No More Learning

Although the reading of Kant's mathematical sublime in terms of such a subreptitious substitution--calling "sublime" what is in fact only "colossal"--is Derrida's (in "Le colossal," in La Ve? rite? en peinture [Paris: Flammarion, 1978], 136-68), de Man's own reading is very close to Derrida's here. That de Man had read Derrida's "Le colossal" is clear in the earlier "Kant's Materialism," also in Aesthetic Ideology.
9. On de Man's reading of Pascal's zero, see my Introduction, "Allegories of Reference," in Aesthetic Ideology, 1-33.
10. The locus classicus for understanding such "economies of the supplement" is, of course, Jacques Derrida, "La mythologie blanche," in Marges (Paris: Minuit, 1972). See also my reading of Derrida and catachresis as the "syntax of tropes" in "Prefatory Postscript: Interpretation and Reading," in Readings in Interpretation: Ho? lderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), liv-lxi.
11. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 184.
12. And not just according to de Man. There are remarkable similarities be- tween de Man's understanding of the stakes of Kant's "Analytic of the Sublime" and Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard's. Indeed, however different their terms, de Man's and Lyotard's readings coincide in many respects. See Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1994).
13. Although he does not explicitly read the vaulted sky as a figure for the bridge between the supersensuous underlying nature and the supersensuous under- lying freedom, Derrida does link the ocean in this passage to the abyss between them. See La Ve? rite? en peinture, 148.
14. But whose phlegmaticity is then judged sublime in the Critique of Judgment! For more on de Man and the Dutchman, see "Kant's Materialism" in Aesthetic Ideology, 124-25. It is worth noting that de Man's joke in "Kant's Materialism" about Kant's characterization of the Dutch in the precritical text--"I have never felt more grateful for the hundred or so kilometers that separate Antwerp from Rotterdam" (AI 125)--undergoes a slight arithmetical transposition in the later "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant": "I have never felt more grateful for the fifty or so kilometers that separate the Flemish city of Antwerp from the Dutch city of Rotterdam" (AI 85; emphasis added). The Dutch--those "phlegmatized Germans"--seem to have moved closer to Antwerp by the time of the later essay!
15. J. H. Bernard's and Alexis Philonenko's translations are: Critique of Judg- ment (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 110-11; Critique de la faculte? de juger (Paris: Vrin, 1984), 107.
16. Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured," in RR 122.
17. See Stefano Rosso's interview with de Man in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, 121.
18. See my "Introduction: Allegories of Reference" to Aesthetic Ideology; "Ending Up/Taking Back (With Two Postscripts on Paul de Man's Historical Materialism," in Critical Encounters, ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (New Brunswick, N. J. : Rutgers University Press, 1995), 11-41; and "'As the Poets Do It': On the Material Sublime" in this volume.
19. AR with a page number refers to Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
20. See "Excuses": "we are restating the disjunction of the performative from the cognitive: any speech act produces an excess of cognition, but it can never hope to know the process of its own production (the only thing worth knowing)" (AR 299-300). It's worth noting that de Man here is restating the disjunction between performative and cognitive, which would support my contention that a radicaliza- tion of the performative takes place in the course of his reading.
21. Cf. "Excuses": "Rousseau singled out the episode of Marion and the ribbon as of particular affective significance, a truly primal scene of lie and deception strategically placed in the narrative and told with special panache. We are invited to believe that the episode was never revealed to anyone prior to the privileged reader of the Confessions 'and . . . that the desire to free myself, so to speak, from this weight has greatly contributed to my resolve to write my confessions. ' When Rousseau returns to the Confessions in the later Fourth Re^verie, he again singles out this same episode as a paradigmatic event, the core of his autobiographical nar- rative" (AR 278-79).
22. See the end of my "'As the Poets Do It': On the Material Sublime" in this volume.
23. In working on Georg Luka? cs's History and Class Consciousness, I was pleased to find that in Luka? cs too, what he calls "the next step," the step to action, to revolution if one likes, the step that is taken by the class consciousness of the proletariat, turns out in fact to be the passage to the step--indeed, the step to the step. The action of the proletariat is the step to action. The step is the step to the step. That this "next step" emerges out of the system of bourgeois thought--that is, clas- sical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel--that is, out of the inability of the (tropological) system to close itself off, is an indication that the class consciousness of the proletariat and the action that is the step to action, for Luka? cs as for de Man, emerges out of an epistemological critique of trope--or, if you like, a rhetorical "deconstruction" of the tropological system that is bourgeois thought. See my forthcoming "Next Steps: Luka? cs, Jameson, Post-dialectics. " (That de Man's late work on the philosophical category of the aesthetic is at least somewhat informed by his 1960s reading of Luka? cs's early reflections on aesthetics is legible in his "Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self," in Blindness and Insight, es- pecially 41-44. )
"As the Poets Do It" 31
32
Art and Ideology: Althusser and de Man
Michael Sprinker
My title refers to a conceptual problematic with a long and complex heritage in Western philosophy. Given its classic formulation in the eighteenth century (most notably in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters), it has continued to trouble the theory and practice of art to the present day. For Marxism, it poses special difficulties, not least because of Marx's own tantalizingly brief comments on Greek art in the Introduction to the Grundrisse, where the problem of the relationship between the ideological and aesthetic dimensions is posed with great clarity, but left unresolved.
