighted like merchandise in a shop or rare
objects in a museum. The viewer has to navigate the “mess” and to make meaning out of
it; that is, construct a narrative. The process is similar to navigating a digital database. Yet
still, we can agree that it is not digital. Does this make the narration linear – or
randomized? Someone – the artist and perhaps the curator – has ordered it. If it is an
intentional and constructed narration – then, is it not a database? The dichotomy “database
vs. narrative” offered by Lev Manovich doesn’t help much in clarifying the question. I
would label the above installation a proto-database: a multiple-choice, ordered but non-
linear narration.

The act of displaying plastic utensils could be perceived as a critique of the centralized
principles governing traditional archives and museums. This was very much the case of the
giant exhibition Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany, 2002, where many installations could be
labelled analogue archives or proto-databases. And the experience of visiting a gigantic
exhibition like this could be compared to navigating a database, full of items and
fragments, disseminating in an abundance of links to other sites. Someone made a
calculation showing that if a visitor was to see all the videos shown at Documenta 11, it
would have taken several weeks. Discriminating and ordering items becomes crucial –
much like the experience of using the Internet.
There is no unifying story at Documenta 11, at least not obvious. It’s a seemingly non-
linear narrative – but, of course, a curator has ordered it: “It’s not a question of replacing a
linear order for chaotic informality...the model of articulating could be characterized as
architectonic...urban. The city as a garden of memory.”88

Agency of the user

The logarithmization of images into digital code has no doubt opened a vast field of
non-linear narrative possibilities. The term “Database Aesthetics” refers to this turn of
archival principle, from previous storage techniques and centralized, govermental and
sometimes policial or even repressive usage of photographic images, like in the mug shots
of the early 20th century, into the endless sprawl of todays Internet.89 Artists are concerned
with a wide range of issues focusing on digital platforms as a means of resistance to any
authoritative imposed rules and regulations, proclaiming the ever increasing agency of the
user: the fan is very much in vogue in contemporary Media Theory, propelling vast amounts

88
From the Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue, Kassel. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz
Verlag, 2002, p. 61.
89
See for instance Database Aesthetics. Art in the Age of Information Overflow. ed. Victoria
Vesna. Minneapolis/London: Minnesota University Press, 2007.

35
of studies in visual popular culture.90
Can computers and software provide a new, fresh start – devoid of any old-time, used-
up narratives? A question worth discussing, although no final answer can be given, other
than perhaps in retrospect. I question Manovich’ notion of the database, representing
freedom, agency of the user, new possibilities of expression, devoid of imposed order or
linear structure, the so called “narrative”. Both the term “database” and the term
“narrative” presuppose a compilation of some kind of data, and thus there is an analogue
or digital locus where something is expressed, by someone who has the ability and power
to do so. The ultimate logic of the database is the A-bomb, as Friedrich Kittler drastically
remarks.91 With this statement he puts focus on the fact that technical inventions stem
from governmental and military needs of control, surveillance and warfare. What digital
way of narration can possibly be user governed in the first place? The user of a digital
technique is always at some point dependent on a software company.
I think we can gain from analyzing how spatiotemporal value become commodities.
This is certainly not unique of our time, but perhaps more difficult to grasp. According to
the model of Pierre Bourdieu, it happens through a very particular series of consecrations:
first, the artist has to be consecrated by someone with the power to do so: a leading art
critic, a fine gallery, and so on.92 The channels for consecration may have changed
somewhat since the 1970’s, but the mechanism prevails.

