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DOI: 10.1177/0952695107077109 2007 20: 141History of the Human Sciences

Griselda Pollockdifference with some historical reflections on sociology and art history

Thinking sociologically : thinking aesthetically. Between convergence and

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Thinking sociologically:thinking aesthetically.

Between convergence anddifference with some historical

reflections on sociology and art history

GRISELDA POLLOCK

ABSTRACT

This article takes as its provocation Marxs intriguing statement aboutthe disjunction between the flowering of Greek art and the under-developed stage of social and economic development made as anepilogue to the Introduction to the Grundrisse in order to ask what arethe relations between that which has been considered art and what Marxcalls production as such. In the elaborated conditions of contemporarycapitalist societies, we can ask: Is art still being made? To examine thisquestion I juxtapose what Bauman has called thinking sociologicallywith a proposition that art thinks aesthetically. So how can art historiansdeal with that challenge of thinking aesthetic practices both socially andhistorically? I track a genealogy of art historians (Clark, Antal, Shapiro)who have attempted to think socially about artistic practices. This leadsinto a section about the necessity for both sociological and aestheticeducation if we are to avoid totalitarianism or free-market individual-ism (Bahro). Finally, thinking sociologically, by taking as a case study

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 20 No. 2 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) pp. 141175[20:2; 141175; DOI: 10.1177/0952695107077109]


the work of Aby Warburg, I explore the technological conditions of arthistorical production itself particularly in relation to photography andthe way this shapes our access to the image. Warburg represents thepossibility of another model for art historical thinking about the imageas Kulturwissenschaft, a parallel to Sozialwissenschaft in its ambitionand relation to the great intellectual revolutions c.1905 (Freud, Bergson,Einstein, Hussserl). Like Marx, Warburg questioned the continuity ofthe imaginary space of art thinking in the age of technological indus-trialism. Where art is now, where art history is, are not just sociologicalquestions to which Marx might offer a dismal answer. I conclude thatwhat is necessary is a constructive conversation between thinking socio-logically and thinking aesthetically, knowing synthetically and knowingfor oneself curricular issues made more intense by the shared conditionsin which all intellectual production is being transformed in contempor-ary sites of intellectual practice, the university, by production as suchleading thought to risk the same fate as art in contemporary society, asMarx hypothesized. As a final thought, I suggest that in contemporaryart work that confronts trauma and catastrophe, often using new tech-nologies as aesthetic processes, we may find a counter-argument.

Key words aesthetic practices, aesthetic thought, art history,commodification, image cultures, Marx, social histories of art,sociological thought, sociology

Readers might well imagine that a conversation between Sociology and ArtHistory should begin with the division of disciplines in the university systemthat might create an immediate dissonance between the harder end of thesocial sciences with their dispassionately quantitative methods and the softerend of the interpretative, qualitative humanities with Art History bridgingboth the humanities (history/philosophy/literature/classics/theology) and thecreative arts. What I intend to do, however, is to explore relations and differ-ences between what Zygmunt Bauman called thinking sociologically: Sozial-wissenschaft that grand intellectual project of deeply humanistic socialanalysis and a later 19th-century concept: Kulturwissenschaft which I trans-late as cultural analysis, theory and history (Bauman, 1990). In both cases wemight be considering the analysis of the interrelations between the conditionsof social experience and the cultural forms through which they are articulatedand subjectively (not individualistically) interpreted or registered. By meansof its attention to systems, patterns, networks and conditions, sociologicalanalysis produces a range of concepts through which this double project canbe pursued theoretically, distilling lived and changing relations of inter-dependency into formations such as class, gender, ethnicity, and relationsinto terms such as intimacy, proximity, sexuality, identity, agency. Sociology

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 20(2)142


operates in relation to its own cognates in psychology and anthropology aswell as across to philosophy, while embracing all of us within its potentialfor sociological analysis of every social activity and experience.

To my mind no adequate analysis of the socially historically but notablyimaginative practices we call art can be undertaken without familiarity withthe conceptual aids offered by Sozialwissenschaft whose secondary effectis to demand an ethical self-reflexivity and positioning of the investigatinginterpretant. Thinking sociologically provides a kind of Archimedeanpoint, furthermore, in which to situate ones practice from an external andperhaps more synthetic point of view. Yet what Art History has historicallyundertaken to analyse as its specific project is neither reducible to, norentirely to be discerned through, only sociological lenses. I shall argue thatthere is a specificity to the aesthetic: not in the Kantian sense of a dis-interested judgement of beauty which Bourdieu has shown is but the idealistreflex of a middle classs distance from actual production (Bourdieu, 1984). Idraw instead on Julia Kristevas sense of aesthetic practices in music, poetry,dance, drama or the visual arts, as both imaginative thinking and affect-ladensignification, which explore through what she calls signifying practices thedifficult space between subjectivity and forms of social collectivity, and whichcan be approached through semiotics and psychoanalysis (Kristeva, 1986).What Kristeva poses as aesthetic practices emerged in opposition to theconcurrent end of religion (the emergence of secularism) and the assimilationof institutionalized religion to the modern covenant between state, familyand church typical of modern bourgeois society (Kristeva, 1975). Identifiedinitially with transgression around signifying practices of the literary avant-garde 18901920, aesthetic practices, now, historically, take on a new signifi-cance precisely in the disjuncture their anachronistic attention to singularityand signification in a massified information society. She thus concludes:

It seems to me that the role of what is usually called aesthetic practicesmust increase not only to counter-balance the storage and uniformityof information in present-day mass media, data-bank systems and, inparticular, modern communications technology, but also to demystifythe identity of the symbolic bond itself, to demystify, therefore, thecommunity of language as a universal and unifying tool, one whichtotalizes and equalizes. In order to bring out along with the singu-larity of each person and, even more, along with the multiplicity of everypersons possible identifications the relativity of his/her symbolic aswell as biological existence, according to the variation of his/her symboliccapacities. And in order to emphasize the responsibility which all willimmediately face of putting this fluidity into play against the threats ofdeath which are unavoidable whenever an inside and an outside, a selfand an other, one group and another, are constituted. At this level ofinteriorization with its social as well as individual stakes, what I have

THINKING SOCIOLOGICALLY 143


called aesthetic practices are undoubtedly nothing other than themodern reply to the eternal question of morality. (Kristeva, 1986: 210)

In specific social and historical conditions, a specific set of human activitiesacquires a new diagnostic value as well as one capable of holding before uswhat might be most easily lost in contemporary societies subject to increasingmassification, fake individualism fostered by ever more intensified commod-ification of every area of life. Far from having a permanent and transcendentsocial value, aesthetic practices, defined as enacting both the singularity of eachsubject and their relation through language to the common, their multipleidentifications and their relativity suspended between the corpo-material andthe symbolic, have historically contingent social effects and even necessity.

The argument I shall propose in the following article will follow what, tosome, might seem a strange itinerary. There are many routes through whichI could have considered the relations between sociology and art history, thelatter being presented as not an obvious cognate of the former. Yet, placingart and sociology together, many readers will anticipate an engagement withone of giants of the crossing between the two fields, Pierre Bourdieu. Thesociology of culture is a well-resourced subdiscipline of sociology and itsliterature a point of reference for sociologically minded art historians. Toretravel the ground so richly plotted out by Bourdieu and his school wouldthus be predictable and possibly boring. I have chosen a more quirkyprocedure, characterized less by logical unrolling of a single line of argumentthan by the purposive use of intellectual montage which mirrors ultimatelythe intellectual position of Aby Warburg who dedicated his working life tothinking through what he called Kulturwissenschaft in opposition to thedominant trends in later 19th-century art history: aestheticizing art historyor formalism.