A somewhat less enigmatic account of the art/ideology relation ap- pears in Althusser's "Letter on Art in Reply to Andre? Daspre. " The passage in question has provoked a good deal of skeptical commentary (e. g. , from Terry Eagleton), but Althusser's formulation remains the necessary point of departure for any serious theory of art understood as a social practice with specific features distinguishing it from other social practices:
I believe that the peculiarity of art is "to make us see" (nous donner a` voir), "make us perceive," "make us feel" something which "alludes" to reality. . . . What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of "seeing," "perceiving" and "feeling" . . . is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes. . . . Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a "view" of the ideology to which their work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distanciation from the very ideology from which their novels emerged. They make us "per-
ceive" . . . in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held. 1
The burden of the passage (slightly, but not innocently truncated here) is to establish the special modality of art that distinguishes it from ide- ology. We need not tarry over the rather clumsy term allusion (faire allusion), which is meant to conjure up conventional (i. e. , non- Althusserian) theories of ideology as pure illusion, focusing instead on the more frequently deployed Althusserian concept of "internal distan- ciation" (une prise de distance inte? rieure). The passage, then, can be construed as a schematic effort to establish the necessary concept for a properly materialist theory of art, what may be called its particular modality, as distinct from the different modality of ideology (which, it will be recalled from the essay on Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), also has a material existence).
In his later writings, Paul de Man came to focus on this same con- ceptual problematic, projecting a full-scale engagement with Marxism via a reading of The German Ideology (a work he did not live to com- plete). It would of course be perilous to predict the exact form de Man's reading would have assumed, particularly in the light of his own confession that "[w]hat will come out of it, I just do not know. "2 None- theless, I shall risk certain conjectures in the direction of de Man's un- finished engagement with Marxism, but in the appropriately critical spirit that de Man himself always exemplified. The long-awaited publi- cation of Aesthetic Ideology gives some grounds for speculating, how- ever tentatively, about the shape that engagement would probably have assumed. The points of entry, in any event, seem clear enough.
TROPOLOGICAL COERCION
In a decisive passage on the nature of tropes in the essay "Pascal's Alle- gory of Persuasion," de Man quotes Pascal on the relation between signs and things:
It is not the nature of these [indefinable] things which I declare to be known by all, but simply the relationship between the name and the thing, so that on hearing the expression time, all turn (or direct) the mind toward the same entity [tous portent la pense? e vers le me^me objet].
De Man then comments:
Here the word does not function as a sign or a name, as was the case in the nominal definition, but as a vector, a directional motion that is
Art and Ideology 33
34 Michael Sprinker
manifest only as a turn, since the target toward which it turns remains unknown. In other words, the sign has become a trope, a substitutive re- lationship that has to posit a meaning whose existence cannot be veri- fied, but that confers upon the sign an unavoidable signifying function. 3
It is the coercive but nonrational power of this operation that is signifi- cant. Tropes are perforce meaningful, but their meanings can never be equated with that which is true, in the sense of being rationally demon- strable or justifiable; they "posit a meaning whose existence cannot be verified. " And yet the tropological imperative is "unavoidable," the turn toward the same mental entity (in the Pascal passage "time") something that "all" (tous) are bound to perform. It would not be stretching a point to say that the account of the operation of tropes here contains in nuce the de Manian conception of ideology, which is a property of language, or more precisely, of the figural or tropological aspects of language that, pace Locke and a certain tendency in the Enlightenment, cannot be eliminated or controlled in any linguistic sci- ence, least of all in contemporary semiotics. 4 De Man's stipulative defi- nition of ideology as "the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism"5 restates what in many places he identifies as the seductively mystifying power of tropes, as in the classic instance of catachresis: referring to the legs of a table implicitly confers sentience on an inanimate object by attributing to it features of an ani- mate being. Or, to adopt a slightly different terminology, ideology can be defined as that which "represents the imaginary relationship of indi- viduals to their real conditions of existence. "6
Tropes or figures enforce an "imaginary relationship" to things; they, as it were, "interpellate individuals [e. g. , the table] as subjects [interpelle les individus en sujets]" (LP 170; SR 302). 7 And lest it be thought that I myself am engaged in an illicit transposition from one discursive regime to another, that the comparison between de Man on tropes and Althusser on ideology is an abuse of language, another tropological illusion,8 consider the following passage glossing the the- sis on interpellation just quoted:
As St. Paul admirably put it, it is in the "Logos," meaning in ideology, that we "live, move and have our being. " It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary "obviousness" [e? vi- dence] . . . : it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc. . . . ). Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word "name a
thing" [de? signe une chose] or "have a meaning" [posse`de une significa- tion] (therefore including the obviousnesses of the "transparency" of language), this "obviousness" that you and I are subjects . . . is an ideo- logical effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is in effect in the very nature of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are "obviousnesses") obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out to ourselves (aloud or in the "silence of conscience"): "That's obvious! That's right! That's true! " (LP 171-72; SR 303-4; translation modified)
In the Pascal passage cited by de Man, moreover, the tropological power of language specifically constitutes (or interpellates) individuals as subjects--a universal subject in fact: "tous [all or everyone] portent la pense? e vers le me^me objet. " All hold the same object in thought (time); all respond to the call of this object and recognize it as the same thing, though this recognition be illusory, the necessary consequence of "the relationship between the name and the thing," rather than a true understanding of the nature of the thing itself.