In contemporary discourse, as throughout history, technical inventions have been joined

with utopian, political strivings of empowering “the users.” But who is governing the user?
And what is implied in this notion of the “vox populi”, or the “common sense” approach
to Art, since the concept of “the connaisseur” has become completely outdated, and when
mastering some non-digital artistic technique has been replaced by the “copy-paste”
function of any simple software program?
The tendencies in postmodern Art, and Aesthetic and Media Sciences, to embrace the
democratic and activist potential of the Internet is easy to understand, yet raises questions
about whether agency and power to express oneself (for the artist or the average citizen) is
actually enhanced or diminished through partition and dissolution of governing principles
of digital platforms for photobased expressions – since the distribution of time and space is
always political, be it in virtual or physical reality. Rather than an ahistorical, apolitical way

90
See the often cited Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. New
York: New York University Press, 2006. And Henry Jenkins: Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers.
Exploring participatory culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
91
Friedrich Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
92
Pierre Bourdieu: Konstens regler. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag
Symposion, 2000, p 215-260. And Kultursociologiska texter. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus
Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1994, for instance p. 133-136 and p. 196-199.

36
of idealizing user agency and power of an online “avant-garde” – like by Lev Manovich and
Henry Jenkins, theorists who are themselves fans, bloggers and gamers – a critical
approach is much needed today.

The screen as utopian projection surface

The whole dimension of everyday life with its infinitesimal movements and its multitude of transitory
actions could be disclosed nowhere but on the screen.

Siegfried Kracauer – Erwin Panofsky. Briefwechsel 1941-1966.

The screen in the above 1940’s quote by film theorist Siegfried Kracauer refers of course
not to the computer screen, but to the film screen. Much in the same way that
logarithmization bears the utopian aspirations and projections of personal artistic freedom
today, the film screen functioned as an utopian projection surface for the artistic avant-
garde of the 1920’s.
I have previously examined how spatiotemporal elements (images, sound, time) are
employed - consciously or not – to convey an ideological message in television jingles.93
Although the influence through a seemingly harmless flow of spatiotemporal
representation affects thought, not enough attention is currently directed to investigate
how ideology of images and aesthetics are intertwined in a global, digital screen culture,
where moving photographic images appear in ever-new constellations and contexts.
The scarcity of Art Historical accounts in this field might have to do with the fact that
moving images historically has a connection to the history of perception, whereas Art
History predominantly is preoccupied with the production of Art.94

We are doomed to relate to the relationship body/technology, and a degree of media

archeology is difficult to avoid in the description; technology shifts become significant,
linked to people’s changing movements and mindset (TV, satellites, computers, Internet)
and the post-industrial society’s changing production and distribution conditions. That
changes take place and the new platforms arises that affects the conditions of art
production and distribution, is a fact that hardly needs to be mentioned. The conviction
that the aesthetic technologies influence people’s thinking in fundamental ways also has
many supporters, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan and
Friedrich Kittler. However, it can be questioned how the globalization believed to

93
Monica Anjefelt: Det optiska omedvetna, eller massans ornament och den rörliga bilden som social
hieroglyf. Department of Art History, Stockholm University, 2009.
94
Angela Dalle Vacche; (ed.): The Visual Turn. Classical Film Theory and Art History. New
Jersey/London: Rutgers University Press, 2003, p. 14.

37
accompany new media and communications, is used as an argument in the criticism of
universalist theories and ”grand narratives”, as sprung from thoughts of progress,
enlightenment and modernity. Based on the new social movements our way of
understanding and interpreting reality is expected to result in a change in aesthetics, beyond
the institutionalized modernism. After the death of grand narratives (Lyotard) followed, in
the post-modern historiography, small stories and local language games. The presumed
death of grand narratives is often linked to innovative narrative techniques, exempt from
(modernist) linear narratives, thanks to the databases and copy-paste techniques (the Lev
Manovich/Henry Jenkins discourse). But it is ”natural given” or a rash of dichotomous
thinking that upon the abolition of grand narratives follow automatically ”small and local”
stories?
Possibly, this is not either/or: large and small stories can exist in parallel, in
interdependence, dialogue and negotiations with each other. Perhaps sticking to the term
“narrative” is a problem in itself, as Jacques Rancière points out:

The real needs to be turned into a fiction to be thought at all. This claim must be separated from any
positive or negative theories according to which everything is “narrations”, “large” or “small”. The
term “narrative” fixates contradictions between the real and the artificial in which both positivists and
deconstructivists are lost.95

The latest technology is always praised (and demonized) as a platform for strategies of
resistance. But scissors and tape also served well to reshape narrations, as dadaists et al.
have shown. An interesting observation is how the forms of conceptual art paves the way
into the digital age of mechanical reproduction, by opening up to new form of distribution
in media society - and perhaps also adapting the art work to fit the new forms of
communication.96
The handwritten letters and performance instructions which Fluxus artists sent back and
forth to each other across the globe worked just fine as networking. Every era has its
network technology, its principles and hierarchical channels of consecration. Those who do
not engage in ”new media” today – which voice do they have? At the same time, one is
hardly consecrated as artist just because you can put out a video clip on Youtube. Still,
consecration emerges from some sort of centre (where it lies can be debated), and just as
the conceptual artists adapted to new channels of distribution, the same sort of mechanism
may very well be valid for contemporary artists: adapting to the logic of hybrid media, the
so called “third space”.97

95
Jacques Rancière: ”Delandet av det sinnliga”,(French orig. 2000), in Texter om politik och
estetik. Site Edition 2. Lund: Propexus, 2006, p. 230. My translation.
96
Sven-Olov Wallenstein: ”Det utvidgade fältet – från högmodernism till konceptualism”,
in Konsten och konstbegreppet. Stockholm: Raster förlag/Kungliga konsthögskolan, p. 139.
97
Yvonne Spielmann: Hybridkultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010.

38
 Parting the sensible in digital space
Paramount in understanding issues of user agency, power and consecration in the art
world are the surveys of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.98 Yet still, Bourdieu’s
viewpoints are attacked both from contemporary media theory, and from the affective turn
of philosophy, stating that a circular argument lies behind his science of social and cultural
agency: a perpetuation of inequality where working-class youth “are excluded because they
don’t know they are excluded; and they don’t know why they are excluded because they are
excluded.”99 For Rancière the problem of knowledge consists not in its inherent
“concealment” but is always the outcome of a “partition of the sensible”, which he defines
as

…an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying,
and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the
visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is
understood as discourse and another as noise.100

Aesthetic technologies divide time and space, who is visible and invisible, who has a
voice or not, therefore, aesthetics is always political, historical, social, according to Jacques
Rancière. The role of aesthetics is to provide a resistance against the establishment and
distribution of the sensible. These ideas are parallel with modernism’s early fascination with
technology, for example, in Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. In Benjamins view, the
distribution of the sensible could be democratized through photography and film media,
but according to Rancière, it is literature, Flaubert and Balzac, that first grant the ”common
man” a voice. After that, film and photographic arts became possible. For Rancière it is the
author who first detects and conveys changes in the distribution of the sensible.
The perspectives of Bourdieu and Rancière are not necessarily antagonistic: in fact,
combining them is a royal road to understand the discourse of intermediality, and
technology acting as a pseudo-sensual proxy of the body, in a time when minds can
connect worldwide in nano-seconds, while bodies remain isolated. In the 1980’s, we were
supposed to have avatars representing ourselves in cyberspace, but this practice never
became widespread. Today, even the word cyberspace seems utterly outdated.

98
Pierre Bourdieu: Konstens regler. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag
Symposion, 2000, p 215-260. And Kultursociologiska texter. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus
Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1994, for instance p. 133-136 and p. 196-199.
99
Jacques Rancière: ”On the Theory of Ideology (the politics of Althusser)”, Radical
Philosophy Nr 7 (Spring 1974), pp 2-15. Bourdieu is often perceived as a Marxist
materialist much in the same way as Louis Althusser.
100
Jacques Rancière: Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998, p. 29.