Each section of the following article addresses the central confrontation Iwant to pose between thinking sociologically a term borrowed with respectfrom one of the greatest living sociological thinkers, Zygmunt Bauman and thinking aesthetically a difficult neologism that intends to perplex bylinking aesthesis with thought, and thought with the formal and the affec-tive. The text weaves several strands drawn from my own long-term engage-ment with the legacies of Marxist social and cultural theory as a resource forthinking through some of the challenges faced by an art historian whoseproject has paradoxically been consistently anti-art historical while seekingto engage with what art history has taken to be its prime objects. Becausethis is a journal of the history of the human or social sciences, I shall need toexplain certain things that will be self-evident to art historians of varioustraditions, but without a common understanding of which, my own argu-ments will not be grounded as I attempt to traverse sociology and art historyto argue first against convergence and finally for renewed reciprocity. Starting



with a reading of a perplexing passage in Marxs Grundrisse, I shall weavetogether statements by Antal, Clark, Schapiro, Simmel and Warburg to estab-lish a complex picture of the relations between artistic practices and thetotality of practices in history we call the social ensemble. If we are not tothink of merely reduction or determination, which would explain art by refer-ence to something other than itself, society, how will we specify in a way thatacknowledges sociality in the specificity of the work that artistic practicesdo? How shall we arrive at a critical attitude, able to discern art that is doingsomething to or even for and art that is complicit with its own conditions ofproduction at any historical juncture, and specially our own? Finally, in aswerve that might seem unexpected but is deeply linked to the theme of seeingartistic practice as one practice among the many that compose the social,including technologies and institutions associated with image-making andthe circulation of cultural meaning, I shall discuss the impact on art historyof technologies that have fostered modern image cultures from the photo-graphic to the digital in order to excavate from one of my hinge figures, AbyWarburg, a possibility for art history in a moment in which critical practicehas become extremely difficult to imagine.

Since the 1970s, art history has undergone considerable transformations,being challenged notably by the very constituencies its dominant narrativesexcluded from its canon: women, people of colour, and gay and lesbian people.In order to accommodate gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity as well as to workagainst racism, sexism, homophobia and patriarchal Christian Eurocentrism,we, dissidents within art history, faced the constant accusation that we werebetraying art with sociology. It was as if encounters with the social processesand their terminology for the analysis of the major formations and deforma-tions of social relations were alien intrusions into a virginal space of aestheticautonomy and transcendent meaning populated only by universal beings,artists. It was not possible to begin to speak of difference (in which we cancollect all the formations and deformations listed above) without apparentlybreaching the closed boundaries of certain types of institutionalized 20th-century art history, dominated by formalist, iconographic and antiquarianmodes in which art historians effectively worked on behalf of dealers, galleriesand national heritage to consolidate knowledge of who did what when, whoinfluenced whom how, and how each work has come to its current location orownership. This rather grim caricature obscures deeper intellectual struggles,relations to fascism and cold war politics, the effects of the Holocaust onshifting whole communities of scholars from Europe to the States and creatingthe conditions for apolitical formalism or apolitical humanism as genuinelyand deeply committed perspectives. Art histories vary with national traditionsand the nature of the treasures they conserve and curate; with intellectualhistories of various academies and language traditions. From the feministsocial historical perspective through which I work, however, many of these



variations interesting and important for micro-histories of the discipline are less significant than the bold shapes of an increasing flight from affinitywith sociological thinking that actively obscured the complex of socialrelations and imaginative intensities with which it is obvious that artistic prac-tices and their visual cultures contended both in the production of dominantideologies and in critical renegotiation. I do not intend to go deeply into thefeminist critique of art history here, because that would serve to replayprecisely the way in which dominant Euro-American Art History dismissedthe feminist questions as belonging to another discipline: sociology (Parkerand Pollock, 1981; Pollock, 1999). I want to mount what is in fact a feministreading through an oblique approach: a question posed about art in themiddle of the 19th century by one of the founders of sociology, Karl Marx,a man of his times thinking about art as contemporary Hegelian German arthistory and middle-class taste formed him.

MARX 1857

In the case of the arts, it is well-known that certain periods of their flow-ering are out of all proportion to the general development of society,hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure, as it were,of its organization. (Marx, 1973: 110)

In the brief final section of the introduction to the Grundrisse of 1857, KarlMarx turned to an unanticipated discussion of the uneven developmentbetween artistic forms and social-economic relations. His example was thatof Greek art and Greek society. What does this curious afterthought aboutart offer us now?

In the course of the preceding discussions of how to begin his analysis ofpolitical economy, pressuring the Hegelian dialectic in order to conceive of adynamic and rich totality of many determinations and relations (Marx, 1973:100) in which production could be logically demonstrated as the foundation,Marx showed also that production and consumption were both determinants,and instances, of each other. Not only did production produce objects forconsumption but consumption also produced more production by consuming.Production furthermore produced a subject for consumption of the object,and produced the need for the object it then supplied. Marx gives the exampleof art. Here, production creates a desire for, and a capacity to respond to, art.

The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the per-ception of it. The object of art like every other product creates apublic which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus notonly creates an object for a subject, also a subject for an object. (Marx,1973: 92)



Production is thus creative of a potential within subjectivity, forming thedesiring and consuming subject within the determining circuits of production.Such an argument would firmly place any discussion of art within the largerexplanatory field of political economy or, in our case, sociology. There isno doubt that a sociology of art addresses precisely the social institutionsand processes by which art is produced, circulated and consumed. PierreBourdieus towering work stands as monument to and resource for complexand thorough sociological study of art in modern culture.

My purpose here is to consider the estranged space between two disciplines,sociology and art history, the latter being designated as a strange other. Arthistory puzzles over a relation between two concepts, only one of which itmight share with a sociology of art. The first is the concept of art and thesecond the concept of historical process. The term art has been subject tomany conceptualizations in the field of philosophical aesthetics from the 18thcentury through to 20th-century sociology in which the former speculationsas to a fundamental essence give way to a more contingent interpretation ofart being whatever practices, texts, images, institutions, experiences to whichthe term is generally applied. It might then seem anachronistic at worst orpurely philosophical at best to reclaim any kind of steady meaning for theconcept art. Yet art history cannot be simply sociological and accept thatwhat we study will be whatever any particular period so designates. It mustat least begin from the assumption, bequeathed by its origins in 18th-centuryaesthetics, that there is some quality or process, called art, which needs itsown discipline, and which will then be subject to historical analysis, theterm art forming the commonality across which the differences of histori-cal cultures can be mapped to allow us to perceive some kind of evolution,development, or change, at the very least. Art History unhappily lives withthis tension between the apparent conceptual consistency of a category, art,and the historical inconsistency of the forms of its appearance, institutional-ization and practice. This can lead, in the case of the work of Hans Belting,to remind us that in studying the medieval West, we may in fact be studyingimages in an age before art (Belting, 2004). Even though concepts of artand artist are specific to times, periods and nations, we can still agree thataesthetic-symbolic practices that occur worldwide can be studied by a dedi-cated discipline under the late-arriving categorization of such practices asart and their makers as artists.

Marx, however, proposes something rather different. He is arguing that themodern world, far from marking the emergence of art as such, heralds theend of what historically was produced and later understood by the term art.

We need to plot a path to this paradox. The opening passages of the Intro-duction to the Grundrisse deal with Marxs critique of Robinsonades, thevarious fictions that traverse social/political and imaginative literature suchas Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719), a novelistic treatment of the



documented case of Alexander Selkirk who was marooned alone on anisland 400 miles off the coast of Chile. Defoes Crusoe, however, re-createdhis social world on the island including racial hierarchies and master/slaverelations. For Marx, Robinsades ideologically propose the notion of a primary,complete, autonomous individual independent of society. They are thus anti-sociological allegories that Marx exposed as ideological registers of 17th- and18th-century political philosophy which posits an individual over againstsociety as extraneous to him. Rather than reflecting a pre-social, autonomousreality created by the free individual, Marx suggested that these fictionsindirectly registered the real conditions on which they arose as the invertedrepresentation, or the ideological (he is thinking of the camera obscura) reflexin the imagination, of living in such an advanced state of socio-economicdevelopment that the complexity of the social ensemble confronts the indi-vidual as alien and opaque, creating the conditions for the experience ofestrangement and thus individuation, unleashed from the powerful bondsthat hitherto surrounded the social subject in less developed ensembles ofsocial and economic relations.

The Robinsades inscribe not the ideas of the epoch but the epochs imag-inative structuring of its own misrecognition of the conditions of social exist-ence. The illusion of autonomy is, for Marx, the paradoxical effect of the verycomplexity of social development, and not of an imaginary simplicity of oneEnglish gentleman on his (colonized) island naturalizing conditions of servi-tude upon which his freedom is built. The effect of autonomy is the result ofthe historical development of a social complexity that veils from its subjectsthe very advanced nature of their interdependencies. Complex forms of socialtotality turn opaque, as it were, confronting the social individual as a dense,indecipherable, alien other. Thus, for Marx, a form of individuated socialexperience is the product of an elaborated division of labour and of theeconomic conditions for the emergence of civil society and its institutions:the very things that become the objects of sociological analysis, of course,but which disconnect the individual experientially from the totality of whichshe or he is an effect.

