In The Aftermath of Art

In the Aftermath of Art
DONALD PREZIOSI’S LATEST COLLECTION OF ESSAYS,

In the Aftermath of Art, explores multiple per-
spectives on the enduring foundational dilem-
mas of art history, art criticism, and museology.
By juxtaposing issues and problems originally

addressed sequentially, the collection aims to
open up multiple interpretative possibilities by bringing to the surface hidden resonances in the
implications of each text. It presents a model of reading, re-reading and radical re-collection inspired
by the methods of Walter Benjamin in his posthumously published ‘Arcades Project’. In so doing, and
in re-reading his own writings, Preziosi opens up alternatives to the paradigms of critical interpreta-
tion haunting the contemporary discourses on art history and visual culture. A critical commentary
by critic, historian, and theorist Johanne Lamoureux complements the author’s own introduction,
providing a stereoscopic perspective not entirely distinct from the collection itself.
Donald Preziosi received his Ph.D in Art History from Harvard University. He is a member of
the faculty of the Department of the History of Art and Centre for Visual Studies at Oxford
University, and Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA). He is the author of a dozen books on aspects of critical and cultural theory, the
historiography of art history, and museology, most recently Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art,
Museums and the Phantasms of Modernity, the 2001 Slade Lecture in the Fine Arts at Oxford
(2003), and, with Claire Farago, Grasping the World: the Idea of the Museum (2004).
Johanne Lamoureux is Johanne Lamoureux is Full Professor and Chair of the department of Art
History and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal. From 1998 to 2003, she was also guest
curator at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec where she curated Irene F. Whittome.
Bio-Fictions (2000) and Doublures. Vêtements de l’art contemporain (2003). She is the author
of L’art insituable. De l’in situ et autres sites (2001), a collection of her essays on the sequels of
site specific art and the rhetoric of museum displays. In English, her essays figure in Theater
Bestiarum (MIT), Sightlines/Réfractions (Artexte), Thinking About Exhibitions (Routledge),
Anyplace (MIT) and The Companion to Contemporary Art after 1945 (Blackwell).
Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture
Edited by Saul Ostrow
Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context

Essays by Stephen Melville. Edited and introduced by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Capacity: History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism
Essays by Thomas McEvilley. Commentary by G. Roger Denson
Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication

Essays by Marshall McLuhan. Edited and with a Commentary by Michel A. Moos
Literature, Media, Information Systems
Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler. Edited and introduced by John Johnston
England and its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste

Essays by John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Adrian Stokes. Commentary by David
Carrier
The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste

Essays by Arthur C. Danto
Selected and with a critical introduction by Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn
Beauty is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design

Edited and introduced by Richard Roth and Susan King Roth
Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic

Edited and introduced by Adam Krims, with Commentary by Henry
Klumpenhouwer
Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page

Essays by Douglas Dunn, Marjorie Gamso, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Kenneth
King, Yvonne Meier, and Sarah Skaggs. Text and Commentary by Elena
Alexander, and with a foreword by Jill Johnston
Difference/Indifference: Meetings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and

John Cage
Introduction and text by Moira Roth. Commentary by Jonathan D. Katz
Art History as Cultural History: Warburg's Projects

Essays by Kathryn Brush, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Peg Katritsky, Kristen
Lippincott, Dorothea McEwan, Matthew Rampley, Charlotte Schoell-Glass and
Aby Warburg. Edited by Richard Woodfield
Critical Vices: The Myths of Postmodern Theory

Essays by Nicholas Zurbrugg, and Commentary by Warren Burt
Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work

Essays by Richard Woodfield
Practice: Architecture, Technique, and Representation

Essays by Stan Allen, and Commentary by Diana Agrest
Looking In: The Art of Viewing
Essays by Mieke Bal, and Commentary by Norman Bryson
Music Inside Out: Going Too Far in Musical Essays

Essays by John Rahn, and Commentary by Benjamin Boretz
Looking Back to the Future: 1990–1970

Essays by Griselda Pollock, and Commentary by Penny Florence
Information Subject
Essays by Mark Poster, and Commentary by Stanley Aronowit
Art and Ventriloquism

Essays by David Goldblatt, and Commentary by Garry L. Hagberg
In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics

Essays by Donald Preziosi, and Critical Commentary by Johanne Lamoureux
Forthcoming titles:
Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic
Essays by Lawrence Alloway, and Commentary by Richard Kalina
The Idealized Body: Theories and Improvement in Art and Science

Essays by Sir Francis Galton, and Commentary by Kirby Gookin
Art After Ideology

Essays by Sidney Tillim, and Commentary by Katy Siegel
donald
preziosi
in the
aftermath
of art
ethics, aesthetics,
politics
critical
commentary
johanne
lamoureux
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2006 Donald Preziosi
Typeset in Minion by Taylor & Francis Books

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or here-
after invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage
or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Preziosi, Donald, 1941-
In the aftermath of art : ethics, aesthetics, politics / Donald Preziosi ;
critical commentary, Johanne Lamoureux.
p. cm. -- (Critical voices in art, theory and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-36230-X (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-415-36231-8
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Art--Historiography. 2. Art museums--Philosophy.
I. Lamoureux, Johanne. II. Title. III. Series.
N7480.P74 2005
707.2'2--dc22
2005028276
ISBN10: 0-415-36230–X (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-36231-8 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-36230-6 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-36231-3 (pbk)
Taylor & Francis Group is the Academic Division of T&F Informa plc.
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface viii

Acknowledgements xii
Introduction: Subjects, objects

and object lessons 1
1. La vi(ll)e en rose: reading

Jameson mapping space 7
2. The question of art history 29
3. Collecting/museums 55
4. The art of Art History 69
5. The crystalline veil and the

phallomorphic imaginary 95
6. Romulus, Rebus, and the gaze

of Victoria 115
7. Seeing through art history:

showing scars of legibility by
Johanne Lamoureux 131
Index 155
Series Editor’s Preface
THOUGH IT APPEARS FIRST IN THIS VOLUME,

the Introduction is actually the third
introduction to this collection of
texts by Donald Preziosi. Johanne
Lamoureux was asked to write a criti-
cal commentary to accompany the essays that were originally to constitute this edi-
tion in Chapter 7. The second introduction is Preziosi’s own, in which he explains
how this volume has conceptually changed since he was first asked in 1998 to partic-
ipate in the Critical Voices Series. As for my own introduction, as Editor of this series
it is my task now to try to give a brief account of how his work reflects the philosoph-
ical crisis and self-critical resurrection of the practice of Art History.
Since its inception in the mid eighteenth century, art historians have been claiming
that their primary goal is to be objective investigators and observers. Their texts were to
illuminate with insightful analysis the nature of art by elucidating its content, context,
and influence. Insights into genealogy, iconography, the artist’s life and psychopatholo-
gy as well as the socio-political conditions under which the artwork came to be produced
became essential components of such accounts. The countering view has been that Art
History like all histories is an ideological illusion, an imagined entity used to create a
sense of logic and purpose where there is none. In other words by imposing a hierarchy
of social values historians give order to what might otherwise be arbitrary, discontinu-
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE {IX}
ous cultural products. The central problem, regardless of which perspective one upholds,
is that in writing such accounts inevitably what one proposes creates the illusion that
what is being presented is merely a recounting, or recollecting of the facts that make up
our past. As such, history makes what is being presented appear as if it were objective and
neutral, and is true and therefore unavoidable. Consequently, the faithful argued among
themselves as to what the best methodology to achieve their objectives might be.
Explicitly the purpose of such debates, of course, is to produce an ever more truthful
chronicle of Art’s progress; implicitly they constitute a form of validation.
While there is always someone in such circumstances committed to exposing the
fraudulent or denouncing the institutional, in bringing low the old gods, they tend
to hang their hopes on new messiahs offering a counter methodology that is sup-
posed to be truer, or more accurate. In the case of recent art historical practices this
was the New Art History and its project was to reintegrate art into the social and
political. However, it was just a new faith that left the terms and practices embed-
ded in the old faith in place. Its failing was that. Art historians found that, even if
they focused on art’s political or social function rather than its aesthetic one, in
order to dismantle art’s erratic, fetishistic and cultist models. Yet, by arguing against
such a model of art, they also found themselves arguing against their own role as
mediators and interpreters of art’s history. As such the practices of art history,
unless they could re-orientate themselves, appeared destined to be a fetter on those
critical practices intent on reordering culture in its entirety. Theory appeared as if
it could dissolve the problematic heterogeneity that under the reign of modernism
had stymied the historians’ attempts to define a practice that could establish with
competency its hegemony over art.
While how best to tickle the required data from mute objects has often been
defined and redefined, more often than not self-reflexivity has seldom been an issue.
Then came the ‘End Days’ of the late 1980s, which were marked by the doctrine that
Modernism’s own institutional and instrumental logic had become a fetter on its own
self-reflective analysis and as such could no longer be sustained. With the rise of mass
media, the collapse of cold war ideologies, the failure of the Modernists’ project and
the emergence of Postmodernism, we came to believe that we were on our way to
achieving a state of self-determination and self-definition after almost two and a half
centuries of consistently testing and reforming our systems of taxonomy and reason.
It was proposed that History had come to its end, at least in the Hegelian sense, which
meant that the record of necessity was no longer necessary because we had self-reflex-
ively gained ascendancy over language and thought.
{X} SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
Due to our old habits of thought with the end of history, the future and the past
also had ended, and it was imagined we would now live in a constant present, that was
static and unchanging. Promoted in the most vernacular of terms the end came to be
celebrated by the liberal left who saw this as individually liberating. However, it was
the conservative right with its vested interest in the status quo that embraced this
view most strongly. A view that validated the very system of thought, practices and
institutions that had set into motion the dream of the ‘End’ by vanquishing the prom-
ise that history would show us the way beyond. The claim was made that if History
was an ideological construct, an imagined entity, then all other master narratives were
to be viewed as such as well. In the case of art, this was manifested by an infatuation
with the negation of the notion of originality by means of the appropriation of his-
torical styles as a way to counter the modernist notion of authorship and authentici-
ty. This left those committed to a more radical and critical position in a fuzzy unde-
fined present in which there was no other recourse than that of paradox and irony.
Critics and historians responded to this situation introspectively by contextualiz-
ing it politically, and historically by addressing its philosophical implications. This
condition, it was determined, while marking the terminus of the modernist project,
inaugurated the beginning of another that required new methodologies and subjects.
This response found its expression in the founding of a ‘new’ discipline, the study of
visual culture, which was openly committed to interpretation rather than historical
reconstruction. Yet, such reformations returned art history to its root in archaeology,
for it necessitated an awareness of the varied impulses that within a given society
inform its conception of visual communication and the styles both high and low by
which it is manifested.
The emergence of Visual and Cultural Studies’ multi-disciplinary approach has
contributed to the recuperation of such marginalized and maligned figures as Alois
Riegl and Abby Warburg. These revivals have been initiated with the intent of estab-
lishing methodological as well as conceptual antecedents that may serve as correctives
for the tendency toward subjectivism, arbitrariness and abstraction that appears to
have become endemic to modernist practices of interpretation and criticism.
Although no singular practice or discipline actually governed art history, this situa-
tion had resulted in the object or artist under analysis becoming little more than a
sign of its exegeses – and the diverse structure of references and sources that consti-
tute its contents dissolving into overtly academic, ideological or essentialist accounts.
On occasion, in a less grandiose though no less polemical manner, someone
begins to rethink not the faith, but its terms and practices, and what these encompass
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE {XI}
and circumscribe. Among these was Donald Preziosi who raised his voice not to
denounce Art History, but to reform art history by analysing what it does. What he
did was to step back from his own practice as a historian and to take as his task the
exposure of the implicit content of those terms and conditions that had come to cir-
cumscribe art history’s logic and practices. So rather than reforming or abandoning
art history he took as his subject the history of art history. By addressing how the
existing system of thought affected our conception of art and our formulation of the
present, he distinguished art’s subject and object as two distinct qualities, recasting
Art History and Art as each existing as a causal chain in and of itself within the con-
text of their respective disciplines: each, in turn, giving rise to its own discourses such
as theory and criticism. As such, history comes to frame the studio, the museum, and
the classroom as a productive force informing and forming, that which comes to be
made and commented on. This raises questions about whether historians are still
engaged with art or whether they are merely commenting on previous texts. Based on
this premise, Preziosi has continued to generate an exegesis of what may, and may
not, be said about art history, and its cultural consequences.
Placed side by side the texts collected here may be assembled into a causal chain
that can create an illusionary vision of Preziosi’s development and progress. The irony
of this is, of course, that having ripped these texts from what might be the continu-
um of his thought, Preziosi challenges the critical reader to assemble this assortment
of artifacts into something more than a history of his thought. In his introduction he
tells us that we may read each text as the context for every other one. In doing this, he
suspects that we will generate new interpretations and unintended contents. In this
manner he places us in a position similar to his own as a historian; we are asked to
speculate and interrogate our subject. I suspect that this is one of the object lessons
of this collection. The other is learned from Preziosi’s own practice. It is that either
those who use history prescriptively or prohibitively are consciously or unconscious-
ly committing themselves to restricting the role that art and thought play in our social
and cultural development. Given that art, art history, and its institutions have signif-
icantly changed, and their subjects and objects have considerably broadened, what
remains to be learned is the still unlearned lesson of the dangers of negation, essen-
tialism, and reification. If we are to follow Preziosi’s example, awareness is an impor-
tant aspect of the task of revising and recasting art history, or history of any kind for
that matter, along the lines of a discursive model.
Saul Ostrow
Acknowledgements
1 Preziosi, Donald, ‘La Vi(ll)e en Rose: Reading Jameson Mapping Space’ in

Strategies, 1, 1988. Reproduced by permission of the author.
2 Preziosi, Donald, ‘The Question of Art History’ in Critical Inquiry, 18.2, 1992.
Reproduced with permission.
3 Preziosi, Donald, ‘Collecting/Museums’, from R. Nelson and R. Schiff (eds),
Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Reproduced with permission.
4 Preziosi, Donald, ‘The Art of Art History’, from Donald Preziosi (ed.), The Art of
Art History, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Reproduced
with permission.
5 Preziosi, Donald, ‘The Crystalline Veil and the Phallomorphic Imaginary’ in De-,
Dis-, Ex-, London: Routledge, 1999. Reproduced with permission.
6 Preziosi, Donald, ‘Romulus, Rebus, and the Gaze of Victoria’, from Donald
Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Museums and Phantasms of Modernity,
Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2003. Reproduced with
permission.
Introduction:
Subjects, objects and
object-lessons
Clear meaning … does not

pre-exist ideological obscuri-
ty, and there is no ‘truth’ with-
out a labor of transformation.
Clarity comes only in the moment of the after-effect [après-
coup] and is attained, not through the resolution of theoretical
contradictions, but through a practical revolution. The camera
obscura is never set right by a camera lucida.
Sarah Kofman, Camera Lucida 1973: 19
This book is a ‘collection’ of texts in the root meaning of the word: a reading
together of a half-dozen essays written over the past dozen years for disparate
purposes and for different audiences in several countries. It is intended to
afford the possibility of re-articulating and understanding otherwise the var-
ious issues and problems originally raised by each by their very juxtaposition
in this space, so that by this rendering of simultaneous texts produced sequen-
tially, they may be seen to generate hidden resonances; multiplied and com-
pounded senses, problematizing the simple pieties of time, space, subjectivity,
genealogy, chronology, and teleology. Looking backwards at these essays now
brought into the same frame reveals not only unintended consequences and
{2} INTRODUCTION
implications but the inevitable reciprocity of ‘past’ and ‘future’ constituting

the ‘present’ as the artifact and effect of memory and desire. This ‘labor of
transformation’, to repeat Sarah Kofman’s words, presses upon both of us.
So where in all this am I as the collection’s author and composer? One is
never ‘present’ except historically; one’s subject position is always anamor-
phic; the effect of a triangulation. While it is not uncommonly believed that
one lives life in a ‘forward’ direction, but only understands that life in the
reverse order – ‘backwards’ and by hindsight – in fact there is no clear demar-
cation between the two. The life led is invariably lived in the projected and
anticipatory light of what its sense shall have been for what it (and its sub-
ject) are in the process of becoming. The future as the fulfilment of a lost,
obscured, or repressed (forgotten) past through the medium of the subject in
(as) the ‘present’. This problematic of anamorphism, that is, of ‘modernity’ as
a structural and topological problem which transcends historical time and
cultural chronology, is part of what these essays may be seen to be ‘about’
now, even where they might ostensibly have been speaking of other things.
The collected texts, in being ‘collected’ now, enact a looking askance at struc-
tural oppositions and disciplinary polarities masking the ethical content and
import of our practice. Which is not to say that this wasn’t said originally,
sometimes in the same words, in parts of these essays.
‘Introducing’ now the senses one has made in the past of various issues,
problems, dilemmas and conundrums, not simply surrounding but central-
ly defining the idea of art as radically unconceptualizable, is an especially
fraught task, suggesting a practice that might well be named historical fic-
tion; novelistic romance, or the adventures of certain desires over time and
space. The essays may be read together here and now as episodes in a narra-
tive; the story, it might be claimed, of the unfolding and maturing of the
writer’s sense of an issue or set of related (juxtaposed) problems and themes.
But it will become evident as you labour through these texts that the com-
plex and diverse trajectories represented here ‘add up’ to more than a small
bible of begatting; of one thing after (and because of) another. By hindsight
(that is, now), these texts are siblings of each other, no longer descendants.
But why, you may well ask, put all these texts together if not to delineate a
‘development’; if not to cause you to infer the existence of a particular intel-
lectual trajectory, a curriculum vitae, a set of premises latent in a (reconstitut-
ed) episode chain? This curriculum may very well be ‘in’ the chain of texts.
INTRODUCTION {3}
But chronology as genealogy as teleology is at the same time the central ide-
ology called into question by this experiment in collecting; this attempt to
cause the items in the collection to produce harmonic resonances.
In purporting to stand apart from what is being introduced, introductions
provide synoptic ‘overviews’ of the complex intellectual space or mental land-
scape of that material, giving the reader clues as to what to pay attention to
without losing one’s way (intro-duction: a leading or drawing into or within).
This entails the casting-forward for the reader of landmarks, spoors, threads,
or highlights to mark a secure or sanctioned or efficient way of working
through the space(s) of material. In this manner they are also commonly held
to assume a privileged perspective on the items in the collection, being written,
after all, by (and having the ‘authority’ and ‘voice’ of) the same person who is
identified as author of the texts. But this author is as much a reader as you are,
and perhaps just as bemused and challenged by what has been written.
The assumptions underlying the belief in a privileged viewpoint or eye are
profound indeed, resonating with not a few fundamental beliefs about the
nature of everything from authorship to subjectivity to the relationship
between an author or producer and a person’s products and effects. It
assumes, for example, that the author’s ‘take’ on what the author wrote is
closer to the ‘truth’ of what was written. The idea of ‘the man and/as his
work’; of deep homologies between you and your stuff, is the great undying
ideology/theology of our interminable modernity.
Where is the ‘critical voice’ in a book published as one of a series present-
ing ‘Critical Voices’ in art history, and visual and cultural studies? This intro-
duction is not the only set of remarks appended to and framing the collec-
tion; it is complemented by an invited ‘critical commentary’ by Canadian art
critic, historian, and theorist Johanne Lamoureux, written when the emerg-
ing collection was tentatively titled ‘Seeing through Art History’ or ‘No Art,
no History’. My introduction is another ‘critical commentary’, as hers is
another ‘introduction’ to the texts collected here between us, and no less true
or false. It is best to consider these two introductions or commentaries as
making up a stereoscopic perspective on the collection from vantage points
not entirely distinct from the collection itself.
To conclude, then, this book consists of texts I’ve chosen for their poten-
tial in generating sense not literally present or implied in any individual
essay. These are texts meant to be constru(ct)ed both in tandem and seriatim,
{4} INTRODUCTION
and in particular by (y)our rearrangements of them, engendering connec-

tions and conjunctions suggestive of new possibilities for construing the
ideas and propositions mooted therein. There is no necessary order in which
the essays are to be read. They are printed chronologically and may be under-
stood developmentally or ‘historically’: useful knowledge, perhaps, but not
necessarily primary. Begin with any text and work in either (printed) direc-
tion. The essays collected here may be read as facets of an ongoing investiga-
tion into the mission central to our modernities, and the raison d’être of art
as such in modernity, of demarcating and keeping distinct, and uncontami-
nated by its ‘opposite’, the idea of the ‘subject’ and the idea of the ‘object’.
The idea that art has or should have a ‘history’, a ‘theory’, and a ‘critique’
is of course a corollary of this, and is itself a product of the notion that the
sum of all that is palpable is the artifact of an Artificer distinct from its arti-
fact-world: the very ‘object-lesson’ of this keeping-at-arm’s-length what we
continue to distinguish and oppose as ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’.
Some background to the essays