39
 Final discussion and conclusion

In this thesis I have - according to my first purpose - discussed the possibilities of an

aesthetics following Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard: how certain art works
through sensational and hysterical qualities may be able to change discoursal foundations.
One suggestion is that the matrix, the difference itself, becomes visible in the impossible
synthesis between Deleuze’ philosophy of hysteria, Lyotard’s The figural; Das Unheimliche
from Freud, and The Real from lacanian psychoanalysis; the latter as refined by feminists
like Julia Kristeva: a tension that opens up both from within, a “spacing of Philosophy
itself”, to travesty Lyotard’s view on the productive action in playing off phenomenology
and psychoanalysis against each other.101
If we agree on the assumption that even perception stylizes, the “primary point” –
devoid of theoretical attitudes – will be impossible, merely utopian. This makes Lyotard’s
project in pointing out the matrix that can’t really be depicted, very intricate.
I have discussed if there is a possible way to recouperate sensation as a means of escape
from ready-made perceptions in information society, in the quest for a primary spot where
all attitudes aren’t already found and formed. The art work of radical alterity is what opens
a future of possible responses – including negative ones – whereas the masterpiece only
invites admiration and conservation. Following Jean-François Lyotard, I have discussed if a
work of art can act on the same critical level as theory, and furthermore change discoursal
foundations. Based mainly on Deleuze and Lacan, I have given examples of art works like
first and foremost Antichrist by Lars von Trier, but also photography by Cindy Sherman
and plastic surgery performances by Orlan, with abilities to create cracks into the symbolic
order, an almost unmediated materiality, a radical alterity with hysterical and unheimlich
qualitites, placing the art work and the spectator jointly in the position of a symptom, thus
achieving the performative contradiction in trying to say the unsayable.
My second purpose was to examine attitudes in current academia concerning digital
aesthetic technologies versus organizing and narrative principles, and also, the attitudes
towards interdisciplinary co-operations to deal with the flow of hybrid, visual, temporal
media in a digital context. I have discussed this issue through the body of science at hand.
My questionnaire directed to 14 prominent scholars ended up with only one respondent,
but also evoked some interesting comments off the record, strengthening my belief that the
questions are valid, although method and context brought obstacles, and despite that no
clear results can be stated by the survey as it turned out in this case.
Following Lyotard and D.N Rodowick I have suggested the rhizomic concept of the
figural as as a tool to infiltrate different discourses throughout history, not accepting
dichotomies like linguistic vs. plastic, or narrative vs. database, that tend to dominate

101
Daniel Birnbaum och Sven-Olov Wallenstein: Spacing Philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard and
the Philosophy of the Exhibition. Draft of Chapter 4, not yet published.

40
current media theory.
The postmodern reluctance towards hierarchy, the so called “meta-narratives” and
universalizing ideologies, are seen as parallels of “the narrative” and traditional linear
structures. But as I have shown in this thesis, anomalies appear by using historical concepts
in technological time.
As contemporary networked communications between global cities are non-linear and
discontinuous (unlike classical institutions or states), we cannot any longer treat power as
linear and continous. Power becomes elusive in the information order, moving to a regime
of power-knowledge, whose ethos is informational instead of discursive.102 The distribution
of time and space is always political – be it analogue or digital time and space, as Jacques
Rancière has shown. Friedrich Kittler discusses this, as do Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and
Siegfried Kracauer among others.

One out of many possible suggestions for future research is analyzing power in the
informational order: Who owns spatiotemporal capital, and who doesn’t?
Research on hybrid media talk about a third space, providing more artistic freedom in
digital globalization. This can certainly be discussed, given the fact that millions of people
lack access to electricity, let alone the Internet. Hybrid media as resistance strategy will
surely propel lots of research ahead.
Freedom is a key word, since “individual freedom” is one cherished feature in the story
of modernity.103 This concerns questions of ideology and preferential right if interpretation:
what kind of narratives and success stories are in vogue today. The implications of digital
development and hybrid media for art discourse is indeed forming a vast field of future
research.

