Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Here we will be concerned only with chronology, the most basic but also necessary of analytical procedures.

The ball and chain of the historian, all periodization is an even greater burden to the aesthete. What good will it do to plough the sea? asks the amateur accustomed to drifting on a boundless ocean of beauties, content to do without a compass. However, the articulation of the duration of history in conventional periods—antiquity, the Middle Ages, modernity—is almost as old as the discipline of history itself. Why would the history of images be exempt from this rule? Yet to be limited to inflecting the time of art into “ancient,” “medieval,” “classical,” “modern,” and “contemporary” in imitation of convenient scholarly divisions does not seem particularly rigorous. The history of the eye does not coincide with institutional, economic, or military history. It has a claim, if only in the West, to its own, more radical temporality.

One cannot escape the continuist confusion in which the official history of art is immersed without finding alternate means—conceptual thus, in the first place, terminological ones. For a different function, so too a different appellation. An image that does not support the same practice cannot bear the same name. Just as primitive imagery cannot be properly understood without taking off the spectacles of art, the language of the aesthetician must be forgotten in order to discover the originality of the visual.

See also: Hans Belting, Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology

Régis Debray's most recent works include Critique de la raison politique ou l'inconscient religieux (1981), Cours de médiologie générale (1992), Manifestes médiologiques (1994), and L'Oeil naïf (1994). Eric Rauth is participating as a faculty fellow in the Center for Critical Inquiry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He translated Régis Debray's Manifestes médiologiques (1995) and is currently working on a historical and mediological study of the novels of Verne and Conrad entitled Living in the Flicker.

Like much abstract art, Barnett Newman's paintings have often been interpreted as significantly gendered. His case is also typical insofar as the interpretive processes by which gender has been located in his work ordinarily have been primitive. Masculinity is situated in the “phallic” vertical bands of his paintings, the so-called zips—this term itself evokes not only speed and direction but also mundane openings onto male organs. Newman's zips and Jackson Pollock's spurts have sometimes been taken to symbolize the intense and aggressive masculinity recognized as characteristics of New York school art and its milieu. Closer scrutiny is warranted as theories of the gendering of abstract expressionism bear increased weight in art historical arguments—some of which seek to interpret the art by women associated with the movement, especially Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, and its neglect by critics; some to explore the inscription of identity in New York school art; and some to establish gender as a significant factor in the development of postmodern reactions against abstract expressionist high modernism.1 The case of Barnett Newman is especially valuable to such projects. His own considerable difficulties with critical reception hinged on the gendering of his art, or so I will argue. Moreover, his eccentric handling of gendered metaphors brings into sharper focus abstract expressionism's distinctive and complex uses of gender in the registration of authorial subjectivity. And the contested status of Newman's work, seen as simultaneously high modern and postmodern, makes it a crucial case study for discerning the character of the divide.

See also: Caroline A. Jones, Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego

· 1. See, for example, Anne M. Wagner, “Lee Krasner as L. K.,” Representations, no. 25 (Winter 1989): 42-57; Anna C. Chave, “Pollock and Krasner: Script and Postscript,” Res 24 (Autumn 1993): 95-111; Ann Gibson, “Recasting the Canon: Norman Lewis and Jackson Pollock,” Artforum 30 (Mar. 1992): 6-73; Caroline Jones, “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 628-65; and Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, Conn., 1993).

Michael Leja is associate professor of art history at Northwestern University and the author of Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (1993). He is currently working on a study of the origins of visual modernism in the United States.