THE PERFORMATIVE POWER OF IDEOLOGY
As it happens, Pascal also surfaces, somewhat unexpectedly, in the ISAs. Althusser's recourse to the Pascalian account of religious faith discloses yet another point of contact with de Man's conception of ide- ology. Referring to what he terms "Pascal's defensive 'dialectic,'" Althusser asserts the priority of actions (or, more technically, practices) over ideas in the functioning of ideology. He writes: "Pascal says more or less: 'Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe'" (LP 168; SR 301). If ideology is produced by the irresistible tropologi- cal potential of language, which carries or directs thought (porte la pense? e) toward its object, it can be said to exercise a coercive power that moves individuals to act, even against what we conventionally term their will. The existence and the effectivity of ideology are ante- rior to and cannot be resisted by the individuals it hails as subjects. Of the individual so determined, Althusser asserts:
his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices gov- erned [re? gle? es] by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive [rele`vent] the ideas of that subject. (LP 169; SR 301; emphasis in the original)
Art and Ideology 35
36 Michael Sprinker
Ideology is a performative; as such, it is not regulated according to a regime of truth and falsehood, but by its sheer power to move.
De Man exemplifies this ultimate performative power of ideology in his analysis of Pascal's famous Pense? e on justice and power, which con- cludes on an uncompromisingly Machiavellian note:
Justice is subject to dispute. Power [la force] is easily recognizable and without dispute. Thus it has been impossible to give power to justice, because power has contradicted justice and said that it is unjust, and said that it is itself just.
And thus, not being able to make the just strong, one has made the strong to be just. (AI 67)
Justice functions here in classical ideological fashion: it instances an imaginary relation to real conditions of existence. But it works, that is to say, it successfully appeals to and governs the actions of individuals, to the extent that it already possesses power. Justice is neither a con- cept nor an idea; it is a set of practices, as in the decisions of courts and the procedures that lawyers and judges are bound to observe--a seem- ingly paradoxical notion. The ideology of justice is an effect of the force of law. It is, to quote de Man once more, a "modal statement" that "perform[s] what [it] enunciate[s] regardless of considerations of truth and falsehood" (AI 68).
AESTHETIC ILLUSION
So much for ideology; what about art? In what sense can we say that art is material for de Man, and to what extent is de Man's materialism comparable (or not) to that of Althusser and the Marxist tradition more generally?
It will hardly come as a surprise to those familiar with de Man's corpus if I say at the outset that the term aesthetic is a complex one in the lexicon of de Man's later essays. It can refer, as the title of the posthumous collection Aesthetic Ideology indicates, to the protective, sheltering function of art, which allows us to experience as fiction what would threaten us in reality. De Man comments on this usage in his exegesis of Schiller's essay "Of the Sublime" ("Vom Erhabenen"): "one plays at danger as in a fiction or as in a play, but one is sheltered by the figurative status of the danger. It is the fact that the danger is made into a figure that shelters you from the immediacy of the danger" (AI 144). Nor is this aspect of the aesthetic alien to the Marxist theory of art. Marcuse's now generally neglected essay, "The Affirmative
Character of Culture," elaborates the compensatory function of aes- thetic pleasure with great lucidity. Even Luka? cs acknowledges this positive valorization of the noncritical aspects of art in his exegeses of Goethe and Schiller's aesthetic theory. But it may come as something of a surprise that Althusser, the notorious exponent of the ubiquity of ide- ology and the theoretician of antihumanism, would hold much the same view.