In relatively underdeveloped socio-economic conditions, however, imagi-native activity such as the epic itself premised on a mode of thought calledmythic thinking flourished. Furthermore, the epic arises from social formsalready reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular sociallydispersed and orally maintained imagination. With developments in preciselythose areas of signification and collective consciousness such as newspapers,the mass media, as well as changes in the technologies of warfare gun-powder and lead and of sustenance such as agriculture and provision ofenergy, certain relations between unconscious artistic reworking and apopular imagination as a means of interpreting unmastered material realitiesbecome weakened. Thus Marx asks rhetorically:



What becomes of Fama beside Printing House Square? What chanceVulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning rod andHermes against Crdit Mobilier? From another side is Achilles possiblewith powder and lead? (Marx, 1973: 110)

In this final section of the Introduction, therefore, moving beyond logicto historical speculation, Marx identifies a disproportion between certainperiods of flowering of art its production and its produced consumers and the general development of the society in which that took place. Thusthe Greeks produced a high level of aesthetic practices in relatively under-developed economic conditions. Incidentally swiping at progressivist delu-sions of the 19th century that are noticeable specifically in Hegelian arthistorical discourse that plots historical change as development, Marx argued:

Certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be produced in theirworld epoch-making, classical stature as soon as the production of artas such begins. (Marx, 1973: 110; emphasis added)

Marx proposes, therefore, that certain conditions for artistic productionare in contradiction with the general socio-economic development of society.The difficulty of this situation disappears the minute it is formulated as ageneral principle. It has, moreover, rather shattering repercussions for thepresent. One reading of Marxs proposition, in the light of what has precededthis discussion of art in the Grundrisse, is that art may not be a permanentfeature of social life; indeed, there are forms of social life in which art notonly would not flourish but would lose its foundations altogether. Theconditions for this might be the production of art as such.

By that phrase, Marx hinted at the danger to this imaginative sphere ofhuman interaction with the conditions of existence resulting from the totalincorporation of artistic production/imaginative thinking into the generalsystem of production when it has become production as such, that is, in indus-trial capitalism, the first society to be primarily determined by its economicsystem. Marxist critics of specifically postmodern culture as the culturallogic of the latest stage of globalizing capitalism like Frederic Jameson, forinstance, identify a profound loss of what was once marked by modern art,as a site of critical negotiation of its own conditions, modernity, by its moreor less total incorporation into commodification in advanced capitalistrelations of production (Jameson, 1991). Under penetrating conditions ofcommodification in which even the gap or resistance marked by the notionof the avant-garde has been eroded, imaginative and creative activity to whichwe still attribute world, epoch-making significance might cease altogetherdespite the fact that commodities and production practices called art mightstill appear to be being produced, circulated and consumed, in fact, in evergreater volume. We are currently witnessing an increased visibility of art, the



increased notoriety of artists, and a wider cultural use of museums such as theTate Modern, for instance. But what is being experienced under that label?Is it the consumption of a packaged, mediated and symbolic-capital-accumu-lating administered culture? Or are we being offered an encounter with, ora critical reading of, artistic practices as themselves a complex set of negoti-ations as well as uneven and often revealing ideological reflexes of the currentconditions of existence? Does art today explore the relations of cultural tosocial practices, in which nexus, for instance, critical Modernism or the artof the Greeks, were forged?

Why did Marx intimate that art as he understood it for the Greeks, meaninga relation between a popular imagination conditioned by its own level ofsocio-economic development and a set of specific aesthetic forms such as theepic, might not survive full integration into commodity capitalism? Clearlyproduction makes its own subjects, manufacturing the nature of subjectiveneeds, desires and capacities. The answer may also lie either in the nature ofthe contradiction between socio-economic conditions and their reflex inimaginative or aesthetic forms or in its complete supersession by productionof art as such. Surveying the emergence of the very term art as part of anarray of linguistically trackable changes around the end of the 18th centurythat aligned class, democracy, industry, art and culture, Raymond Williamsintimated this potential historical redundancy of art as a consequence ofcapitalism. In the elevated ideas newly attributed to Art as a sphere of moraljudgements and non-utilitarian action, Williams argues that, in bourgeoissociety, art found a secondary function, which Bourdieu outlines as theaccumulating of symbolic capital, which must inevitably change the nature ofthe relation people have to what is no longer art but art as symbolic capital.This new form of social usage and cultural investment was appropriated andused in the legitimation struggles of emerging and contesting class formationsof capitalist and later totalitarian societies (Williams, 1958; Bourdieu, 1984).

Before going any further, I need to distinguish this discussion of Marxsprecocious speculations about the questionable survival of art at all in the ageof production of art as such from what might appear similar to modernistJeremiahs in the art world who currently bemoan the end of art in thecurrent postmodern era of anti-aestheticism, or post-art, a term coined byhappening artist Allan Kaprow. Marxs idea that art may not survive theproduction of art as such is not a sentimental but a structural proposition.It holds within it the larger question posed by Marx about the dissonantrelation between imaginative solutions in the face of material conditions overwhich the imagining communities have little real mastery, and the effect ofincreasing mastery over the forces conditioning material existence on thenecessity for imaginative solutions. The analysis of contemporary artisticforms must, if we follow Marx, identify the specificity of the conditionsunder which we live and work: commodification being for Marx the decisivecharacteristic of capitalist economies. The commodity itself is a complex



form, disguising in that form the chain of equivalences and substitutions thatconstitute it as a form in which social relations of production become opaqueand substitute relations between fetishized things, objects of human sociallabour, for the real and sensory knowledge of the human social labour thatproduced them, in asymetrical relations of exploitation. As art or culturalhistorians, we can chart different moments or key points in the struggle withand against commodification in and through artistic practices, some of whichshow critical understanding of the historical nature of the struggle, othersmerely idealistic resistance or romanticized nostalgia. I think a great deal ofwhat is currently being produced and circulated in the art world does notmeet my definition of art as a critical negotiation, conscious or unconsciousof its own worlds (Clark, 2002). What is bought and sold, exhibited and evalu-ated by art history, offered to public consumption through the media, as art,does not at all or necessarily constitute art (aesthetic practices as defined byKristeva). Indeed in new media art, the boundaries between what is known asideological production and what held itself aloof (conservatively or critically)are now being willingly eroded. It is the task of a critical art history/art writingto help us understand the current configuration of relations and ideologies,and ponder if a critical space called art can still operate when the terms ofbeing seen as artist and making art are so entirely framed by the relationsbetween art economics and the managers of symbolic capital (the dealers andthe museums). The very public nature of success often instant and early,and rewarded by fabulous wealth resulting from ludicrous pricing militatesagainst the distance, the space of critical reflection and struggle, that mightmake certain practices merit the term art as a term precisely for alterity orresistance to willing or, worse, self-serving ideological incorporation.

Such reflections are not the same as those of critics, like Allan Kaprow andDonald Kuspit, who categorize postmodern art production as post-art, a termwhich in itself harks nostalgically back to the last moment of art: modernism.Such Jeremiahs seek to recover an aesthetic of universal human experience inthe artists they select as new Old Masters (note the resurgence of the oldmasculinist and probably racist canon) who retain the authenticity of anolder notion of the artist and his or her practice (Kuspit, 2004). Although thetriumph of cleverness (the postmodern habit) over creativity (the modernistepitome), the banal over the enigmatic, the sociological over the sacred allquotations from the blurb for Kuspits book may indeed define the shiftfrom modernist to postmodernist culture, I shall place the crisis deeper andin the conditions in which even modernism itself evolved. Starting, therefore,with Marxs still perplexing but ultimately astute reflections in the middle ofthe 19th century, stretches the historical frame within which the encounterof art history and sociology might be thought to encompass the very emer-gence of urban-industrial modernity as a different set of conditions fromthose which, to a greater or lesser degree, may be said to have persisted sincethe Greeks.



