Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 8

(Here’s another picture of Wolfgang, in a nice Christmas sweater.)

We are now getting to the "science" part promised by Panofsky's subtitle ("Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art"): “Insofar as art history as a pure science of things wants to understand the style of a work of art in stylistic analyses and even in pictorial descriptions it must assume a basis in the fundamental and individual artistic problems. Therefore the fundamental and individual art-theoretical problems are assumed to be already established, even in cases where the practicing scholar could not give an account of these problems and concepts themselves and might even deny their existence.” In other words, the fundamental conceptual problems are what the empirical, practicing scholar is responding to in the work of art, whether she knows it or not. In this respect, it’s like natural science: one geologist who looks at a rock with a certain set of concepts and another geologist who has another set are looking at the same rock, with the same properties, they’re just describing it differently.

“But as art history is only a pure science of things up to the point where it navigates on the basis of the problems as ascertained art theoretically and not when it reflects on them. In instances when this should happen, when the results of art-theoretical investigation do not govern the choice of observation and the construction of concepts within research from the outside but rather directly infiltrate art-historical thinking, art history would move from denoting and interpreting a set of facts in the material world to denoting and interpreting an abstract relation between the formulation of a problem and its solution. At this point art history would cease to be a pure science of things and a restricted historical discipline and would change into what might be described as a transcendental art-theoretical discipline or, more modestly and perhaps more accurately, as a fully interpretive enterprise” (63)

The distinction here is not between a good and a bad kind of art history (which, for Panofsky, would be an art history with and an art history without theoretical guidance, respectively). It’s between two modes of the good kind of art history: on the one hand, empirical observation informed by theory, which EP calls a “pure science of things”; and on the other, a kind of metadiscourse undertaken by theorists (or by the researcher wearing her theorist hat) which, while staying with the object, shuffles the middle-range (not the fundamental) concepts around, and is thus “fully interpretive.” (Interesting how Panofsky makes the big Kantian claim — to be “transcendental,” to be trafficking in the realm of pure metaphysical ideas rather than physical objects — and then backs away from it at once. Lorenz and Elsner, in their introduction, note that this essay is heavily Kantian in a way that Panofsky’s later, American work is not. So maybe that’s what’s going on here.)

This latter, interpretive theorizing is what Panofsky wants to have the right to do, but he, crucially, doesn’t think that everyone should have the right to do it.

“Researchers need not accept this change of states as long as they are content with a solely stylistic morphology, but they must be ready for it the moment they want to move from an understanding of stylistic symptoms (of style in its external sense) to an understanding of the stylistic nature of art — that is, an understanding of style in the internal sense or Kunstwollen” (63). Staying in the first mode, then, of the “pure science of things,” researchers can do plenty of things with artworks: they can do the kind of morphology, for instance, that was getting underway in Russia around that time and culminated in the work of Vladimir Propp (and is currently being revived by Franco Moretti): they can see what looks like what, and how a certain form might transform into another. But, invoking a comparison with medicine, Panofsky insists that these forms are only “symptoms.” (Among the many, many tempting detours I’m avoiding going down here is this pre-Lacanian/Althusserian/Žižekian use of “symptom.” Partly because I’m not convinced that I’d ever come back.) They are the outward signs of the will to make art, the Kunstwollen, but no matter how closely we examine them we aren’t going to fully understand why or how the artist did what she did.

“Because the principles of design in a work of art are nothing other than the artist’s comments, executed in this way or that, on the fundamental and individual artistic problems and because the underlying stylistic principle is nothing but the artist’s comment, executed in this way or that, on the artistic ur-problem, the principles of design and the underlying stylistic principle itself can only be understood if the understanding is based on an explicit confrontation with the problems” (63-64). So this is a funny kind of biographical criticism: one that wants to know what the artist thinks she’s doing, her intention, but that also views everything she does as nothing more than “comments” on pre-existing artistic problems, both fundamental (haptic vs. optic) and individual (how do I differentiate this column from the wall, or whatever). (“Comment” is a very weird word; I wonder what the German is.) But Panofsky’s opponent here is not Romantic, producer-centered theories of artistic creation (as Barthes’ and Foucault’s would later be) but hardcore empiricist art historians who think all one needs to do is collect objects and describe them: his point is you need to know the basic problems, which have been answered (or “commented on”) throughout art history, in order to know what the artist thinks she’s doing.