CATHARSIS AND CRITICISM
In a little-known text of 1968, "Sur Brecht et Marx," Althusser com- ments on the nature of aesthetic play, virtually repeating what de Man terms the protective or "sheltering" function of the aesthetic in the passage cited in the preceding section. Althusser insists on the essential role in theatrical presentation of what Schiller termed Schein, that is, illusion, or better, aesthetic illusion. But Althusser gives this common- place of aesthetic theory a slight twist that both acknowledges the comforting notion of aesthetic illusion and disrupts it at the same time, turning aesthetic illusion back upon itself in such a way as to provoke a rather different response from the audience than sheer comfort. Here is the passage, quoted in extenso, including the very un-Schillerian sen- tences that bring Althusser's essay to a close:
The theater is a catharsis, said Aristotle and Freud: art is a fictive tri- umph. Translation: a fictive triumph is a fictive risk. In the theater the spectator is given the pleasure of seeing fire played with, in order to be quite sure that there is no fire, or that the fire is not with him, but with others, in any event in order to be quite sure that the fire is not with him.
If we wish to know why the theater diverts, it is necessary to account for this type of very special pleasure: that of playing with fire absent any danger stipulated by this twofold clause: (1) it is a safe fire because it is on the stage, and because the play always extinguishes the fire, and (2) when there is fire, it is always at one's neighbor's. . . . [But] these neighbors, among whom there is the fire on the stage, are also, as luck would have it, in the theater hall. The humble, who behold the great in the hall respectfully, laugh at the great when the fire on stage affects them [the great], or else they [the humble] find that on the stage which is equally great with which to overcome the crises of their life and their conscience. (EPP 556; my translation)
Aesthetic presentation does more than provide a sheltering illusion (the catharsis attributed to Aristotle's and Freud's conceptions of art); it
Art and Ideology 37
38 Michael Sprinker
provokes action, presumably revolutionary action by the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The aesthetic can serve a critical function as well, exploding the ideological illusion that shields the audience from real danger by promoting a consciousness of the play's fictionali- ty. 9 As at the end of Ken Loach's masterful portrayal of working-class oppression and resistance in the film Riff-Raff, the fire that consumes the building site on which the day laborers have been working and that has been started by two of them to avenge the sacking of another worker on the job--that fire is, for some who view the film, the one they themselves might ignite one day to bring down the structure of privilege and exploitation to which they currently submit. This critical function of the aesthetic, which Althusser (following Brecht) empha- sizes, is not so far from what de Man proposes is to be found in Kant and Hegel's philosophical reflections on art.
Art as critical reflection on ideology--this late de Manian motif is entirely in the spirit of the passage from Althusser's "Letter on Art" with which this essay began. Explicitly, art's critical reflection is said to produce knowledge, different in kind from scientific knowledge, but knowledge nonetheless. Brecht believed this as well, repeating again and again throughout his career that the purpose of his plays was to induce revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat, with the Lehrstu? cke plainly, but also with less programmatically "didactic" works such as Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera. 10 The famous line from the latter, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral," imparts a positive spin to Kant's suspicion of the necessarily seductive nature of aesthetic experience in promoting morality. As de Man puts the matter:
Morality and the aesthetic are both disinterested, but this disinterested- ness becomes necessarily polluted in aesthetic representation: the per- suasion that, by means of their very disinterestedness, moral and aes- thetic judgments are capable of achieving is necessarily linked, in the case of the aesthetic, with positively valorized sensory experiences [Brecht's Fressen]. The moral lesson of the aesthetic has to be conveyed by seductive means. (AI 84)
But this mistrust of the aesthetic--due in part, one imagines, to that Pietist heritage which made him notoriously among the most ascetic of men (one wonders if Kant ever took pleasure in anything)--is not the last word in Kant. 11
SEEING AS THE POETS DO IT
Alongside, and in contradiction to, Kant's critical evaluation of aes- thetic pleasure stands his injunction that, in order to experience the true sublimity of the ocean, "we must regard it as poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], merely by what the eye reveals [was der Augenschein zeigt],--if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by the heavens; if it is stormy, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm every- thing" (quoted from AI 80). De Man terms this seeing "as poets do" "pure aesthetic vision" (AI 82), and glosses the concept as follows:
In this mode of seeing, the eye is its own agent and not the specular echo of the sun. The sea is called a mirror, not because it is supposed to reflect anything, but to stress a flatness devoid of any suggestion of depth.