The earliest piece, ‘La vi(ll)e en rose: reading Jameson mapping space’ (1988),
was written as a review for what at the time was a new critical theory jour-
nal, Strategies, started by a consortium of graduate students and faculty in
history, art history, film, comparative literature, and theatre at UCLA,
intended to engage with critically timely texts and ideas. The catalyst for this
text was the rampant and notorious obtuseness of cultural critic and literary
theorist Fredric Jameson with respect to nonverbal cultural phenomena
(such as art, architecture and urban planning) particularly evident in texts
such as The Political Unconscious (1981) and subsequent essays (such as the
text ‘Cognitive Mapping’ specifically critiqued here). It is also reprinted in a
2003 volume of collected essays from Strategies entitled Strategies for Theory:
From Marx to Madonna, edited by R. L.Rutsky and Bradley J. Macdonald.
The second essay, ‘The Question of Art History’, first published in 1992,
was commissioned by the journal Critical Inquiry as one of a series of inves-
tigative studies of the nature of evidence and proof in various disciplines.
After all of these essays were published over a period of a year and a half, the
journal’s editors held a conference at the University of Chicago at which
commentators in various fields presented critiques of (‘responses’ to) each
essay in their field, followed by a ‘rejoinder’ by the original author. The orig-
INTRODUCTION {5}
inal essay, the response, and the rejoinder were then published in 1994 as a
book called Questions of Evidence. The discussions at the conference were at
times especially vigorous, and the view of the history of art history developed
in this essay was at that time still seen as radically heterodox, particularly
amongst historians and literary scholars present.
The third essay, ‘Collecting/museums’ (1996), was commissioned for the
volume Critical Terms for Art History published by the University of Chicago
Press, and modelled after a similarly named and widely read recent volume
devoted to literary theory. A quick perusal of the essay will show a certain
impatience with the given categories and the distinctions between the ‘terms’
naturalized by the book’s organization; it is written in ‘centripetal’ fashion,
with the term ‘history’ the outermost shell containing within the term ‘art’,
within which in turn was embedded the term ‘subject’, all of which surround
the notion of artifice or ‘stage/craft’. All this in aid of a meditation/critique of
distinctions between art history and museology. One reads into, through,
and out of the embedded ‘terms’.
The next piece, ‘The art of Art History’ (1998), appeared as the concluding
essay in the critical anthology of the same name published by Oxford
University Press, and marketed widely as an introduction to the history, the-
ory, and criticism of the academic field of art history. This essay was written
to put into perspective the three dozen texts collected in the book; primary
and secondary sources from various periods in the history of the field and
grouped under about half a dozen themes (‘History’, ‘Style’, ‘Iconography’,
‘Gender’, ‘Aesthetics’, etc.). It was a counterpoint in the anthology to my gen-
eral introductory essay at the beginning, and it delineated a topological model
of the relationships among three principal themes running through the histo-
ry of the discipline, personified by the names Winckelmann, Kant, and Hegel.
The fifth essay, ‘The crystalline veil and the phallomorphic imaginary’
(1999), began as an invited lecture at a conference in London on Walter
Benjamin and the visual arts and museology, sponsored by and published in
the journal De-, Dis-, Ex-. It echoes other versions of papers given at confer-
ences in Los Angeles, New York, and London that year. Parts of the subject
matter (the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London, and
four museums in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, founded in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century) were incorporated into two of the Slade Lectures I
gave at Oxford in 2001.
{6} INTRODUCTION
The last essay, ‘Romulus, Rebus, and the gaze of Victoria’ (2001) reprints
the fourth of the eight Oxford Slade Lectures, and now also appears as the
fourth chapter of the book Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums and the
Phantasms of Modernity, the 2003 publication of those lectures. It depicts
experiences and discoveries at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington and the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens, and, in reflecting
on issues of time, identity, and artifice, articulates a perspective on the study
of art and its ‘history’ addressed to and building upon issues raised by
Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever (1996) and by Walter Benjamin in
various writings on art, museums, collecting, and the project for a material-
ist philosophy of history.
La vi(ll)e en rose
Reading Jameson map-
1
ping space
Is it not possible that the

doctrine of ‘History’, so ardu-
ously cultivated by the Western
tradition of thought since the
Greeks as an instrument for
releasing human consciousness from the constraints of the
Archaic age, is ready for retirement along with the ‘politics’
that it helped to enable? And could not the death of ‘History’,
politics, and narrative all be aspects of another great transfor-
mation, similar in scope and effect to that which marked the
break with Archaism begun by the Greeks? Marx thought
that the Communist revolution would release humankind
from the conditions of pseudo-historical existence, and usher
in a genuinely historical one. The problem may be not how to
get into history, but how to get out of It. And in this respect,
modernism in the arts may be…an impulse to get beyond the
myth–history distinction, which has served as the theoretical
basis for a politics that has outlived its usefulness, and into a
post-political age insofar as ‘politics’ is conceived in its nine-
teenth-century incarnations.
Hayden White, ‘Getting Out of History’1
{8} READING JAMESON MAPPING SPACE
You will therefore note in passing that a certain unifying and

totalizing force is presupposed here – although it is not the
Hegelian Absolute Spirit, nor the Party, nor Stalin, but simply
Capital Itself; and it is on the strength of such a view that a
radical Jesuit friend of mine once publicly accused me of
monotheism.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’2
Beginning with the founding of the journal Social Text in 1979 and the publi-
cation of his The Political Unconscious (hereafter PU) in 1981,3 Fredric Jameson
has increasingly argued for a certain subsumption of contemporary critical
theory into an extended, absolute horizon of a ‘new’ Marxist hermeneutics
which would frame the former as second-order critique(s) capable (despite all
appearances to the contrary) of being rescued and reoriented in the service of
the latter. Like a referee on the Homeric battlefield of contesting poststruc-
turalist players, Jameson would like to blow his whistle on all those ‘great
themes and shibboleths of post-Marxism’; it is time, he has argued, for us to
leave the field and come home to the long nightmare of History and the
untranscendable Real(ities) waiting impatiently on the sidelines.
Jameson himself is clearly not unaware that the turn he has taken in
recent years has caused a certain amount of astonishment:
in a Marxist conference in which I have frequently had the feeling that I am one
of the few Marxists left (like some antediluvian species momentarily spared the
extinction of the postmodern) – I take it I have a certain responsibility to restate
what seem to me to be a few self-evident truths, but which may seem to you
some quaint survivals of a religious, millenarian, salvational form of belief.4
Enough has been written elsewhere over the past seven years about
Jameson’s Utopian and totalizing resolutions as Imaginary wish-fulfilments
of resounding religiosity to require little comment here,5 except perhaps to
observe in passing that his revised agendas for history and criticism may well
comprise a stunning (and to not a few, a surprising) example of plain old-
fashioned countertransference, a case of the analyst losing his place amidst
the scenographies generated by his analysand.6 The Jameson of the 1980s, as
someone noted recently, seems fully in tune with the Age of Reagan.
There may now perhaps be a certain distance from the critical astonish-
ments greeting PU in the early 1980s, as well as from Jameson’s reactions to
that astonishment, to begin to assess what has happened with some degree of
READING JAMESON MAPPING SPACE {9}
circumspection. While a full-scale reassessment is beyond the scope of these

pages, a beginning might be made by addressing some of the consequences
of his ‘new’ agendas for history and criticism. I will focus here on some of
Jameson’s work in the mid-1980s on the question of postmodernism by
attending closely to a theme increasingly foregrounded in the writings: the
question of space – the space of the city, or, as Jameson has put it, the
hyperspace of the (postmodern) city.7
La vi[ll]e en rose
Although Jameson has written a good deal about various arts under modernism
and postmodernism, it is clearly architecture which occupies a privileged place
in his recent lectures and essays on the relationships he has projected between
post-industrial, ‘late’, or multinational capitalism and postmodernism:
Architecture is…of all the arts that closest constitutively to the economic, with
which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediat-
ed relationship: it will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flow-
ering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multi-
national business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporane-
ous with it. That these two phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interre-
lationship than simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project we
will try to suggest later on.8
The latter remarks, taken from a celebrated essay of 1984 entitled

‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, prefigure a
lengthy discussion of what Jameson terms a ‘mutation in built space itself’ into
a ‘hyperspace’ of postmodern architecture, an emblem of which he presents
as the 1977 Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, designed by John Portman.
Further on in the same essay he again accords to architecture a primacy of
place in the figuring of postmodernism:
[postmodern texts] afford us some glimpse into a postmodern or technological

sublime, whose power or authenticity is documented by the success of such
works in evoking a whole new postmodern space in emergence around us.
Architecture therefore remains in this sense the privileged aesthetic language; and
the distorting and fragmenting reflections of one enormous glass surface to the
other can be taken as paradigmatic of the central role of process and reproduc-
tion in postmodernist culture.9
Postmodern writing (and painting) afford us only ‘glimpses’ into this

postmodernist ‘sublime’; they merely ‘evoke’ the space of multinational cap-
ital: postmodern building, however, figures that space powerfully, directly, and
paradigmatically. If you want to understand the force and power of multina-
tional capitalism, look at the musculature and sinewy skeleton of contempo-
rary building, which has a ‘virtually unmediated relationship’ to the latter.
It is not enough to merely look, however, and Jameson avers that such
figurations may nonetheless remain opaque for human subjects ‘who hap-
pen into this new space’, for the ‘mutations’ in this (new) object have been
unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent ‘mutation in the subject’. We do
not, he claims, ‘possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyper-
space…in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind
of space I have called the space of high modernism’.10 This postmodern
hyperspace, he asserts, induces us to ‘grow new organs’ and ‘expand our sen-
sorium and our body’.
Leaving aside the question of who precisely ‘we’ might be in all this hyper-
spatial bewilderment, or for that matter just which ‘high modernism’ ‘our’
perceptual habits were formed under, let us press on to consider Jameson’s
‘analysis of a full-blown postmodern building’. Before sketching out that
‘analysis’, however, he takes pains to say that the Bonaventure Hotel is ‘in
many ways uncharacteristic’ of the postmodern architecture of Venturi,
Moore, Craves, or Gehry, yet to his mind nevertheless it ‘offers some very
striking lessons about the originality of postmodern space’.
In the first place, the Bonaventure confirms a claim similar to many
other postmodernist works that it is, in Jameson’s words, a popular or
populist structure in contrast to the elite and ‘Utopian’ austerities of the
great architectural modernisms: it ‘respects the vernacular of the
American city fabric’ and seeks to ‘speak the very language’ of the ‘tawdry
and commercial sign-system of the surrounding city’. It has in fact
‘learned from Las Vegas’.11
However, despite its ‘populist insertion into the city fabric’, the hotel in
fact ‘transcend[s] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself,
to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its
position in a mappable external world’.12
The building accomplishes this generation of confusion in four ways: by
means of
1 the complexities of its multiple entrance systems on several levels: ‘these

curiously unmarked ways-in…[which] seem to have been imposed by
some new category of closure governing the inner space of the hotel
itself ’;
2 escalators and elevators: ‘here the narrative stroll has been underscored,
symbolized, reified, and replaced by a transportation machine which
becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer
allowed to conduct on our own’;
3 the complex shape of the atrium or lobby: ‘it is quite impossible to get
your bearings in this lobby’; ‘hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty
space in such a way as to distract systematically and deliberately from
whatever form it might be supposed to have’; and, the visitor is ‘in this
hyperspace up to [their] eyes and body’;
4 the reflective glass skin or cladding of the building: ‘the glass skin achieves
a peculiar and placeless dissociation of the Bonaventure from its neigh-
borhood’ for on the outside ‘you cannot see the hotel itself, but only the
distorted images of everything that surrounds it’.
Jameson does not mention the hotel rooms themselves in his remarks,
except to observe that ‘one understands that the rooms are in the worst of
taste’,13 nor does he dwell upon the shopping mall boutiques grouped on sev-
eral levels above the central atrium lobby except to note that:
I will take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial mutation the
notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the various balconies: it has been
obvious, since the very opening of the hotel in 1977, that nobody could ever
find any of these stores, and that even if you located the appropriate boutique,
you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a second time; as a consequence,
the commercial tenants are in despair and all the merchandise is marked down
to bargain prices.14
Our analyst finds this all the more remarkable, since one must ‘recall
that Postman [sic] is a businessman as well as an architect, and a million-
aire developer’, an artist who is also ‘a capitalist in his own right’. He notes
laconically that ‘one cannot but feel that here too something of a “return
of the repressed” is involved’.15 All of which leads Jameson to conclude,
finally, that
this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment –
which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of
space craft are to those of the automobile – can itself stand as the symbol and
analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at
least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered commu-
nicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.16
This is all truly astonishing: is he kidding? Is this intended as a hilarious

parody of that lugubrious and vulgar art historicism which fills the pages of
the ‘Art’ or ‘Style’ or ‘Living’ or ‘Entertainment’ section of American newspa-
pers? Is the author simply universalizing his own (non)narrative strolls in the
place during the annual MLA convention held in part at the Bonaventure
shortly before this ‘analysis’ appeared in print? But let us press on, for short-
ly a grim realization will set in that in fact this is no intended parody.
But as I am anxious that Portman’s space not be perceived as something either

exceptional or seemingly marginalized and leisure-specialized on the order of
Disneyland, I would like in passing to juxtapose this complacent and entertain-
ing (although bewildering) leisure-time space with its analogue in a very differ-
ent area, namely the space of postmodern warfare.17
Jameson goes on to discuss and quote at some length a book by Michael

Herr on the Vietnam experience, Dispatches, which, as he claims, opens up
‘the place of a whole new reflexivity’.18 In the machinery of this ‘first post-
modernist war’, ‘something of the mystery of the new postmodernist space is
concentrated’.
His analogy rests in part on his view of the Bonaventure that it is a whole
world in itself: ‘for it does not wish to be part of the city, but rather its equiva-
lent and substitute…the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete
world, a kind of miniature city’, for in his view to this new total space cor-
responds a now collective practice, ‘something like the practice of a new and
historically original kind of hyper-crowd’.19 And corresponding to this new
hyperspace (with its new hyper-crowd) are a certain number of other charac-
teristic postmodern buildings, notably the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the
large Eaton Centre shopping mall in Toronto. And what is a ‘hyper-crowd’?
Jameson’s discussion thus has taken a reverse-turn: where at the begin-
ning the Bonaventure was a popular or populist structure ‘speaking the lan-
guage’ of its ambient urban fabric, now it is seen as its replacement and repu-
diation. The postmodern hyperspatial Bonaventure contrasts with the spaces
of ‘the great monuments of the International Style’ of high modernism – i.e.,
for Jameson, Corbusier’s buildings on pilotis: both are Utopian gestures, but
whereas the latter ‘explicitly repudiates’ a degraded and fallen older (Victorian)
city fabric, the former ‘is content to let the fallen [older] city fabric continue
to be in its being’.20 Moreover, the Bonaventure rises against ‘its referent, Los
Angeles itself ’, which spreads out breathtakingly ‘and even alarmingly’ before
it. (Alarmingly?)
Once again, Jameson insists, we are no longer in a cognitively mappable
position in a mappable external world. This ‘new and virtually unimaginable
quantum leap in technological alienation’ is for him exactly equivalent to the
world of the Vietnam war:
This first terrible postmodern war cannot be told in any of the traditional para-
digms of the war novel or movie – indeed that breakdown of any shared lan-
guage through which a veteran might convey such experience…open[s] up the
place of a whole new reflexivity.21
It is equally consonant with the world of postmodernist writing or paint-

ing, with a brief sketch of which Jameson prefaces his discussions of architec-
ture and war, along lines familiar from some of his other recent essays.22
It is abundantly clear that the chief problem with what he construes as
postmodernism is its ‘unmappability’ for the traditional instruments of
Jameson’s nostalgically Lukácsian perspective: ‘the luxury of the old-fash-
ioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other,
becomes unavailable’. For in its apparent abolishment of critical distance, the
world of the postmodern creates (for Jameson) a dilemma for a certain Left
politics which
has [not] been able to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal
aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside
the massive Being of Capital, which then serves as an Archimedean point from
which to assault this last.23
He reflects that his own analyses of literature, painting, and (above all) archi-
tecture have demonstrated:
that distance in general (including critical distance in particular) has very pre-
cisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism…our new postmod-
ern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically)
incapable of distantiation; meanwhile, it has already been observed how the
prodigious expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and coloniz-
ing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which
offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity.24
Jameson is in effect claiming that the ‘demoralizing and depressing origi-

nal new global space’ is the moment of truth of postmodernism. If there is to
be any hope left for a Marxist or a socialist position in the realities of this ‘new
space’ – any ‘Archimedean point’ as he remarkably puts it25 – then that must
be thought in a manner analogous to (a) Marx’s move vis-à-vis ‘the newly
unified space of the national markets’, or (b) Lenin’s move with respect to
‘the older imperialist global network’.
What could such an Archimedean, panopticist position conceivably be in
a global matrix where ‘critical distance’ is apparently now abolished?
Jameson’s answers turn out to be as problematical as his ‘analyses’ of post-
modernist hyperspace, and its congruent cultural acts are stunningly impres-
sionistic, reductive, and, to perhaps restate the obvious, ahistorical.
The subject in hyperspace
But if society has no form – how can architects build its counterform?
Aldo van Eyck (1966)26
To understand Jameson’s proposals for resolving the dilemmas he has project-

ed, one must turn to the last section of the essay under discussion, along with
a paper presented at the important major conference on Marxism and the
interpretation of culture held at the University of Illinois in 1983 (published
1988).27 The latter paper also appeared in typescript for a conference held the
following winter at Santa Cruz in honour of Henri Lefebvre.28 Also of perti-
nence here is an interesting interview in an international art-market magazine
published in 1987, conducted with Jameson by a Social Text colleague.29
Throughout the above, Jameson is concerned with ‘cognitive mapping’,
and bases his understanding of this on the research of MIT urban planner
Kevin Lynch nearly 30 years ago: the text to which Jameson refers is Lynch’s
famous The Image of the City of 1960. And Jameson’s strategy, or rather his
desire, is to somehow combine and reconcile Lynch’s empirical research with
Althusser’s concept of ideology and its Lacanian under-pinnings.30
Lynch conducted research into the ways in which residents of particular
American cities conceptualized and internally represented their native habi-
tats; in essence he found that individuals develop ‘cognitive maps’ of their
urban environments which enabled them to negotiate, navigate, and concep-
tualize their urban spaces. Classic studies of residents of Boston, Los Angeles,
and Jersey City, Lynch, in Jameson’s words:
taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable
to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which
they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the tra-
ditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives)
obtain, are the most obvious examples.31
Urban alienation is thus taken by Jameson to be ‘directly proportional’ to the

mental unmappability of local cityscapes. He suggests that:
A city like Boston, then, with its monumental perspectives, its markers and mon-
uments, its combination of grand but simple spatial forms, including dramatic
boundaries such as the Charles River, not only allows people to have, in their
imaginations, a generally successful and continuous location to the rest of the
city, but in addition gives them something of the freedom and aesthetic gratifi-
cation of traditional city form.32
Leaving aside for the moment the obvious questions with such a claim (for
whom is a cityscape ‘successful’ – which classes, races, economic or neighbour-
hood or age groups? Or for that matter whether ‘traditional city form[s]’
inevitably evoke ‘freedom and aesthetic gratification’), let us press on. Jameson
does not consider any of the enormous body of research and writing spawned
by or stimulated by the work of Lynch and his colleagues and students since
the early 1960s (and continuing unabated today).33 He simply notes in passing
that The Image of the City ‘spawned a whole low-level subdiscipline (why ‘low-
level’?) that today takes the phrase “cognitive mapping” as its own designation’.
In short, he wishes only to take this research as ‘emblematic’ since ‘the
mental map of city space…can be extrapolated to that map of the social and
global totality we all carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms’.
Jameson’s agenda becomes apparent in his subsequent words:
I have always been struck by the way in which Lynch’s conception of city expe-
rience – the dialectic between the here and now of immediate perception and the
imaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent totality – presents some-
thing like a spatial analogue of Althusser’s great formulation of ideology itself, as
‘the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real con-
ditions of existence’.34
For Jameson, cognitive mapping would involve such extrapolations to ‘the

totality of class relations on a global (or…multinational) scale’. Thus:
the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the anal-

ogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aes-
thetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is an integral part of any socialist polit-
ical project.35
The connection with his analyses of postmodern texts, paintings, and

buildings (such as the Bonaventure) thereby becomes clear, and Jameson
closes his essay as follows: ‘The political form of postmodernism, if there is
any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cogni-
tive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale’.36
And yet he gives us no easy clues as to what this might be; as to what forms
such a ‘new aesthetic of cognitive mapping’ might take (surely not the return
of a repressed social realism?). Instead, he provides us with a suggestive ‘his-
torical’ analogue, one drawn from the evolution of cartography itself. He
suggests earlier in his essay that Lynch’s ‘cognitive maps’ elicited from his
research subjects were really, in effect, pre-cartographic, being essentially
subject-centred itineraries or sketches of existential journeys. These he com-
pares, in his narrative stroll, to the old nautical itineraries or portulan sea-
charts foregrounding coastal features, of the type developed by Mediterranean
navigators who in ancient times seldom ventured out into the open sea.
Next, he observes that the historical introduction of the magnetic compass
utterly transformed the problematic of the itinerary. Together with the sextant
and the theodolite, this new technology introduced a whole new coordinate –
that of a relationship to a uniform totality. At this point, Jameson claims, ‘cog-
nitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of
existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract
conceptions of the geographic totality’.37 Such coordinations, it would appear,
correspond to his earlier observations on ‘the imaginary sense of the city as an
absent totality’. He then goes on to speak of a third age of cartography, ush-
ered in during the last decade of the fifteenth century, by Mercator projection
and the invention of the globe. This ‘third dimension’ of cartography
involved, according to Jameson, a whole new fundamental question of the
languages of representation itself, which now becomes a pressing practical
and empirical problem – the dilemma of the transfer of curved space onto flat
charts. It becomes clear at this time, he asserts, that there can no longer be
‘true maps’ as such. Any map, it might be added, is always already a partial
perspective, co-existing with other perspectives which may or may not be
directly transcodable or in some way compatible.
Obviously, Jameson is projecting here an analogy with his problems with
postmodernist ‘hyperspace’ and its ‘unrepresentability’ as he sees it. Just
before concluding the essay, he notes that:
An aesthetic of cognitive mapping – a pedagogical political culture which seeks

to endow the individual subject with some heightened sense of its place in the
global system – will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex
representational dialectic and to invent radically new forms to do it justice.38
A ‘new political art’, he writes, must hold firm to ‘the truth of postmodernism’
while at the same time achieving a breakthrough to ‘some as yet unimaginable
new mode of representing…in which we may again begin to grasp our position-
ing as individual and collective subjects’ because our inabilities to act or struggle
are at the moment ‘neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion’. It is
not that the new totalities of hyperspatial postmodernism and multinational
capitalism are unknowable: it is that they are ‘unrepresentable’, unmappable.
Jameson presents this as the dilemma of contemporary socialist vision (to
the consternation of some of his colleagues)39 – the problem of repositioning
individual/collective subjects in such a way as to allow for the perspectival
clarity of ‘cognitive mapping’ (of the spatial and the social) without ‘return-
ing to some older kind of machinery…some more traditional and reassuring
perspectival or mimetic enclave’.40
The dilemma of course is Jameson’s own, and is in fact part of a complex
matrix of double-binds informing his work since the publication of The
Political Unconscious. In order to understand more clearly the make-up of

these contradictions and the position Jameson has propelled himself into, we
must begin to consider more explicitly his perspectives on history, periodi-
cization, and signification, all of which are necessarily interrelated.
The subject in [hyper]history

Jameson’s Dilemma is in fact a nexus of intersecting and co-implicative dou-
ble-binds of classic configuration. Consider first the following oft-quoted
passage from PU:
These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold
within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and
symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme – for
Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of
Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished
plot.…It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to
the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental
history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and neces-
sity.41
History is thus a story ‘waiting to be told once and for all, in the one and
only way’.42 Necessity, moreover, is no mere ‘content’, but ‘rather the inex-
orable form of events’. History, then, as the experience of Necessity, is what he
would call that space which includes and comprehends all things. For
Jameson, his version of Marxism is a place coextensive with the space of
History. To arrive in that space, it is necessary to ‘pass through’ texts, and
above all the texts and hyperspaces of postmodernism, in order to grasp the
latter’s ‘absent causes’: their History.
The obvious problem of course is how to distinguish Marxism in
Jameson’s version from ‘ideology’ itself? If we construe ideology (as Jameson
does) on the order of Althusser’s formulation – ‘the Imaginary representa-
tion of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’,
and if that Real is coterminous with History as, in Jameson’s words, ‘ground
and untranscendable horizon’, then of necessity this History must in fact be
a ‘text’ or narrative which is at the same time Real.
Weber has astutely delineated the Jamesonian double-bind at work here
in one of the more penetrating critiques of PU, entitled ‘Capitalizing
History’:43 the Marxism of PU would criticize its competitors as being ide-

ological (in the sense of being partial and partisan, of practising strategies
of containment). Yet at the same time, its own claim to offer an alternative
to such ideological containment must itself be based on a strategy of con-
tainment, only a radically more total and comprehensive one.44 In addi-
tion, it might be noted, this places the individual in precisely the position
Jameson wishes to avoid: a position of unmappability. For structurally and
systemically, there would be no criteria by which to distinguish a ‘false’ ide-
ology from the ‘truth’ of (Jameson’s) Marxism, apart, ultimately, from
teleological faith.45
Another double-bind is folded into this envelope: an oscillation between two
contradictory notions of signification or semiosis, two variations on the nature
of the relationships between signifier and signified. On the one hand, a distinc-
tion is made between a text (narrative, space) and its referent or ‘absent cause’.
On the other hand, they are collapsed together: History is not merely any text,
but The text, a Real text. In a curious way, Jameson’s Dilemma resonates with
that of the Port-Royal grammarians whose agenda necessitated an accounting
for the central Christian mystery (hoc est corpus meum) within a system of signs
simultaneously necessitating distantiation between signifier and signified, sign
and referent. For the believing Christian, the host could not be construed as
mere sign or symbol of the body of Christ: it must be (est) that body.46
The ‘flotation’ of contradictory versions of semiosis is, as I have argued
elsewhere at some length, at the foundation of modern disciplinary knowl-
edge and critical practice in art and architectural history;47 within such a
framework, Jameson can be seen as projecting a subsumption of contempo-
rary poststructuralisms by what might be characterized as a eucharistic mod-
ernism which seeks to restore a singular point of view (and a self-identical
individual subject capable of cognitively mapping the spatial and social). By
naming that a collective subject, we remain in the realm of hocus-pocus.
Yet Jameson is often at great pains to eschew an individualistic and
expressive modernism. Both in the recent ‘space’ essays and in the older PU,
the category of individuality is a highly contested space – a place which must
be exploded in favour of a collective unity.48 He explicitly asserts that
One of the most urgent tasks for Marxist theory today – is a whole new logic of
collective dynamics, with categories that escape the taint of some mere application
of terms drawn from individual experience (in that sense, even the concept of
praxis remains a suspect one).49
But the assertion might raise not a few eyebrows for readers of his architec-
tural or art historical musings. As Sam Weber notes, ‘ultimately Jameson sim-
ply universalizes the individual by construing the collective as a self-suffi-
cient, intelligible unity’: what, additionally, could be more individualistic
than a notion of History as a ‘single, vast unfinished plot’?50 What remains
unanswered is how this scenario differs fundamentally from the plot-struc-
ture of the realist novel: despite his portrayal of literary history in PU as a
play of sedimented and conflictual realities (each age of which might be
characterized by a ‘dominant’), a nostalgia for a linearist and totalizing ‘his-
tory’ remains strong.51
Jameson’s writings on art and architecture have elicited no substantive
reaction from the community of historians and critics of those fields.52 On
the face of it, this remains somewhat surprising, given that a fair amount of
his writings have appeared within such disciplinary contexts.53 I suspect this
may have less to do with any explicit aversion to Marxist interpretations of
artworks or cultural practices – not that such aversion is non-existent;
indeed, far from it.54 Rather, it may well be that his observations on mod-
ernist and postmodernist art and architecture have seemed to offer little
more than an inflection on what has been a commonplace, totalizing histori-
cism central to art historical discourse since its nineteenth-century institu-
tionalizations on both sides of the Atlantic.55
Indeed, despite the contemporary contexts of his discussions and analyses
of the modernist/postmodernist problematic in the arts, in many ways the
closest analogue to Jameson’s writings on painting and ‘space’ is not the rich
body of contemporary criticism, but rather the work of Erwin Panofsky in
the 1950s, and in particular the Panofsky of the celebrated essay ‘Gothic
Architecture and Scholasticism’ of 1951,56 ‘An Inquiry into the analogy of the
arts, philosophy, and religion in the Middle Ages’.
In his vision of the period of High Scholasticism, Panofsky elegantly wove
together a complex series of historical phenomena to demonstrate the exis-
tence of a striking homology between the logical and systemic structure of
Scholastic texts and arrangement of parts and divisions within the space of
Gothic design. The principles of homology which controlled the entire
process of architectonic organization corresponded, for Panofsky, to the