“Therefore art history as a pure science of things, because it only navigates according to the artistic problems but does not reflect on them, is capable of understanding stylistic criteria and their aggregates but not principles of design and their unity.” This is clear enough: art history without theory (or even a-h that excepts fundamental theoretical concepts, but doesn’t work with a theorist to refine and relate the second-order concepts to research findings) can draw up “criteria,” say what counts as art based on all previous known examples, but they can’t get a handle on the “principles of design” that determine artworks (principles which exist in the minds of artists). (Cf. Wittgenstein/Austin/Cavell on criteria. Or don’t.)

“This deeper understanding is reserved only for that form of study that is familiar with those problems that art history in the strict sense only assumes as known and that, by reflecting on them with the help of an art-theoretically constructed fundamental and specialist conceptual system, is capable of systematically dissecting the relations between the formulation of a problem and the solution of a problem.” The repeated key word here is “reflection,” an activity that follows upon fundamental theory and practical empirical research and reconciles them. (It seems to me that Panofsky owes more of a description of what reflection would actually look like, aside from some super-smart theorist ringing changes on a data set. But maybe it can be reconstructed from an account of his actual practice. I guess this would be a good first place to look.)

Then Panofsky does some algebra — which I hope I will be forgiven for leaving out because I don’t think it’ll make things any clearer (at least, for me) — the gist of which is: “In this way and only in this way can scientific study grasp style in its internal sense or Kunstwollen, which can be understood neither as the sum of sensible qualities nor as an aggregate of stylistic criteria but exclusively as unity within and above the principles of design, which not only requires a tacit relation to the results of art theory but a direct collaboration” (64-65). Collaboration between research and theory alone has a hope of getting a handle on Kunstwollen — that is, achieving a rough scholarly approximation of what it’s actually like to make art. (Value judgment mine.)

Panofsky’s final move, in section B, is a really interesting, ambitious one. It’s one that opens up the heretofore uncharted territory of comparativism, or the relation of the findings of art historical research (once it has passed through the refining process of theoretical reflection) to other disciplines within the faculty of the humanities: “If this Kunstwollen can reveal the immanent sense of the manifestation in question then there is no barrier to comparing this sense as articulated in visual-artistic phenomena with the sense of musical, poetic, and even extra-artistic phenomena. Absolutely all philosophical and religious doctrines as well as juridical statues and linguistic systems must be understood as solutions of philosophical, religious, juridical, and linguistic problems.” After having carefully limited himself to the discipline of art history throughout, Panofsky is all of a sudden advocating the application of his “fundamental problem” approach to the humanities as a whole. But even this is not all. “This is why all humanities disciplines are related to a science of art. Just as a science of art attests that within a certain artistic manifestation all artistic problems are solved in one and the same way, so the humanities in general can attempt to show that within a certain culture (which must itself be determined as regards epoch, region, and the persons involved) all intellectual problems, including the artistic, are solved in one and the same sense.”

Wait a second… “all intellectual problems … are solved in one and the same sense”? What would that even mean, practically? Also, how are we to define “a certain culture” — where does one stop and the next begin? (Cf. Wittgenstein on towns and concepts, or don’t.) It seems as though Panofsky’s made a quick turn from neo-Kantian to way way Hegelian, from Kunstwollen to Kulturwollen, a jump that seems to make EP himself a little nervous — witness the very tentative end of the paragraph: “Though one cannot ignore the dangers inherent in the practical application of this process of comparison, today perhaps practiced all too often (the will to unveil analogies can easily lead to interpreting the phenomenon in question in capricious and even brutal ways), one cannot deny on purely theoretical grounds that it is undoubtedly possible and justifiable” (65). I think he’s almost definitely gesturing at Marxism here, and perhaps other hasty totalizations of the social world — but here Panofsky seems to think that the risk of such theoretical abuses is a small price to pay for the promise of such a grand rationale for the humanities.