102
Scott Lash: Critique of Information. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2002, p. xi.
103
Hans Hayden: Modernismen som institution. Om etableringen av ett estetiskt och historiografiskt
paradigm. Stockhom/Stehag; Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2006, p. 149.

41
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47
 Pictures

Cover picture: José Luis Liard © 2011.

Picture 1 & 2: “Les Immatériaux”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985. “Tous les auteurs’ site”,
with Nam June Paik’s “TV Buddha” in the background. Scenography by Philippe Délis.
Photographs: CCI/J.-C Plancher, 1985, colour photography, 180x135 mm. Tate Papers,
Autumn 2009, Tate Modern, London, tate.org.uk.

Picture 3: Francis Bacon, “Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X” , 1953. Oil
on canvas, 153 cm x 118 cm. Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa.

Picture 4 & 5: Film stills from Antichrist, Lars von Trier (108 mins., Zentropa, Denmark,
2009).

Picture 6: Film still, Emily Watson in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (159 mins.,
Zentropa, Denmark, 1996).

Picture 7: Marina Abramovic, “Thomas Lips (The Star )”. Performance, 1973, Video 1975-
1993, Video, colour, sound. Dur.: 1’13’’. Still from video. Collection FRAC, Lorraine.

Picture 8: Carolee Schneemann, “Interior Scroll”. Performance, 1975 (collab. w/Anthony

Mc Call). Gelatin Silver Print, 17,8 cm. x 12,7 cm., 1975. Swann Galleries, New York.

Picture 9, 10 & 11: Orlan, “Omnipresence – Surgery”, filmed performance, New York,
1993. Needle of anesthetizing syringe in upper lip, from the documentation film,
36’50 mins. Cibachrome in Diasec mount, 165 mm x 110 mm. 7th out of totally nine plastic
surgery-performances 1979-1993. From Orlan’s official website:
http://www.orlan.net/works/performance/, accessed 110616. Pictures 10 & 11, results
after operations. Photos from Orlan’s linked site, digibodies.org. Dimension 113 mm. x
148 mm.

Picture 12, 13 & 14: Cindy Sherman, “Untitled (Woman in Sun Dress)”, 2003,
Photography, Lambda C-print, 55,88 cm x 76,2 cm. Williams College Museum of Art,
Williamstown, Massachusetts. “Untitled (Cosmo Cover Girl)”, 1990-91. Cromogenic
development Print, 17 in. x 11 in. MoCP, Museum of Contemporary Photography,
Chicago. “Untitled nr 408”, 2002, Colour photograph on pvc board, 137,20 cm x 91,40 cm.
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

48
Picture 15: Cindy Sherman, “Untitled nr 153”, 1985, Chromogenic colour print, 170,8 cm.
x 125, 7 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Picture 16: Robert Rauschenberg in his Lafayette Street Studio, New York, 1968. Photo:
Henri Cartier-Bresson. Black and white photo, 400 mm. x 298 mm. Copyright Henri
Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.

Picture 17: Aby Warburg: “Mnemosyne-Atlas”, 1924-29. Installation, mixed media and
dimensions. Black and white photo, 1200 mm x 1566 mm. merodeoscriticos.blogspot.com

Picture 18: Hans-Peter Feldmann: “Schattenspiel (Shadow Play)”, 2002-2009. Mixed media,
dimensions variable. Installation at the Venice Biennal, 2009. Photo: Monica Anjefelt.

49
 Appendix

List of respondents who received the questionnaire:

Susan Buck-Morss, Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory, Cornell

University, NY. Research interests: Critical concepts for the study of visual culture, the
intersection of art and politics in the twentieth century.

Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology, Literature, Communication and

Culture, Atlanta. Research interests: The intersection of aesthetic theory, Art and Film
history.

Judy Gammelgaard, PhD Psychology, lector Copenhagen University. Research interests:

psychoanalysis, its theory, psychotherapy and application in the literary and aesthetic
disciplines.