‘visual logic’ evident in Aquinas’ system of similitudines:
the membrification of the edifice permitted [one] to re-experience the very

process of architectural composition just as the membrification of the Summa
permitted [one] to re-experience the very processes of cogitation…the panoply
of shafts, ribs, buttresses, tracery, pinnacles, and crockets was a self-analysis and
self-explication of architecture much as the customary apparatus of parts, dis-
tinctions, questions, and articles was…a self-analysis and self-explication of rea-
son…the Scholastic mind…accepted and insisted upon a gratuitous clarifica-
tion of function through form just as it accepted and insisted upon a gratuitous
clarification of thought through language.57
In Jameson’s terms, the era of High Scholasticism would be a supremely

‘mappable’ age, and its space(s) would (in Panofsky’s analysis) emblematize
an ‘endow[ing of] the individual subject with some heightened sense of its
place in the global system’, assuming that subject to be an educated
Schoolman. Such mappability was necessarily promoted and enhanced by
the perfection into a fine art of the reconciliation of opposites or of the
(seemingly) irreconcilable, through the public rituals of the disputationes de
quolibet, wherein every topic (as in every articulus in Aquinas’ Summa) had
to be formulated as a quaestio, the discussion of which, as Panofsky notes,58
was staged dialectically, setting one set of authorities against another. What
is of interest is that apparently contradictory propositions – for example dif-
ferent views on, say, the permissibility of suicide among several authorities –
could not simply be sorted out between a correct and an incorrect view:
rather, both had to be worked through to the limit, and reconciled at some
distant theoretical point or end.
Panofsky then takes pains to demonstrate how such reconciliations
evolved in the history of French Gothic cathedral building, and he cites
architectural sources referring to discussions about design which proceeded
along the Scholastic videtur quod – sed contra – respondeo dicendum:59
And what is the result of this disputatio? A chevet which combines, as it were, all
possible sics with all possible nons. It has a double ambulatory combined with a
continuous hemicycle of fully developed channels, all nearly equal in depth. The
groundplan of these chapels is alternately semi-circular and – Cistercian fash-
ion–square.
Panofsky saw in Gothic space what Jameson cannot find in postmodern

hyperspace. There is a complex double-reversed irony in this juxtaposition of
Jameson and Panofsky, for their particular insights are the result of a certain
blindness.
In the case of Panofsky, the ‘mutual inferability of parts’ in ‘Gothic’ space
was in no small measure the projection (by no means Panofsky’s own) onto
a diverse and complex historical age of a ‘High Scholastic’ order which was
in fact itself a pastiche of philosophical and rhetorical contradictions and
differences held together by ‘reconciliations’ beyond reason, i.e., by faith. A
faith, it should be observed, that would reconcile contradictions among
equally venerable authorities on a far rhetorical horizon: an ‘untranscendable
horizon’ isomorphic to that projected into the future by Jameson.
Panofsky himself was careful to admit that his reader might very well find
his schemata ‘fanciful’ or even rather Hegelian, for his architectonic ‘recon-
ciliations’ and unities were momentary and fleeting. The homologies pro-
jected between Gothic cathedral design and Scholastic philosophy were lim-
ited to a few examples looked at in a certain light – the light of (as he says) a
‘single scrap of evidence’ from a sketch-plan in the Album of Villard de
Honnecourt.60
In Jameson we find little appreciation of such ironies. And what he fails to
see in ‘postmodern space’ is in fact an important characteristic feature of
recent design which pastiches earlier formations by means of quotation, his-
torical allusion, and the juxtaposition and abruptly surprising sedimentation
of ‘styles’ of different ages, places, and peoples – the effective ironicization of
the unities and ‘mutual inferability of parts’ of the received historical canon
of forms.
In short, recent design (whether ‘postmodernist’ or more recent ‘decon-
structivist’) frequently works to foreground the usually repressed ficticity of
those very unities which Jameson, in his nostalgia for what is not here-and-
now, patently longs for – as indeed we have seen in his rhetorical overcom-
plications of the relatively simplistic Bonaventure Hotel.
What is in fact highlighted by a good deal of recent design – from the
hilarious multi-level pastiche-maze of the Horton Plaza urban mall in San
Diego, to Eisenmann and Trott’s Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in
Columbus, to the 30 fragmented ‘follies’ of Bernard Tschumi for the Parc de
la Villette in Paris (which will also include a garden designed jointly by
Eisenmann and Derrida) – is a metacommentary on architectonic represen-

tation itself, directed equally to the past and the present. In such an address,
the unities of the historical canon(s) are themselves revealed as always
already having been fictive, as pastiches of contradictions, and as suppres-
sions of difference.
What Jameson would have us see as ‘dehistoricizing’ is in fact supremely
historical. In precisely the same way, that untranscendable History which
Jameson would have us see, that grand master narrative plot which ‘goes out-
side the postmodern paradigm’,61 is itself revealed as a romantic fiction and
an anamorphic fable.62 For in order to make that story visible, representable,
and ‘mappable’, we must ultimately position ourselves outside or beyond not
simply ‘postmodernism’ itself, but outside of time, space, and history.
Jameson’s Real(ism) is finally just another realist, modernist novel, a collaps-
ing together of the ‘three ages’ of cartography into the ‘reassuring perspecti-
val or mimetic enclave’ he is at pains to go beyond: a world before Mercator.
This is a dangerous game which, perhaps not so ironically, is itself one of
the emblems of the ‘politics’ we have inherited.
notes
1 Hayden White, ‘Getting Out of History’, Diacritics, vol. 12, no. 3 (Fall 1982), p. 13.
2 Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds)
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1988), p. 348 (written 1983).
3 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). Social Text, eds Stanley Aronowitz, John
Brenkman and Fredric Jameson, began publication in 1979. In its opening
Prospectus (vol. 1, p. 3), the following appears:
Our position is that the valuable interpretative and theoretical work done in
these various schools [semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,
Althusserian marxism, deconstruction, etc.) is often accompanied by a
strategic containment or delimitation of the field being interrogated.
This…takes the form of suppressing or repressing history and the historical
perspective. It is this which the Marxist framework seeks to restore.
4 ‘Cognitive Mapping’, typescript, p. 1, from the Conference on Urban Ideologies,

Politics and Culture in Honor of Henri Lefebvre, University of California at Santa
Cruz, 29 Feb. to 4 Mar., 1984. In its essentials, this version is identical to the cita-
tion in note 2 above, except for the phrase reproduced here in parentheses.
5 Of the great many responses and critiques of PU, the most important are: the
special Fall 1982 issue of the journal Diacritics (vol. 12, no. 3), with essays by
Hayden White, Terry Eagleton, Geoff Bennington, S. P. Mohanty, Jerry Aline
Flieger, and Michael Sprinker; the issue includes an interview with Jameson con-
ducted by Jonathan Culler and Richard Klein. See also Sam Weber, ‘Capitalizing
History: Notes on The Political Unconscious’, Diacritics, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer
1983), pp. 14–28; Timothy Bahti, ‘ “Mastering” Mastery: A Critical Response’, in
Enclitic, vol. V, no. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 107–123; Dana Polan, ‘Above All Else to
Make You See; Cinema and the Ideology of Spectacle’, boundary 2, vol. XI, no.
1/2 (Fall 1982/3), pp. 129–144; Cornel West, ‘Fredric Jameson’s Marxist
Hermeneutics’, in boundary 2, pp. 177–230 (this entire issue is devoted to
Marxism and Postmodern Criticism); John Brenkman, review of PU in
SubStance, vol. 37/38 (1983), pp. 237–239; Alice Benston, review of PU in
SubStance, vol. 41 (1983), pp. 97–103; Cornel West, ‘Ethics and Action in Fredric
Jameson’s Marxist Hermeneutics’, in Jonathan Arac (ed.) Postmodernism and
Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 123–144. While
this list does not exhaust the citations for reviews of Jameson’s PU, it will pro-
vide a good representative sample. On the subject of postmodernism and
Marxism more generally, useful introductions to basic issues and debates may be
found in many places, among them the vol. 2, no. 3 issue of the journal Theory
Culture and Society (Special Issue on ‘The Fate of Modernity’, 1985), and vol. 20
of the Australian journal Leftwright (1986); see also recent numbers of New
German Critique.
6 The penetrating critique of Jerry Aline Flieger in Diacritics, vol. 12, no. 3 (1982),
entitled ‘The Prison House of Ideology: Critic as Inmate’, elaborates on this point
in discussing Jameson’s ‘imprisonment in the maze of intersubjective desire’ by
his failure to ‘relinquish any claim to a position outside ideology’. Flieger’s essay
(pp. 47–56) is largely devoted to the ‘blindness’ in PU which undermines
Jameson’s claim to have assimilated the lessons of deconstruction in his totalized
historical methodology.
7 The principal texts are: ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism’, New Left Review, vol. 46 (July/August 1984), pp. 53–59; ‘Cognitive
Mapping’, cited above, notes 2 and 4; ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in
Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111–125
(originally delivered as a lecture at the Whitney Museum in New York, Fall 1982);
‘An Interview with Fredric Jameson’ with Anders Stephanson, in Flash Art, no.
131 (Dec. 1986/Jan. 1987), pp. 69–73. See also Jameson’s ‘Reification and Utopia
in Mass Culture’, Social Text, vol. 1 (1979), pp. 130–148, and various film reviews
in the same journal in subsequent issues [esp. vol. 2, no. 1, Social Text, no. 4 (1981)].
8 ‘Cultural Logic’, p. 46, p. 56 (1984). Italics here and subsequently are mine.
9 ‘Cultural Logic’, p. 79.
11 ‘Cultural Logic’, p. 81; the reference is to the seminal study Learning from Las
Vegas by R. Venturl, D. S. Brown and S. Izenour (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972).
There is an enormous body of literature spawned by the latter; see especially the
critiques of M. Tafuri in his The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and
Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, esp. Chapter
9 ‘The Ashes of Jefferson’), pp. 291 ff.
12 ‘Cultural Logic’, p. 46, p. 83.
16 ‘Cultural Logic’, pp. 83–84.
18 ‘Cultural Logic’, pp. 84–85; the reference is to Michael Herr, Dispatches (New
York, 1978), pp. 8–9.
20 ‘Cultural Logic’; Jameson suggests that the architecture of [Corbusier’s] ‘high
modernism’ would wish to ‘fan out and transform [the older urban fabric] by the
virulence of its Novum’ whereas the postmodern Bonaventure implies ‘no further
effects, no larger proto-political Utopian transformation’. By contrast, see M.
Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1976), esp. pp. 125 ff.
22 See especially Flash Art, no. 131 (Dec. 1986/Jan. 1987), pp. 69–73. In ‘Cultural
Logic’, pp. 58–64, Jameson discusses Van Gogh’s famous painting of the ‘pair of
peasant shoes’ focusing primarily on Heidegger’s reading. Remarkably, he omits
any mention of the Heidegger–Meyer–Schapiro controversy regarding the paint-
ing’s interpretation, discussed by Derrida in his The Truth in Painting [(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. pp. 257–382] except to note that ‘Derrida
remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian paar Bauernschuhe, that the Van
Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair, which allows neither for perversion nor for
fetishization’. As has become familiar in Jameson’s discussions of the visual arts,
individual artistic impressionism stands in for historical and theoretical analysis,
which may in large part explain the rather pregnant silence regarding Jameson’s
writings on art among art historians and critics.
25 On the problematic of Archimedean Ansatzpunkten, see D. Preziosi, Rethinking
Art History: Meditations of a Coy Science (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1989), Chapter III, ‘The Panoptic Gaze and the Anamorphic
Archive’.
26 Quoted in Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 276.
27 See above, note 2. Jameson’s essay, ‘Cognitive Mapping’,was followed by a discussion
session with questions by Nancy Fraser, Darko Suvin, and Cornel West (p. 358).
28 Jameson’s participation in that conference (see above, note 4) also included an
outline of the problematics of the conference, consisting in part of summaries of
Henri Lefebvre’s books Le droit à la ville and The Production of Space, upon which
(along with the writings of Ernest Mandel) Jameson draws heavily in formulat-
ing his approach to postmodern ‘hyperspace’. A somewhat different approach to
the dialectics of spatiality and sociality is given in two essays by E. W. Soja: see his
‘The Socio-Spatial Dialectic’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
vol. 70, no. 2 (June 1980), pp. 207–225, and ‘The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards
a Transformative Retheorization’, in typescript for that conference. Soja’s essays
give an excellent introduction to the various strains of Marxist writings (both
anglo- and francophonic) on the problematic of social space. In the first essay,
Soja criticizes what he terms ‘an increasingly rigidifying orthodoxy [which] has
begun to emerge within Marxist spatial analysis that threatens to choke off the
development of a critical theory of space in its infancy’ – an observation that pre-
figures Jameson’s own later writings on ‘cognitive mapping’, as we shall see. A fine
discussion of the ‘space’ debate and the ramifications of Lefebvre’s writings may
be found in Mark Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1985), pp. 110–156 and pp. 157–194.
29 See above, note 7.
30 K. Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). See Louis Althusser,
For Marx (London: NLB/Verso, 1977), Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1965), esp.
Chapter 7, ‘Marxism and Humanism’, pp. 219–247, which originally appeared in
June 1964 in the journal Cahiers de l’ISEA. On the Lacanian underpinnings of
Althusser’s conception of ideology, see the suggestive discussion in R. Coward
and J. Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory
of the Subject (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 61–121. See also D.
Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, Chapter III, Section 3. See also note 62 below.

32 ‘Cognitive Mapping’, p. 353.
33 A representative bibliography would be beyond the scope of these pages; for use-
ful general introductions, see R. M. Downs and D. Stea (eds) Image and
Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior (Chicago: Aldine Press,
1973); K. Lynch, A Theory of Good City Form (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981).
39 See the responses to the ‘Cognitive Mapping’ essay (pp. 358–360), and especially
the remarks of Cornel West: ‘I think that holding on to the conception of totality
that you invoke ultimately leads toward a Leninist or Leninist-like politics that is
basically sectarian, that may be symptomatic of a pessimism’. See also West’s cri-
tique of PU cited above, note 5, where he observes (p. 188) that ‘[Jameson’s] view-
point rests upon an unexamined metaphor of translation, an uncritical acceptance
of transcoding’; ‘[Abram’s] attempt to recuperate the humanist tradition and the
bourgeois conception of history, and…Jameson[’s] to recover the Marxist tradi-
tion and the political meaning of history all ultimately revert to and rely on prob-
lematic methodological uses of various notions of analogy and homology’.
41 PU, p. 18.
42 In the words of Sam Weber, ‘Capitalizing History: Notes on The Political
Unconscious’, Diacritics, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 1983), p. 24. Weber’s critique also
appears as Chapter 4 in his Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 40–58.
43 See above, note 42. Weber notes (p. 25):
To determine History as totalization, as a single, selfsame narrative, as a
process of unification and of integration – ultimately, in short, as a move-
ment of identity and presentation – is to assume a point of view from which
the whole can be comprehended, a position, therefore, that must be essen-
tially detached from and outside of what it seeks to contemplate.
Panopticism and disciplinary knowledge, see D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History,
Chapter III, Section 2, ‘The Eye(s) of Power’; and Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of
Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977,
ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 146–165.
44 See Weber, ‘Capitalizing History’, p. 22.
45 Weber, ‘Capitalizing History’, pp. 20–21. As Weber observes, it has been precisely
the persistent suspicion of the ‘teleological perspective of totalization in which
historical “development” has traditionally been conceived’ that has constituted
the ‘poststructuralist’ challenge to the linearist Marxism which Jameson would
wish to revive. ‘Capitalized’ History, then, in Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault has
been subjected to a re-examination which has problematized the attributes of
self-identity, universality, and objective ‘necessity’ hitherto attributed to it,
redefining such attributions as part of a strategy which sought to impose itself
precisely by masking its own strategic and partisan character. See also Eagleton’s
critique of PU in Diacritics, vol. 12, no. 3 (Fall 1982), pp. 14–22, entitled ‘Fredric
Jameson: The Politics of Style’, which observes (p. 22), ‘there is no resting-place
in criticism for those who take their poetry from the future’.
46 Discussed in detail in D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, Chapter IV, Section 5;
see also L. Marin, Le portrait du Roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981), and M. Doueihi, ‘Traps
of Representation’, Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 66–77.
47 See above, note 46, and ‘That Obscure Object of Desire: The Art of Art History’,
boundary 2, vol. XIII, no. 2/3 (Winter/Spring 1985), pp. 1–41.
48 See the Flash Art interview (above, note 7), pp. 70 ff.: ‘I always insist on a third
possibility beyond the old bourgeois ego and the schizophrenic subject of our
organization of society today: a collective subject, decentered but not schizophrenic’.
49 PU, p. 294.
50 Weber, pp. 25 ff. See also Cornel West’s comments in his boundary 2 critique
(pp. 189 ff.) on Jameson’s mistaken presupposition that analogous and homolo-
gous relations obtain between ethics and epistemology. He observes that Jameson
misreads the Marxist perspective wherein all metaphysical, epistemological, and
ethical discourses are construed as complex ideological affairs of specific groups,
communities, or classes in particular societies, with their collective dynamics.
Jameson, he argues, misreads Marx’s own rejection of bourgeois ethics, resulting
in an unnecessary call for a ‘new logic’ of collective dynamics.
51 Weber (p. 23) astutely notes that
to hear [Jameson’s claim] that ‘History as ground and untranscendable hori-

zon needs no particular theoretical justification’ is doubtless music to the
ears of many scholars and critics for whom recent theoretical discussion has
rendered the ground upon which the discipline has been based less than
solid, and its horizons anything but clear and ‘untranscendable’.
Compare the remarks made recently by a prominent Marxist art historican (O.
Werckmeister) to the effect that ‘If we can qualify our techniques of investigation
and pursue them with consistency, we won’t need the abstraction of current the-
ories in order to write a straightforward social and political history of art’, quot-
ed in the ‘Announcement and Call for Papers: 1988 Annual Meeting’ of the
College Art Association of America.
52 See however the interesting critique of PU by film critic and historian Dana Polan
(cited above, note 5), who observes in the course of his discussion that ‘[Jameson’s]
nomination of certain practices as aesthetic and others as economic is itself reifica-
tory of their potential imbrications and conjunctural exchange’ (p. 136).
53 Such as the Flash Art interview; the appearance of his ‘Postmodernism and
Consumer Society’ first as a 1982 lecture at the Whitney Museum and then as an
essay in the important Anti-Aesthetic anthology; the presentation of ‘Cognitive
Mapping’ in the ‘Urban Ideologies’ conference at Santa Cruz. An exchange
between Rosalind Krauss and Jameson at the Kansas symposium on the post-
modern in 1987 is unpublished. Jameson’s essay ‘Progress versus Utopia; or, Can
we Imagine the Future?’, appearing in the anthology Art after Modernism:
Rethinking Representation (eds) Brian Wallis and Marcia Tucker (New York: New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 239–252, originally appeared in
Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 9, no. 2 (July 1982), pp. 147–158.
54 For example, the notoriously anti-Marxist journal New Criterion, edited by
retired New York Times’ critic Hilton Kramer. The 1988 College Art Association
meetings in Houston included a major symposium on the Marxist tradition in
US art history (as yet unpublished).
55 The question is taken up in the final chapter of D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History:
Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1989); see also Hayden White’s discussion of PU referred to above in note 1.
56 E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: World Publishing
Company, 1957), delivered as a lecture six years earlier at St Vincent College.
57 Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, pp. 59–60.
58 Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, p. 68.
59 Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, pp. 87–88.
60 Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, p. 87 and note 62. Cf. H. R. Hahnloser (ed.)
Villard de Honnecourt: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Vienna, 1935), p. 69, plate 29.
The inscription recording a disputatio between Villard and the master Pierre de
Corbie was in fact added by one of the former’s disciples. Panofsky notes at the
end of his essay (p. 88): ‘Here Scholastic dialectics has driven architectural think-
ing to a point where it almost ceased to be architectural’.
61 At the end of the Flash Art interview (p. 71), the interviewer observes that ‘The
historical dimension counteracts the postmodernist immersion in the present,
the dehistoricizing or nonhistorical project. In that sense it goes outside the post-
modern paradigm.’ To which Jameson responds: ‘That is essentially the rhetori-
cal trick or solution that I was attempting: to see whether by systematizing some-
thing which is resolutely unhistorical [i.e., postmodernism], one couldn’t force a
historical way of thinking at least about that. The whole point [is] about the loss
in postmodernism of the sense of the future.’
62 On the subject of the ‘anamorphic’ perspectivism of ideology, see D. Preziosi,
‘Reckoning with the World: Figure, Text, and Trace in the Built Environment’,
American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 4, no. 1/2 (1986), pp. 1–15; and ‘Structure as
Power: The Mechanisms of Urban Meaning’, Espaces et Sociétés, no. 47 (1985),
pp. 45–55. Some of the implications of an Althusserian position on the ‘space’ of
the subject in ideology are delineated therein, within the contexts of a specific
historical analysis.
The question of art
history 1
2
What a beautiful book