The Cultural Logic of Late Cynicism: Jameson on Bourdieu

Frederic Jameson's "How Not to Historicize Theory," in the Spring 2008 issue of Critical Inquiry, is primarily a critical response to the intellectual historian Ian Hunter's article "The History of Theory" (which I haven't read, though Hunter's response to Jameson's response in the same issue gives a pretty good idea of its contents). It's a pretty scattered piece, addressing itself both directly to Hunter and to all liberal critics of poststructuralist theory and Marxism. I won't go into the Jameson/Hunter controversy now, which honestly seems like old ground: liberal rationalist humanist Anglo-American empiricism vs. radical poststructuralist "Continental" Marxism. There are some good points scored on both sides, but essentially this is a case of two well-established intellectual traditions with no use for one another.

But, more interestingly for me, Jameson also takes the opportunity to assess, or rather attack, the growing influence of Pierre Bourdieu. (It seems a bit odd that Jameson waited to do this until Bourdieu was no longer alive; certainly the conjunction of the two would be more interesting than the pairing of Jameson and Hunter.) It's also a little surprising that Jameson dwells on Bourdieu at such length, especially since it seems clear that he is not intimately familiar with the oeuvre: he refers mostly to the very early Outline of a Theory of Practice, the very famous Distinction, and a handful of interviews, suggesting that he knows the "greatest hits" and the idée reçue of Bourdieu as the thorn in the side of the theoretical Left.

Jameson calls Bourdieu's work "the most complex rationale for anti-intellectualism today" and reads it as an attempt to "undermine and discredit all the ideologies in play in the intellectual market." I've noticed that Marxist critics tend to focus on the aspect of Bourdieu's project that's closest to their own: that is, the exposure of supposedly disinterested positions as determined by objective structures. What Bourdieu lacks, in their view, is a positive utopian program, or even a sociohistorical scapegoat like late capitalism. Thus he appears to them as a purely negative force, an exterminating angel who takes the Marxist decimation of liberal ideology a step further by applying it to Marxism itself. But Bourdieu doesn't want to "undermine and discredit all ideologies in the intellectual market," as Jameson suggests, though it sometimes seems that way (he is a pretty fierce polemicist). One could say rather that he wants to make us aware of ideologies — it might be better to say ideas — as something that can be thought of as being discredited, in part because they are not just ideas but products that circulate in a "symbolic marketplace," and which become commonly accepted not on the basis of logical, pragmatic or dialectical assessment alone, but also on the basis of a previously accumulated capital or prestige. This isn't in the service of undermining intellectual debate, but of making the conditions under which it is conducted more visible to its participants.

There are lots of other misreadings here. Jameson somewhat puzzlingly ascribes a very crude dualist understanding of society as composed of "two dichotomous social classes" (575) to Bourdieu, when in fact the latter's version of class structure is immensely complex, full of fractions, poles and cross-sections — indeed, his empirical and conceptual elaboration of the notion of class is one of the things Marxists should be happiest to take from Bourdieu, even if they reject everything else in his theory. Jameson also associates Bourdieu with "populism" (577) and "a sympathetic and even nostalgic evocation of the material lives of peasants and workers and, in particular, of their authentic relationship to their own bodies" (575), both of which would seem more germane to any number of Marxist critics (Raymond Williams, for example) than to Bourdieu, who despite himself was something of a cultural mandarin and who follows Lévi-Strauss in painstakingly recording the mystifications and inequalities of premodern agricultural societies.

Jameson also gets Bourdieu wrong on what he rightly calls "his most influential theoretical innovation, namely, the notion of cultural capital," a concept Jameson sketchily vulgarizes as "the social payoff for listening to Mahler rather than to pop classics like Tchaikovsky." This actually seems closer to John Guillory's underdeveloped idea of the American "ordeal of middlebrow culture" than anything Bourdieu has written. The point of cultural capital is not that people calculatedly acquire culture merely to use it as capital, but that culture, whether acquired consciously or unconsciously, happily or dutifully, inevitably refers back to its form of acquisition, which in turn works to classify us and determine our social ontology, whether we like it or not. (The related concept of misrecognition is crucial here: we think we have a mysterious connection with someone, when in reality we share the same habitus, the same class or cultural background.) The point Jameson presses home, though, is that Bourdieu's analyses overemphasize cultural capital "at the expense of the significance of the economic or of the infrastructure that serves as the base or tenor of the figure in the first place." Bourdieu was hardly inattentive to the operations of economic capital (particularly in his later, more directly politically engaged books like Acts of Resistance, which Jameson doesn't mention), but he didn't make them the basis of a historical theory, which is what really separates him from Marxism and what Jameson can't seem to get past. For Jameson, Bourdieu's emphasis on culture as a means of social distinction "tends to confirm so-called cultural intellectuals in their complacency about the significance of culture and to reassure them that to point to cultural capital is enough to exempt them from any further mention of capital itself" (576-577). Significantly, this is not really a criticism of Bourdieu himself but of his potential bad influence on other, presumably young and impressionable, intellectuals. This argument is strangely evocative of certain reactions to the current New Yorker cover scandal; it's as if Jameson were saying, "I mean, I get it, but what are the less enlightened going to think?"