It might then become possible to propose a correspondence between Marxsmid-19th-century musings and the more formalized sociological thinking ofGeorg Simmel (18581918) at the turn of the 20th century. Simmel alsoconsidered the relations between the city as a site of the new money economyand the increasing predominance of relations of exchange, and the forms ofintensified individuality which are its subjective imprint. Just as Marx arguedin reading the Robinsades of the 17th century, Simmel suggested that socio-economic processes refashion conditions of subjectivity. I would also like tointroduce an art historian of Simmels generation, Aby Warburg (18661929)who, by a different route through anthropology, philology and psychology,came to a conclusion not dissimilar from Marxs about the potentially fatalconsequences of capitalist technological modernity for the conditions ofartistic creation rooted in mythic thinking where thought projects itselfimaginatively across a cognitive gap in relation to a sense of human depen-dency on the surrounding material world for survival.

Having travelled in 1896 through the desert areas of New Mexico andArizona, settled by the Hopi and other indigenous Pueblo peoples still prac-tising modified forms of extremely long-standing rituals within a livingmythological and cosmological thought system (though not unaffected byfour centuries of contact with Spanish Catholicism and Protestant evange-lism), Warburg concluded his interpretation of their rituals using serpents assignifiers of energy and water, of earth and sky and their necessary inter-action, by adding a photograph taken on the streets of San Francisco on hisreturn to the modern Euro-American city (Fig. 1).

Walking down the streets this Uncle Sam (Warburgs term) passes beneaththe electricity and telegraph wires that effortlessly and regularly carry power,light, energy and communications to users at the thoughtless and emotionally

neutral flick of a switch. Warburg ponderedwhether the idea of the sacred that senseof powerless awe and needy yearning in theface of uncertainty which sustained mythicthinking could survive the impact oftechnological mastery, hence of emotionaldistanciation from nature and from theprecariousness of life which was the con-dition for a certain kind of reflection aDenkraum that is distinct from the act oflogical or utilitarian mastery.

The American today, argued Warburg, isno longer afraid of the rattlesnake. He killsit; in any case he does not worship it. Itnow faces extermination. The lightningimprisoned in a wire captured electricity


Figure 1 Uncle Sam, photograph(1896) from collection of Aby Warburg (reproduced by courtesyof the Warburg Institute)


has produced a culture with no use for paganism. What has replaced it?Natural forces are no longer seen in anthropomorphic or biomorphicdisguise, but rather as infinite waves obedient to human touch. With thesewaves, the culture of the machine age destroys what the natural sciences, bornof myth, so arduously achieved: the space for devotion which evolved in turninto the space required for reflection.

The modern Prometheus and the modern Icarus, Franklin and theWright Brothers . . . are the ominous destroyers of the sense of distance,who threaten to lead the planet back into chaos. Telegram and tele-phone destroy the cosmos. Mythical and symbolical thinking strive toform spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world,shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection; thespace undone by the instantaneous electrical connection. (Warburg,1995: 54)

Both Marx and Warburg might themselves be accused of anti-capitalistRomantic nostalgia projected onto idealized pasts, the Greeks in the case ofMarx, and the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico in the case of Warburg. Indifferent ways, I would argue, however, they were both hard-headed analystsof their presents. They were, in fact, thinking sociologically about thematerial conditions for creative and imaginative activity that runs from artsorigins in ritual through the historical development of a specific sphere ofaesthetic-symbolic production separated from the sacred, ritual and ulti-mately religion. They both allow me to pose a heretical question that lies atthe heart of this consideration of the relations of Sociology and Art History.In the very text in which Marx poses the possibility of an end of art inmodernity with the production of art as such, Marxs analysis of theRobinsades effectively poses the conditions for the emergence of sociologi-cal thinking as such. Its conditions lie in the critical analysis, or rediscoveryas critical knowledge, of the increasingly invisible relations of interdepen-dence, networks and patterns of social life and experience precisely as theybecome, as a result of that very development of capitalist modernity, spon-taneously unknowable by existing forms of imaginative or formal knowl-edge. Thus I could pose a historically produced dissonance between thinkingsociologically and thinking aesthetically. Where is art history in this?

Foucault identified the historic moment at the end of the 18th century asthe moment of emergence of the sciences of man ranging from the biologi-cal to the social sciences (Foucault, 1974). This moment is also that of theundoing of the conditions of art through production of art as such. It also,significantly, marks the beginnings of the discipline of Art History as such,taking its place long before literary or even musicological studies within theHumboldtian German university system. In what I have written so far, I havewandered outside art history proper, entering into an extended conversation



with various key sociologically inspired cultural theorists struggling withmajor issues of sociality, collectivity, singularity, signification, subjectivityand the historical emplacement and changing of their relations. Where in allthis is art history itself and why am I obliged to be so unfaithful to it inorder to think historically and aesthetically?

ANTAL, 1966; SCHAPIRO, 1937; CLARK, 197388

Writing as an unwelcome Marxist exile/Jewish refugee in Britain from thelively intellectual ferment of Georgy Lukcs Sonntagskreis in Budapest in1916, whose members included intellectuals such as the philosopher GeorgyLukcs (18851971), the sociologist Karl Mannheim (18931947) and arthistorians Arnold Hauser and Johannes Wilde, Czech-born Frederick Antal(d. 1954) surveyed the state of British Art History as he, a student of the greatfigures of Heinrich Wlfflin in Berlin and Max Dvrk in Vienna, found it.

The whole point of view of art historians who have not yet evenabsorbed the achievements of Riegl, Dvrk and Warburg (let alonetried to go beyond them) is conditioned by their historical place; theycling to older conceptions, thereby lagging behind at least a quarter ofa century. And in the same way, they are conditioned by the concessionsthey are willing to make not too many and not too soon to the newspirit. (Antal, 1966: 187)

Writing in a still politically charged moment of post-fascist anti-communismwhich saw in art history the triumph of Wlfflinian formalism on the onehand, or Panofskys humanistic iconography on the other, Antal noted aboveall a radical unwillingness amongst art historians at mid-century to allowanything of a social or materialist explanation of artistic practice to impingeon the idealizing story of great individuals creating universally significantbeautiful things. Patronage studies were allowed for the minor artists but notfor the major figures. Reference to popular culture similarly was to be keptat a distance from the major players. Discussion of subject matter wasconfined to an esoteric kind of iconography remote from what Antal calledliving history, while any relation between art and history or art and societymust be left allusively vague with no real engagement with any of the majorsociological theories. He then stated:

. . . The last redoubt which will be held as long as possible is, of course,the most deep rooted nineteenth century belief, inherited from Roman-ticism, of the incalculable nature of genius in art. (Antal, 1966: 189)

For those privileged to watch TV series such as Simon Schamas The Powerof Art (2006) or even the BBCs The Impressionists (2006), Antals anatomy



of art history as the cult of individual genius with almost no registration ofthe impact of 30 years of critical, theoretically enriched scholarship, will beall too horribly familiar. Served up regularly through the media and even theTurner Prize extravaganza, what passes as Art History in the media is exactlywhat Antal ironically decried as being out of date by the late 1940s: idealistand romanticizing hero-worship. Antals conclusion is relevant here:

Methods of Art History, just as pictures can be dated. The methodsof Art History naturally constitute part of a prevailing intellectualoutlook, the problems and interests of successive periods. Alterationsin art historical methods do not cancel out the achievements of previousgenerations, but only effect a shift of accent which brings into reliefideas in art, as in history, which a particular generation considersimportant. (Antal, 1966: 189)

Composed at the end of the 1940s but only published in 1966, Antals diag-nosis of the dominance of formalism combined with and actually antitheticalto Romanticist cults of expressive genius in official mid-20th-century ArtHistory marks a historical point of maximum alienation between Art Historyand the sociological imagination.1

Antals call for a recovery of a social history of art was heeded, however,during the 1970s. A counter-movement to cold war formalism that domi-nated museal and academic Art History in Europe and America reconnectedwith the legacies of the men whose names Antal had mentioned, Riegl,Dvrk and Warburg, probably hardly known outside arcane art historicalcourses except to students of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin studied with thefounder of formalism, Wlfflin at Munich, disliking him greatly and lateropposing his formalist teaching to that of Alois Riegl who profoundly influ-enced Benjamins project of reading the crisis of capitalist modernity acrossits entire interrelating cultural production including many sites and ephemeralobjects unacknowledged by formal Art History and unrecognized prior tothe development of Cultural Studies. It is, however, perhaps to the impact ofGeorg Simmel that we should attribute Benjamins engagement with Rieglwhose notions of a cultural configuration of space, the haptic versus theoptical visual experience, and of the permeation of all cultural practices by ashared formal structure, clearly play out in Benjamins Arcades project inwhich everything from bus tickets to songs becomes equally indexical of thenew social and hence subjectivity-shaping processes of capitalist modernity.Through Simmels teaching, Benjamin built on the reflections on the novelsubjectivizing effects of metropolitanizing Berlin around 1900 to recognizeretrospectively their anticipation in the writings of the poet Charles Baude-laire in Paris during the 1850s.