could be composed, telling
the life and adventures of a
word!…Is it not true that
most words are dyed with the idea represented by their out-
ward form? Imagine the genius that has made them!…The
bringing together of letters, their forms, the figure they give
each word, trace precisely, according to the genius of each
nation, unknown beings whose memory is in us.…Is there not
in the word vrai a sort of supernatural rectitude? Is there not
in the terse sound it demands a vague image of chaste nudity,
of the simplicity of the true in everything?…Does not every
word tell the same story? All are stamped with a living power
which they derive from the soul and which they pay back to it
by the mysteries of action and the marvellous reaction that
exists between speech and thought – like, as it were, a lover
drawing from the lips of his mistress as much love as he press-
es into them.
Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert
{30} THE QUESTION OF ART HISTORY
1
Debates on the nature, aims, and methods of art historical practice have in
recent years given rise to a variety of new approaches to the study of the visu-
al arts, to the projection of one or another ‘new art history’, and to a sustained
engagement with critical and theoretical issues and controversies in other
historical disciplines to a degree unimaginable not very long ago. At the heart
of many of these debates has been an explicit and widespread concern with
the question of what art objects may be evidence for, and with the relative
merits of various disciplinary methods and protocols for the elucidation of
art historical evidence.
Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and others in
these debates has been paid to differences among the partisans of various disci-
plinary methodologies, or to the differential benefits of one or another school
of thought or theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social
sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art historical practice.2 Yet
there has also come about among art historians a renewed interest in the histor-
ical origins of the academic discipline itself, and in the relationships of its insti-
tutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing of other historical
and critical disciplines in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These inter-
ests have led increasingly to wider discussion by art historians of the particular
nature of disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic
practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern discourse
on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, the
art market, exhibitions, and museology.3 What follows does not aim to summa-
rize or characterize these developments but is more simply an attempt to delin-
eate some of the principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary
institution in the light of the material conditions of academic practice that arose
in the latter half of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of museo-
logical display. In brief, this essay is concerned with the circumstances of art his-
tory’s foundations as a systematic and ‘scientific’ practice, and its focus is limit-
ed to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American example.
2
In 1895, 21 years after the appointment of Charles Eliot Norton as Lecturer
on the History of the Fine Arts as Connected with Literature at Harvard, the
THE QUESTION OF ART HISTORY {31}
Fogg Art Museum was founded as the first institution specifically designed to
house the entire disciplinary apparatus of art history in one space.4 The
organization of the Fogg established patterns for the formatting of art histor-
ical information, teaching, and study that have been canonical in America
down to the present, and that have been replicated through various material
and technological transformations by scores of academic departments
throughout the world.5
The institution of the Fogg provided for several distinct kinds of spaces
designed to make the historical development of the visual arts clearly legible:
lecture classrooms fitted with facilities for the projection of lantern-slide
reproductions of works of art; a library of textual materials on the fine arts
of various periods and places; an archive of slides and photographs of works
of art organized according to historical period and genre; and space for the
exhibition of reproductions of works of art photographs principally, but also
a few plaster casts of sculptures and some architectural models. Despite its
name, the Fogg initially was not a museum in the common sense of the term,
and no provision was made for the display of actual works of art, despite
many pressures to form such a collection.6
The Fogg Museum was in fact conceived of as a laboratory for study,
demonstration, teaching, and for training in the material circumstances of
artistic production. It was intended to be a scientific establishment devoted
to the comparison and analysis of works of art of (potentially) all periods
and places, to the estimation of their relative worth, and to an understanding
of their evidential value with respect to the history and progressive evolution
of different nations and ethnic groups.
Photographic technology was central to the Fogg Museum’s conception as
a scientific institution, affording a systematic and uniform formatting of
objects of study. Artifacts as diverse as buildings and miniature paintings
were reproduced at a common scale for analysis and study – in this case, to
two complementary formats: lantern slides for projection on walls and print-
ed photographs of standard size.7 The entire system was extensively cross-
indexed and referenced by means of a card catalogue for efficient access.
The institution was in effect a factory for the manufacture of historical,
social, and, as we shall see, moral and ethical sense; a site for the production
of meaning in several dimensions: aesthetic, semantic, historical. Out of its
constantly expanding data mass, the researcher could compose a variety of
narratives at various analytic scales: at the level of the individual artwork, or

through several kinds of ‘slices’ of works – for example, the use of line or
colour in the works of a single artist or of artists of different times and places.
The system made it possible to trace the ‘evolution’ of many different aspects
of pictorial representation in a single civilization or across different cultures
and historical periods. One could instantaneously chart, for example, the
‘development’ of perspectival rendering of three-dimensional objects through
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome by means of the juxtaposition of
images of paintings or drawings, and the student could calibrate the relation-
ships between thematic content in medieval religious paintings and composi-
tional format as these could be shown to change over time and place.
While the opportunity for the fabrication of narratives about items in the
archive might seem unlimited, in practice this capacity was limited by the
pedagogical curriculum devised by Norton and expanded and augmented by
him and his colleagues over the years. By the time of the foundation of the
Fogg, Norton’s curriculum included the following sequenced elements:
Fine Arts 1: Principles of delineation, colour, and chiaroscuro

Fine Arts 2: Principles of design in painting, sculpture, and architecture
Fine Arts 3: Ancient art
Fine Arts 4: Roman and medieval art
Norton himself occasionally taught advanced courses on specialized top-

ics. By the turn of the century, the Fogg curriculum included courses on the
history of architecture, landscape design, Greek and Roman archaeology, the
history of the printed book, Renaissance art, Florentine painting, Venetian
art, and the art of China and Japan. In 1912–13, the Fogg organized the first
art history survey course as we now know it, which attempted to cover the
entire ‘history’ of the arts of the world in a single year.8
Prior to Norton’s appointment in 1874 the only instruction in the technical
aspects of art making had been offered by Charles Herbert Moore, who was
appointed in 1871 as the first instructor in freehand drawing and water-
colour at Harvard. He taught exclusively at the Lawrence Scientific School
on campus, where such instruction was deemed necessary to the training of
students in the physical and natural sciences. Norton engaged Moore’s serv-
ices for his own new curriculum, and made his classes (Fine Arts 1 and 2)
prerequisite to any training in the history of art on the principle that any
serious understanding of the history of art should be grounded in hands-
on experience of the technical processes of artistic production – a principle
at the core of what later came to be known as the ‘Fogg Method’ of formal-
ist connoisseurship.9
Norton was an immensely popular lecturer, and his perspectives on the

social and ethical implications of the visual arts profoundly influenced sev-
eral generations of American art historians. By training an expert on
medieval Italian literature and a Dante scholar, he became a devotee of
medieval Italian art during his extensive travels in Europe after his gradua-
tion from Harvard in 1854. An intense anglophile as well, Norton attended
John Ruskin’s lectures on Italian art at Oxford prior to his appointment at
Harvard – an appointment encouraged by Ruskin himself, who became over
the years a close personal friend, model, and mentor.10
The creation of the Fogg Museum three years before Norton retired in
1898 was the direct embodiment of the theories of art and of the method-
ologies of historical analysis espoused by his teaching and inspired by
Ruskinian ideals regarding the ethical and social import of artistic practice.
In a very direct sense, the founding of the Fogg accomplished what Ruskin
himself was unable to bring about, institutionally, at Oxford – the pragmat-
ic synthesis of previously disparate components of art historical and critical
practice in a common, scientific, ‘laboratory’ environment.11 The institution
was organized according to
the principle that the history of the fine arts should always be related to the his-
tory of civilization; that monuments should be interpreted as expressions of the
peculiar genius of the people who produced them; that fundamental principles
of design should be emphasized as a basis for aesthetic judgments; and that
opportunities for training in drawing and painting should be provided for all
serious students of the subject.12
3
The overriding business of the Fogg was the collection of evidence for the
demonstration of the aforementioned principles, especially the principle that
there is an essential relationship between the aesthetic character of a people’s
works of visual art and that nation’s social, moral, and ethical character.
Works of art, then, provide documentary evidence for that character, and
that evidence is assumed to be homologous to that which may be evinced

from that people’s other arts – in particular its literature.13 At the heart of the
institution was its central data bank, in principle an indefinitely expandable
archive of uniformly formatted slide and photographic print items organized
geographically and chronologically and, within those divisions, by known
and unknown artist, by style (where that was not coterminous with histori-
cal and geographical divisions), and by medium. Further divisions in the col-
lection were made according to major arts (painting, sculpture, architecture)
and minor arts (book illumination, luxury domestic and ceremonial objects,
jewellery, and so on). The system is still replicated with essentially minor
variations in most art historical collections today.
In principle every object in the archive bears the trace of others, and its
meaning is a function of the system’s juxtapositions and separations as
determined by the physical arrangement of the cabinets in which items are
stored.14 Each informational unit is thus in an anaphoric position, cueing
absent others, suggesting resonances with related objects, referring both
metonymically and metaphorically to other portions of the archival mass.
In short, the meaning of an item is a function of its place, its ‘address’ in the
system.15
The system is genealogical at base, and the archive permits the articula-
tion of a variety of kinships among items in the collection, whether formal
or morphological, thematic or iconographic. It is equally teleological in that
each item is assumed to bear the stamp of its historical locus in an evolution-
ary development of artistic practice, on several possible levels – those of tech-
nique, individual or ethnic or national evolution, and so on: the archive is
never not oriented. The Fogg method of formalist connoisseurship, like
other techniques of connoisseurship developed in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century, stressed the ability of the trained art historical eye to assign a
specific and unique address to any artwork encountered; at the same time,
the method was attached to an ability to assess the aesthetic – and conse-
quently the moral – value of a work. In this regard, the work is seen as hav-
ing a certain physiognomic or characterological quality or value, an indexi-
cal and iconic relationship to mentality.16
The system is also organized in what may be termed an anamorphic man-
ner, such that relationships among units in the archive are visible (that is, leg-
ible) only from certain prefabricated stances, positions, or attitudes toward
the system. In effect, the user is invariably cued toward certain positions from
which portions of the archival mass achieve coherence and sense. These ‘win-
dows’ are various and have changed in the modern history of the discipline.
Among the most persistent anamorphic points is that of the period or peri-
od style, consisting of the postulation that all the principal or major works of
a time and place will exhibit a certain uniform pattern. Normally, this is mor-
phological in character, but may also involve certain consistent uses of mate-
rials, compositional methods, routines of production and consumption, per-
ceptual habits, as well as a consistency of attention to certain genres, subject
matters, formats of display, and the like.17
The pedagogical requirements of the system involve accessing the archival
mass in such a way as to fabricate consistent and internally coherent narra-
tives of development, filiation, evolution, descent, progress, regress: in short,
a particular ‘history’ of artistic practice in the light of that narrative’s relation-
ship to others actually and potentially embedded in the archival system. A
particular historical narrative (the evolution of Sung painting; the develop-
ment of Manet’s sense of colour composition; the history and fate of women
painters in Renaissance Italy; the relationship of Anselm Kiefer’s oeuvre to
contemporary German society; the evolution of naturalism in Greek sculp-
ture, and so on) is in one sense already written within the archive and is a
product of its organizational logic. Every slide is, so to speak, a still in a his-
toricist movie:
New art is observed as history the very moment it is seen to possess the quality
of uniqueness (look at the bibliographies on Picasso or Henry Moore) and this
gives the impression that art is constantly receding from modern life – is never
possessed by it. It is receding, it seems, into a gigantic landscape – the landscape
of ART – which we watch as if from the observation car of a train…in a few years
[something new] is simply a grotesque or charming incident in the whole – that
whole which we see through the window of the observation car, which is so like
the vitrine of a museum. Art is behind glass – the history glass.18
4
When Sir John Summerson spoke these words on the occasion of his inau-
guration as the first Ferens Professor of Fine Art in the University of Hull in
1960, he was in the midst of a double lament. In the first place, he was at
pains to inform his audience about the historical circumstances surrounding
the tardiness of England in establishing academic university departments of

art history in comparison, most notably, with Germany, where the first art
history professorship had been established for G. E. Waagen in Berlin in
1844.19 Indeed, it was not until 1933 that art history became an independent
academic institution in England with the founding of the Courtauld
Institute at the University of London – itself, at the time, considered by not a
few as a fanciful innovation, as Summerson recorded.
Summerson’s inaugural lecture at Hull was entitled, significantly, ‘What Is
a Professor of Fine Art?’ and he clearly conveyed his regret at a series of
missed opportunities for the establishment of the academic discipline in
England during the nineteenth century. In the same year that Waagen was
appointed at Berlin, the Reverend Richard Creswell of Oxford, founder of the
Oxford Museum, published a monograph arguing for the establishment of
three professorships in England (at Oxford, Cambridge, and London).
Creswell’s plan came to fruition only in 1870, with the bequest of collector
Felix Slade. None of these led to the development of a department of art his-
tory in England, a fact profoundly (and vociferously) regretted by Ruskin
and Roger Fry during their incumbencies as Slade Professors at Oxford.20
The second and deeper lament running through Summerson’s lecture is a
regret that we in the modern world have to deal with the history of art at all –
a situation that he sees arising from the problematic nature of art in the nine-
teenth century. He characterizes the origins of art history in a particular
‘moment’ when
modern painting began to turn its back on the public and to become deliberate-
ly and arrogantly incomprehensible (to put it succinctly, Burckhardt and
Courbet were of the same generation); and it can be shown that the rise of Art-
History and the rise of modern painting are accountable to the same historical
pressures.21
He goes on to note that this change had ‘nothing to do with the social and
mechanical revolutions of [that] century; it was an affair entirely of the per-
spective of the past, of the way history had been explored, mapped and then
generalized’22 – which led him to suggest that the scholarly mind came to
imagine the presentation of and accounting for a new ‘totality’ of art: ‘a
social-historical phenomenon co-extensive with the history and geography
of man’. For the nineteenth-century artist, a new ‘brooding immensity of past
[artistic] performance’ had the effect of forever condemning the modern

artist to a struggle toward ever new and independent relationships with the
‘overwhelming mass’ of past art.23 The result, Summerson says, was that ‘Art
has been a “problem” ever since’:
It is this feeling for art as a ‘problem’ which not only ties so much of modern art
to art of the remoter past and detaches it at the same time from the currency of
modern life but which links it with an activity which is its opposite – the analyt-
ic processes of the art-historian. Thus, modern art and Art-History are the
inevitable outcome of the same cumulative pressure exerted by the toppling
achievements of the centuries.24
Because art has come to be ‘behind glass – the history glass’, it therefore ‘has
to be peered at, distinguished, demonstrated. And so we have Professors of
Fine Art.’25
Summerson’s thesis regarding the motivations for the rise of the discipline
of art history in the nineteenth century rests on the historical convergence he
discerns between the withdrawal of modern painting from more public life,
the awareness of the ‘overwhelming mass’ and ‘brooding immensity’ of past
artistic achievement, and the rise of what he terms in his lecture as ‘totalitar-
ian’ art history.26 At the same time, he argues that the rise of modern art, and
of art history, were the result of a new conception of history in the nineteenth
century, which he suggests owed nothing to the ‘social and mechanical’ rev-
olutions of that century. The new discipline of art history was made possible
by a new conception of art as a universal human phenomenon, a ‘social-his-
torical phenomenon co-extensive with’ human history and geography, whose
emblem was the new ‘totalitarian’ museum – the museum whose mission was
to collect, classify, and systematically display a universal history of art.
While Summerson’s history is rather sweepingly impressionistic, and if the
factors he adduces for the historical rise of art history were for the most part
already in play a century earlier, his scenario nonetheless is a telling one in
that it sketches the outlines of a certain commonplace wisdom in the disci-
pline of art history with regard to the field’s origins, missions, and motiva-
tions – factors already inscribed in the protocols of modern disciplinary prac-
tice.27 In his assertion that art history is the opposite of art making, that it com-
prises an analytic activity of ‘peering, distinguishing, and demonstrating’, we
can see the outlines of the kind of laboratory technologies orchestrated and
formalized by the Fogg Museum and other art historical institutions in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America and Europe. For
Summerson, the museum’s vitrine – ‘the history glass’ so like the window of
the railway observation car moving away from the past – is directly analogous
to the microscope slide of the scientist in the laboratory and to its locus in an
increasingly expanding and refined taxonomic order of specimens.
As the laboratory scientist dissects, analyses, and ‘peers at’ specimens,
breaking them into their component parts and distinctive features, so too
would Summerson’s art historian endeavour to read in the specimens the
signs and indices of time, place, ethnicity, biography, mentality, or national
or individual morality – in short, to read in artworks evidence of their his-
toricity: their position within an ever-expanding mass of work ‘coextensive
with the history and geography of man’.
5
As an evidentiary institution, the modern discipline of art history has taken
the problem of causality as its particular concern. While in this regard art
history has been identical to other areas of disciplinary knowledge, certain
aspects of its most common perspectives on evidence and causality distin-
guish it from other critical and historical fields. The present section examines
features by and large shared by art history and other disciplines; features
peculiar to the discipline are discussed subsequently.
Within art history’s domain of analytic attention, the object or image
invariably has been held to be evidential in nature such that the artwork and
its parts are seen as effect, trace, result, medium, or sign. Art historical prac-
tice has been principally devoted to the restoration of the circumstances that
surrounded (and therefore are presumed to have led in some however
extended and indirect sense to) the work’s production. An important justifi-
cation for disciplinary practice – as may be adduced from Summerson’s lec-
ture no less than from the institution of the Fogg Museum and its progeny –
has been that a historical accounting for the circumstantial factors in the
production of an object renders the visual artifact more cogently legible to a
wider audience. In this regard, art historical practice is typically exegetical
and cryptographic, and the art historian and the public are led to understand
that one may discern in works the traces of their particular origins, the
unique and specifiable positions in a universal developmental history or evo-
lution of art. In short, the artwork is construed invariably as being reflective

of its origins in some determinate and determinable fashion, and the disci-
pline has been organized, throughout its century and a half of academic pro-
fessionalization, to respond to the question of what it is that works of art
might be evidence of and for.
The discipline of art history has evolved a number of often quite disparate
perspectives on what might constitute a proper or adequate accounting for
the origins or ‘truth’ of works of art, including a family of methodologies
responding to different notions of explanatory adequacy. At the same time,
the discipline has been heir to an immense philosophical tradition of specu-
lation on the nature, functions, and qualities of art, some of it of consider-
able antiquity, and most of it fairly remote from modern disciplinary prac-
tice and institutional organization.28 Although all art historians, it is likely,
would agree that a fully adequate explanation of a work’s origins requires an
accounting of as many conceivable factors as might be adduced for a given
product, in actual practice (evidence invariably being fragmentary at best)
this remains an ideal explanatory horizon.
It has been the case throughout the history of the discipline that certain
modes of explanation are privileged over others, and certain forms of evi-
dence have been deployed as dominant or determinant. For some art histo-
rians an adequate explanation of the origins of a work is to be located in the
internal or individual conditions of production: the mentality, so to speak, of
an artist or studio. For others, external or contextual conditions of produc-
tion are given primary weight. These latter may be as disparate as the gener-
ic mentality, spirit, or aesthetic climate of an age, place, or race; the political,
economic, cultural, social, religious, or philosophical environments in which
the work appears (its synchronic milieu); or in the sometimes more, some-
times less inexorable systemic logic of the temporal evolution of forms and
genres (its diachronic milieu).29 Art historical and critical attention has been
devoted to the articulation of all of these causal factors for several centuries,
and most if not all remain in play in contemporary practice.30 It has been the
partisan debate on the adequacy of one or another of these explanatory hori-
zons that has constituted the greater bulk of theoretical and methodological
writing in the discipline in modern times.31
Characteristic most generally of the disciplinary discursive field in mod-
ern times has been an investment shared by most art historians in fixing and
locating the particular and unique truth about an artwork. In situating the
object in a specifiable relationship to aspects of its original material and/or
mental environment, that environment may then be seen to exist in a causal
relationship to the object-as-product. In such a framework, the object has
evidential status with respect to other factors in a nexus of causal relation-
ships: in the dynamic processes of artistic expression and communication.
The most common theory of the art object in the academic discipline has
undoubtedly been the conception of the artwork as a medium of communi-
cation and/or expression;32 a vehicle by means of which the intentions, val-
ues, attitudes, messages, emotions, or agendas of a maker (or, by extension,
of his or her time and place) are conveyed (by design or chance) to (target-
ted or circumstantial) beholders or observers. A correlative supposition is
that synchronic or diachronic changes in form will signal changes in what the
form conveys to its observers. This supposition is commonly connected to an
assumption that changes in form exist so as to produce or effect changes in
an audience’s understanding of what was formerly conveyed prior to such
changes. That is, changes in an artistic practice or tradition are assumed to
be an index of variations in an evolving system of thought, belief, or politi-
cal or social attitudes. In this regard, the object or image, or indeed potential-
ly any detail of the material culture of a people, is treated as evidence of vari-
ations in a milieu.33
The object of art historical analysis is thus in an important sense a speci-
men of data insofar as it can be situated in an interrogative field, in an envi-
ronment already predisposed to consider data pertinent only to the extent
that they can be shown to be relevant to a particular family of questions.
What determines the ‘art historicity’ of an artifact might be said to be its per-
tinence to a given field of questions, themselves determined by certain
assumptions about the significance or pertinence of material objects.
Such interrogative fields have been various in the history of art history. In
sections 2 and 3 above we considered one such field central to the institu-
tionalization of the discipline in America and distinguished early modern art
history in this country from developments elsewhere – that is, the organiza-
tion of the discursive field and its anamorphic archive in quite specific
response to Norton’s Ruskinian notions regarding the work of art as
inescapably evidential with respect to the moral, ethical, and social character
of an individual or a people. In Norton’s view, the most essential and most
deeply enduring characteristics of a people were to be found in its visual art

and literature; other, more ‘material’ phenomena of a society – its economic
or political institutions – were secondary or marginal to its morality.34
In this regard, the institution of the Fogg Museum was a scientific labora-
tory. Entities, in short, became facts or data in the Fogg system insofar as they
could be correlated with (and thereby become evidence for and answers to)
an underlying question. For the Fogg, and for all the interrelated activities
that it housed, the generic question would have been: in what way is this
monument an expression of the peculiar genius of the people who produced
it? The inflection of the question particular to the Fogg and its method con-
cerned the ethical dimension of that peculiar genius.
Underlying the entire evidentiary system of the discipline and its object-
domain are three fundamental assumptions: first, that everything about the
artwork is significant in some way; second, that not everything about the art-
work is significant in the same way; and third, that not everything about the
artwork can be significant in every way.
The first of these specifies that there will be no semantically or semiotical-
ly null, empty, or insignificant components of a work; that everything in its
finest detail will contribute to the overall meaningfulness and value of the
object. The second specifies that the contributions of the parts of a work to
the whole – line, colour, texture, materials, compositional framework, con-
textual siting and situation, and so on – are varied and disparate; each detail
of the work contributes differentially to the work’s overall organization and
meaning. The third assumption specifies that the signification of a work is
determinate and not arbitrary or subject to promiscuous reading. In other
words, parts of an object cannot mean anything or everything but exist
where and how they do as the result of some determined intelligence: every-
thing should be understood as having a reason for being there, which the
professional practitioner will have become adept at articulating.
These conditions and assumptions articulate a certain determinacy with
respect to the analytic domain of art history, criticism, and museology, work-
ing to define their disciplinarity as systematic, ‘scientific’ fields of inquiry and
exegesis. Form is assumed to have discoverable ‘laws’, which may exist on
individual, local, geographic, temporal, and universal levels.35
In this regard, art history might be seen as fundamentally similar in
its pursuit of scientificity as certain other modern academic disciplines
institutionalized in the nineteenth century – for example, literary studies and