In the same way and to the same extent that this vision is purely material, devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication, it is also purely for- mal, devoid of any semantic depth and reducible to the formal mathe- matization or geometrization of pure optics. The critique of the aesthet- ic ends up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, includ- ing the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and of the sublime as de- scribed by Kant and Hegel themselves. (AI 83)
The materiality of art, seeing "as poets do," is, if you will, anti-aesthetic. Its pure formality evacuates from the work of art any phenomenal con- tent. Kant's understanding of materialism in this passage is, by his own criterion (see the Introduction to the first Critique), empty, since it con- sists of concepts without percepts or intuitions (Anschauungen). 12
On first inspection, this formal materialism of the aesthetic would seem to have little if anything to do with Althusser's repeated emphasis on aesthetic illusion, or with the "sensory manifestation of the idea" (das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee) of Hegel's canonical definition. Art simply cannot do without some degree of phenomenalization, be it only the sparse lines and colors in a Mondrian painting, or the stutter- ing dialogue in a late Beckett play or story, or the dissonant sounds of atonal music. 13 And so one might speculate that Kant's materialism, as expounded by de Man, is not merely anti-aesthetic, but properly an- aesthetic, that is to say, it is nonart. 14
Althusser himself will hypothesize something similar in his celebra- tion of the late works of the Italian painter Leonardo Cremonini. Here, expounded at some length, is the crux of Althusser's position:
Art and Ideology 39
40 Michael Sprinker
In order to "see" Cremonini, and above all to talk about what he makes visible, we have to abandon the categories of the aesthetics of consump- tion: the gaze we need is different from that of desire for or disgust with "objects" [Brecht's Fressen]. Indeed, his whole strength as a figurative painter lies in the fact that he does not just "paint" "objects" . . . , nor "places" . . . , nor "times" or "moments" . . . Cremonini "paints" the relations which bind the objects, places, and times. Cremonini is a painter of abstraction. Not an abstract painter, "painting" an absent, pure possibility in a new form and matter, but a painter of the abstract, "painting" in a sense we will have to define, real relations (as relations they are necessarily abstract) between "men" and their "things," or rather, to give the term its stronger sense, between "things" and their "men. " (LP 230; EPP 574-75)
It is now possible to revise slightly the formulation given earlier concerning the constitutive phenomenalization in works of art. Art cannot do without materialization--in Cremonini's case, not only the color and texture of the paint itself, but the forms in which that matter appears in the paintings, what Althusser refers to later on as the "verticals" and "circles" that dominate Cremonini's mature works. But the "matter" of art, in Kant's poetic Augenschein and in Cremoni- ni's painting of abstraction, has nothing to do with the phenomenal forms in which it is made to appear--for example, in both Kant and Cremonini, the figure of the mirror. Such forms as the human figures that continue to populate Cremonini's paintings are not ideological, or, better said, to see the figures he paints as representing humanity is to reproduce the ideological illusion par excellence, what Althusser calls "humanism. "
The point is made most sharply in Althusser's commentary on Cremonini's deformed faces:
Strictly speaking, the deformation to which Cremonini subjects his faces is a determinate deformation, in that it does not replace one identity with another on the same face, does not give the faces one particular "expression" (of the soul, the subject) instead of another: it takes all ex- pression away from them, and with it, the ideological function which that expression ensures in the complicities of the humanist ideology of art. . . . Cremonini's human faces are such that they cannot be seen, i. e. identified as bearers of the ideological function of the expression of sub- jects. (LP 238-39; EPP 582-83)
The similarity to de Man's lapidary summary at the end of "Kant's Ma- terialism" is too striking not to notice:
The language of the poets therefore in no way partakes of mimesis, reflection, or even perception, in the sense which would allow a link between sense experience and understanding, between perception and apperception. Realism [in Althusser's version, "the humanist ideology of art"] postulates a phenomenalism of experience which is here being denied or ignored. Kant's looking at the world just as one sees it ("wie man ihn sieht") is an absolute, radical formalism that entertains no notion of reference or semiosis. (AI 128)
"Pure aesthetic vision," which de Man locates in Kant's exposition of the sublime, fails precisely to connect intuition with concept; it is blind, devoid of sensuous content, mute, equivalent to what Hegel termed "blosses Lesen," which he associated with the practice of read- ing silently--a perfectly legitimate practice, but inimical to poetry as art. At the limit, aesthetic materialization has nothing to do with the concept of art as "the sensory manifestation of the idea. "15
POLITICS AND HISTORY
That said, it would be incorrect directly to equate de Man's conception of materiality in art with Althusser's. For de Man stops just here, where the most interesting question arises: to wit, what effects are to be achieved by this rigorously antihumanist aesthetic practice? De Man often asserted that the aesthetic and the political are inextricably bound up with each other, but he never, so far as I'm aware, made good on this insight by showing how works of art produce their politi- cal effects. 16
One surmises that this reticence was at least in part due to a certain conception of history, well articulated by Andrzej Warminski. Quoting de Man on the coercive power of tropes over thought, Warminski writes: "The mind is bound to do this, not on account of any subjective choice--it is bound to do it. It's a linguistic necessity, the ideology built 'into' language . . . it's what is bound to happen. And that's history. "17 History is that which was "bound to happen"; it is governed by struc- tures as invariant and ineluctable as those that command linguistic tropes. Small wonder that de Man would invest so little energy in devel- oping his intuitions concerning the political and ideological effects of art: rigorous examination of the linguistic features of literature would,
Art and Ideology 41
42 Michael Sprinker
ex hypothesi, disclose the absolute limits imposed on action, limits that can only be ignored by further indulgence in ideological mystification. For Althusser, certainly, and one should add, for Marx as well (ca- nards about his so-called economic determinism notwithstanding), this strict insistence on historical necessity, on, as it were, the iron laws of the dialectic (to translate de Manian strictures into a familiar idiom), is anything but Marxist. On an Althusserian Marxist account, history is not the record of what "was bound to happen"; it is, rather, a series of contingent possibilities, what the early Althusser termed "over-
determined conjunctures. "
A single citation, among many that could be adduced in support of
this claim, underscores the point with great economy. It comes from a collection of interviews and letters dating from the late 1970s, when Althusser's grasp of the trajectory and the irreducible features of his project was probably surest. To the interviewer's query concerning the possibility of conceiving "another type of history," Althusser responds:
Yes, the German language presents us with another term: Geschichte, which does not designate a history completed at present, doubtless determined to a large extent by an already completed past, but only in part, since present, living history [l'histoire] is also open to an uncertain, unforeseen future, not yet completed and consequently aleatory. Living history only obeys a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not employ the term "constant" that I borrowed from Le? vi- Strauss, but a genial expression: "tendential law," capable of inflecting (not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a ten- dency does not possess the form or figure of a linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the effect of an encounter with another tendency and so forth to infinity. At each intersection, the tendency can take an unfore- seeable form, just because it is aleatory. 18
This is the very issue that Althusser tackles head-on at the end of the essay on Cremonini.