Within the field of Art History, in which the poet Baudelaire, friend andmentor to Edouard Manet, is acknowledged as a fundamental influence in the



articulation of the need for a radical formal shift in art to catch the experi-ence of Modernity as it unfolded in Paris in the middle of the 19th century,Benjamin became the conduit for art historians back to Simmel to an eventwithin Sociology and its early formations. This circle is then completed when,during the 1970s, one of those who listened to Antals advocacy of a socialhistory of art, excavated from Benjamins intellectual biography the signifi-cance of Georg Simmel and placed his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life(Simmel, 1969) on the reading list for researchers into early cultural forma-tions of painterly Modernism in Paris c.186090. In doing this, Marxist arthistorian T. J. Clark was forced to articulate the problems with which wecontinue to struggle today.

What I want to explain are the connecting links between artistic form,available systems of representation, current theories of art, otherideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures andprocesses. . . . How does experience become a form, an event an image,boredom become its representation, despair become spleen: these arethe problems. (Clark, 1973: 1213)

If we think sociologically, artistic practices must become thinkable withinthe fields of social practices and related subjectivities. Yet if we think aboutart, our object is to specify the particularity of aesthetic-symbolic articulationas a cultural practice and as a meaning-producing effect that is not reducibleto a prior determination: the social, but is one of the many sites and threadsof what constitutes the social at the level of both experience and creativereflection upon its subjective meanings. Art is not an object but a practice,and a practice that uses specific resources, sound, images, words, genres,conventions, techniques to give form to aspects of social and subjective experi-ence that would otherwise remain insignificant, culturally inoperative inshaping the ways in which people lived their lives. As Raymond Williamsarticulated it in his superb analysis of the Marxist metaphor of base and super-structure, we should not ask what is the relation between literature andsociety, since they have no relation in such an abstracted way. Instead we mustgrant that literature or art is one of the practices of which society is complexlycomposed. Indeed until it and all practices are present, the society cannot beseen as fully formed (Williams, 1980: 44). Thus Modernism as an aestheticpractice is not merely the register through social iconography of Modernity;but a critical struggle with and reflection upon the conditions of Modernityby means of a mode of formal thinking that is pictorial art-making.

In 1984 T. J. Clark presented his most Simmelian book: The Painting ofModern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Clark would theredeclare:

The argument I wish to make in this book is somewhat less watertight,I hope; I wish to show that the circumstances of modernism were not



modern and only became so by being given the forms called spectacle.(Clark, 1984: 15; emphasis added)

Clarks point of departure for this proposition was a passage from a Marxistart historian of the previous generation, Meyer Schapiro, who had, like Antal,taken the struggle over the social versus the formalist vision of art and itshistorical narration to the formalist horses mouth. In 1937, Meyer Schapirolaunched a critique of the concept of art historical evolution of modernismarticulated by the very Wlfflinian art historian Alfred Barr, the first directorof the first ever Museum of Modern Art (founded in New York in 1929).

In presenting a major survey exhibition of the emergence of modern artfrom the 1880s to the 1930s, Barr had ordered the apparently chaotic jumbleof competing styles and artistic cliques into a coherently trackable formalevolution represented by a famous chart placed on the cover of the Cubismand Abstract Art exhibition in 1936. This chart plotted an evolutionary logicfor modernist art by setting movements impressionism through post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism, constructivism to abstract art in the 1930s against a simple chronological grid. Visually, therefore, art seemed to emergefrom preceding art movements in a process of influence and reaction, un-affected by world catastropes such as the First World War or events such asthe Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Great Depression. This visionof artistic autonomy and self-sufficiency was challenged by Schapiro whowanted to locate the motor for the evidently accelerating rate of artisticchange and diversity not in purely formal reactions but in the social experi-ence of capitalist modernity which altered the position and subjectivity ofthe artist/producer and was registered in the proliferating variety of individ-ualized strategies that, nonetheless, could still be read socially as indices oflife as a private producer in capitalist relations of modernity. Even the self-deluding myth of anonymous and estranged genius suffering poverty for thesake of authenticity could be patched onto this social analysis.

A short digression is needed here: formalism functions as one of thesediscourses of specification of Art History. What makes it possible to dedicatea discipline to the study of art that is distinct from philosophical aesthetics,archaeological antiquarianism and cultural history? Two moves had beennecessary: one was the legacy of 18th-century philosophical aesthetics thatseparated out from cognition, and thus identified, aesthesis as a mode ofperception and/or knowing. This distinguished a human capacity for responseto beautiful things and a capacity for discrimination between them: judge-ment. But for Art History to emerge, the aesthetic sphere had to be histori-cizable, epochal and changing. This involved two further moves: one was tobind specific forms or modes of art to place, geography, politics and socialforms the Greeks to Greek landscapes, democracy and mythology so thateach era or epoch could have its own distinctive character rooted in its socialforms and historico-geographical conditions. This produced the inherently



racist nationalism that structured 19th-century Art Historical practice and isinscribed in our museum classifications of art by national schools. What wasneeded, furthermore, was to show that art was variable according to suchfactors; thus it was historical, changing within the term art that was, nonethe-less, structurally consistent across times and places. This then required aninternal definition not that of the aesthetic response to these historicizableobjects but a definition of what was constant within such variability: andthat unity was form which, in its changing modes, produces what the arthistorian sets out to distinguish as style.

Art History is not so much defined by its modes of thinking as by its priv-ileged object: art, which had to have simultaneously a historicizable andstructural unity. Of course, following Foucaults theory of discourse as aproductivity, objects of discourse are, in fact, produced by the discursivepractice itself which also creates its own experts relative to their objects. Artis thus created in the emergent discourse of Art History, seeking to founditself beyond both philosophical aesthetics and general cultural history inwhich every feature of an age or civilization contributes evenly to its overallcharacter. Formalism the identification of an internal logic that makessomething art and relates different forms to each other through oppositionsand narratives of stylistic change is, however, potentially anti-humanistic,being an attribute of the objects paintings, sculptures, drawings, buildings,etc. that operates by its own formal logic. Romantic counter-forces, equallyinvested in this emergent field of the study of art historically, emerged tocompensate the objective logic of epochal form by recovering a subjectivedimension which proposes, as the source of value and intention beyondformal and stylistic activity, a biographically constructed authorship: theartist, which as Antal suggests and Freud ironically revealed, marks narcis-sistic and theological investment in a kind of heroic figure who cannot andshould not be ordinary, like us, hence socially nameable. Genius marks asingularity that surpasses human conditions.