history.36 Yet in a number of respects, there are aspects of the evidentiary
nature of art historical practice as it has evolved over the past century and a
half that find no easy parallel with other fields.
6
In the first place, the art historical object of study has what may be termed a
compound existential status. It is simultaneously material and simulacral,
tactile and photographic, unique and reproducible. It may appear at first
glance that it is inescapably material, and yet the individual, unique, palpa-
ble artifacts made, collected, and displayed constitute the occasion for art his-
torical practice rather than, strictly speaking, the subject matter of art histo-
ry, which is in fact history itself: that is, the history and development of indi-
viduals, groups, and societies.
Nor does the material art object exist simply as data for the art histori-
an, as raw material out of which histories are fabricated. There is an impor-
tant sense in which the art object exists as art only insofar as it may be sim-
ulated, replicated, modelled, or represented in historical and critical narra-
tives: that is, insofar as it may be adduced as evidence in the writing of
social history.
A certain disciplinary parallel may be drawn here between the study of art
and the study of literature. In both cases, professional concern with the orig-
inal object is ancillary to the business of the discipline, which is historical,
theoretical, and critical in nature, concerned with the construction of narra-
tive texts of an exegetical nature in the light of their importance to the under-
standing of sociohistorical developments in a broad sense. In this regard, the
disciplinarity of art history is fundamentally bound up with a dialogic con-
cern with the human past; works of art are of interest to the discipline inso-
far as their quiddity can be argued as having evidential value with respect to
particular questions about the past’s relation to the present. One of the pri-
mary functions of art history, from the time of its founding as an academic
discipline, has been that of the restoration of the past into the present so that
the past can itself function and do work in and on the present; so that the
present may be framed as itself the product of the past; and so that the past
may be seen as that from which, for one particular reason or another, we are
descended and thereby accounted for.37
Art history is thus a mode of writing addressed to the present; addressed,

one might say, to the fabrication and maintenance of modernity. As a social
and epistemological technology for framing modernity, the discipline has
served as one of modernity’s central and definitive institutions and instances.
Its goals have been fundamentally historicist, which is to say teleological.
Yet at the same time that the art object may bear a relationship to art his-
tory homologous to the relationship of an original manuscript to literary
history and theory, there is an important sense in which they differ, for the
material artwork has a status within the discourse on art as a whole that has
no parallel. For one thing, artworks participate in an immensely articulated
network of material relationships complementary to and partly intersecting
with the evidentiary elements in art historical practice. In other words, art
history has existed in tandem with another institution whose subject matter
would seem to be artworks: the museum.
7
Since their origins in familiar form some two centuries ago, museums of art
have functioned as evidentiary institutions in a manner similar to art histo-
ry itself. In the most general sense, the museology of art has been devoted to
the judicious assemblage of objects and images deemed particularly evoca-
tive of time, place, personality, mentality, and the artisanry or genius of indi-
viduals, groups, races, and nations.38 At the same time that the museum is a
repository of evidence for the seemingly inexhaustible variety of human
artistic expression, it has also functioned in the modern world as an institu-
tion for the staging of historical and aesthetic development and evolution –
that is, for the simulation of historical change and transformation of and
through artwork, or, more generally, material culture. In this respect, the
museum of art has had distinctly dramaturgical functions in modern life,
circulating individuals through spaces articulated and punctuated by
sequential arrangements of historical relics. Objects and images are choreo-
graphed together with the (motile) bodies of beholders.
Museological space is thereby correlative to art historical space and its
anamorphic archival stagecraft. A museological tableau is for all intents and
purposes intensely geomantic in that its proper and judicious siting (sight-
ing) – the mise-en-sequence of objects – works to guarantee the preservation
of the spirit of the departed or absent person or group. What is guaranteed
above all is the spirit of artisanry and of human creativity as such, the exis-
tence of such a phenomenon as art beneath what are staged as its myriad
manifestations or exemplars. In spatially formatting examples of characteris-
tic forms of expression of an artist, movement, nation, or period, the visitor
or user of the museum is afforded the opportunity to see for himself the evi-
dence of what is quintessentially and properly human in all its variety. The
absences of the past are peopled with palpably material relics, synecdochic
reminders that the present is the product of a certain historical evolution of
values, tastes, and manners – or a certain moral sensibility – summarized by
and inscribed in museological space.
And yet while the apparatus of art history and the dramaturgy of the
museum are similar to the extent that they both are addressed to the task of
fabricating and sustaining the present as the product of the past, there is a
dimension of museological stagecraft only inferentially present in art histo-
ry, namely, its address to the self as an object of ethical attention and inward
work through the heightened confrontation of beholder and the museologi-
cal ‘man-and/as-his work’.39 More about this shortly.
Since the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the transformation of
the old curio closets of early collectors into what Summerson termed ‘totalitari-
an’ museums devoted to the encyclopedic ‘histories’ of art, two principal para-
digms for the organization of museological space have dominated the practice of
the modern museum.40 The first of these involved the decoration of a given space
– a room, gallery, or ensemble of rooms – in such a way as to simulate the peri-
od ambience of a work or works by the inclusion of objects from the historical
contexts in which such works would have been originally seen, displayed, or
used. Variations on this theme include the exact replication of an artist’s studio,
or of a space in which such works were originally displayed, suggestive arrange-
ments of period pieces around objects or images, or arrays of relics and memen-
tos of the artist in question. The format may be as minimally articulated as in the
case of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the modernity of the
architecture itself provides a fitting complement to the artistic modernism of
twentieth-century artworks deployed therein, or as maximal as the replication of
an entire Roman villa for the display of ancient Greek and Roman art in the J.
Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. This model has obvious parallels with the famil-
iar panoramas of museums of natural history and ethnography, wherein plants,
animals, or human effigies may be set up within typically ‘natural’ settings.41
The second paradigm of museological display common to museums of

art involves the delimitation of designed or appropriated space according to
time periods, styles, or schools of art (or of a particular artist). Typically such
spaces are more or less coterminous with centuries, the span of political
regimes, or national, ethnic, or religious groupings. This mode of museolog-
ical stagecraft is correlative to the archival space of art historical practice, as
well as to the format of the art historical survey text wherein portions of the
archive or text correspond to episodes in the historical and genealogical
development of styles, genres, schools, or artistic careers.42
Both dramaturgical devices are addressed to the display of evidence for
the ‘truth’ of artworks. The first model affords the possibility that the signif-
icance of a work will be construed as a complex function of the multiple rela-
tionships among all elements of its contextual environment, of the specifici-
ties of the object’s history and moment. The second model foregrounds the
work’s significance on a diachronic axis, and the work is staged as one of a
linked series of ‘solutions’ to some aesthetic or iconographic ‘problem’ – for
example, the problem of naturalistic rendering of the human form in two
dimensions as might be staged by the sequential array of black- and red-fig-
ure Greek vases in a gallery, or the problems facing modern designers of fur-
niture, teapots, or political broadsheets.
While it might appear that these two modes of museological stagecraft
correspond specifically to art historical paradigms of explanation, the
first, that is, similar to modes of sociohistorical explanation in art histor-
ical argumentation, with the second paralleling more formalistic argu-
mentation – in fact in both modes of practice the significance, truth, or
pertinence of a work is formatted as a function of contextual relation-
ships: in the first case more or less synchronic; in the second instance
diachronic.
In the first or panoramic mode of evidentiary display, the object purports
to be in some way a distinct and fitting product of its time and place, a ‘reflec-
tion’ (in a variety of senses) of a wider milieu of production and consump-
tion. Underlying this mode of stagecraft is the assumption of a certain
homogeneity in that original environment, a certain uniformity of style,
mentality, or moral or aesthetic sensibility. The inference is that the observ-
er may find traces or symptoms of that specificity in many or all of the mate-
rial products of that spatio-temporal frame.
In the second mode, the artwork’s pertinence or truth is staged incremen-

tally or differentially as a moment in the evolution (commonly staged as pro-
gressive) of a tradition, style, school, genre, or problem in morphology or
iconography, or of an individual career (Monet at Giverny, Monet in old age,
or Picasso after Guernica, for example).
Common to both is the establishment of predicative or interrogative
frameworks for the viewer: enframings of works whose material topologies
simulate or perform the associations needed to fix and localize meaning. The
institution of the museum functions in a manner not unlike that of the visu-
al, diagrammatic logic of scientific demonstration wherein the actual deploy-
ment of evidence – like so many charts, tables, lists, and diagrams – itself
constructs and legitimizes the ‘truth’ of what is intended: conclusions regard-
ing origins, descent, influence, affiliation, progress, historical direction, or
the make-up of the mentalities and morals of an age or place. In this regard,
museological and art historical practice may be seen as correlative: the
object’s position in the archival and mnemonic system acquires its cogency
in response to (more or less) explicit questions: What time is this place?
Art history and museums of art consequently establish certain conditions
of reading objects and images in such a way as to foreground the rhetorical
economies of metaphorical and metonymic relationships.43 Both situate
their users (operators) in anamorphic positions from which the ‘history’ of
art may be seen as unfolding, almost magically, before their eyes. Regardless
of the fragmentary or partial nature of a particular museum collection or of
a given art historical archive or curriculum, both function as exemplary or
emblematic instances of an imaginary, ideal plenitude. Objects known and
unknown will have their ‘place’, their proper and fixed locus in that encyclo-
pedic and universal history of art projected onto the horizon of the future.
Both art historical and museological practice, to paraphrase Walter
Benjamin, deal in allegorical figures that express a certain ‘will to symbolic
totality’ and that continually stare out at us as incomplete and imperfect.44 At
the same time, the narrative stagings of these two mechanisms of our moder-
nity, in their evidential and implicational palpabilities, hold out the promise
that all will eventually make sense. In short, art history and museology con-
stitute the promise that whatever might occur could one day be made mean-
ingful. As evidentiary institutions, both have been grounded in that irony so
poignantly articulated by Lacan:
What is realized in [my] history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no
more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future
anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.45
Since Hegel and Winckelmann, this irony has deeply informed what art his-
tory has taken on itself to afford.
8
Art history and museology both work to legitimize their truths as original,
preconceived, and only recovered from the past. Both have aimed at the dis-
solution of troubling ambiguities about the past by fixing meaning, locating
its source in the artist, the historical moment, the mentality or morality of an
age, place, people, race, gender, or class, and by arranging or formatting the
past into rationalized genealogy: a clearly ramified ancestry for the present,
for the presence that constitutes our modernity. The narrative duration of the
‘history of art’ becomes at the same time the representation of and explana-
tion for history. This reality effect has constituted the historicist agenda on
which art history as a mode of writing addressed to the present has been
erected and to which museological theatre alludes.46
Both are practices of power wherein the desire for constructing the pres-
ent is displaced and staged as a desire for knowledge of the past such that the
present itself may come to be pictured as ordered and oriented as the effect
and product of progressive and inevitable forces. It is clearly the case, for
example, that the discourse on art has been deeply concerned, implicitly and
explicitly, with the promotion and validation of the idea of the modern
nation-state as an entity ideally distinct and homogeneous on ethnic, racial,
linguistic, and cultural grounds. Museums of art in particular have served,
since their origins in the late eighteenth century, to legitimize the nation-
state or the Volk as having a distinct, unique, and self-identical persona, style,
and aesthetic sensibility. At the same time, art history and the museum have
worked to promote the idea of the historical period as itself unified and
homogeneous, or dominated by a singular family of values and attitudes.47
It will be clear that the underlying and controlling metaphor in this his-
toricist labour is a certain vision of an ideal human selfhood – a persona with
a style of its own, and with an exterior directly expressive of an inner spirit
or essence. In this regard the labours of art history and museology have
traditionally been carried forward along the lines of personification and

characterization: what stamps Netherlandish art of a certain age or of all ages
will ideally be reflected in the painting of a seventeenth-century master as
well as in the design of contemporary bateaux-mouches plying the canals of
Amsterdam in the twentieth century; and the stamp of Picasso’s persona will
be adduced as much from his signature as from his ceramics, glasswork, and
painting.
It may not be hyperbolic to suggest that art history and museology have
been conventionally guided by a more deeply set metaphor – namely, that in
some sense art is to man (and it is necessary to stress the markedness of this
gendering) as the world is to God – that human creativity in all of its variety
is itself a shadow of divine creativity, its mortal echo. It is in this respect that
the confrontation of viewer and artwork in the landscape of the museum
embodies one aspect of art historical practice that finds no easy parallel in
other historical and critical disciplines. This has to do less with the unique
and palpable quiddity of the original artwork as such, and more to do with
its compound siting in that landscape as an evidential specimen.
The function of the museological specimen as an evidentiary artifact as
sketched out above – wherein museological and art historical practice can be
seen as correlative – in fact exists in a multiple epistemological space. Insofar
as the museum and art history frame the artwork or its photographic simu-
lacrum in an archival mass such as that pioneered by the Fogg, or in teleo-
logically motivated tableaux in space, the object or image acquires evidential
status when construed metonymically, synecdochically, or indexically. A cer-
tain mode of reading the object is specified and afforded by the art historical
archive or by museological dramaturgy wherein the object’s significance is
historical, genealogical, or differential. At the same time, however, the muse-
ological artifact is staged as an object of contemplation paradoxically both
inside and outside of ‘history’: as an occasion for the imaginative reconstitu-
tion of a world, a person, or an age, or of a universe of (aesthetic and/or eth-
ical) sensibility with which the viewed object is materially congruent in all of
its finest details. In short, the artwork is an occasion for individual medita-
tion and for the alignment of the individual viewing subject with that which
appears to be cued by the viewed object. According to David Finn,
there is no right or wrong way to visit a museum. The most important rule you
should keep in mind as you go through the front door is to follow your own
instincts. Be prepared to find what excites you, to enjoy what delights your heart
and mind, perhaps to have esthetic experiences you will never forget. You have a
feast in store for you and you should make the most of it. Stay as long or as short
a time as you will, but do your best at all times to let the work of art speak direct-
ly to you with a minimum of interference or distraction.48
It may be argued that the massive art historical and museological atten-
tion to the concrete specificity and uniqueness of the work of art, to its par-
ticularity and unreplicative materiality, to its auratic quiddity, represents not
only a dimension of disciplinarity peculiar to art history and museology, but
in one sense more interestingly the perpetuation of a particular mode of
epistemological practice antecedent to the historicist scientism, the ‘analyti-
co-referentiality’ characteristic of modern disciplinary practice.49
Two modes of knowing might thus be seen to be embodied in the work of
the museum, two kinds of propositional or interrogative frameworks: one
which relies on a metonymic encoding of phenomena, and one deeply
imbued with a metaphoric orientation on the things of this world, ground-
ed in analogical reasoning. With the former, facticity and evidence are for-
matted syntactically, metonymically, differentially; and the order of the sys-
tem constructs and legitimizes questions that might be put to sympathetic
data. With the latter, form and content are construed as being deeply and
essentially congruent, and the form of the work is the figure of its truth.50
It is here that we may begin to understand the foundational dilemma that
would have confronted the formation of a discipline such as art history:
how to fabricate a science of objects simultaneously construed as unique
and irreducible and as specimens of a class of like phenomena. The solution
to this dilemma has been the modern discourse on art, a field of dispersion
wherein a series of intersecting institutions – academic art history, art criti-
cism, museology, the art market, connoisseurship – maintain in play con-
trasting systems of evidence and proof, demonstration and explication,
analysis and contemplation, with respect to objects both semantically com-
plete and differential.
In modern disciplinary practice, there are seldom entirely pure examples
of these contrastive epistemological technologies, suggesting that art history
is no simple science, no uniform mode of cultural practice, but an eviden-
tiary institution housing multiple orientations on an object of study at once
semiotic and eucharistic.51 If the Fogg Museum appears as a paradigmatic
instance of scientific labour in the establishment of a historical discipline

modelled on the protocols of historical and literary inquiry, that labour at
the same time was, as Norton and his associates made abundantly clear, in
the service of the demonstration of an ethical practice of the self and its
works.52 The articulation of a ‘history of art’ was not intended to be an end in
itself but was rather antecedent to the formation of moral character on the
part of those who would submit to its discipline. Norton’s museums, then,
bore a more direct relationship to the memory theatre of Giulio Camillo of
the Renaissance,53 or to the ethical cosmos of his beloved Dante, than to the
‘totalitarian’ museums so exasperating to John Summerson.
Notes
1 This essay originally appeared in Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992).
2 An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald Preziosi,
Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 80–121. See also The New Art History,
ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (London: Camden Press, 1986).
3 One important sign of these discussions has been a series of ‘Views and
Overviews’ of the discipline appearing in The Art Bulletin in recent years, of
which the most recent has been perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive:
Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, ‘Semiotics and Art History’, The Art Bulletin 73
(June 1991), pp. 174–208.
4 The Fogg Art Museum was founded in memory of William Hayes Fogg of New
York by his widow and served as the home of the discipline at Harvard for 32
years, until its replacement by the present Fogg Museum in 1927. See George H.
Chase, ‘The Fine Arts, 1874–1929’, in The Development of Harvard University since
the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), pp. 130–145. See also Caroline
A. Jones, Modern Art at Harvard: The Formation of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-
Century Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1985), esp. pp. 15–30.
5 See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, pp. 72–79. Useful discussions of the art his-
torical tradition in Germany may be found in Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als
Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1979); see also Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press, 1982). Extensive discussions of early art historical
programmes in America will be found in Early Departments of Art History in the
United States, ed. Craig Hugh-Smyth, Peter Lukehart and Henry A. Millon
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). On England, see sect. 4 below.
6 Pressures were very strong from the outset of the planning for the institution. In
the first year of its existence, 16 Greek vases were loaned by an alumnus, and in
1896 two collections of engravings numbering over 30,000, already bequeathed to
the university, were transferred to the building. By 1913, extensive alterations were
made to the building to accommodate what had by then become a very large col-
lection of original works, sacrificing space previously given over to instruction.
7 The use of lantern-slide projection for a variety of purposes is of great antiquity.
A description of the process may be found in Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis
et umbrae (Rome, 1646); for an excellent discussion of optical devices in the nine-
teenth century, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press,
1990). The Swiss art historian Heinrich Wolfflin is said to have pioneered double
slide projection in the 1880s, wherein two images might be juxtaposed for com-
parison. On Wolfflin see Joan Hart, ‘Reinterpreting Wolfflin Neo-Kantianism and
Hermeneutics’, The Art Journal 42 (Winter 1982): 292–300. See also Preziosi,
Rethinking Art History, pp. 54–72.
8 See Chase, ‘The Fine Arts, 1874–1929’. The Fine Arts division was established at
Harvard in 1890–91; prior to that, the department had semi-official status. The
university catalogue for 1874–75 listed two courses: Fine Arts 1: Principles of
design in painting, sculpture, and architecture, taught by Charles Herbert Moore,
and Fine Arts 2: The history of the fine arts, and their relations to literature,
taught by Norton. Norton’s course became Fine Arts 3 and 4 by the 1890s. See
Charles Eliot Norton, ‘The Educational Value of the History of the Fine Arts’, The
Educational Review 9 (Apr. 1895): 343–348, wherein Norton observed that ‘it is in
the expression of its ideals by means of the arts…that the position of a people in
the advance of civilization is ultimately determined’ (p. 346). On the relationship
of instruction in the history of art to departments of classical languages, see
Robert J. Goldwater, ‘The Teaching of Art in the Colleges of the United States’,
College Art Journal 2 (May 1943): 3–31 (supp.).
9 On the Fogg (or Harvard) method, see Denman W. Ross, A Theory of Pure Design:
Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (Boston, 1907). The method aimed at developing sen-
sitivity to the grammar of an art object and at elaborating a ‘scientific language’ of
art intended to ‘define, classify, and explain the phenomena of Design’ without regard
to the personality of the artist (p. vi). This was in contrast to the perspectives of
Bernard Berenson, a follower of Norton and graduate of the method, who laid great-
est stress on the analysis of the structural properties of an image as an expression
of personality. The Fogg method strictly avoided the theorizing about the histor-
ical contexts of artworks emphasized in contemporary German scholarship. On
the history of connoisseurship, see Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, pp. 90–95.
10 On Ruskin’s immense influence on art historical and aesthetic thought in the
USA, see Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900
(Cambridge, MA, 1967), and Solomon Fishman, The Interpretation of Art: Essays
on the Art Criticism of John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Herbert
Read (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). At the time of his appoint-
ment in 1874, Norton wrote to Ruskin outlining his plans to take groups of stu-
dents to Venice and Athens in order to ‘show the similarity and the difference in
the principles of the two Republics’, in order to demonstrate that ‘there cannot be
good poetry, or good painting, or good sculpture or architecture unless men have
something to express which is the result of long training of soul and sense in the
ways of high living and true thought’ (Norton, letter to Ruskin, 10 Feb. 1874, The
Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols. [Boston, 1913], 2:34).
11 See John Summerson, ‘What Is a Professor of Fine Art?’, Inaugural lecture deliv-
ered at the University of Hull, 17 November 1960 (Hull: University of Hull, 1961),
p. 7; hereafter abbreviated ‘WP’.
12 Chase, ‘The Fine Arts, 1874–1929’, p. 133. Moore was appointed director of the
institution in 1896 and served until 1908. Chase himself served as dean of
Harvard College after succeeding Moore as chairman of the Department of the
Fine Arts.
13 A significant number of instructors in the Harvard art history programme were
recruited from departments of literature, most notably classics. This was a pat-
tern to be found at a number of other American universities in the late nine-
teenth century – such as Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Cornell, and Case Western
Reserve – as noted by Goldwater, ‘The Teaching of Art in the Colleges of the
United States’, pp. 26ff.
14 See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, pp. 75–79.