In the music world, the seventies was the decade of Rimbaud. For a while you could flip on the radio or attend a rock concert and hear the name of Arthur Rimbaud intoned earnestly by any one of a diverse group of young musicians. Lyricists such as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith evoked Rimbaud as an important predecessor, thereby establishing their project within the paradoxical “tradition” of antiestablishment art. The assimilation of Rimbaud into certain trends of popular music during the seventies can be seen as the extension and most recent incarnation of what literary critic René Étiemble has called le mythe de Rimbaud.1 In particular, punk musicians implicitly—and in some cases explicitly—kept the torch of the Rimbaldian myth alive, viewing, as music critic Greil Marcus puts it, “the beautiful, the poetic, and the call to murder” as “all of a piece.”2

· 1. For an exhaustive discussion of Rimbaud's life as a generator of myths, see René Étiemble, Le Mythe de Rimbaud: Genèse du mythe (Paris, 1954) and Le Mythe de Rimbaud: La Structure du mythe (Paris, 1952).

2. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 17.

See also: Peter Brooks, Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?

Carrie Jaurès Noland is assistant professor of French literature at the University of California, Irvine. She was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1994 and is currently working on a book-length project entitled Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology.

The aim of this paper is to consider some recent paintings by Art & Language, to reflect on the conditions under which they came to be painted, and to offer reasons for their strange technical characteristics.1 I also mean to explore a hiatus in the development of a studio practice. I do so not only with the specific project of Art & Language in mind but also form a more general interest in the kinds of untidy and improvised compounds that are often hidden beneath art history's seamless teleological narratives.

Before I embark on my main subject, there are a few points to be established both for the purposes of argument and for the benefit of those unfamiliar with Art & Language and its history. The name Art & Language was first adopted in 1968 as the name of an artistic practice and as the title of a partnership. As a formal body, Art & Language was to be responsible for issuing artworks as publications and also for editing and publishing the journal Art-Language.2 For those who first used the name, and for the majority of those like myself who came to identify with it over the next five or six years, Art & Language served as a focus of activity apart from the normal patterns of artistic careers as these were defined at the time. To be more specific, it served as an intellectual base from which to pursue that hardly imaginable change in the profession and position of art that the conceptual art movement seemed to promise in the late sixties and early seventies.

· 1. This is the third of three papers provoked by Art & Language's paintings on the theme of landscape. See Charles Harrison, “Form” and “Finish” in Modern Painting', Filozofski Vestnik 1 (1991): 49-60 and 'On Painting a Landscape', Kunst en Museumjournaal 5, no. 2 (1993): 1-11. The present paper originated in a lecture given at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, in November 1993, during the course of an exhibition of work by Art & Language.

· 2.The first series of Art-Language was published fro May 1969 to March 1985. Art-Language, n.s., no. 1 was published in June 1994. The present author is editor of the journal.

See also: Charles Harrison, On the Surface of Painting  ·  Art & Language, Voices Off: Reflections on Conceptual Art

Charles Harrison is professor of the history and theory of art at the British Open University. He is editor of Art-Language and author of Essays on Art & Language (1991) and English Art and Modernism (rev. ed. 1994). He is coeditor with Paul Wood of Art in Theory 1900-1990 (1992) and is preparing Art in Theory 1750-1900 with the same coeditor. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was “On the Surface of Painting” (Winter 1989).

In reading the literature of American public health in the Philippines, one soon becomes immersed in a poetics of pollution.1 Medical texts insistently contrast a closed, ascetic American body with an open, grotesque Filipino body, the former typically in charge of a sterilized laboratory or clinic, the latter squatting in an unruly, promiscuous marketplace. Reductive as it may seem, this sequence of equivalence and opposition proved remarkably pervasive and effective. American colonial health officers in the early twentieth century turned their new tropical frontier into a desolate human-waste land, imagining everything “brownwashed” with a thing film of germs. Thus constituted, the tropical environment called for massive, ceaseless disinfection; the Filipino bodies that polluted it required control and medical reformation; and the vulnerable, formalized bodies of the American colonialists demanded sanitary quarantine. (By definition, the American body was necessarily closed off, abstracted from its tropical dislocation.) This is an essay, then, on the medical production of colonial bodies and colonial space—in other words, an essay about feces, orifices, and toilets.