There also seems to be a basic confusion about the historical dimension of Bourdieu's thought. Short answer: there isn't one. Jameson writes that "the emergence of a given champ or discipline must itself be theorized in terms of what [Niklas] Luhmann called differentiation, as a historical dynamic of modernity and capitalism, a process of the autonomization of specific differentiating practices and their emergent self-theorization; and in that sense Bourdieu's is only one of the numerous theoretical formulations that have sought to name and conceptualize this epochal development" (579). Except that Bourdieu, unlike Luhmann apparently, does not link his notion of autonomy of social fields explicitly to the rise of capitalism or to modernity, even while he borrows their terminology: he is, in fact, an old-fashioned Lévi-Straussian structuralist in his belief in deep social structures of behavior, among them the accumulation of capital and the desire for distinction, which are transhistorically present, behaviors which modern economic structures like capitalism can nonetheless either enable or control (and in Bourdieu's view they overwhelmingly favor the former). This foreign periodization is then extended by Jameson's reference to "the dedifferentiating movement of postmodernity [which] began to reverse this structural trend of modernism and thereby to throw a retrospective light on it. I want to suggest that in that respect theory is itself a form of thinking (and writing) that aims to focus the relationship-in-difference of the various autonomous fields" (580). Postmodernism (a term "rarely invoked in France," Bourdieu points out somewhere) is being made to do an awful lot of work here, and one questions whether the logic of late capitalism, if it exists, has really done anything to weaken the logic of practice, in practice.

Clearly Bourdieu is an unsettling presence for Jameson, as I think he is for many Marxists. Here's a passionately written but ultimately not very convincing portrait of the sociologist as knight of bad faith, which ironically might better serve to characterize Jameson himself:

An agonizing self-awareness shows up in virtually all of his works, nor is it redeemed by the incomparable reflexivity the sociologist brings to his situation, in 'distinction' from the relative detachment of his various garden-variety imitators. For populism is not an adequate squaring of the circle for confronting the Godel's law of social class (no foundational position outside the system) or of evading the ideological vision of society as one endless struggle for recognition that can never be resolved, a struggle that must last as long as human history itself, assuaged by no communist utopias let alone liberal Rawlsian ones. Such a conception of the social then ultimately condemns the sociologist to the same dilemma as that faced by the most implacable of social critics and satirists, namely, that of the satirist satirized, that of the position from which one is entitled to look down with glacial indifference at those interminable mortal struggles. It is a tragic sense of life Max Weber most memorably formulated when he characterized his own vocation in the words, "I want to see how much I can stand." (577-578)

I don't know about "agonizing self-awareness": "unwarranted self-confidence" might be more damaging as a description of Bourdieu's trademark tone. And Jameson's claim that Bourdieu fails to escape the contradictions of his position as an analyst of the social world, to be credible, would need to engage with Bourdieu's own concerted struggles with this dilemma (cf. Homo Academicus, passim). But again there's this sense of Bourdieu, and the sociologist in general, as an unfathomable nihilist, accepting the general Marxist critique of disinterested liberal reason but unwilling to drink the Kool-Aid on the dialectic. The real key here seems to be the phrase about "utopias," which I know is something Jameson's written a lot on recently, and the end of the essay attempts a reconciliation with Bourdieu (Hunter seems to have kind of fallen by the wayside), or really with the younger intellectuals Jameson feels he has influenced, by trying to see his empirical enquiries into institutions as a possible foundation for a new conception of Utopia, one that is relentlessly critical of commodification without imagining anything substantially different taking its place. Bourdieu's "cynical reason" is seen by Jameson as a "successor to Adorno's omnipresent positivism; perhaps we might say that cynical reason is a positivism with a mission, with a politics or even a metaphysics":