15 A classic example of this practice is Gisela M. A. Richter, The Sculpture and
Sculptors of the Greeks (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford
University Press, 1929). On the modes of reasoning implicit in such analyses and
their historical background, see Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 21–54, 351–385.
16 See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, pp. 21–40, 90–110.
17 See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy
(London, 1972).
18 ‘WP’, p. 171.
19 See ‘WP’, p. 5. Waagen played an influential role in the life of English collector
Felix Slade (himself destined to influence the course of art history in England by
his bequest of 1870) and is known to have spent time in England with him in the
late 1850s.
20 Summerson’s lecture conspicuously fails to mention developments in America,
where ironically Ruskin’s dream for Oxford was realized at Harvard through the
agency of Norton, who might be said to have founded English art history on the
wrong side of the Atlantic, across from the country that he regarded as his true
home. See ‘WP’, pp. 7–11. On connections between Ruskin and Eliot, see n. 10 above
and the essay by Sybil Kantor in Early Departments of Art History in the United States.
21 ‘WP’, p. 15.
22 ‘WP’, p. 16.
23 ‘WP’, p. 16. On crises in the representation of history in the nineteenth century,
see Richard Terdiman, ‘Deconstructing Memory: On Representing the Past and
Theorizing Culture in France since the Revolution’, Diacritics 15 (Winter 1985):
13–36.
24 ‘WP’, pp. 16–17; emphasis added.
25 ‘WP’, p. 17.
26 ‘WP’, p. 16. Summerson refers to Jacob Burckhardt’s mentor Franz Kugler as the
first ‘“totalitarian” art-historian’ in that he dealt equally with ‘painting, sculpture
and architecture over all time’ (’WP’, p. 16).
27 See also Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, Tropics of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), pp. 121–134, regarding the modern discipline of history.
29 See Rethinking Art History, pp. 159–168 on the ‘social history’ of art. On ‘form’
and its ‘laws’ of dispersal over time, see David Summers, “‘Form”, Nineteenth-
Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description’, Critical
Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 372–406; and compare Walter Benjamin’s critique of
Wolfflin in his ‘Rigorous Study of Art’, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October, no. 47
(Winter 1988), pp. 84–90.
30 See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, pp. 159–168 for an assessment of the recent
‘methodological’ controversies in the discipline, and also The New Art History for
British perspectives on recent debates.
31 An exemplary instance may be found in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T.
Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 203–248, where T. J.
Clark and Michael Fried stage a critical exchange on the subject of modernism in
art history (to little profit). See also the Discussions in Contemporary Culture
series sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation, in particular Vision and Visuality, ed.
Hal Foster (Seattle, 1988), and Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil
Mariani (Seattle, 1989).
32 See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, pp. 44–53, 95–121, regarding the logocentric
bias of art historical discourse in modern times, and Jacques Derrida, The Truth
in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian MacLeod (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987). esp. parts 1–3 of ‘Parergon’, pp. 15–82.
33 A useful discussion of the metaphorical foundations of these processes may be

found in Baxandall, ‘The Language of Art History’, New Literary History 10
(Spring 1979): 453–465. See also Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem
of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York, 1932).
A paradigmatic articulation of these processes is that of Hippolyte Taine, whose
1867 essay ‘De l’idéal dans L’art’, Philosophie de l’art, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Paris, 1880)
developed the concept of valeur characteristic of a given epoch in the history of
art, intrinsically and systematically connected to all facets of an evolving cultural
system; see also Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of
Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982), pp. 360–361; Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, pp. 87–90; and
White, ‘Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination’, Tropics of Discourse,
pp. 101–120.
34 Norton was especially deprecatory of German scholarship in the history of art,
which he regarded as so abstractly removed from the actual artwork as to be
largely useless for systematic and scientific understanding of artistic practice. By
contrast, the development of art history at Princeton University in the latter years
of the nineteenth century took contemporary German scholarship as its model.
On Norton’s attitude toward German art history, see Kantor’s article in Early
Departments of Art History in the United States.
35 See ‘WP’ on the problem of form; on the problem of ‘style’, the fundamental
text remains Meyer Schapiro, ‘Style’, in Anthropology Today, ed. A. L. Kroeber
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 287–312; see also the
important volume The Uses of Style in Archaeology, ed. Margaret W. Conkey
and Christine A. Hastorf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
esp. Conkey, ‘Experimenting with Style in Archaeology: Some Historical and
Theoretical Issues’ (pp. 5–17) and Ian Hodder, ‘Style as Historical Quality’
(pp. 44–51).
36 The best discussions of these issues with regard to the discipline of history are
White, ‘Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination’, Tropics of Discourse,
pp. 101–120; and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Maurice
Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason: Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), esp. pp. 42ff.; and R. G.
Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). See also Reiss,
The Discourse of Modernism, pp. 351–385.
37 See White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 104–141.
38 Substantial bibliographies pertaining to the origins and development of muse-
ums of art may be found in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities
in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur
MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 281–3 12, and in Adalgisa Lugli,
Naturalia et mirabilia: Il collezionismo enciclopedico nelle Wunderkammern
d’Europa (Milan, 1983), pp. 243–258. See also Louis Marin, ‘Fragments d’his-
toires de musées’, Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 17–18 (1986): 17–36;
Hubert Damisch, ‘The Museum Device: Notes on Institutional Changes’, Lotus
International, no. 35 (1982): 4–11; Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of
the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 76–92; and Paul
Holdengraber, ‘“A Visible History of Art”: The Forms and Preoccupations of the
Early Museum’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, no. 17 (1987): 107–117.
40 See Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History
3 (Dec. 1980): 447–469, and Ignasi de Sola-Morales, ‘Toward a Modern Museum:
From Riegl to Giedion’, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 68–77.
41 See Bann, The Clothing of Clio, pp. 77–85. This model corresponds to that of
Alexandre du Sommerard’s Musée de Cluny; see also Ann Reynolds,
‘Reproducing Nature: The Museum of Natural History as Nonsite’, October, no.
45 (Summer 1988): 109–127, and Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz, ‘The Fate of
Tipoo’s Tiger: A Critical Account of Ethnographic Display’, typescript.
42 See Bann, The Clothing of Clio, pp. 77–85; the second model corresponds to that
of Alexandre Lenoir’s installations in the Convent of the Petits-Augustins in Paris
in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Lenoir distributed objects accord-
ing to centuries over several rooms of the museum.
43 In Bann’s suggestive analysis of the museums of du Sommerard and Lenoir, the
former relies on relationships of synecdoche in the associations of objects, the lat-
ter on metonymy. A critique of Bann’s analyses will be found in Preziosi,‘Art History,
Museology, and the Staging of Modernity’, Parallel Visions, ed. Chris Keledjian
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). See also White, ‘Foucault’s Discourse:
The Historiography of Anti-Humanism’, The Content of the Form, pp. 124–25,
and Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism, pp. 9–54. The fundamental text is Roman
Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Style in Language, ed.
Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350–377.
44 Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(London: NLB, 1977), p. 186.
45 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris, 1966), p. 300; my translation.
46 See White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, Tropics of Discourse, pp.
121–134, in connection with the ‘reality effect’ of historical narration.
47 See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, pp. 11–16; and Fredric Jameson, The Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1981), p. 27, on the question of periodicity. A series of essays on the sub-
ject by art historians may be found in New Literary History I (Winter 1970):
113–144, with discussions by Schapiro, Ernst Gombrich, H. W. Janson, and
George Kubler.
48 David Finn, How to Visit a Museum (New York: Abrams, 1985), p. 10. On the fic-
tion of the work ‘speaking’ to the beholder, see Douglas Crimp, ‘On the Museum’s
Ruins’, October, no. 13 (Summer 1980): 41–58.
49 See Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism, pp. 9–54, and Preziosi, Rethinking Art
History, pp. 55–56.
50 In effect, this double epistemological framework for the art of art history and of
museology corresponds to the contrastive domains of knowledge examined by
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences,
(London: Tavistock Publications, 1970). The suggestion here is that art history
and museology preserve, in their object of study, an older analogic order of the
same within the play of difference and change.
51 On the subject of a ‘eucharistic’ semiology, see Preziosi, Rethinking Art History,
pp. 102–106; Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris, 1981); and Milad Doueihi’s review
of Le Portrait du roi by Marin, and Money, Language, and Thought, by Marc Shell,
Diacritics 14 (Spring 1984): 66–77.
52 For a suggestive parallel, see David Saunders and Ian Hunter, ‘Lessons from the
“Literatory”: How to Historicise Authorship’, Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991):
479–509, in connection with the rise of the modern novel, seen as comprising the
occasion for the modern practice of the self.
53 See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1966).
Collecting/museums 3
ALREADY THERE IS TROUBLE WITH THIS

title: this ‘critical term’ may itself be a
modest sign of the disciplinarity which
is in fact one of the subjects of the
essay. One of the pragmatic effects of
the conflation of ‘museums’ and ‘collecting’ and of their unstable oscillation may
be a masking of the revolutionary political history of museology in its
Enlightenment beginnings (not to speak of in present debates), in favour of a
(more seemly?) scenario of a technologically neutral ‘modernization’ of earlier,
more personalized or dis-ordered institutions – the curio cabinets, the private
and princely collections, the Kunst-und-Wunderkammern of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. This still remains the most commonplace picture of
museological ‘evolution’ not only for the lay public but also amongst some muse-
um professionals, even today – the modern, historically organized public
museum being construed as a more rationally or systematically ordered version
of these earlier ‘idiosyncratically’ organized collections. But perhaps we can just
leave this for now, and not prolong an essay which might just as well be renamed
‘Museology and museography’, for such a title more closely suggests what the fol-
lowing is about, which by the way is organized in centripetal fashion:
(History (Art (Subject (Stage/craft) Subject) Art) History)

{56} COLLECTING/MUSEUMS
History
The museum is one of the most brilliant and powerful genres of modern fic-
tion, sharing with other forms of ideological practice – religion, science,
entertainment, the academic disciplines – a variety of methods for the pro-
duction and factualization of knowledge, and its sociopolitical consequences.
Since its invention in late-eighteenth-century Europe as one of the premier
epistemological technologies of the Enlightenment, the museum has been
central to the social, ethical, and political formation of the citizenry of mod-
ernizing nation-states. At the same time, museological practices have played
a fundamental role in fabricating, maintaining, and disseminating many of
the essentialist and historicist fictions which comprise the social realities of
the modern world.
The modern practices of museology – no less than those of the museum’s
ancillary discursive practice of museography (aka ‘Art History’) – are a
dimension of the distinctively modernist ideology of representational
adequation, wherein it is imagined that exhibition and display may be faith-
fully ‘representative’ of some extra-museological states of affairs; some real
history which, it is supposed, pre-exists its portrayal or re-presentation in
exhibitionary or discursive space.
Museums are commonly constru(ct)ed as repositories or ‘collections’ of
objects whose arrangements in institutional space frequently simulate the
geographical relationship, chronological situation, or evolutionary develop-
ment of a form, theme, or technique, or of a person or people. In this regard,
they are understood as being representational artifacts in their own right,
portraying ‘history’ or the past through objects and images staged as relics
of that past. Despite the often fragmented or abstracted state of such speci-
mens, their association in the museum constitutes a system of representa-
tion which in turn endows each item with an evolutionary direction and
weight. Passage through museological space (which as we shall see is any-
thing but Euclidean) is commonly formatted as a simulation of travel
through historical time.
Museology and the various forms of museography which came to be
professionally organized since the early nineteenth century – art history,
connoisseurship, art criticism – have sustained the particular ideological
practices and affordances of historicism, wherein the import, value, or
meaning of an item is a direct function of its relative position in an
COLLECTING/MUSUEMS {57}
unfolding diachronic array. Both have also operated in a complementary

fashion to naturalize certain essentialist notions of the individual social
subject and its agency: in this regard, both ‘objects’ and their ‘subjects’ may
be seen as museological productions. For some two centuries, the muse-
um has been a powerful and effective crucible in which modern historiog-
raphy, psychology, ethics and aesthetics have been brought into mutual
alignment as coordinated and complementary systems within the
Enlightenment project of commensurability – the transcribing of all
human experience and expression into a common, universal frame of ref-
erence; into a common ‘language’.
Art
The most powerful agency (or ‘frame of reference’) by which the discipline
of museology has been successful in its virtually universal colonization of the
world’s cultures is the totalizing notion of Art. As one of the most remark-
able of modern European inventions, ‘art’ has been one of the most effective
ideological instruments for the retroactive rewriting of the history of human
societies.
Art has been the paradigm of all production from the beginnings of the
Industrial Revolution onward – its ideal horizon, and a standard against
which to measure not only all forms of manufacture, but also all kinds of
individuals and societies. At the same time, the artist is the very paragon of
agency in the modern world, and remains so today.
The modern individual or subject is interpellated into its own position in
the social order as a composer of its own life, in all of its facets. Ordinary
habitation in the modern world is above all an occasion for the dramaturgy
of the self, as this may be reflected (‘represented’) in a subject’s relationships
to the objects (from pitchers to paintings) with which it surrounds itself –
which it may have ‘collected’ – and with which it carries out the routines of
daily life.
This is an ethical practice of the self. As ethical artists, we are exhorted to
compose our lives, from the most minute and private details to the larger
public practices of careers, vocations, and social obligations and performanc-
es of all kinds as ‘works of art’ in their own right, and we exhort each other
to live ‘exemplary’ lives – those which may themselves be legible as represen-
tative artifacts, worthy of emulation. In no small measure, the languages of
ethics and of aesthetics are virtually palimpsests of each other in the day-to-
day enterprise of modernity.
The practices of museology thereby constitute a concordance between
religion, psychology, historiography, and individual and collective gover-
nance (the Enlightenment ideology of ‘representative’ government, wherein
delegation, exemplarity, and substitutability constitute social representa-
tion). In this respect, the institution is a key ideological apparatus; a discipline
for the production of the social realities and subjectivities of the modern
world. That this has been a successful institutional enterprise may be clear;
but the degree of its success is little appreciated, even today, for (as with most
functionally effective ideological practices) the seeming luxury, marginality
or even disposability of the museum may be read in fact as the very mark of
its totalizing achievement.
In the contemporary world, virtually anything can be deployed as a spec-
imen in a museum, and virtually anything can be staged or designated as a
museum. The very existence (and contemporary ubiquity) of the institution
transforms most things into museological matter – into objects which,
whether or not they might come to be (literally) situated in institutional
space, invariably come to bear a concerted relationship to whatever is or
might be so sited (cited). The entire made environment and its parts –
indeed the entire biosphere itself – is touched by museological practice of
some kind, to the extent that things not in museums are perforce ‘things-not-
in-museums’.
As the theatre’s existence ironicizes imagined divisions of behaviour into
the natural and the artificial, so the museum, by marking the world into the
museological and the extra-museological, renders paradoxical distinctions
between original and copy, reality and fiction, presentation and representa-
tion, while at the same time keeping such dualities in play. Whilst mas-
querading as an assemblage or ‘collection’ of what pillage, patronage, or pur-
chase has bestowed upon its treasuries, the institution in fact constitutes a
system of representation – an ideological apparatus – that operates upon its
users’ imaginary conceptions of self and social order so as to render desirable
and needed specific forms of social subjectivity and social reality.
It may be clear that within such a system of representations, ‘art’ thus
came to be the object par excellence of Enlightenment disciplinarity and its
more recent offsprings. What is less obvious is that this is an ‘object’ which is
at the same time an instrument of that enterprise – both the name of what
might be museologically instantiated and museographically cited, as well as
the (now largely forgotten) name of the language of study itself.
It is in this sense that the Enlightenment invention of ‘art’ should be
understood – as both a thing and a framing device or medium of expression:
a parergonal instrumentality. As with the term ‘history’, denoting equally a
disciplinary practice of writing – historiography – and the referential field or
‘object’ of that scriptural practice, ‘art’ will be best understood in its fullest
sense as the instrumentality or metalanguage of the museum’s historio-
graphical and psychical confabulations, as well as that confabulated world of
objects itself.
‘Art’, in other words, is what museology and museography practise, as well
as what that practice instantiates. The instrumental valence of the term has
been largely (and quite successfully) submerged in modern museography in
favour of the ‘objecthood’ of art and all its metaphysical baggage.
Subject
As it has since the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of great civic
and national public museums, the object of the museum – art – constitutes
a method of organizing whole fields of activity so as to make legible, to give
structure and point, to certain notions of the subject and its agency. Museum
objects are formatted as representatives or even simulacra of the character or
mentality of the subjects who produced them (individuals or peoples), and
stand to be read as these effects or traces. At the same time, the work and its
maker are transformed into a new disciplinary unity – the man – (or the peo-
ple) and/as – its – work.
The museum object in this sense serves to legitimize a subjectivity organ-
ized around notions of composure, consistency and homogeneity of spirit
and mission, as well as of order and clarity of purpose no less than of gender
and station in life. In fact, this is the familiar bourgeois ideal of the social
subject with a determined and determinate biography or trajectory; a
curriculum vitae which must be tended carefully according to its position in
the social order; a life which must be clearly legible as an ethical and moral
masterpiece (however modest) in its own right.
Museums are heterotopic sites within social life which provide subjects with
some of the means to simulate mastery of their lives whilst compensating for
the contradictions and confusions of daily life.Virtual realities have always

been what museums and art histories have engendered. What this has
accomplished since the nineteenth century, in concert with their sibling
Enlightenment disciplines and institutions, was nothing less than the disci-
plining of whole populations through a desire-driven interaction with
objects that were object-lessons in at least two principal ways – as documen-
tary indices of a history of the world and its people, construed as teleologi-
cal dramaturgy (‘evolution’), as having a direction and point and leading up
to the spectator at the apex of this journey; and as simulacra of a richly var-
ied series, a veritable cornucopia of subject-positions (ways of ‘being’-in-the-
world) which might be admired, desired, emulated, eschewed, or forgotten.
Just as the museum object comes to serve as a perspective or window on
history and evolution of styles, attitudes, values, or peoples, and on the won-
drous diversity of human existence and expression, so also does the new
modern social subject itself come to be constituted as an anamorphic per-
spective on the bits and pieces of its own life and experience. What the muse-
um subject ‘sees’ in this extraordinary institutional and disciplinary space is
a series of possible ways in which it can construct or compose its life as one
or another kind of centred unity or consistency which draws together in a
decorous and telling order all its diverse, fragmentary, and contradictory
experiences; its sundry devices and desires. Museums put us in the picture,
by teaching us how to be picture-perfect. Ethics and aesthetics, in this virtu-
al reality, are portions of the same museological Moebius strip; surfaces
which only at first glance appear unconnected.
Stage/craft
The mechanics of this discipline are stunningly simple, even if their effects
are enormously complex, subtle, and far-reaching. Consider the semiotic and
epistemological status of the museological artwork. It has, in fact, a distinct-
ly hybrid epistemological status, staged (as it has been since the modern
invention of the museum) in a spatio-temporal framework of oscillating
determinacy and causality.
On the one hand, the object’s significance is perpetually deferred across a
network of associations defined by formal or thematic relationships. Staged
as a specimen of a class of like objects (which may or may not be physically
present in the same space), each of which seems to provide ‘evidence’ for the
progressive ‘solution’ to similar problems of representation, the object’s

meaning is literally ‘elsewhere’ (in museographical space).
On the other hand, it is invariably foregrounded (whether or not specifi-
cally pedestalized) as unique and irreplaceable, as singular and non-repro-
ducible, its significance or meaning rooted in its emblematic and expressive
properties relative to (representative of) its maker or origin. In this respect,
the very form of the work is always in some manner the figure of its truth –
a truth connected directly and transitively to the vision, mission, intentions,
mentality, or character of the maker or source (person, people, ethnicity,
gender, etc.).
As deployed in museographical exegesis and museological stagecraft, the
museum object is thus simultaneously referential and differential in charac-
ter. This ‘simultaneity’, however, is akin to that of a ‘visual illusion’, wherein
there is an oscillating determinacy (as for example in the famous Necker
cube), where either one or the other character is foregrounded at any one
time, only to be subject to a perpetual slippage or alternation with its other.
In short, referentiality is paradoxically both the foreground and background
to differentiality, and vice-versa, in an oscillation or slippage which can never
fully be fixed in place. Of course, historically, it has been this very oscillation
or ‘incompleteness’ of any one mode of (for example) art historical ‘explana-
tion’ which has literally kept disciplinary discourse ‘in play’ for so long.
Rather like an alternating current, this oscillating determinacy is virtually
invisible in ‘ordinary’ (exegetical) light, and is palpable primarily anamor-
phically, by reading or seeing ‘against the grain’.
All this is in fact epistemologically similar to the ‘object/instrument’ char-
acter of ‘art’ itself on a broader plane, wherein museological stagecraft (and
museographical argument) generate a paradoxical, enigmatic, and indeter-
minate field of legibility. In attending to the ‘artifice’ of museological stage-
craft (and that of museographical demonstration and proof), the bivalent
character of this extraordinary ‘object’ may be rendered more visible.
In rendering the visible legible (which after all is the point of the discourse
on ‘art’), museum objects are literally both there and not there, and in two dis-
tinct ways. In the first place, the object is both quite obviously materially part
of its position (situation) in the historiographic theatre of the museum (it’s
physically present in truth). Yet at the same time, it is unnaturally borne there
from some other milieu, from some ‘original’ situation: its present situation
is in one sense fraudulent (this museum is not ‘its’ place). In the second place,
the object’s significance is both present and absent, in the manner described
above: its semiotic status is both referential and differential; it is both direct-
ly and indirectly meaningful.
For the museum user, then, the object’s material properties, no less than
its significance, are simultaneously present and absent. In being induced to
reckon with – to cope with and think with – the truths of a museum object
by imagining what might plausibly lie ‘behind’ it, in its historiographic or art
historical reality as ‘specimen’, the subject is nevertheless equally bound to it;
‘fascinated’ with it (from the Latin fascinare, ‘to bewitch’), as somehow ‘con-
taining’ (or ‘being’) its ‘own’ explanation. Formalism and contextualism, as
may have been clear all along, are prefabricated positions in the same ideo-
logical system of representation; co-determining and coordinated facets of
the sociopolitical project of modernity.
{Here, at the heart of the essay’s centre (rather than at its beginning), it
might be useful to insert a quotation. It reads: ‘Psychoanalysis and historiog-
raphy thus have two different ways of distributing the space of memory. They
conceive of the relation between the past and present differently.
Psychoanalysis recognizes the past in the present; historiography places them
one beside the other. Psychoanalysis treats the relation as one of imbrication
(one in the place of the other), of repetition (one reproduces the other in
another form), of the equivocal and of the quiproquo (What “takes the
place” of what?)’ [But here let me insert one more quotation, which reads as
follows: ‘I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it
looks like a subject’.(Lacan, 1978)] ‘Everywhere, there are games of masking,
reversal, and ambiguity). Historiography conceives of the relation as one of
succession (one after the other), correlation (greater or lesser proximities),
cause and effect (one follows from the other), and disjunction (either one or
the other, but not both at the same time)’ (De Certeau, 1986).}
It is here that we may begin to understand the sleights-of-hand on which
museological stagecraft and museographical citation are dependent, and
upon which being a subject in a museum (and consequently in a museolo-
gized world) is so dependent.
Despite what might be claimed by some museum professionals, or even
imagined by museum users themselves, museological stagecraft has
remained virtually unchanged except in superficial ways since the middle of
the nineteenth century. It remains to be seen whether or not recent interac-

tive media will accomplish anything different than what has been done for
nearly two centuries – viz., aligning spectator and object together in such a
manner that the individual object may be ‘read’ with a minimum of distrac-
tion or interference (from other viewers or from other objects).
[Given what has been accomplished in this area to date, as well as what
may be discerned in the projections of many museum personnel and of an
increasing number of art historical cyberpreneurs (as may be read daily on
the museum internet), what is emerging is less a substantive change in insti-
tutional practices or agendas and more a merger or synthesis of museology
and museography. Today, each museum user is provided increasingly more
direct access to the means of fabricating his or her own individual ‘art histo-
ries’, by accessing the institution and its resources as if it were an expandable
and alterable data source. These new technological syntheses, this collapsing
together of museology and art history, parallels the contemporary synthesis
of television, telephone, fax, and computer into a single (‘new’) apparatus.]
Subject
Constituted by lack (and lack of determinate causality and fixity), the staged
and storied artifact becomes both the emblem of and catalyst for the subject’s
‘own’ desire. And the subject comes to ‘see’ itself as constituted by a ‘lack’ that
may only be ‘filled’ by acceding to the object’s own ‘promise’. Some implica-
tions of this, in shorthand, are as follows.
The subject is induced to imagine (is forced to ‘reckon’ with, in both sens-
es of the term) a gaze which is ‘outside’ the field of vision. How one is
‘induced to imagine’ is specific to any number of staging techniques or exhi-
bitionary formattings, yet most commonly, this is referred to the purview of
something that is understood to be the History of Art, located elsewhere – as
a future ideal horizon (or vanishing point) at which all of ‘history’ comes to
completion and sense; where ‘answers’ are to be found. Somewhere, the
object’s significance is fixed in place once and for all; some art historian,
somewhere, knows (that this is itself an artifact of disciplinarity and its holo-
graphic authority is quite clear: the ‘art historian’ is, above all, a ‘subject-sup-
posed-to-know’).
For the spectator, then, the museum object is in a position rather like the
‘blur’ in an anamorphic picture which is only resolvable, which comes into
clarity of focus, from some (‘imaginary’) elsewhere. Legibility, if you will, is

