Postmodernist Purity

John McGowan

Department of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
jpm@unc.bitnet

 

Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

 

Craig Owens was a critic/theorist of contemporary art, best known for his essays in October and Art in America, who died of complications stemming from AIDS in 1990. Just about everything he ever published–plus the syllabi and bibliographies for courses he taught on postmodern art, on critical theory, and on visualizing AIDS–has been collected in the volume under review. It makes for sad reading, not just because Owens should still be among us, but also because the shifting yet intractable aporias of a certain postmodernist discourse haunt this work. Owens’s intellectual trajectory–from Derrida to Foucault to Lacan as the major influence on his work–follows that of much of his (and my) generation in this country. From an aestheticist, textual rejection of modernist pieties inspired by Derrida, Owens moved to a political analysis of modernism that focused on relations of power and from there to a cultural critique of the construction of gender identities and of desire (sexual and social) itself. In the process, Derrida and Foucault do not completely disappear, but the prevalence of psychoanalysis in much feminist thought had shaped Owens’s discourse in a particularly distinctive way by the mid-eighties.

 

The thread that runs through these various sub-periods in Owens’s work is the problematic of representation. An early (1979) essay on Derrida’s critique of classical aesthetics ends with the enigmatic statement from which the editors of this volume take its title:

 

If in 'The Parergon' Derrida offers us no alternative theory of art, it is because the theoretical investigation of works of art according to philosophical principles is what is deconstructed. Still, 'The Parergon" signals a necessity: not of a renovated aesthetics, but of transforming the object, the work of art, beyond recognition."(38)

 

What is the nature of the “necessity” here? Necessary for what and to whom? And how would we know (if) something (was) beyond recognition? A few years later (1982), Foucault has led Owens to be more willing to name names, to suggest why an escape from representation, from recognition, might be desirable. He calls our attention to “the ways in which domination and subjugation are inscribed within the representational systems of the West. Representation, then, is not–nor can it be–neutral; it is an act–indeed, the founding act–of power in our culture” (91). The wholesale condemnation of the West’s representational systems is retained in this shift from Derrida to Foucault, but now Owens can at least specify particular harmful effects of powerful representations and the groups most likely to suffer those harms.

 

Three years later (1985) Owens criticizes Foucault for only telling “half the story”; what “Foucault would excise” is the half “that concerned desire and representation” (204). Here we need Lacan, who teaches us to “regard all human sexuality as masquerade” (214), as a representation of presence/plenitude/identity over the absence/lack that is castration. Appropriately enough, the Lacanian essay on “Posing” brings Owens full circle. He ends with a quote from Derrida. “If the alterity of the other is posed, that is simply posed, doesn’t it amount to the same . . . . From this point of view I would even go so far as to say that the alterity of the other inscribes something on the relation which can in no way be posed” (215).

 

The critique of representation, then, keeps coming back to the desire for that which exceeds representation, which cannot be represented. I use the word “desire” deliberately here because, while fascinated by the inscription, formation, and constraints of conventional desire, Owens follows his models in never thinking through his own desire to question and disrupt the conventional. This postmodern discourse adopts without question a certain oppositional posture traditionally associated with the avant-garde. This blind spot is particularly irritating because Owens recognizes that the avant-garde was never the revolutionary force it set itself up as and that contemporary re-runs of avant-garde movements are the farcical versions that follow tragedy in Marx’s version of historical repetition. “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women” offers a wonderful send-up of neoexpressionism, while “The Problem with Puerilism” argues convincingly that “what has been constructed in the East Village is a simulacrum of the social formation from which the modernist avant-garde first emerged” (263). But, lest we allow this talk of simulacrum to entice us into nostalgia for the original modernist avant-garde, Owens is quick to sketch for us the role that avant-garde played in making “difference . . . become an object of consumption”:

 

The fact that avant-garde artists had only partially withdrawn from the middle-class elite--which also constitutes the primary, if not the only, audience for avant-garde production--placed them in a contradictory position; but this position also equipped them for the economic function they would eventually be called upon to perform--that of broker between the culture industry and subcultures.(264)

 