Although the dominant forms of art historical writing are monographicand artist-centred (just look along the shelves in any library and bookshopand you will see that Art History is still the story of artists), within ArtHistory the deeper battle takes place between the foundational necessity toidentify an internal specificity for art in form and its stylistic changes and theacknowledgement of artistic activity as a symbolic practice, a system ofmeaning production, which is indifferent to the aesthetic attitude so closelyrelated to formalism. The symbolic approach developed into what we nowknow as iconography: the study of recurring motifs and themes in imagesand their pretexts in stories, myths and allegories. In the later 20th century,iconography was transformed a little by the encounter with semiotics ananti-romantic and non-esoteric conviction that visual representations couldbe read as signifying systems whose signs visual and related could be read



ahistorically, a consequence of which that the meaning happens in the presentof reading, although we might acknowledge different moments of viewing andreading are historically conditioned. Thus we can link across from semioti-cized art history to emergent Cultural Studies replacing the aesthetic for thecultural in Stuart Halls formulation of the impact of semiotic structuralism:

If the weakness of the positions outlined earlier was their tendency todissolve the cultural back into society and history, structuralisms mainemphasis was the specificity, the irreducibility, of the cultural. Cultureno longer simply reflected other practices in the realm of ideas. It wasitself a practice a signifying practice and had its own determinateproduct: meaning. To think of the specificity of the cultural was to cometo terms with what defined it, in structuralisms view, as a practice: itsinternal forms and relations, its internal structuration. (Hall, 1980: 30)

With this sense of the battles internal to historical art histories, we canreturn to Clark and Simmel and the manner in which the latters work canilluminate the reflexive relations between Sociology and Art History. Simmelidentifies the way in which the transformed societal conditions of metro-politan Modernity fashioned urban subjectivities across relations of space andencounter, proximities, distance, familiarity, the unpredictable, heightenedindividuation as well as the threat of a loss of self in the crowd or mass.Probably also influenced by Simmel, Schapiro refuted Alfred Barrs linearmodel of an internal formal development within modern art by suggestingthat the very impetus for change, the search for new forms that accelerated tocreate the chaos of competing individualistic or small group styles in early20th-century modernist art, which it was Barrs project to organize into alogical system of stylistic and formal development, were fostered by the socialconditions of urban capitalist life. This is how Schapiro articulated a radicallydifferent reading of Impressionism as having meaning, a moral aspect, arelation to social subjectivity and social relations that underpinned them.

Early Impressionism had a moral aspect. In its discovery of a constantlychanging phenomenal outdoor world of which the shapes depended onthe momentary position of the casual or mobile spectator, there was animplicit criticism of symbolic social and domestic formalities . . . Inenjoying realistic pictures of his surroundings as a spectacle of trafficand changing atmospheres, the cultivated rentier was experiencing inits phenomenal aspect that mobility of environment, the market andindustry to which he owes his income and his freedom. (Schapiro, 1979:1923)

Admired for the liberating breadth of this insight into potential relationsbetween economically conditioned social being and the emergence of a new



set of artistic forms, this passage, nonetheless, suggests a homology betweenan idealized type the cultivated rentier and the world-picture offered tohim through the paintings made by his paid dependants (from a differentclass), the painters, themselves clearly not experiencing the world supportedby rents and investments as they found themselves producing art in the novelconditions of an uncertain marketing strategy known as the dealer-criticsystem which emerged with the liberalization of the French economy afterthe Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the foundation of the Third Republicin 1875 (White and White, 1965). Clark works precisely against reductivehomology in order to argue, in a more rigorously Marxist fashion, that thecontradictions, the dismal disjuncture of appearances, fantasies and socialrelations that underpin the spectacularization of commodity capitalism,inform the textures and provocations of paintings of the Impressionists, thatwe can consider to be modern insofar as they show that Modernism andModernity are not reflexive. Even though Impressionist and later modernistart chooses to show obvious and special sites of modernity such as the street,the caf, the brothel, entertainments and commodities, what merits the termof modern lies in the formal strategies used to create a distanciation and ambi-guity about appearances and meanings. Clark treats paintings above all as akind of work, struggling to forge from inherited materials and anachronisticpractices of visual representation (that still presumed stability between signi-fier and signified) a register of the as-yet-unrecognized social at the level ofboth representation and solicited subjectivity that can be incited to recognizeits own confusions through the encounter with paintings that can beconsidered modern, precisely because they refuse the promise of imaginaryunity and do not deliver comfortable illusion. The modernist mode ofpainterly representation is not about a meaning known in advance andshown through legible representation. It is the work done on, and indeedagainst, painting and its inheritances of such visible presentation, in order tofind/create a form, a form of representation for the capitalist modernity thatdefies representation, namely the conditions of capitalist modernity that Marxspecified as producing its particular tissue of illusions in which phenomenalappearances occlude real relations. It is that very difficulty which generatesthe perplexing ruptures within western representational practice that we callModernism. From then on, artistic practice can only bear witness to an ever-deepening crisis about the representability of the world that is, nonetheless,the condition for an ever-more intense but doomed impulse to make senseof it. This crisis is still playing out in contemporary art whose most abjectlyuncritical practices simply fall into thoughtless mimesis of capitalisms delusivestructure, mistaking Andy Warhols fragile holding of the two apart in orderto demonstrate the risks and the trends for easy-going collapse of criticalperspective into wholesale participation in commodification. Compare, forinstance, Warhols ironic use of the term factory to suspend the romantic



illusions of the studio with Damien Hirsts overt use of a factory system formaking his paintings.

Instead of retrospectively tracking the progressive evolution of formalexperiments that mark a rupture with dominant academic regimes of repre-sentation, as Barr and the formalists do, in ways that inhibit any recognitionof their fundamental failure or their self-deluding dishonesty, or theirmoments of terrible revelation in relation to a social reality marked by itsown opacity, Clark forces us to recognize the strangeness of Impressionistand later modernist art, and to ask what is specific to the manner in whichmaking an artwork, a painting, is seeking to articulate visually the problem-atic of spectacular Modernity. What did these practices reveal, indexically,through their own modality of failure about that capitalist social reality andits unavailability to cognitive understanding or even affective engagement?

Thus it is not a question of translation from social experience to its visualrepresentation, but of representation as a moment of cognizance of theopacity of social experience which from then on will be known through itsnegative representational forms and troubled artistic strategies which willinvolve obscurantism, avoidance, misrepresentation or a complete failure tofind an adequacy in formulation and construction of signs: a symptomaticsignifying failure as Clark sees many of the key paintings of the 1870s1880s precipitating a crisis that plays out until the entire project of Modernism isabandoned abruptly in the 1960s and a radically different, non-formalistparadigm takes its place. The new paradigm draws enviously on arts modernothers, on industrial technologies producing and refashioning social subjec-tivity in the 20th century: the photographic and the cinematic and now thedigital. I could certainly perform a kind of Schapirian reading of the moralaspect of contemporary art. I would prefer to do the Clarkian job of iden-tifying, in a reading of particular practices and works, the cracks and diffi-culties of any cultural articulation of the opaque and diss(ass)embling socialrealities we currently live in, the era that Zygmunt Bauman names Liquidrather than Post Modernity (Bauman, 2000; Bryant, 2007).

In terms of the relation between Sociology and Art History, I am, there-fore, arguing against homology, reductionism, base/superstructure-type hier-archies in which the social is reified prior to representation. Sociologicalanalysis is itself a conditioned practice of representation of the social. Instead,by talking of representation and signification on the one hand, allying myselfthus with the larger discourse of a sociologically inflected cultural studies,and, on the other, insisting that there is a specificity to the way in which artisticpractices engage with, register, think about, index the unconscious of thesocial mediated through the lens of a situated singular subject, the maker andher practices, we have to acknowledge a specificity that has its own effects andmay even play into the sociological understanding of human interventionsinto the object world and their subjective registration as meaning.



My argument has been against convergence. Let me take this further tosuggest that thinking sociologically and thinking aesthetically (in terms ofpractices inducing meaning and affect) form a polarity that, nonetheless, cancome back into reciprocity.

BAHRO, 1977

In 1977 an East German Marxist wrote a book for which he was promptlyexpelled from East Germany for excessive radicalism. Rudolf Bahros Alterna-tive in Eastern Europe offered an analysis of the creation of a subjectivecondition of generationally transmitted and depressive subalternity in the so-called socialist states of the East. He identified a blueprint for transformationwithin the continuing frameworks of democratic and humanist socialism.Central to his plan for creating a redivision of labour was education. Withinthe discussion of an education programme, Bahro proposed a dual necessity.All children must be taught that which enables them to understand the largersynthesis, the structures, processes and practices that shape the worlds ofwhich each is a part. This would link with Baumans notion that Sociology isdefined by understanding human action in both a world of interdependencyand one of supra-individual patterns and relations.