deferred to a place where everything but the original blur becomes mis-
aligned and indistinct. Which, of course, keeps the game in play.
Museography in this sense is museology’s ‘imaginary elsewhere’. And vice-
versa: there is (again) an oscillating epistemological determinacy in the mod-
ern discourse on art whose two ‘states’, as it were, are museology and
museography. (But that is another essay; the phrase ‘optical illusion’ is in one
sense inappropriate here, for the fact of the matter is that in museological
space, strictly speaking, there is no ‘illusion’, for there is only ‘illusion’.)
Art
The veritable Summa of opticality – and an invention as profound in its con-
sequences as that of one-point perspectival rendering several centuries earli-
er – the museum subjects the viewer’s identity to an Otherness whose own
identity is both present and absent. The object can only confront the subject
from a place where the subject is not. It is in this fascination with modernity’s
paragon of objects – with ‘art’ per se in museological and discursive space –
that the subject or spectator is ‘bound over’ to it, laying down his or her gaze
in favour of this quite extraordinary object. And it is in this fascination that
we find ourselves, as subjects, remembered (the opposite of dis-member-
ment). Museums dis-arm us so as to make us re-member ourselves, and in
ever new ways.
Our need/desire to reckon with the institution itself is a perpetuation of
the Imaginary order in the daily life of the systems of the Symbolic – the fas-
cination of the child – its being drawn to and tied to its mirror image(s), its
‘imaginary’ sense of wholeness, coincides with its (and our) recognition of
lack. Museums in this sense serve a decidedly autoscopic function, providing
‘external’ (organs for the) perception of the subject and its modes of agency.
Moreover – and rather like an ego – the museum object does not strictly
coincide with the subject, but is rather an unstable site where the distinction
between inside and outside, and between subject and object, is continually
and unendingly negotiated in individual confrontations. The museum is in
fact a theatre for the adequation of an I/eye confronting the world-as-object,
with an I/eye confronting itself as an object among objects in that world: an
adequation that is never quite complete and remains endlessly pursued. The
museum (and art) have been so successful precisely because these adequa-
tions, these circuits of desire, must be continually (re)adjusted. (There’s

always more than meets the I/eye.)
History
On a global scale, art has come to be a universal method of (re)narrativizing
and (re)centring ‘history’ itself by establishing a standard or canon (or medi-
um, or frame) in or against which all peoples of all times and places might
be seen together in the same epistemological space; on the same botanical
tables of aesthetic progress and ethical and cognitive advancement (histori-
ographic anteriority and posteriority). Once this remarkable invention came
to be museographically and museologically deployed, it proceeded,
inevitably, to ‘find’ itself everywhere, in all human productivity. Works of art
were construed as the most distinctive and telling of human products, the
most paradigmatic and exemplary of our activities, more fully revelatory and
evidentiary in all their details than any other objects (apart from ‘subjects’
themselves) in the world. All the world’s things are thereby galvanized into
greater or lesser approximations of this ideal.
To each people its proper and unique art, and to each art its proper posi-
tion as a station on the historiographic grand tour leading (up) to the
modernity and presentness, the always-alreadyness, of Europe (or ‘the
West’). Against that, all that which was not (of) Europe was ‘objectified’ (ety-
mologically, ‘thrown-behind’) as anterior. To leave Europe (this brain of the
earth’s body) was to enter the past (an alterity in the process of being trans-
formed into the future anterior of political, economic, and social coloniza-
tion and domination; into the field of play of entrepreneurial opportunism),
the realm of everything that might be framed as prologue.
In the broadest sense, art is the very esperanto of Western hegemony.
Museology and museography have been indispensable instruments of the
Europeanization of the world. As a device for distributing the spaces of social
memory within a totalizing schema of coordination and commensurability,
art provided the means for envisioning all times and places and peoples
within a common and universal and ‘neutral’ frame. For every people and
ethnicity, for every race and gender no less than for every individual, there
could be imagined legitimate and proper art histories, theories, and criti-
cisms, each in relationship to an aesthetic practice with its own unique
‘spirit’ or soul; its own birth, maturity, and decline; its own archaisms and
classicisms; its own stylistic and representational problem-solving adven-

tures; its own respectability and its own geographical and chronological
home or address. Neither Mannerism nor Lower Manhattan Neo-
Deconstructivist parking meter graffiti should come as a surprise to anyone,
for most museographic categories or art historical ‘movements’ are artifacts
of the museological system of representations itself, and could have been pre-
dicted from the stagecraft of the post-Revolutionary Louvre of the early
1800s to that of NY MOMA of the 1930s.
The sheer brilliance of such a colonization – which (as with any hetero-
topia) compensates for dominance and marginalization through the dissem-
ination of essentialist and historicist fantasies of seemingly limitless horizons
and great personal and collective satisfactions (however much, like a library
book, they must be regularly renewed) – is quite truly astonishing. There is
no ‘artistic tradition’, no ‘aesthetic practice’ anywhere in the world today
which is not formatted or scripted through the terms of this epistemological
technology and its system of representation. All this takes place, quite natu-
rally (of course), in the very hands of the colonized (ourselves and others).
And the modernist ideologies of nation-statism, with all their terrors and
salvations, are naturalized and ‘demonstrated’ through the apparatus of the
museum and the disciplinarity of art. One simply cannot, today, be a nation-
state, an ethnicity, or a race, without a proper and corresponding art, with its
own distinctive history or trajectory which ‘reflects’ or models the broader
historical evolution of that identity – which bodies forth its ‘soul’.
It is in this sense that museology and museography have so very profound-
ly enabled identity and allegiance of all kinds, and in all dimensions, from the
ethnic group to the individual. They have been so indispensable to modernist
identity, whether this is linked to ethnicity, class, gender, or sexual politics,
that there is today the natural presumption that any conceivable identity must
have its corresponding and proper (and presumably unique) material ‘aes-
thetic’. To be lesbian no less than being Liberian (whatever else these might
mean) necessitates ‘having’ an art (and/or ‘enacting’ one) within the contem-
porary enterprise of modernity – if one cannot be found immediately, one
can be scripted and staged: art historians are grateful for the work.
As with other grand modernist fictions (such as ‘race’) which form the
‘real’ bases of social entitlements, art, once having been invented, not only
structures thought and reorders perception (to the extent that it no longer
has an outside that is clearly distinct – almost anything can ‘be’ art in some
context for someone, just as almost anything can be designated as a muse-
um), but art also makes it difficult to imagine that there was ever not such a
thing. To think our way back beyond art has always been to think our way
back beyond the human.
So also does the museum, once having been invented and deployed, make
it difficult to imagine a world in which a made thing could be anything but
the reflection, effect, product, sign, or ‘representation’ of some prior state or
capacity; some intention or purpose. Which (to bring this essay full circle) is
of course another way of scripting theology.
Suggested reading
Bann, Stephen (1984) The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of
History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’,
New York: Routledge.
Carruthers, Mary (1990) The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in
Medieval Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Certeau, Michel (1986) Heterologies, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Deotte, Jean-Louis (1993) Le Musée, L’Origine de L’Esthétique, Paris: Editions
L’Harmattan.
Derrida, Jacques (1987) The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Finn, David (1985) How to Visit a Museum, New York: Abrams.
Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean (1992) Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge,
London: Routledge.
Impey, Oliver and Arthur MacGregor (eds) (1985) The Origins of Museums:
The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lacan, Jacques (1978) The Four Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis,
trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton.
McClellan, Andrew (1994) Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins
of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-century Paris, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pearce, Susan (1992) Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study,

Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Preziosi, Donald (1989) Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
——(1992) ‘The Question of Art History’, in Critical Inquiry 18, pp.
363–386.
Walsh, Kevin (1992) The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in
the Post-Modern World, London: Routledge.
The art of Art History 4
IS THERE NOT IN THE WORD VRAI A SORT OF

supernatural rectitude? Is there not in
the terse sound it demands a vague image
of chaste nudity, of the simplicity of the
true in everything? … Does not every
word tell the same story? All are stamped with a living power which they derive
from the soul and which they pay back to it by the mysteries of action and the
marvellous reaction that exists between speech and thought – like, as it were, a
lover drawing from the lips of his mistress as much love as he presses into them.
Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert
The modern practices of museology – no less than those of the museum’s

auxiliary discursive practice, Art History (let us call this here museography) –
are firmly rooted in an ideology of representational adequacy, wherein exhi-
bition is presumed to more or less faithfully ‘represent’ some set of extra-
museological affairs; some ‘real’ history which, it is imagined, pre-exists its
portrayal; its re-presentation, in exhibitionary space.
However fragmentary, temporary, or terse the collection or exhibition, it
exists today within the parameters of expectation established by two cen-
turies and more of museums, galleries, salons, fairs, expositions, displays, and
visual and optical demonstrations and experiments of many familiar kinds.
{70} THE ART OF ART HISTORY
Every exhibition is commonly understood as a fragment, or a selection out

of, some absent and fuller whole. Every item in museological space is a
specimen – a member of a class of like objects.
Each mode of modern exposition is in its own way the successor to, or a
modern version of, one or more older ‘arts’, ‘books’, or ‘houses’ of memory,
some of which are of very great antiquity in the West.1 It may be useful to
consider all such modes of exposition and display as comprising facets of an
interrelated (and mutually defining) network of social practices or epistemo-
logical technologies that together make up the vast enterprise of modernity.
Just as the set of practices which came to be orchestrated together as the
modern museum may have had separate and distinct antecedents,2 so too
may it be useful to understand the museum as itself one of a set of techniques
whose coordination and interrelation came about in connection with the
evolution of the modern nation-state.
This essay is a meditation or reflection (the use of such words is
inescapably part of that long tradition) upon the broad architectonic param-
eters, distinctive features, or systemic structures, underlying the historical
formation of Art History and museology. In particular, it is an attempt to
articulate what characterizes the storied space of museology in a manner
which may help shed light on what may have been at stake in the origins of
Art History, itself a facet of a broader discursive field that might possibly be
termed ‘museography’.
This I will characterize loosely for the moment as a peculiarly modernist
orchestration and linking together of subjects and objects in a variety of stages
or venues that became key operating components of the efficient functioning of
the modern nation-state. These would not only include the familiar features of
professional art historical practice such as slide, photo, and electronic archives
and teaching facilities, but also aspects of the tourist, fashion, and heritage
industries. Museums and other modernist artifacts such as novels would be
examples of such museographic practices. More on these distinctions below.
One motivation for what follows here is the pressing need to think Art
History otherwise: to consider it apart from two kinds of inertias. First, the
obstinacies of millennialist scenarios of traditional disciplinary historiogra-
phies, which continue to articulate the ‘histories’ of art historical practices in
a social and epistemological vacuum (thus recapitulating and simulating the
‘art history’ of Art History). Second, the recent satisfactions of recanoniza-
THE ART OF ART HISTORY {71}
tion and the formulaic assimilation of various ‘new art histories’ that have
largely expanded the ground of existing canons and orthodoxies rather than
offering substantive alternatives to the status quo.3 The format of what fol-
lows, then, reflects an attempt to stand apart from the discipline at an oblique
and raking angle; to read it obliquely or anamorphically, as it were.
The evolution of the modern nation-state was enabled by the cumulative for-
mation of a series of cultural institutions which pragmatically allowed national
mythologies, and the very myth of the nation-state as such, to be vividly imag-
ined and effectively embodied. As an imaginary entity, the modern nation-state
depended for its existence and maintenance on an apparatus of powerful (and,
beginning in the late eighteenth century, increasingly ubiquitous) cultural fic-
tions, principal amongst which were the novel and the museum. The origins of
the professional discipline of Art History, it will be argued here, cannot be
understood outside the orbit of these complementary developments.
The new institution of the museum in effect established an imaginary
space-time and a storied space: a historically inflected or funeous4 site. It
thereby served as a disciplinary mode of knowledge-production in its own
right, defining, formatting, modelling, and ‘re-presenting’ many forms of
social behaviour by means of their products or relics. Material of all sorts was
recomposed and transformed into component parts of the stage-machinery
of display and spectacle. These worked to establish by example, demonstra-
tion, or explicit exhortation, various parameters for acceptable relations
between subjects and objects, among subjects, and between subjects and
their personal histories, that would be consonant with the needs of the
nation-state. To be seen in the storied spaces of the museum were not only
objects, but other subjects viewing objects, and viewing each other viewing.
And the smile of the Mona Lisa appearing not to smile for thee.
Museums, in short, established exemplary models for ‘reading’ objects as
traces, representations, reflections, or surrogates of individuals, groups,
nations, and races, and of their ‘histories’. They were civic spaces designed for
European ceremonial engagement with (and thus the evocation, fabrication,
and preservation of) its own history and social memory.5 As such, museums
made the visible legible, thereby establishing what was worthy to be seen,
whilst teaching museum users how to read what is to be seen: how to activate
social memories. Art History becomes one of the voices – one might even say
a major popular historical novel – in and of museological space.6 In a com-

plementary fashion, Art History established itself as a window onto a vast
imaginary universal museum, encyclopedia or archive of all possible speci-
mens of all possible arts,7 in relation to which any possible physical exhibit,
collection, or museum would be itself a fragment or part.
Since its invention in late-eighteenth-century Europe as one of the premier
epistemological technologies of the Enlightenment, and of the social, politi-
cal, and ethical education of the populations of modernizing nation-states,
the modern museum has most commonly been constru(ct)ed as an eviden-
tiary and documentary artifact. At the same time, it has been an instrument
of historiographic practice; a civic instrument for practising history. It con-
stitutes in this regard a particular mode of fiction: one of the most remark-
able genres of imaginative fiction, and one which has become an indispensa-
ble component of statehood and of national and ethnic identity and heritage
in every corner of the world. In no small measure, modernity itself is the
museum’s collective product and artifact; the supreme museographic fiction.
What can it mean, then, to be a ‘subject’ in a world of ‘objects’ where some
are legible or construed as representative of others because of their physical
siting in the world, or the manner in which they are staged or framed? What
constitutes such ‘representation’? What exactly makes this possible or believ-
able? The possibilities of representation in the modern world are grounded
in much more ancient philosophical and religious traditions of thought
regarding the nature of the relations between character and appearance.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, there are aspects of civic and secular forms of
representational adequacy and responsibilty that are specific to the syntheses
of modernity, being closely tied to the affordances of the system of cultural
technologies in service to, and simultaneously enabling, the nation-state.
We live in a world in which virtually anything can be staged or deployed
in a museum, and in which virtually anything can be designated or serve as
a museum. Although in the last two decades of the twentieth century there
has appeared an immense and useful literature on museums and museology,8
it has also become clear that significant progress in understanding the
remarkable properties, mechanisms, and effects of museological practice
remains elusive. In fact it is clear that it demands nothing less than a major
rethinking of not a few historical and theoretical assumptions, and modes of
interpretation and explanation. The position taken here is that the
Enlightenment invention of the modern museum was an event as profound

and as far-reaching in its implications as the articulation of central-point
perspective several centuries earlier (and for not dissimilar reasons).9
That it was truly a revolutionary social invention is increasingly clear. It was
achieved abruptly in some places, and more gradually in others, as was the case
with the European social revolutions that the new institution was designed to
serve. The museum crystallized and transformed a variety of older practices of
knowledge-production, formatting, storage, and display into a new synthesis
that was commensurate with the eighteenth-century development of other
modern forms of observation and discipline in hospitals, prisons, and
schools.10 In this regard, the museum will most usefully be understood as a pri-
mary site for the manufacture of that larger synthesis constituting modernity
itself; it simultaneously stands as one of its most powerful epitomes.
The following three sections consist of, first, [Part 1] a series of observations
and informal propositions expanding on some of the ideas just outlined.
Although much of this appears assertive and declarative, it is in fact written
on a translucent surface beneath which you may be able to catch glimpses of
descending layers of questions. Each proposition, then, may be taken as an
anamorphic perspective on the entire set of observations. Or as a provocation
intended to move the discourse of museology out of its current muddy tracks.
This is followed, in Part 2, by an expansion on the propositions and observa-
tions just set forth, and consists primarily of an examination of certain prop-
erties of the art of Art History, particularly in its relationship to fetishism. The
final section [Part 3] is an attempt to delineate in a systematic fashion the
properties and features of the storied spaces of museology and museography,
and is written as a response to the question: What was most deeply at stake in
the foundation of the discipline of Art History two centuries ago?
1 Museology and museography11
I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it

like an object.
Jacques Lacan12
(1) Museums do not simply or passively reveal or ‘refer’ to the past; rather
they perform the basic historical gesture of separating out of the present a
certain specific ‘past’ so as to collect and recompose (to re-member) its dis-
placed and dismembered relics as elements in a genealogy of and for the pres-
ent. The function of this museological past sited within the space of the pres-
ent is to signal alterity or otherness; to distinguish from the present an Other
which can be reformatted so as to be legible in some plausible fashion as gen-
erating or producing the present. What is superimposed within the space of
the present is imaginatively juxtaposed to it as its prologue.13
This museological ‘past’ is thus an instrument for the imaginative produc-
tion and sustenance of the present; of modernity as such. This ritual per-
formance of commemoration is realized through disciplined individual and
collective use of the museum, which, at the most basic and generic level, con-
stitutes a choreographic or spatiokinetic complement or analogue to the
labour of reading a novel or newspaper, or attending a theatre or show.
(2) The elements of museography, including Art History, are highly coded
rhetorical tropes or linguistic devices that actively ‘read’, compose, and allegorize
the past. In this regard, our fascination with the institution of the museum – our
being drawn to it and being held in thrall to it – is akin to our fascination with
the novel, and in particular the ‘mystery’ novel or story. Both museums and mys-
teries teach us how to solve things; how to think; and how to put two and two
together. Both teach us that things are not always as they seem at first glance.
They demonstrate that the world needs to be coherently pieced together (literal-
ly, re-membered) in a fashion that may be perceived as rational and orderly: a
manner that, in reviewing its steps, seems by hindsight to be natural or
inevitable. In this respect, the present of the museum (within the parameters of
which is also positioned our identity) may be staged as the inevitable and logical
outcome of a particular past (i.e., our heritage and origins), thereby extending
identity and cultural patrimony back into a historical or mythical past, which is
thereby recuperated and preserved, without appearing to lose its mystery.
In essence, both novel and museum evoke and enact a desire for panoptic
or panoramic points of view from which it may be seen that all things may
indeed fit together in a true, natural, real, or proper order. Both modes of
magic realism labour at convincing us that each of us could ‘really’ occupy
privileged synoptic positions, despite all the evidence to the contrary in daily
life, and in the face of domination and power.
Exhibition and art historical practice (both of which are subspecies of
museography) are thus genres of imaginative fiction. Their practices of compo-
sition and narration constitute the ‘realities’ of history chiefly through the use of
prefabricated materials and vocabularies – tropes, syntactic formulas, method-
ologies of demonstration and proof, and techniques of stagecraft and dramatur-
gy.14 Such fictional devices are shared with other genres of ideological practice
such as organized religion and the entertainment (containment) industries.
(3) The museum is also the site for the imaginary exploration of linkages
between subjects and objects; for their superimposition by means of juxta-
position. The art museum object may be imagined as functioning in a man-
ner similar to an ego: an object that cannot exactly coincide with the subject,
that is neither interior nor exterior to the subject, but is rather a permanent-
ly unstable site where the distinction between inside and outside, subject and
object, is continually and unendingly negotiated.15 The museum in this
regard is a stage for socialization; for playing out the similarities and differ-
ences between an I (or eye) confronting the world as object, and an I (or eye)
confronting itself as an object among objects in that world – an adequation,
however, that is never quite complete. See also (8) below.
(4) In modernity, to speak of things is to speak of persons. The art of Art
History and aesthetic philosophy is surely one of the most brilliant of mod-
ern European inventions, and an instrument for retroactively rewriting the
history of all the world’s peoples. It was (and remains) an organizing concept
which has made certain Western notions of the subject more vividly palpa-
ble (its unity, uniqueness, self-sameness, spirit, non-reproducibility, etc.); in
this regard it recapitulates some of the effects of the earlier invention of cen-
tral-point perspective.
At the same time, the art of Art History came to be the paradigm of all
production: its ideal horizon, and a standard against which to measure all
products. In a complementary fashion, the producer or artist became the
paragon of all agency in the modern world. As ethical artists of our own sub-
ject identities, we are exhorted to compose our lives as works of art, and to
live exemplary lives: lives whose works and deeds may be legible as represen-
tative artifacts in their own right.
Museography in this regard forms an intersection and bridge between
religion, ethics, and the ideologies of Enlightenment governance, wherein
delegation and exemplarity constitute political representation.
(5) Art is both an object and an instrument. It is thus the name of what is
to be seen, read, and studied, and the (often occluded) name of the language
of study itself; of the artifice of studying. As with the term ‘history’, denoting
ambivalently a disciplined practice of writing and the referential field of that
scriptural practice, art is the metalanguage of the history fabricated by the
museum and its museographies. This instrumental facet of the term is large-
ly submerged in modern discourse in favour of the ‘objecthood’ of art.16
What would an art historical or museological practice consist of which was
attentive to this ambivalence?
As an organizing concept, as a method of organizing a whole field of
activity with a new centre that makes palpable certain notions of the subject,
art re-narrativizes and re-centres history as well. As a component of the
Enlightenment project of commensurability, art became the universal stan-
dard or measure against which the products (and by extension the people) of
all times and places might be envisioned together on the same hierarchical
scale or table of aesthetic progress and ethical and cognitive advancement. To
each people and place its own true art, and to each true art its proper posi-
tion on a ladder of evolution leading toward the modernity and presentness
of Europe. Europe becomes not only a collection of artworks, but the organ-
izing principle of collecting: a set of objects in the museum, and the museum’s
vitrines themselves.17
As Sir John Summerson astutely observed in 1960:
New art is observed as history the very moment it is seen to possess the quality
of uniqueness (look at the bibliographies on Picasso or Henry Moore) and this
gives the impression that art is constantly receding from modern life – is never
possessed by it. It is receding, it seems, into a gigantic landscape – the landscape
of ART – which we watch as if from the observation car of a train…in a few years
[something new] is simply a grotesque or charming incident in the whole – that
whole which we see through the window of the observation car, which is so like
the vitrine of a museum. Art is behind glass – the history glass.18
Art, in short, came to be fielded as central to the very machinery of his-

toricism and essentialism; the very esperanto of European hegemony. It may
be readily seen how the culture of spectacle and display comprising museol-
ogy and museography became indispensable to the Europeanization of the
world: for every people and ethnicity, for every class and gender, for every
individual no less than for every race, there may be projected a legitimate ‘art’
with its own unique spirit and soul; its own history and prehistory; its own
future potential; its own respectability; and its own style of representational
adequacy. The brilliance of this colonization is quite breathtaking: there is no
‘artistic tradition’ anywhere in the world which today is not fabricated
through the historicisms and essentialisms of European museology and
museography, and (of course) in the very hands of the colonized themselves.
In point of fact, Art History makes colonial subjects of us all. In other
words, the Enlightenment invention of the ‘aesthetic’ was an attempt to come
to terms with, and classify on a common ground or within the grid of a com-
mon table or spreadsheet, a variety of forms of subject–object relationships
observable (or imagined) across many different societies. As object and
instrument, this art is simultaneously a kind of thing, and a term indicating
a certain relativization of things. It represents one end in a hierarchized spec-
trum from the aesthetic to the fetishistic: an evolutionary ladder on whose
apex is the aesthetic art of Europe, and on whose nadir is the fetish-charm of
primitive peoples.
(6) Taking up a position from within the museum makes it natural to
construe it as the very Summa of optical instruments, of which the great pro-
liferation of tools, toys, and optical games and architectural and urban exper-
iments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might then be understood
as secondary servo-mechanisms and anecdotal emblems. The institution
places its users in anamorphic positions from which it may be seen that a cer-
tain historical dramaturgy unfolds with seamless naturalism; where a specif-
ic teleology may be divined or read in geomantic fashion as the hidden fig-
ure of the truth of a collection of forms; and where all kinds of genealogical
filiations may come to seem reasonable, inevitable, and demonstrable.
Modernity itself as the most overarching form of identity politics.
It is the most extraordinary of ‘optical illusions’ that museological space
appears baldly Euclidean in this anamorphic dramaturgy. The museum
appears to masquerade (but then there’s no masquerade, for it’s all masquer-
ade) as a heterotopic lumber-yard or department store of alternative models
of agency that might be taken up and consumed, meditated upon, imagined,
and projected upon oneself or others. What one is distracted from is of
course the larger picture and the determinations of these storied spaces: the
overall social effects of these ritual performances, which (a) instantiate an
ideology of the nation as but an individual subject writ large, and (b)
reduce all differences and disjunctions between individuals and cultures to
variations on the same; to different but commensurate versions of the same

substance and identity. In such a regime, we are all relatives in this Family-
of-Man-and/as-Its-Works.
(7) Within the museum, each object is a trap for the gaze.19 As long as our
purview remains fixed in place at the level of the individual specimen, we
may find it comfortable or pleasing to believe in an individual ‘intentionali-
ty’ at play in the production and appearance of things, as its significant and
determinate, and even final, cause. Intentionality becomes the vanishing
point, or explanatory horizon, of causality. It is a catalyst of the ubiquitous
museological exhortation, ‘let the work of art speak directly to you with a
minimum of interference or distraction’.20
(8) The museum may also be understood as an instrument for the pro-
duction of gendered subjects. The topologies of imaginary gender positions
are among the institution’s effects: the position of the museum user or oper-
ator (the ‘viewer’) is an unmarked analogue to that of an unmarked (usual-
ly, but not necessarily, male) heterosocial pose or position. But as an object
of desire, the staged and storied museum artifact is simultaneously a simu-
lacrum of an agental being or subject (usually, but not necessarily, female)
with whom the viewing subject will bond (or be repelled by).
In short, the superimposition of subjects and objects within the storied
space of the museum creates the conditions for a blurring or complexifying
of male/female gender distinctions: the museum object, in other words, is
gender-ambiguous. Such an ambiguity creates the need for more distinct
gender-framing. What becomes clear in the process is that all art is drag, and
that both hegemonic and marginalized sexualities are themselves continual
and repeated imitations and reiterations of their own idealizations. Just as
the viewer’s position in exhibitionary space is always already prefabricated
and bespoken, so too is all gender (a) drag.21
Museology and museography are instrumental ways of distributing the space

of memory. Both operate together on the relationships between the past and
present, subjects and objects, and collective history and individual memory.
These operations are in aid of transforming the recognized past in the pres-
ent into a storied space wherein the past and present are imaginatively
juxtaposed, where their virtual relationships cannot not be construed as suc-
cession and progression; cause and effect. Where, in other words, the illusion
that the past exists in and of itself, immune from the projections and desires
of the present, may be sustained.
Progress in understanding the museographical project, as well as the
museology which is one of its facets, would entail taking very seriously
indeed the paradoxical nature of that virtual object (what I elsewhere called
the eucharistic object)22 that constitutes and fills that space. The art of Art
History and its museology became an instrument for thinking representa-
tionally and historically; for imagining a certain kind of historicity commen-
surate with the (now universally exported) nationalist teleologies of
European modernity.
2 Art History and fetishism