[5] Armed with this awareness of the modernist avant-garde’s failure, Owens offers nothing beyond calls for a purity more stringent than the modernists could achieve. Writing during the boom art market years of the 80s (which, again, he wonderfully satirizes when discussing enemies like Robert Hughes in “The Yen for Art”), Owens is reduced to denial when asked to contemplate the relation of the artists he champions to that market. Andars Stephanson asks: “But isn’t it true that oppositional artists themselves became marketable, say, after 1980?”–to which Owens replies: “This is seriously overplayed. Hans Haacke does not sell much work, and he has not had a show in an American museum until now. Kruger’s work is also interesting because it costs far more to produce in terms of photomechanical work, labs and so forth, than it costs to produce a painting, yet it sells for one-tenth of the latter’s price” (307). What’s significant here is not the fact of the matter, but the form that the defense of oppositional artists takes. Owens has not gotten past the association of purity and integrity with poverty, with producing the art work which does not become a commodity. He is setting himself up to reach the same dead end that avant-garde art has been reaching for seventy-five years: the dead end of silence as the only pure act and the dead end of isolation from every audience because to appeal to anyone outside the self (or, in some cases, outside a small coterie) is to become implicated in social forms of exchange that are repudiated.

 

In this context, the poststructuralist critique of representation comes across as a new variant on this long-standing modernist obsession with purity. To even engage in debate with the culture, it seems, would be to succumb to its terms.

 

It is not the ideological content of representation of these Others that is at issue. Nor do contemporary artists oppose their own representations to existing ones; they do not subscribe to the phallacy of the positive image. (To do so would be to oppose some 'true' representivity to a 'false' one.) Rather, these artists challenge the activity of representation itself which, by denying them speech, consciousness, the ability to represent themselves, stands indicted as the primary agent of their domination."(262)

 

What would it mean to “indict” the “activity of representation itself” in the name of “the ability to represent themselves”? By rejecting a conflict within the social over different representations with the assertion that every positive image is a phallacy, Owens places the artist on the path of pure negation that has been a modernist treadmill since at least Flaubert’s desire to write a novel about nothing.

 

The critic is left in even a worse position than the artist.

 

"What you are saying, then, is that to represent is to subjugate?" "Precisely. There is a remarkable statement by Gilles Deleuze . . . that encapsulates the political ramifications of the contemporary critique of representation: 'you [Deleuze says to Foucault] were the first . . . to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others.'"(261-2)

 

Owens as critic does nothing else but speak for others. He wrote only one essay–“Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism”–that is even remotely self-referential, and he is still speaking for gay men, not of this particular gay man. Everything he writes performs the traditional critical task of mediating between audience and work (of art, of theory). A sometime academic who wrote academic prose to introduce academic theory to a nonacademic audience (the New York art world), Owens was primarily a translator, re-representing representations to facilitate their entry into different contexts. His success is attested to by the fact that his work was widely read and highly influential. Through his efforts and those of some collaborators, Art in America became a conduit point between the academy and the art world. Owens was a mediator whose work keeps circling around his distrust of the means of mediation. By adopting a simple-minded and wholesale condemnation of representation, Owens boxed himself into a corner where he had to suspect anything he would write of bad faith. He wrote only three essays the last four years of his life; he did not write about AIDS. I know nothing about Owens personally; his health as well as other commitments could easily explain this relative silence. But his own theoretical views had, by that time, left him very little space to work in.

 

No doubt Owens would have struck out in new directions. What is fascinating and rewarding about these collected essays is the combination of Owens’s sharp eye (this is someone whose representations of others’ art I came to trust) with his continued fascination with and ability to learn from theoretical arguments. If I focus on the theoretical impasse at which his work ends, it is because I find it sad that one version of postmodernism is currently stuck right there, unable (apparently) to apply its own strictures against universals to this universal condemnation of representation, unable to think its own retrograde (modernist) desire for purity within its critique of discourses that aim for homogeneity. Not surprisingly, the specifics of Owen’s wonderful essays on William Wegman, Barbara Kruger, and Lothar Baumgarten already suggest some ways to move beyond a vague and unsatisfiable desire for absolute alterity. The conclusion to the essay on Wegman talks of “necessity” again, but this time it is the necessity of recognition, not of getting beyond it:

 

When we laugh at Man Ray's foiling of Wegman's designs, we are also acknowledging the possibility, indeed the necessity, of another, nonnarcissistic mode of relating to the Other--one based not on the denial of difference, but upon its recognition. Thus, inscribed within the social space in which both Bakhtin and Freud situate laughter, Wegman's refusal of mastery is ultimately political in its implications.(163-4)

 

Postmodern thought needs to turn to the question of the social space which would enable this recognition of difference; it is the absence of the social and its myriad forms of interaction between self and other that constitutes both the purity and the peculiar emptiness of so much postmodernist cultural critique. For what could be more narcissistic than a total repudiation of all the forms of representation by which the other might try to make contact?