For if Adornian positivism was merely a taboo, an injunction to leave out the thinking of what is, cynical reason is a whole program for justifying this view of things. It consists in acknowledging that everything is a commodity; in viewing history, where it has any meaning at all, as a series of conspiracies motivated by interest; and finally in denying that anything else, any positive change, is possible (on the grounds of human nature). … The 1960s attacks on incipient commodification were powered by a vision of radically noncommodified social relations that seems to be unavailable today, rendering the critique of commodification at best a rather complacent affair and at worst a kind of implicit glorification. But perhaps it is time, if cynical reason is somehow historically unavoidable, for a Utopian reading of it … This is to say that cynical reason forces us into a more complicated conception of interest than we were obliged to have in an idealist or spiritualist age and not least into rethinking collective interest in new ways (that also reinvigorate the older notions of ideology) … Indeed, with the onset of what we call postmodernity and globalization, institutions seem to have taken the place of individuals or at least of our illusions of individuality, at the same time dispelling all the older categories of success and revolt or ambition and alienation. The suspicion of institutions has traditionally turned, not merely on bureaucracy as something unremittingly felt to be legalistic and inhuman, if not corrupt, but above all very precisely on their inevitably conspiratorial procedures … The Utopian dimension of institutions is however their collective existence and structure. Insofar as conspiracy theory celebrates this collective dynamic and seeks to replace the categories of individual agency with collective ones, it mark a first imperfect step in that direction. Cynical reason, meanwhile, while seeming to strip acts and events of their appearance of disinterestedness, might well pave the way for some ultimate awareness of collective self-interest as such. (580-582)

This actually reads like Jameson tentatively stepping out from under the Adorno umbrella and towards Bourdieu's camp (or champ), albeit reluctantly and with much rhetorical display. It amounts to an admission that what Adorno's negative dialectics were to the academy of the 60s and 70s — the guiding spirit of nicht mitmachen [not playing along] which Bourdieu himself has spoken of feeling in those days — Bourdieu's "cynical reason" may be to the 00s and 10s, a shift Jameson deplores but is willing to work with as part of his commitment to actually existing intellectual life. I'm skeptical, as ever, about the claims for postmodernism (as a creative or critical ethos) or postmodernity (as a historical or economic or epistemological state), but I think Jameson's right about the turn away from ideological and towards institutional critique having potentially beneficial effects for our critical generation's collective political sense, even if it sacrifices a good deal — even all — of the 60s vision of "radically noncommodified social relations" Jameson is nostalgic for.

Anyway… I'd really welcome responses from those of you who know more about Jameson than I do. He can be very hard to follow on the sentence-by-sentence level sometimes, so I'm afraid I may have missed subtleties of his attack on Bourdieu that a more experienced Jamesonian could illuminate.

How German Is It?

The age of criticism has begun. For the past couple of days I've been reading Aesthetics and Politics, a handy little primer which chronicles the Marxist response to Modernism through essays and letters by Bloch, Lukács, Benjamin, Brecht and Adorno, with a wrap-up afterword by Fredric Jameson. What I like about Marxist criticism, as I was saying to Emily over a burrito last night, is that whether or not one agrees with the ideology, it's bracing to see that level of rigor applied to ideas, to see writers straining themselves to do justice to both their theories and historical facts, and to organize themselves into coherent positions vis-à-vis each other. It's that passionate rigor which is almost always missing from contemporary criticism, whether academic or otherwise: sadly, it may only be purchasable at the cost of being kind of an overzealous asshole.