N. Katherine Hayles, Professor Arts & Sciences, Duke University, Durham. Research
interests: Digital Humanities, Science and Technology, Critical Theory.

Karin Johannisson, Professor History if Ideas, Uppsala University. Research interests:

History of the body, and history of the senses and sensibilities.

Scott Lash, Professor of Sociology and Cultural studies; director, Centre of Cultural
Studies, Goldsmiths University of London. Research interests: Technological media,
Sociology of Postmodernism, Global Modernities.

Trond Lundemo, PhD, Lector at the Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm

University. Research interests: technologies of temporality, aesthetics and intermediality.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York

University. Research interests: The genealogy of visuality, the general development of
visual culture as a field of study and a methodology.

John Rajchman, Adjunct Professor and Director of Modern Art M.A. Programs in the
Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Philosopher working
in the areas of art history, architecture, and continental philosophy. Editor for Art Forum.

David Norman Rodowick, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard

University, Cambridge, USA, Interim director Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Research
interests: Aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical

50
approaches to contemporary art and culture, and the impact of new technologies on
contemporary society. Rodowick has also been an experimental filmmaker and video artist.

Göran Sonesson, Professor Semiotics, University of Lund. Research interests: visual

semiotics, semiotics of gestures and body language.

Jakob Staberg, Docent Södertörn University. Research interests: Literature and

psychoanalysis, Media theory, power analysis.

Sven-Olov Wallenstein, PhD, Philosophy, Lector Södertörn University. Research

interests: Philosophy and aesthetics, especially in relation to Modern Art and Architecture;
The Return of Sensibility.

Annika Wik, PhD, Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm
University. Research interests: The relation between Film and Art.