Bahro calls this a political-philosophical education; I am tempted to call ita sociological one. Bahro then writes:

Knowledge of human affairs that is taught and accepted withoutaesthetic emotion must be basically untrue, and particularly more sofor the individuals involved. Aesthetics, as a method of education,means simply the attempt to present all knowledge that man requiresin such a way that it appeals to its own self and receives subjectivemeaning. (Bahro, 1978: 285)

In counter-force, therefore, to insistence that the individual lives relationallyin an overdetermined or patterned world, Bahro proposes a complementarykind of knowing: knowing for oneself. Thus, balancing the sociological-political-philosophical knowledge of the wide world, known externallythrough formalized methods and studies of accumulated and interpreted dataunavailable to common sense and individual life experience alone, there mustbe, as the summit of education, a combination of art and philosophy:

The solution to this problem is in theory extremely simple: youngpeople must have both an artistic and a political-philosophical practice.To put it another way, they must be able to appropriate directly, as toolsfor some use, the means of patterning and the concepts that allow themto differentiate and synthesise both the small world and the wide world.(1978: 286)



For Bahro, this model approximates to Marxs utopia:

The entire educational process must be organised in such a way that theyouthful development of all people leads to the summit of art andphilosophy, the emotional and rational bridges from the subjectivemicrocosm to the totality. If this is utopia, it is Marxs too. (1978: 286)

This dream is set against the cruel and actively depressing effects of totali-tarian and inegalitarian societies.

The emancipating and humanizing power of all art as a human inter-vention in the object-world, as a means of civilised displacement ofemotions outward instead of their repression within, as a medium ofself-purification by awe and compassion all this remains the privi-lege of the very few. The cultural revolution and its educational policymust draw its lesson from the uncontestable experience that those whogrow up without the possibility of political-philosophical and artisticpractice are condemned to subalternity, even if they become specializedscientists. (1978: 287)

Thus Bahro proposes in idealistic fashion both the difference between socio-logical and aesthetic knowledge, the wide world and the small world, thesystematic and the singularly situated, and their necessary complementarityif we are not to produce, through our institutions of subjectification, sub-altern subjects deprived of the means of both participation and self-affirmingjudgement. Socialist societies of the East performed this by an apostasizationof social knowledge a fixed vision of the ideal hence authoritarian modelof normative socialist society and by depriving its subjects of access tothe means of singularizing (not individualistic) self-knowledge. Access to themeans of making and appreciating aesthetic practice as a mode of knowing not a form of elite entertainment and cultural capital becomes an emanci-patory goal and a means of securing genuine democraticization of society.

Western capitalist democracies perform this subalternization with lessdepressing effects by the seductive illusions of an individuality permitted itsfree play in a phantasmagoria of commodities, themselves, as Marx argued,a form of fetishistic misrepresentation obscuring real relations betweenproducers by the seduction of desirable objects. Bahros almost Schillerianknow for yourself is not at all part of the massification of consumers typicalof the West.2

Reconsidering this blueprint from the other side, we can now come backto a more sociological consideration of what Art History as a practice anddiscipline actually performs in managing the distancing of the aesthetic as selfand socially situated self-knowing from a sociological or, rather, an ideo-logical function. I speak here of Art History as the official form of thepractice that I have above suggested could hold open a more extended andinteresting dialogue with sociological thinkers.



PANOFSKY, 1937 OR MARX IN THE AGE OFMECHANICAL REPRODUCIBILITY

Figure 2 shows a photograph taken in the 1930s of art historian ErwinPanofsky, a colleague of Aby Warburg in Hamburg, giving a lecture in theInstitute of Fine Arts, New York University. The room has been adapted forthis pedagogical purpose for which it was not custom-built. Indeed the wall-paper, fireplace and general proportions betray its origin as the receptionroom of the grand-scale Fifth Avenue New York home of tobacco magnateand Methodist millionaire James B. Duke immortalized by his endowmentof Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Founded in 1831, NewYork University appointed as its first Professor of Fine Arts, Samuel F. B.Morse, who invented the telegraph. Only in 1922, however, did Art Historybecome a dedicated field of study, lagging far behind Princeton and otherAmerican universities that instituted chairs in the subject in the 1850s.

In 1931 a graduate programme in Art History at New York University wasinstalled in the Duke House on the Upper East Side to be near the Metro-politan Museum of Arts collections; it was renamed the Institute of Fine Artsin 1937, when it was enriched by a flood of refugee continental Jewish arthistorians such as Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedlaender, Karl Lehmann,Julius Held and Richard Krautheimer. Erwin Panofsky was a Professor ofHistory of Art in Hamburg until the moment of the National Socialist elec-toral victory in 1933 when he was forced to flee. At that moment over 25 percent of the art historical profession in areas about to be directly affected byNazisms racial legislation were Jewish itself a fascinating statistic worthyof further cultural examination (Michels, 1999).

In this photograph, Panofsky is lecturing using a single projected glassslide itself significant in that the practice of using dual projection was then

a feature of the Munich School ofArt History initiated by HeinrichWlfflin, thereby installing thevisual structure of compare andcontrast that indexed the philo-sophical principles and methodo-logical grounds of formalistanalysis. Only with the possibili-ties of such widespread photo-graphic capture and migrationof artworks as travelling imagescould this whole edifice ofcomparative study of what thenappeared across this imaginarymuseum as a coherent unity calledart be undertaken.3 Panofsky is


Figure 2 Erwin Panofsky lecturing onGothic Art at the Institute of Fine Arts,New York, 1946 (reproduced courtesy ofNew York University).


lecturing on Gothic architecture using a projected photographic image tobring into the room in New York a distant European building remote alsoin time from the late 19th-century mansion in which the students aregathered for this induction into Art History. What these students are beinginducted into involves both the visible performance of an audio-visual lecturethat certainly distinguishes Art History from other disciplines and also aninvisible socio-technological, photo-mechanical underpinning that made thevery subjects expansion possible. Art History, as we know it, as a universitydiscipline and general subject, was not possible before the photographic age.Panofsky at work can be contrasted to a photograph of Andr Malraux,author of the Voices of Silence (1955), in which he proposed what he calledle muse imaginaire (Malraux, 1963).

The museum of the imagination was created precisely by the relationbetween musealization and photographic reproduction. Both extracted build-ings, altars, monuments and other embedded uses of aesthetic-symbolic prac-tices to create the levelled playing field of modern consumption of art in whichan altar-piece becomes a Caravaggio, a cathedral an instance of the Gothic andso forth (Pollock, 2007b). Reflecting on the previous generation, or even the19th centurys impact on concepts of art and emergent Art History, Malrauxrightly asked: What had those generations actually seen of art unless theyhad been able to travel extensively and have access to a huge range of privatecollections? What constituted knowledge of art on which 19th-century ArtHistory and criticism were practised was slight in comparison to what becameaccessible through cheaper photographic reproduction. This enabled forms ofanalysis and hence interpretativestructures freed from the relativelystatic and canonized forms oforiginal patronage, commission andantiquarian or social elite collection.

Aby Warburg was a university-trained art historian who estab-lished his own institute around alibrary that he founded in Hamburghaving given up his claim to thefamily banking business to hisyounger brother in return for abook allowance. Warburg, however,actively used both architecture (the shape of his library) and tech-nology to create an intellectualintervention against what wasbecoming the dominant trend inart historical studies in Germany:aestheticizing formalist Art History.


Figure 3 Andre Malraux with illustrationsfor le muse imaginaire, 1950 Jarnoux/Paris Match Scoop


Not the single slide, nor Wlfflins comparisons, nor Malrauxs promiscuousassemblage, Warburgs method was a critical reading of the persistence ofmeaning across cultural time by means of the image as a kind of mnemonicsignifier.

Warburgs library was housed in a specially designed circular building byGerhard Langmaack which symbolically enacted Warburgs conviction that,according to Kurt Forster:

The library, which demanded a building of its own, and the scholarsdesk, which as the mensa of mental labour signifies a ritual site ofmental sacrifice, present positive analogies with the world of primitivereligious ritual. . . .