Anyway, just a small thing for now. Jameson, in his conclusion says that "[t]he legacy of German Expressionism provided a more propitious framework for the development of a major debate within Marxism," and explains this fact by saying that "in the writings of the surrealists, and particular of Breton, the problem of realism largely fails to arise — in the first instance owing to their initial repudiation of the novel as a form. While for their principal adversary Jean-Paul Sartre … the realism/modernism dilemma did not arise either, but for the opposite reason: because of Sartre's preliminary exclusion of poetry and the lyric from his account of the nature and function of literature in general. Thus in France, until that second wave of modernism (or post-modernism) represented by the nouveau roman and the nouvelle vague, Tel Quel and 'structuralism,' the terrain for which realism and modernism were elsewhere so bitterly to contend — that of narrative — was effectively divided up between them in advance, as though in amicable separation" (197).

An interesting claim, that, and a difficult one to assess without a great deal of historical research. I think there are problems here. For one thing, it suggests a too-easy equation of poetry (and lyric in particular) with the subjective and fiction with the objective and committed that smacks of Lukács at his worst. Poetry is often spoken about, it seems to me, as some sort of means of escape or forced marginalization, perhaps for the simple reason that it's so much less popular than fiction. But when we're dealing with experimental literature, it really seems to me that this is a sort of category-error: it's only that modernist novels seem to be the same sort of things as popular novels that we think of them as being a more realistic or objective, more world-embracing, form than lyric poetry. In contrast, by the mid-20th century, there is no popular poetry really: it's all degrees of specialty interest.

But let's leave that aside, for now. Another thing that interests me here is Jameson's characterization of France as the province of a sort of complacent radicalism which remained outside the important debates about Modernism until the 60s. This is especially surprising given that the majority of the literary authors at issue throughout the book are French, including Balzac, Baudelaire, Proust, Valéry, Sartre, and, if we want to be provocative, we can count Beckett too. (The other major names that get thrown around are Thomas Mann, Joyce, Kafka and, of course, Brecht.) And in fact, after the initial exchange between Bloch and Lukács, Expressionism itself is little-mentioned in the debate: perhaps because it was quite literally destroyed by the rise of the Nazis, who viewed it as "degenerate art."

From the Marxist perspective, then, France is not ahead of the times (as most British and American intellectuals tended to think) but behind them, or rather it provides the times' most interesting literary symptoms, ready-made for German dialecticians to diagnose. Given this structure of cultural economy, it would be more accurate, it seems to me, not to dismiss France but to name it as a particular kind of site of literary production, just as Germany (or, to be more precise, Germans, since much of the writing in Aesthetics and Politics was produced in exile) as the source of the most sophisticated and influential literary theory of the period, is another. The whole book, read slightly against the grain, provides an interesting example of the division of labor among national intellectual communities in the Modernist period. In this scheme, it's usually French writers — or writers with the seal of French approval, like Joyce and Beckett — who are received as important; it's German critics (mostly Marxists and Critical Theorists, including Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer) who fight out the issues of Modernism on the terrain of aesthetic theory and provide ground for later philosophical justifications; and it's American entrepeneurs (Sylvia Beach and Ezra Pound, of course, spring immediately to mind) who publicize and canonize the great works that this transnational cycle of cultural production throws up.* This model holds good more or less up until the sixties, when Tel Quel and the post-structuralists finally supersede Marxism in the affections of American academics; which, of course, is also the moment in which Jameson himself comes of age.

[* This leads me to a further unwarranted speculation. Each nation got the version of Modernism its philosophical heritage could best imagine: Germany, with its tradition of idealism, produced the tortured distortions of Expressionism; France, home of Cartesianism, the proudly subjective but self-evidently present (because provocative) excesses of Surrealism, etc. England is a trickier call: I don't really see Humean skepticism or Russelian logic underlying the development of British Modernism (Empson, maybe?), but one way to explain this would be to say that in England literature was always more important than philosophy: therefore, its Modernism evolved in dialectic with the previous tradition, rather than starting over from some newly adopted position. (The negative way of putting this is that, in England, the new boss was the same as the old boss.) Finally, in America, the legacy of pragmatism produced a literature primarily committed to bringing artistic methods up to date, a milieu in which artists looked over each other's shoulders and commented on particularities of construction, rather than decimating each other's metaphysical foundations as in so much European literature (and literary theory). Pound, obviously, would be the classic example here. (I'd say this is also why the American academy was the most welcoming to Modernism in general, as well: because so much of its energies went into carving out a place for contemporary literature in the public sphere.) ]

Correction appended: It was morning, not night. And it was a breakfast burrito.