51
 UPPSATSER I KONSTVETENSKAP LÄSÅRET 2010/2011

1. Wäreby, Eva: Fritidshusets årsringar. En översikt av fritidshusets arkitektoniska utveckling i Stockholmsområdet,

särskilt Tynningö, från 1870-talet fram till 2000-talet. (Kand)
2. Lindgren, Tony: Utställningar och samverkan inom Stockholms konstliv åren 1998, 2008 och i ett
framtidsperspektiv. En undersökning med semiotik av tillkomst och respons. (Master)
3. Lindqvist, Katarina: Måste kvinnor fortfarande vara nakna för att få komma in på museerna? En undersökning av
könsrepresentationen på fem svenska konstinstitutioner. (Kand)
4. Ljungstedt, Eva: Tyresö Strand – en trädgårdsstad? (Kand)
5. Svensson, Christian: Visuell retorik i stormaktstidens epitafiekonst. Tre fallstudier i den svenska, aristokratiska
och humanistiska åminnelsekulturen ur ett betraktarperspektiv. (Kand)
6. Lingeskog, Karolina: I vanitas spår – vanitassymbolernas betydelse och föränderlighet. (Kand)
7. Andersson, Elin: Krigsrov och krigsbyten i Carl Gustaf Wrangels konstsamlingar. (Mag)
8. Linnaeus, Nina: Den estetiska dimensionen i Ellen Keys pedagogiska åskådning. (Kand)
9. Rådberg Håkansson, Cristina: Moderna hotell. Hotellbyggande i Stockholm 1950 -1980. (Kand)
10. Sundin, Greger: For Princes or Maids? Provenance, form and value of serpentine at Skokloster castle. (Mag)
11. Engholm, Nina: Från att ”bli behandlad som en liten dilettant” till 116 440 betraktare – en diskursanalytisk
undersökning av meningsproduktionen kring Nils Dardels konstnärskap. (Mag)
12. Edin, Olof: Bonde med veranda. Schweizerarkitekturen som avgränsning – om ett byggnadsskick och
levnadssätt bland storbönder i Östjämtland runt år 1900. (Mag)
13. Wingård, Cecilia: Fågelbro - en community i svensk tappning. (Kand)
14. Stenbeck, Elli: Elis Benckert och Carl Milles 1906-1912. År av gemensamt skapande. (Mag)
15. Ekstrand, Anna Mikaela: Feminism & Style: YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES Cunnilingus in North
Korea (2007) and Jenny Holzer’s Protect Me From What I Want (1982). (Mag)
16. Gradin, Emma: Unveiling the Subject – Art Mediation and Representation. A Case Study on Taswir – Pictorial
Mappings of Islam and Modernity. (Kand)
17. Winberg, Sofia: Svensk smyckekonst. En föremålsbaserad analys av konstnärlig utveckling från 1960-talet och
2000-talet i relation till sin samtida kontext. (Kand)
18. Wikman, Tuva: Konstnärens olika roller. Om representation och identitetsskapande i Elisabeth Vigée-Le Bruns
självporträtt. (Kand)
19. Hildén, Sara: ”Sålunda klädder”. Karl XII som nationell ikon. (Kand)
20. Lorentzon Stankova, Petra: Contemporary art & preschool children. A research of art pedagogical methods in
Moderna Museet. (Kand)
21. Widgren, Jenny: Vendels kyrka under medeltiden. En undersökning ur historiskt perspektiv med fokus på genus och
känslointryck. (Kand)
22. Broman Kjulsten, Susanne: Konst i köpcentrum. En studie av Bromma Blocks. En nyöppnad handelsplats i
Stockholm studerad med bakgrund av politiska visioner, varumärkesteorier och genomförda aktiviteter under
hösten 2010. (Kand)
23. Doeser, Setske: Nils Kreugers ”Förstamajbild”. Från omslagsbild till ikon. (Kand)
24. Ohlsson, Maria: Rörelse i konsten och det vidgade konstbegreppet. (Kand)
25. Ekstrand, Kyong: Chun Kyung Ja. Analys av kritiken mot en koreansk konstnärs måleri under den tidigare perioden
av hennes verksamhet. (Kand)
26. Staaf, Karolin: Frank Gehry vs. barocken. En studie av Frank Gehrys konstnärskap utifrån ett neobarockt perspektiv.
(Kand)
27. Juhl, Johanna: Peredvizjniki. ”De heliga sextiotalisterna” inom ryskt 1800-tals måleri. (Kand)
28. Ekman, Jan: Pettibons piktur. Raymond Pettibons bruk av text i bilden. (Kand)
29. Wärnhjelm, Helena: Att bevara och utveckla. En analys av Gamla riksarkivets förnyande. (Kand)
30. Larsdotter, Hanna: Marianne Richter i en samtida kontext. MR MMF AB. Naturen i abstrakt form. (Kand)
31. Swahn, Alexander: Gula Villan. Ett bortglömt kulturarv? (Kand)
32. Montalvo, Ann-Christine: Några inspirationskällor till Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz arkitektur. (Kand)