ART AS REVOLUTIONARY WEAPON
According to Althusser, Cremonini's "radical antihumanism" took him down the same road as
the great revolutionary, theoretical and political thinkers, the great mate- rialist thinkers who understood that the freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition [reconnaissance], but
by knowledge [connaissance] of the laws of their slavery, and that the "realization" of their concrete individuality is achieved by the analysis and mastery of the abstract relations which govern them. (LP 240-41; EPP 584; translation modified)
Althusser is unyielding (and currently rather unfashionable) on this point, as he had been in the "Letter on Art": art is on the side of knowledge, of science, not on the side of ideology, of which it gives a knowledge, however different in form from that which is given in sci- ence. On an Althusserian account, art provides a means by which to discover the true nature of the world, the structure of its social rela- tions, and the possibilities it holds for realizing human emancipation.
If this were the end of the matter, if materialist aesthetic practice were to be limited in its effects to this essentially critical function in re- lation to ideology, the charge Althusser offhandedly hurls at Brecht-- that "there is an aspect of the enlightener in Brecht, the theme of 'theater in a scientific age,' etc. " (EPP 553)--would double back on Althusser himself (although one should add that there are many worse fates than to be an enlightener). The couplet ideology/knowledge would in principle be immediately and permanently dissolved, for who would continue to subscribe to an ideology having attained a knowl- edge of it? But, as always, things are not so simple. 19
The specific relation that works of art establish with ideology is the subject of Althusser's final reflections in the Cremonini essay. If we say that this relation is akin to but distinct from that of the sciences (in- cluding politics), it is only to indicate the specificity, the unique materi- al modality of art. Art matters by virtue of the effects it produces, ef- fects manifested precisely in ideology. Here, one last time, is Althusser on the relationship between art and ideology:
Every work of art is born of a project both aesthetic and ideological. When it exists as a work of art it produces as a work of art (by the type of critique and knowledge it inaugurates with respect to the ideology it makes visible) an ideological effect. . . . like every other object, including instruments of production and knowledges, or even the corpus of the sciences, a work of art can become an element of the ideological, that is to say it can be inserted into the system of relations which constitute the ideological. . . . Perhaps one might even suggest the following proposi- tion, that as the specific function of the work of art is to make visible (donner a` voir), by establishing a distance from it, the reality of the ex- isting ideology (of any one of its forms), the work of art cannot fail to
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exercise a directly ideological effect, that it therefore maintains far closer relations with ideology than any other object, and that it is not possible to think the work of art, in its specifically aesthetic existence, without taking account of this privileged relation with ideology, that is to say without taking account of its direct and inevitable ideological effect. (LP 241-42; EPP 585-86; translation modified)
Scandalously--but with complete consistency--Althusser insists that the ideological (and therefore the political) effectiveness of artworks derives from their aesthetic power, namely, from their production of an "internal distance" in relation to the ideology that they present. The presentation of ideology in art, as it were, estranges ideology from it- self, creating the possibility for, not only identification with or interpel- lation by the ideology presented, but a knowledge of it, a knowledge that the audience can then put to use in transforming the conditions that produced the ideology in the first place. Art's aesthetic power is the source of its pedagogical, scientific function. The key interlocutor, not mentioned by name here, is obviously Brecht.