· 1. I call this a “poetics” in order to emphasize the effort of public health officials to close the structure of medical metaphor and to erase any relations of these texts to a history of political practice. In effect, the expression of a figure outside of time works as a modernizing strategy. The medical symbolic is thus fixed in a system especially discomposed by a recognition of its historical and geographical specificity. Accordingly, this essay can be read as a critique or reencoding of a certain poetics of space (and bodies and culture) that claims “no past, at least in no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas [1958; Boston, 1994], p. xv). Poetics here means rather more than James Clifford's “constant reconstitution of selves and others through specific exclusions, conventions, and discursive practices” (James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford and George E. Marcus [Berkeley, 1986], p. 24), and yet rather less Roman Jakobson's well-known formalist definition. See Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 350-77.

See also: Warwick Anderson, “Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man Is Vile": Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse  ·  Homi K. Bhabha, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817

Warwick Anderson is assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard University. His current research interest is the history of disease and public health in colonial Southeast Asia. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man is Vile': Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse” (Spring 1992).

What does Catharine MacKinnon mean by pornography?1 What account of pornography is she putting forward when, in “Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech,” she writes that pornography is “a practice of sex discrimination” that “combines a mode of portrayal that has a legal history—the sexually explicit—with an active term that is central to the inequality of the sexes—subordination”?2 What do she and Andrea Dworkin mean to accomplish, and what do they accomplish, by talking about what pornography does rather than what pornography is?3 In the essays MacKinnon wrote on pornography in the 1980s, she spoke of “pornography as a practice of sex discrimination” and of “what it does behaviorally” (“FBS,” pp. 176, 177). In her most recent book, Only Words, she speaks continually of pornography in terms that treat it as an action—or a variety of actions—rather than as an object—or a collection of objects. This is a formulation or verbal habit sufficiently interesting to require some examination. We could portray it as simply a matter of rhetorical escalation, a histrionics designed largely for demagogic effect.4 Or we could render it fatuous by paraphrasing it as a statement that all speech is behavior, thus making pornography look like a subset of language in general, merely one example among the myriad examples of the operations of prose. The aim of this essay is to set aside those two dismissive accounts of MacKinnon's position, to examine some of the arguments of some of her opponents, and to isolate what I take to be the most interesting aspect of the Dworkin-MacKinnon position, namely, its attempt to suggest a connection between pornography and action that continually demands a revision of the ways in which the law acknowledges and, indeed, formulates action.

· 1. I tend to leave Andrea Dworkin's work somewhat to the side in this essay. This is not by any means intended as a gesture of disparagement of Dworkin's work on pornography or the importance of her collaboration with MacKinnon. It is merely to avoid the awkwardness of continually using both names to refer to a position that I am, in the present essay, describing almost exclusively through MacKinnon's writing.

· 2. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech,” Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 176; hereafter abbreviated “FBS.”

· 3. This formulation is virtually omnipresent in the work of both Dworkin and MacKinnon. MacKinnon has stated it relatively recently in saying that “the deepest injury of pornography is not what it says, but what it does” (“Pornography as Defamation and Discrimination.” Boston University Law Review 71 [Nov. 1991]: 803).

· 4. Richard Posner has recently reviewed MacKinnon's latest book in such terms: “The title of Catharine A. MacKinnon's new book is intended as an ironic commentary on the belief that pornography is 'only words' and therefore, unlike sticks and stones, can never hurt anyone. There is a further irony that is unintended: Only Words is a rhetorical, rather than an analytical, production; it is only words” (Richard A. Posner, “Obsession,” review of Only Words, by MacKinnon, New Republic, 18 Oct. 1993, p. 31).

See also: Frances Ferguson, Getting Past Yes to Number One  ·  Frances Ferguson, Emma, or Happiness (or Sex Work)

Frances Ferguson is professor of English and the humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit and Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. She is currently completing a study of pornography called Pornography: The Theory.