33. Malmström, Sanna: Kan Hälsingegårdarna bli Sveriges nästa världsarv? En kvalitativ studie av hälsingegårdarnas
nominering till Unescos världsarvslista. (Kand)
34. Korpskog, Adam: ”Fri och ensam” – En dekontextualiserad studie av två outforskade aspekter i Tora Vega
Holmströms konstnärskap. (Kand)
35. Haaraoja, Tarinja: Hunden och människan – Elliott Erwitts fotografier och deras relation till porträttkonst. (Kand)
36. Andersson, Sofia: The Chancellor Seguier on Horseback med ett hiphop-följe – ett samtida härskarporträtt av
Kehinde Wiley. (Kand)
37. Wörman, Hanna: Den platsspecifika installationen och dess mobila ursprung. (Kand)
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Uppsatserna kan beställas på institutionen per tel 08-16 33 56 eller e-post asa.asplund@arthistory.su.se.
38. Borg Kauppi, Liselotte: Anders Göstafsson och Ambrosius Hedengrahn – två konstnärer i Karl XI:s tid. Analys av två
barockkonstnärer och hur deras bilder av Karl XI möts i kyrkorummet. (Mag)
39. Appelgren, Therése: Kulturkonservativ eller postmodernist? Hur ideologiska är konstkritikerna? (Kand)
40. Åhlund, Anna: ARTIST CLOTHING. Konst som mode eller mode som konst? (Kand)
41. Alvarez Nordström, Emilia: The Process of Interpretation of ”eat, eat, eat” Part 1 by Astrid Svangren. (Kand)
42. Hall, Hedvig – Vi arbetar alltid så nära varandra utan att veta om det – studie i Karin Mamma Anderssons och
Jockum Nordströms bildvärld. (Kand)
43. Weiss, Fredrik: Arbetare i strejk. Bilden av arbetaren i borgerlig och socialistisk press 1879 -1900. (Mag)
44. Marinus Jensen, Lene: Sensing Space. En undersökning av perception och rum utifrån et verk av Olafur Eliasson.
(Kand)
45. Bergman, Linda: Christer Strömholm – analys av fyra färgpolaroider. (Kand)
46. Wahrgren, Amanda: Pehr Hilleström d.ä. – en analys av konsthistorieskrivningens produktion av värde. (Kand)
47. Fahlén, Emily: UTSTÄLLNINGSRUMMET OCH KONSTPEDAGOGIKEN. En undersökning om socialt producerad
rumslighet. (Kand)
48. Berg Rhodin, Emmeli: Konsthändelsen i texten. Ett konstkritiskt utsnitt 2011. (Kand)
49. Dybeck, Karin: Tatueringar – Historia, teknik och samtida trender. (Kand)
50. Johansson, Caroline: Den fotografiska bilden – i pixlar eller print. En uppsats om skillnader i kontext och tolkning
av fotografier på internet och i utställningsrummet. (Kand)
51. Etemad Conradsson, Emma: Den Vita kuben – den nya golfrundan. (Kand)
52. Bjurestam, Eric: INFLUERAD ARKITEKTUR – Sankt Eriksområdet och Tjugotalet. (Kand)
53. Nilsdotter Basili, Pia-Lotta: Subjektet och tre aktanta videoverk – om utformning, presentation och interaktion.
(Kand)
54. Arvidsson, Malin: Funktion och relation - En studie om begrepp inom heminredning mellan 1950- och 1990-talet.
(Kand)
55. Rydberg, Manda: Murakami Versailles. En studie av mötet mellan Takashi Murakamis konstverk och slottet i
Versailles. (Kand)
56. Carlén, Emelie: Nittiotalets förändrade ideal – En undersökning om heroin chics betydelse i samhället. (Kand)
57. Gräslund, Pia: Richard Avedon – En jämförande analys av Avedons porträtt ur In the American West och hans
porträtt av celebriteter och societeten. (Kand)
58. Ericsson, Evelina: Skivhusen i Bredäng – en analys av kulturhistoriska värden och hållbarhet. (Kand)
59. Stenstrand, Sandra: Norman Rockwell – omvärderad vid millenniumskiftet. (Kand)
60. Olsson, Hedvig: Matfotografi med konstreferenser – En studie av magasinet Gourmets fotografier och
konsthistoriska konnotationer. (Kand)
61. Jönsson, Anna-Lena: Betraktande av porträtt av Nancy Astor. (Kand)
62. Müller, Sally: Stickgraffiti - en kvalitativ studie av tre konstprojekt och deras samband med crafitivsm. (Kand)
63. Gunmar, Barbro: Johan Laurentz byggnadsminnen. (Master)
64. Sandelin, Agneta: With Pride or Prejudice? Polynesian tattoo practice, in old and modern times – changes and
Reasons. (Master)
65. Anjefelt, Monica: Bits and Bodies. Sensation and Hysteria as Possibilities in Digital Remediation. (Master)

______________________________________________________________________________________
Uppsatserna kan beställas på institutionen per tel 08-16 33 56 eller e-post asa.asplund@arthistory.su.se.