Consider, for a moment, Brecht's career and posthumous fate. Forced into exile during the Nazi period, his postwar return to the German Democratic Republic saw him attain a transformative power over dramatic practice, in Germany and beyond, that had eluded him during the Weimar period. Not only were his plays performed around the globe, his dramaturgical writings exercised an influence so wide- ranging as to make him, arguably, one of the most significant figures in world literature during the 1950s and 1960s. 20 What one might call "the Brecht-effect" was among the most astonishing developments in postwar culture, not least because the political program he espoused could, during the Cold War, be so easily dismissed with the epithet "Stalinist. " Nor has this "Brecht-effect" remained unchanging, frozen in time as the singular model for revolutionary theater. In the post-Cold War era, books like John Fuegi's debunking biography and widespread attempts to "liberate" Brecht from the "burden" of his Marxism are only to be expected.
Yet there remain alternatives, many of them skillfully set forth by Fredric Jameson, whose brief for Brecht's contemporary relevance to Marxist politics is entirely salutary. 21 One that ought to be more fully explored is the very opposite of those aesthetic practices that have con- ventionally been termed Brechtian and are powerfully associated with Brecht's German disciples such as Heiner Mu? ller, in filmmaking with
the French nouvelle vague (Godard, Straub) and the German New Wave (Fassbinder in particular), and in British drama with Stoppard and Caryl Churchill, among others. Far from being revolutionary today, in the age of MTV, the Simpsons, and Beavis and Butthead, what was once alienating in Brechtian theater has become a staple of the culture of consumption. 22 In this ideological conjuncture, then, the truly Brechtian project may just be the reinvention of realism, in the theater certainly, but more importantly in film and video, the dominant media of late-capitalist culture. Not Quentin Tarentino or David Lynch, but Ken Loach and Mike Leigh--the latter are the authentic Brechtians of this moment, the ostensible conventionality of their films notwith- standing. 23 But that would be the subject for another paper, one in which the matter of art is more programmatically linked to the project of revolutionary politics. The latter is still very much on the agenda, however distant the horizon of its realization may seem just now.
NOTES
This essay is a substantially emended version of a paper delivered at the "Culture and Materiality" conference held at the University of California at Davis April 23-25, 1998. The original included lengthy exegeses of texts by Brecht, Althusser, and Benjamin that are of marginal interest in the present context of Paul de Man's later writings on aesthetics and ideology. To conform better to the occasion, I have omitted this other material and expanded the section that directly addresses de Man's writings.
1. Louis Althusser, "A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre? Daspre," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 222-23; hereafter, cited parenthetically as LP. The French original was first published in La Nouvelle Critique 175 (April 1966). I cite from the text as it appears in Louis Althusser, E? crits philosophiques et politiques, vol. 2 (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995), 561; hereafter, EPP. I have occasionally modified the standard English translations of Althusser.
2. Stefano Rosso, "An Interview with Paul de Man," in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 121.
3. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 56; hereafter cited parenthetically as AI.
4. On Locke's (unsuccessful) attempt to discipline language and subject it to rational principles, to eliminate the abuses to which it is put in discourses of eloquence (namely, rhetoric), see de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," in AI, 35- 42.
5. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 1986), 11; cited by Warminski in his Introduction to AI, 8.
6. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in LP 162; in French, "Ide? ologie et appareils ide? ologiques
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d'E? tat," in Sur la reproduction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 296; hereafter SR.
7. The phrase "en sujets" is characteristically rendered "as subjects," but it might better be translated "into subjects," namely, into subjectivity. Ideology takes that which is not a subject (individuals) and subjectifies (or subjectivates) them, al- though it should be said that the ubiquity of ideology makes it impossible to con- ceive anything like a (nonideological) nonsubject; hence, Althusser's scandalous as- sertion that "individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects [en sujets], which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects" (LP 176; SR 306-7).
8. At least one other commentator on de Man has drawn a similar comparison between the Althusserian concept of ideology and de Man's account of tropes; see Andrzej Warminski's Introduction to Aesthetic Ideology, 9-12. Warminski takes up the relationship between de Man's extant texts and The German Ideology in his "Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man's Historical Materialism)," in Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Decon- structive Writing, ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (New Brunswick, N. J. : Rutgers University Press, 1995), 11-41.
9. Cf. the following: "The point is that the neoclassical trust in the power of imi- tation to draw sharp and decisive borderlines between reality and imitation . . . depends in the last analysis, on an equally sharp ability to distinguish the work of art from reality. . . . The theoretical problem [of the aesthetic], however, has been dis- placed [between its original formulation by Schiller and its presentation in Kleist's apologue "U? ber das Marionettentheater"]: from the specular model of the text as imitation, we have moved on to the question of reading as the necessity to decide be- tween signified and referent, between violence on the stage and violence in the streets" (Paul de Man, "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's U? ber das Marionettentheater," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], 280).
10. Cf. de Man: "the political power of the aesthetic, the measure of its impact on reality, necessarily travels by way of its didactic manifestations. The politics of the state are the politics of education" (ibid. , 273)--a formulation that Plato would have heartily endorsed.