In the same way Warburg sought to create by way of experiment aprecise ordering of reified ideas that would set up a flow of thinking,like a galvanic current. The library becomes a battery, an accumulationof thinking in which, through books connected in parallel by Warburgs[discovered] ordering principles, the current of ideas is induced to flow.(Forster, 1996: 1112)

Thus in a movement against the limiting disciplinary specialization, Warburgthought that the private spaces of intellectual labour and academic institutesand resources must structurally reflect the complex interplay of forces andfactors transdisciplinarity that constitute the domain of humanisticstudy: a Denkraum or thinking space that he saw being created by the gapfilled by imaginative construal in cultures not yet affected by modernity likethose of ancient Greece or the Pueblo peoples between mastery and human


Figure 4 The oval library in the Warburg Haus, Hamburg; plate 79 from MnemosyneBilderatlas compiled by Aby Warburg in the later 1920s (reproduced by courtesy ofthe Warburg Institute)


vulnerability to which I referred in earlier sections of this article. Warburgspractice was an argument against the departmentalization of knowledgeproduction and scholarly training which resulted in the disciplinary divisionsof the modern university. The function of a research institute/centre as anenriched environment allowed individual research projects informed byinterrelations with expanded but specific research questions that demandedthat the investigation of art take place in an intellectual environment withoutborders. But scholarship, for Warburg, was also not modern in the sense thathe opposed the displacement by a scientifically deadening attitude of theurgencies and anxieties associated with thinking and feeling humanconditions. If sociology becomes a matter of reducing complex social andindividual experience to statistical abstractions, it would not be part ofWarburgs Kulturwissenschaft. It would need the aesthetic the knowing foroneself and in oneself as a living, sentient, suffering and often perplexedhuman being to be able to produce genuinely humanistic knowledge.

The scholars desk is the site of ritual invocation of those forces thatcompel, and those that assail, human beings within their culture. Notonly the scholars desk, but also the painters paper and canvas can serveto invoke forces far older than the practice of Western culture. (Forster,1996: 12)

Hence my insistence that Warburg is not nostalgic for an era of greatersimplicity, such as the childlike Greeks or Pueblo Indians. Instead, in a moverelated to Freudian thought never acknowledged Warburg reminds us thatwhat lies closer to our cultural and human beginnings is, in fact, emotionallycomplex, scary and overpowering both in its anxieties and in its potentialviolence. Culture is understood not as development, but rather as a negoti-ating process of sublimation and transformation based on creating the spacefor devotion and reflection in the confrontation between human social lifeand its material conditions grounded in the world a version of which wouldfound the political theory of Hannah Arendt articulated in The HumanCondition (Arendt, 1998).

Let me finally link Warburg back to the passage in the Grundrisse whereI began. For Warburg the big question was neither a developmental nor astylistic history of art, nor the regular oscillation identified by Wlfflinbetween classical and baroque styles. It concerned the afterlife Nachleben of pagan antiquity persisting into Christian and post-Christian westernculture. Marx wrote:

The difficulty lies not in understanding that Greek art and epic arebound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty isthat they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect theycount as a norm and as an unattainable model. (Marx, 1973: 111)



The conditions that generated one kind or moment of art in ritual or mythare overtaken by socio-economic changes. Yet the images produced then havea still vivid afterlife; they persist over time and across cultures as Warburgsphotographic assemblages revealed. Marx remained stumped: why didancient Greek art still afford pleasure? Journeying through anthropology andphilosophy, Warburg recognized what Lvi-Strauss would later call wildthinking la Pense Sauvage (Lvi-Strauss, 1962). Warburg accepted that artoriginated in ritual, itself a semi-formalized enactment of defences againstpowerful emotions and anxieties attendant on the pre-industrialized strugglesfor human survival in precarious and unmastered material conditions. ForWarburg, pagan visual cultures and related practices produced a repertoire ofsignifying forms that registered in the language of the emotionally chargedrepresentations of the body, life-grounded, material emotions pathosformulae which become a memory bank. The historicity of art becomes inaddition their mode of persistence and transmission beyond their own momentof inception. In a later historical cultures renewed need for a means of suchexpression, they might at any moment be reanimated, as Warburg argued wasthe case with the revival of pagan antiquity in 15th-century Europe.

Far from proposing the musealized art collections of antiquities as objectsof eternal value and transcendent aesthetic significance for art-lovingconnoisseurs or as dictionaries of sources and influences for esoteric arthistorians, Warburg saw the intensity of these unripe conditions of formsand signs, bearers of wild thinking, as transmissible and rechargeable ironically using metaphors of electricity to convey his meanings. Theircurrency bears witness to the persistence of animating passions even whilesocial, economic and cultural conditions might, as in modernity, mute andeven obscure such relations to life and death anxieties. It is the job of thecultural historian to read the signs, indexing as they do the often violentforces at work in culture. Living at the turn of the 20th century with its risingtide of racism, Warburg tracked images of violence towards the other fromGreek culture to German anti-Semitism in contemporary newspapers. Thefinal plate of his Bilderatlas, illustrated above, forges links between pastimages and contemporary newspaper reports of the pact between the papacyand Mussolinis newly installed fascist regime. It is in this sense thatWarburgs historical work becomes a diagnosis of Western man in hisbattle to overcome his own contradictions and to find his dwelling placebetween the old and the new (Agamben, 1999: 93).

These three final images establish a problem: one shows the institutional-ization of a distinct specialized and technologically conditioned discipline:Art History, which is visualizable through the figure of Panofsky lecturingwith his projected slide or Malraux with his assembled photographs that willsoon become the art history book. Both indicate that whatever knowledge is



being produced is passed on through mere showing. What is it, however, thatyou can see that can be called a knowledge produced by seeing? Style?Form? Possibly some sense of use? What can be seen, in the sense of a deeperunderstanding of visual images as articulations and memories, will depend,however, upon the framing narrative of similarity and difference posited atthe level of visibility. This will operate without any further theorization ofwhat we might call a sociology of the visible, of spectacle, of the monumen-tal, the ceremonial.

Warburg, on the other hand, is represented by a circular library itselfalready allegorizing in modern terms a kind of mental work, a sacrifice, aritual. Intellectual activity is imagined as a still unmanaged electrical currentthat passes galvanizingly through relations between cognate forms of knowl-edge stored in books but also in practices, rituals and objects that themselvessignify both human thought and the underlying emotions and anxieties thatthought or any kind of formalization in ritual or other representationalactivity is struggling to manage and transform. In a final image fromWarburgs last unfinished project a vast montage of images he titledMnemosyne, A Picture Series Examining the Function of PreconditionedAntiquity-Related Expressive Values for the Presentation of Eventful Life inthe Art of the European Renaissance we can see another configuration ofthe image enabled by modern technologies.

On over 60 black hessian-covered boards Warburg hooked assemblages ofapparently unrelated images defying all the categories (nation, period, style,movement, artist, oeuvre) that defined Art History as a formal discipline.Instead these image collections functioned as what Warburg named pathos-formel intertwining of an emotional charge with an iconographic formulain which it is impossible to distinguish between form and content (Agamben,1999: 90). The work was premised on the transmission of an emotional-intellectual charge by means of the survival of image-forms and hence on theproblem of symbols and their life in cultural memory (Agamben, 1999: 93).Thus the project of a radically expanded nameless science akin to Kultur-wissenschaft became for Warburg the historical psychology of humanexpression encoded in the image. This is significant because it is dynamic,historical and hence involves transmission, survival, polarization, and insofaras it is historical, it is not individual, transcendent, universal as so muchmodern Robinsade Art History suggests (remember Antal on genius); it isnot merely cultural or collective in a Burckhardtian or Tainean way therelies the road to nationalist and ultimately racist underpinnings of the arthistorical enterprise. Let me quote you a longish passage from a lecture of1912 which, as Giorgio Agamben argues in his analysis of Warburg, offers amethodological amplification of the thematic and geographical borders ofArt History:



Overly limiting developmental categories have until now hindered arthistory from making its material available to the historical psychologyof human expression that has yet to be written. Because of its excess-ively materialistic or excessively mystical tenor, our young disciplinedenies itself the panoramic view of world history. Groping, it seeks tofind its own theory of evolution between the schematisms of politicalhistory and the doctrines of genius. By my method of interpretation. . . I have shown that iconological analysis, which in refusing to submitto the petty territorial restrictions, shies away neither from recognizingthat antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern age are in fact one inter-related epoch, nor from examining the works of the freest as well as themost applied art as equally valid documents of expression. (Warburg,1999: 585)

Warburgs legacy was muted as it entered Art History of the 20th centurythrough Panofsky where it was reduced to esoteric iconography (source-hunting). Warburgs library (KBW) and research institute was moved toLondon University in the 1930s where it is now the home of the most eruditeresearch that lacks the social and indeed emotional bite that animatedWarburgs own work across the image track of human history a symbolicsite that articulated thought and emotion in a singularly significant modalityrequiring both specialist and the most interdisciplinary expansion andcomprehensiveness in scholarship.

Thus what Warbu

History of the Human Sciences 2007 Pollock 141 75

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