11. As de Man elsewhere observes: "Thus Kant would have forever ended the play of philosophy, let alone art, if the project of transcendental philosophy had succeeded in determining once and forever the limits of our faculties and of our freedom" (ibid. , 283). Notoriously, Kant's project was a failure, the principal evi- dence for which is the Critique of Judgment itself, the text to which de Man turns to disclose this other Kant.
12. In the discussion following her own presentation, Judith Butler contested this formulation, asserting that in this instance materialism for Kant (and presum- ably for de Man as well) was not a concept at all. That there could be something like a "materiality without materialism" (as Jacques Derrida perspicuously put it in his paper), I would not wish to deny. But to the extent that Kant is attempting in the passage cited to define a representational modality ("seeing as the poets do it") and thereby to make it available to the understanding, what he writes necessarily pos- sesses a conceptual dimension, or else it would not be readable at all. Materiality (that to which Kant refers or that which he posits) may not be conceptual, but a
theory (the mode of Kant's referring or positing) of the materiality of art, of seeing "as the poets do it," cannot do without concepts, empty or not. This is the same, ele- mentary, distinction insisted upon by Althusser between the "real-concrete" and the "concrete-in-thought"; see the latter's "On the Materialist Dialectic: On the Unevenness of Origins," in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (1969; rpt. London: NLB, 1977), 188-89.
13. Even famous limit cases like John Cage's performances of silence require the appearance of the composer/performer on stage sitting motionless for a certain number of minutes before the piano. The silence requires this minimal phenomenali- zation for the composition to be realized. The point is evident in the passage on the sublime from Kant's third Critique cited by de Man, but it is slightly obscured in de Man's translation. The standard English rendering discloses the necessity for even the most rigorously anti-aesthetic practice to exhibit itself in phenomenal form: "we must regard [the sublime], just as we see it [bloss wie man ihn sieht], as a dis- tant, all-embracing, vault. Only under such a representation can we ranage that sublimity which a pure aesthetical judgment ascribes to this object" (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard [New York: Hafner, 1951], 110; quoted from Rodolphe Gasche? , The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998], 101).
14. This is the burden of Gasche? 's exposition of de Man's theory of reading; see especially chapter 3, "Apathetic Formalism," in The Wild Card of Reading, 90-113. 15. Gasche? discusses de Man's anti-Hegelian, that is, anti-aesthetic, theory of reading in relation to the passage from Hegel's Aesthetics on silent reading in ibid. ,
115-16.
16. One of the anonymous referees who evaluated the present volume for the
University of Minnesota Press took my essay to task for "its old-fashioned com- paratist strategy," characterized by its "presentation of 'parallels' between the work of de Man and Louis Althusser," and for failing (in contrast to Ernesto Laclau's contribution) "to demonstrate how de Man can help us to read history and politics. " The reader also complained that my paper "lack[s a] conclusion" but "'concludes' with a discussion of Brecht that fully 'forgets' de Man. " I would have thought that the point of the pages that follow is clear: to contrast Althusser's ex- ploration of the political and ideological effects of artworks and to show how it cashes out de Man's provocative, but practically underdeveloped, assertions. That I have recourse to the example of Brecht to illustrate Althusserian theory is hardly fortuitous. I do not so much "forget" de Man as I suggest that his critique of aes- thetics culminates in a gesture toward art's politicality, rather than in any determi- nate politics of art. My aim is therefore quite different from that ascribed to Laclau's text: it is not "to demonstrate how de Man can help us to read history and politics," but rather, to examine the potential for and the limits of a political prac- tice of art. These are not, in my view, de Manian questions; hence, my turn away from de Man at the end.
17. Warminski, "Ending Up/Taking Back," 34.
18. Louis Althusser, Sur la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 45; my trans- lation. On the continuity between the early Althusserian concept of the overdeter- mined conjuncture and the later program to develop an "aleatory materialism," see Gregory Elliott, "Ghostlier Demarcations: On the Posthumous Edition of Althusser's
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Writings," Radical Philosophy 90 (July-August 1998): 27-28. That there may be a deeper theoretical affinity between Althusser and de Man connecting the former's "aleatory materialism" with what Gasche? identifies as de Man's object of defining the "absolutely singular," an affinity that would involve their respective commit- ments to nominalism (noted by Fredric Jameson in the case of de Man, and by Warren Montag in the case of Althusser), is a topic requiring detailed examination of the entire corpus of both thinkers. Such a project clearly exceeds the scope of the present occasion, which is devoted to a more restricted inquiry into the relation of aesthetics to ideology, and to the political effects of art.
19. Althusser explicitly rejects the Enlightenment concept of ideology in the ISAs; see LP 163-64.
20. The claim is argued more fully by Fredric Jameson in Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 1998). See also, inter alia, Michael Patterson, "Brecht's Legacy," in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, ed. Peter Thompson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 273-87; and the essays by John Willett (on Brecht's reception in Britain), Bernard Dort (on Brecht in France), Karen Laughlin (on Brecht's assimilation by American feminist playwrights), Renate Mo?