To appreciate the extraordinary power and success of this enterprise, we
would have to articulate in fine detail what was most deeply at stake two cen-
turies ago in the invention of the modern nation-state. What came to be the
canonical art of Art History was indeed a magical and paradoxical object,
perfectly suited to being an explanatory instrument in the enterprise of fab-
ricating and sustaining the modern nation-state and its (statuesque) epito-
me, the citizen.23 It becomes the product of the aestheticization of social life,
and the embodiment of social desires.
Art was the complementary (civilized) foil to its implicit and imaginary
obverse, that enigma of the Enlightenment, the (uncivilized) fetish: that ‘safe-
ly displaced synecdoche of the Enlightenment’s Other’, in the words of
William Pietz.24 It was a powerful instrument for legitimizing the belief that
what you see in what you make is what in some deep, essential way you truly
are. The form of your work is the physiognomy of your truth. At the same
time, it provided a powerful instrument for making palpable the proposition
that Europe was the brain of the earth’s body, and that all outside the edifice
of Europe was its prologue. Of course that external anterior, that Other, was
the necessary support and defining instance of what constituted the pres-
ence, the modernity, of Europe.25
The term fetish ultimately derives from the Latin adjective factitius (used
by Pliny to refer to that which is the result of art or artifice), through the
Portuguese (e.g., feiticaria, a term applied to West African ‘witchcraft’ and
idol-worship), the word fetisso referring to small objects or charms used in
trade between West Africans and Europeans. Its early modern meaning may
have more to do with a late Latin sense of the term as something imitative of
natural properties (like sound, as in onomatopoeia).
At any rate, it came to be constituted as the uncivilized (read ‘black’) ante-
rior to the imaginary ‘disinterestedness’ of European aestheticism. They
imply one another and cannot be understood in isolation from each other.
Their dyadic complementarity has served as the skeletal support of all that Art
History has been for the past two centuries.
There are some processual parallels. If sexuality came to be privileged by
European society as of the essence of the self; the innermost truth of one’s
personality; art came to be its civilized and complementary obverse; the very
mark of civilized interaction between subjects and objects. In modernity,
moreover, art and sex are commensurate: like sex, art became a secret truth to
be uncovered about all peoples everywhere; an omnipresent, universal phe-
nomenon linking the caves of Lascaux with the lofts of lower Manhattan – a
fictitious unity, to be sure, yet an immensely powerful and durable one.
Historically, art and fetish came to occupy opposite poles in what was
nonetheless a spectrum of continuities from disinterestedness to idolatry,
from the civilized to the primitive. Neither one, in short, can be understood
in isolation from the other.
Art did not precede Art History like some phenomenon of nature discov-
ered and then explained by science. Both are ideological formations designed
to function within specifiable parameters. Art History, aesthetic philosophy,
museology, and art-making itself were historically co-constructed social
practices whose fundamental, conjoint mission was the production of sub-
jects and objects commensurate with each other, and possessive of a decorum
suitable for the orderly and predictable functioning of the emergent nation-
states of Europe.
At the same time, this enterprise afforded the naturalization of an entire
domain of dyadic and graded concepts that could be employed as ancillary
instruments for scripting (and then speaking about) the histories of all peo-
ples through the systematic and disciplined investigation of their cultural
productions.26 Museography and its museologies were grounded upon the
metaphoric, metonymic, and anaphoric associations that might be mapped
amongst their archived specimens. They demonstrated, in effect, that all
things could be understood as specimens, and that specimization could be an
effective prerequisite to the production of useful knowledge about anything.
This archive, in other words, was itself no passive storehouse or data bank;
it was rather a critical instrument in its own right; a dynamic device for cal-
ibrating, grading, and accounting for variations in continuity, and continu-
ities in variation and difference. The epistemological technology of the
museographical archive was, and remains, indispensable to the social and
political formation of the nation and to its various legitimizing paradigms of
ethnic autochthony, cultural uniqueness, and social, technological, or ethical
progress (or decline) relative to real or imagined Others.
It works, in part, this way. The enterprises of mythic nationalism required
a belief that the products of an individual, studio, nation, ethnic group, class,
race, or even gender would share demonstrably common, consistent, and
unique properties of form, decorum, or spirit. Correlative to this was a par-
adigm of temporal isomorphism: the thesis that an art historical period or
epoch would be marked by comparable similarities of style, thematic preoc-
cupation or focus, or techniques of manufacture.27
All of this only makes sense if time is framed not simply as linear or
cyclic but rather as progressively unfolding, as framing some epic or novel-
like adventure of an individual, people, nation, or race. Only then would
the notion of the period be pertinent, as standing for a plateau or stage in
the graded development of some story. (It would have to be graded; i.e.,
delineated into chronological parts or episodes, so as to be vividly percep-
tible to an audience.) The period would mark gradual changes in things –
as the gradual change or transformation of that Thing (or Spirit) underly-
ing things.
Museology and museography fabricated object-histories as surrogates for,
or simulacra of, the developmental histories of persons, mentalities, and peo-
ples. These consisted of narrative stagings – historical novels or novellas –
that served to demonstrate and delineate significant aspects of the character,
level of civilization or of skill, or the degree of social, cognitive, or ethical
advancement or decline of an individual, race, or nation.28
Art historical objects have thus always been object-lessons of documentary
import insofar as they might be deployed or staged as cogent ‘evidence’ of the
past’s causal relationship to the present, enabling us thereby to articulate cer-
tain kinds of desirable (and undesirable) relations between ourselves and
others. Rarely discussed in art historical discourse in this regard is the (silent)
contrast between European ‘progress’ in the arts in contradistinction to the
coincident ‘decline’ of Europe’s principal Other in early modern times, the

(comparably multinational and multi-ethnic) world of Islam.29
It is in this connection that we may understand the enterprises of
museography and museology as having served, in their heyday (which is still
now), as a very powerful and effective modern(ist) concordance of politics,
religion, ethics, and aesthetics. It still remains virtually impossible, at the end
of the twentieth century, not to see direct, causal, and essential connections
between an artifact and the (co-implicative) moral character and cognitive
capacity of its producer(s). Such idealist, essentialist, racist, and historicist
assumptions which were so explicitly articulated in museology and Art
History in their historical origins still commonly comprise the subtext of
contemporary practices, underlying many otherwise distinct or opposed the-
oretical and methodological perspectives.
The nation as the ark of a people: a finite and bounded artifact with a tra-
jectory in time; a storied space. Museology and Art History as cybernetic or
navigational instruments; optical devices allowing each passenger (who is
also always permittted to play the role of ‘captain’ of his or her own fate) both
to see behind the ship, the direction whence it came (its unique and singular
past), and to steer and guide it forward along the route implied by its prior
history: the reflection back from the vanishing point in the past to the ideal
point of fulfilment in the future.
Its substance is ‘art’, that extraordinary artifice (or anti-fetishist fetish)
which is the art of Art History; the Enlightenment invention designed/des-
tined to become a universal language of truth (revelatory along a sliding scale
from primitive fetish to art). The common frame within which all human
manufacture could be set, classified, fixed in its proper places, and set into
motion in the historical novel of the nation.
The art of Art History is the Latin of modernity: a universal medium of
(formerly religious, latterly scientific) truth. At the same time a golden stan-
dard, mean, or ideal canon, relative to which all forms of (manu)facture are
anticipatory. Relative to whose ideal orotundities each utterance is an
approximation, as each botanical entity is a realization of certain ideal inter-
nal formal relationships.30
Nothing less than a brilliant gesture and a massively devastating hegemonic

act, this transformation of the world into not simply a ‘picture’ but an image
of what would be visible from the specific central-point perspective of

Europe masquerading as a snapshot, or archive, or museum, of the world,
exported and assimilated around the world as the natural and ‘modern’ order
of things. A making of Europe into the brain of the earth’s body and a vitrine
for the collection and containment of all the things and peoples of the world:
the most thoroughgoing and effective imperialist gesture imaginable.
Eurocentrism as more than any of the myriad ethnocentrisms ubiquitous
elsewhere, but as a co-option of all possible centres.31
Modernity, the nation-state, as an effect of the aestheticization of social
relations; as a factitius-object which is simultaneously a space and a time.
What would have been needed to effect this transformation? How might it
have worked? Just what is this ‘space’?
What follows is a preliminary sketch or blueprint of this technology.
3 Art History in space and time

a First, a small frontispiece32
The Paris Exposition of 1900 was organized spatially in such a manner
that the ‘palaces’ built to house the products of the two major French
colonies of Algeria and Tunisia were situated between the Trocadero Palace
on the right bank of the Seine and the Eiffel Tower on the left bank. Looking
north from the elevated eye of the Tower toward the Trocadero across the
river, you would see these colonial buildings embraced by the two arms of the
Trocadero’s ‘Neo-Islamic’-style façade. France’s North African colonies –
indeed all of them – would appear to occupy a place within the nurturing
and protective arms of the French nation, whose own identity would appear
to be figured as assimilative, and thus supportive of the peoples33 and prod-
ucts that were contained and exhibited in and by these colonial edifices.
Taking up the view from the opposite direction, looking south from the
Trocadero toward the Exposition ground across the river, there is a
markedly different morphology. The entire fairground is dominated by the
Eiffel Tower, that gigantic technological feat of modern French engineer-
ing. Dwarfing all the colonial edifices like a colossus (or a colossal figure of
the sublime),34 its four great piers are grounded amongst the massed build-
ings of the colonial possessions. Appearing to have been built up on top of
these buildings, the Tower, one might say, puts things (back) in a proper
perspective.35
This extraordinary image – a veritable two-way mirror – is a clear and

poignant emblem both of the imaginary logic of nationalism (and its impe-
rialist correlates), and of the rhetorical carpentry and museological stagecraft
of art historical practice. Consider the following.
From a eurocentric point of view, Art History is constru(ct)ed as a univer-
sal empirical science, systematically discovering, classifying, analysing, and
interpreting specimens of what is thereby instantiated as a universal human
phenomenon. This is the (‘natural’) artisanry or ‘art’ of all peoples, samples
of which are all arranged relative to each other both in museum space and in
the more extensive, encyclopedic, and totalizing space-time of museography,
a distillation and refraction of Universal Exposition. All specimens in this
vast archive sit as delegates or ‘representatives’ – that is, as representations –
in a congress of imaginary equals, as the myriad of manifestations making up
a Universal World History of Art. To each is allotted a plot and display space,
a platform or a vitrine.
And yet, if you shift your stance just a bit – say by taking up a position
amongst the objects and histories of non-European (or, in recent disciplinary
jargon, ‘non-Western’) art, it becomes apparent that this virtual museum has
a narrative structure, direction, and point. All its imaginary spaces lead to the
modernity of a European present, which constitutes the apex or observation-
point; the vitrine within which all else is visible. Europe, in short, is the muse-
um space within which non-European specimens become specimens, and
where their (reformatted) visibility is rendered legible.
European aesthetic principles – in the guise of a reinvented generic mod-
ern or neo-classicism (or ‘universal principles of good design’36) – constitute
the self-designated unmarked centre or Cartesian zero-point around which
the entire virtual museographic edifice circulates, on the wings of which all
things may be plotted, ranked, and organized in their differential particular-
ities. There is no ‘outside’ to this: all different objects are ranked as primitive,
exotic, charming, or fascinating distortions of a central classical (European)
canon or standard – the unmarked (and seemingly un-classed, un-gendered,
etc.) point or site toward which all others may be imagined as aspiring. A ver-
itable Eiffel Tower, if you will.
What would be pragmatically afforded by this archive was the systematic
assembly or re-collection of artifacts now destined to be constru(ct)ed as
material evidence for the elaboration of a universalist language of description
and classification: the vocabulary of Art History. Even the most radically dis-
junctive differences could be reduced to differential and time-factored qualita-
tive manifestations of some pan-human capacity; some collective human
essence or soul. In other words, differences could be reduced to the single
dimension of different (but ultimately commensurate) ‘approaches to artistic
form’ (the Inuit, the French, the Greek, the Chinese, etc.). Each work as approx-
imating, as attempting to get close to, the ideal, canon, or standard. (The the-
oretical and ideological justification for ‘art criticism’ is thus born in an instant,
occluding whilst still instantiating the magic realisms of exchange value.)37
In short, the hypothesis of art as a universal human phenomenon was
clearly essential to this entire enterprise of commensurability, intertranslata-
bility, and hegemony. Artisanry in the broadest and fullest sense of ‘design’ is
positioned – and here of course archaeology and palaeontology have their
say – as one of the defining characteristics of humanness. The most skilled
works of art shall be the widest windows onto the human soul, affording the
deepest insights into the mentality of the maker, and thus the clearest refract-
ed insights into humanness as such.
The art of Art History is thus simultaneously the instrument of a univer-
salist Enlightenment vision and a means for fabricating qualitative distinc-
tions between individuals, peoples, and societies. How could this be?
Consider again that essential to the articulation and justification of Art
History as a systematic and universal human science in the nineteenth centu-
ry was the construction of an indefinitely extendable archive,38 potentially
coterminous (as it has since in practice become) with the ‘material (or “visu-
al”) culture’ of all human groups. Within this vast imaginary museographical
artifact or edifice (every slide or photo library as an ars memorativa) – of which
all museums are fragments or part-objects; every possible object of attention
might then find its fixed and proper place and address relative to all the rest.
Every item might thereby be sited (and cited) as referencing or indexing anoth-
er or others on multiple horizons (metonymic, metaphoric, or anaphoric) of
useful association. The set of objects displayed in any exhibition (as with the
system of classification of slide collections) is sustained by the willed fiction39
that they somehow constitute a coherent ‘representational’ universe, as signs or
surrogates of their (individual, national, racial, gendered, etc.) authors.
The pragmatic and immediately beneficial use or function of Art
History in its origins was the fabrication of a past that could be effectively
placed under systematic observation for use in staging and politically

transforming the present.40 Common to the practices of museography and
museology was a concern with spectacle, stagecraft, and dramaturgy; with
the locating of what could be framed as distinctive and exemplary objects
such that their relations amongst themselves and to their original circum-
stances of production and reception could be vividly imagined and mate-
rially envisioned in a cogent and useful manner. Useful above all to the pro-
duction of certain modes of civic subjectivity and responsibility. The prob-
lematics of historical causality, evidence, demonstration, and proof consti-
tuted the rhetorical scaffolding of this matrix or network of social and epis-
temological technologies.
Needless to say, much of this was made feasible by the invention of pho-
tography – indeed, Art History is in a very real sense the child of photogra-
phy, which has been equally enabling of the discipline’s fraternal nineteenth-
century siblings, anthropology and ethnography.41 It was photography which
made it possible not only for professional art historians but for whole popu-
lations to think art historically in a sustained and systematic fashion – to
actually put Winckelmann, Kant and Hegel into high academic gear, as it
were, thereby setting in motion the stage machinery of an orderly and sys-
tematic university discipline.
It also, and most crucially, made it possible to envision objects of art as
signs. The impact of photography on determining the future course of art
historical theory and practice was as fundamental as Marconi’s invention of
the wireless radio six decades later in envisioning the concept of arbitrariness
in language – which, as linguists of the 1890s very rapidly saw, paved the way
for a new synthesis of the key concepts of modern linguistics.
As we have seen, a clear and primary motivation for this massive archival
labour was the assembly of material evidence justifying the construction of
historical novels of social, cultural, national, racial, or ethnic origins, identi-
ty, and development. The professional art historian was a key instrument for
scripting and giving voice to that archive, providing its potential users, both
lay and professional, with safe and well-illuminated access routes into and
through it. Museology itself became a key art of this museography, this
House of Historicist Memory, evolving as it did as a paradigmatic instrument
for the instituting of archivable events.
Once again: What kind of space is here delineated?
b Not a conclusion, but a proposition

The space of museography, the edifice of Art History, is a virtual space in
three dimensions, each of which affords and confers a specific mode of legi-
bility upon objects in their relationship to subjects. This social and epistemo-
logical space may be imagined as having been constructed, historically,
through a triple superimposition beginning in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century.
(A) The First superimposition (this might be called the dimension or axis
of Winckelmann) entailed the superimposition of objects and subjects
wherein the object is seen by a subject as through a screen of the erotic
fetishization of another subject:42 the object, in short, is invested with erot-
ic agency.
[The object is deployed as an object of sublimated erotic desire.]
(B) The Second superimposition (this might be called the dimension or
axis of Kant) affords a linkage of erotics and ethics, or the hierarchized
markedness of eroticized objects: their ethical aestheticization. This hierar-
chization constitutes a spectrum or continuum from the fetish to the work
of fine art. Aesthetics is thereby entailed with a superior ethics, fetishism with
an inferior one: but both were commensurate as ethical.43
[The ethically eroticized object of desire is rescued from cultural and eth-
ical relativism.]
(C) The Third superimposition (this might be called the dimension or axis
of Hegel) affords the historicization of ethically eroticized objects, a hierar-
chization of time in terms of teleology. This museographical space in which
ethically eroticized objects are rendered legible is thus a storied site, within
which objects become protagonists or surrogate agents in historical novels
(one version of which is the modern museum) with a common underlying
theme: the search for identity, origins and destinies.
[Ethically superior objects of desire are teleologically marked, their time-
factored truth positioned in contradistinction to objects exterior (and thus
always already anterior) to time’s leading edge, which is the European pres-
ent; the point of seeing and of speaking; the vitrine in which is re-collected
the rest of what has thus become a remaindered world.]44
The result of these superimpositions is the spatiotemporal economy of

modernity, the storied space and museographic artifact of an unending
process. These superimposed coordinates are realized on a variety of fronts,

which include but are not exhausted by the museum and Art History. As a
key component of the operating engines of the modern nation-state,
museography worked toward the systematic historicization of ethically eroti-
cized objects of value as partners in the enterprises of the social collective.45
At the same time, the framed and storied artifacts or monuments were
invested with a decorum, wherein objects would be legible in a disciplined
manner, construable as emblems, simulacra, or object-lessons; as ‘illustrat-
ing’ (or ‘representing’) desirable and undesirable social relations in the (per-
petually) modernizing nation (whose faults, it may be added, would seem to
lie not in its nature, but in the relative abilities of its citizens to realize the
national potential).
In addition, artworks, monuments, archives, and histories are the sites
where the hidden truth of the citizen, the modern individual, is to be redis-
covered and read. (Of course there is never a final monument.)46 The art his-
torical object is the elsewhere of the subject, the place where it is imagined
that unsaid or unsayable truths are already written down. Museography
might have been a ‘science’, then, both of the idea of the nation, and of the
discovery of the truth of individuals (nations, ethnicities, races, genders) in
their objects and products.
Such a science, however, did not exist as a single professional field, but rather
as the generic protocol of modern disciplinarity as such; as ‘method’ itself. It
existed perhaps at such a scale as to be invisible in the ordinary light spectrum of
individual perceptions. It could be known and recoverable today through an
examination of traces and effects dimly legible in its later twin progeny (separat-
ed at their disciplinary birth), namely, history and psychoanalysis,47 or through a
critical historiography of a discursive practice – Art History – that was always a
superimposition of the two before their modern schism, and that in its oscillato-
ry and paradoxical modus vivendi continues to bridge, albeit at times in the dark,
what has since become their difference. Its oscillations are that bridge.
Traces of this superimposition are palpable in that ambivalent and para-
doxical object that has constituted the art of Art History since the
Enlightenment, with its perpetual oscillation between the ineffable and the
documentary, the eucharistic and the semiotic.48 The art of Art History cir-
culates in a virtual space whose own dimensions are the result of the triple
superimpositions described above.
Modernity is thus the paradoxical status quo of nationalism. It exists as a

virtual site constituting the edge between the material residues and relics of
the past and the adjacent empty space of the future. That which is perpetu-
ally in between two fictions: its origins in an immemorial past and the des-
tiny of its fulfilled future. The fundamental labour of the nation and its parts,
this cyborg entity conjoining the organic with the artifactual, was to use the
image of the latter fulfilment as a rear-view mirror oriented back toward the
former, so as to reconstitute its origins, identity, and history as the reflected
source and truth of that projective fulfilled destiny. A hall of mirrors, in fact.
You might picture it this way:
You’re standing in the middle of a small room. The wall ahead of you is all mir-
ror. That behind you is also mirrored.When you stand in such a place, watching
your image reflected ad infinitum, you can usually see, after a dozen or so repeat-
ed reflections, that your images recede in a gradually accelerating curve, in one
direction or another – up or down, or to one or another side. After a while you
notice that the reflections are not infinite at all, but rather disappear behind one
of the room’s structural boundaries, or behind your own image. And you can’t
see the spot where the vanishing point actually vanished: you are occluded by
your own image or by its frame. Of course, at a quick glance you do seem to go
on forever, your finitude safely invisible. Or, you might phrase it this way: I iden-
tify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is real-
ized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even
the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what
I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.49
Comprehending Art History’s past is a prerequisite to coping with its present,

and productively imagining its futures, should it have any. So much would
seem obvious. But to do so effectively would mean at the very least abandon-
ing certain comfortable academic habits of viewing Art History’s history as a
straightforward practice – as simply a history of ideas about art, or as genealo-
gies of individuals who had ideas about art and its ‘life’ and its ‘history’, or as
an episode in the evolutionary adventure of the history of ideas – as increas-
ingly refined protocols of interpreting objects and their histories and their
makers: all those ‘theories and methods’ from Marxism to feminism, or from
formalism and historicism to semiology and deconstruction; and all those
disciplinary object-domains from fine art to world art to visual culture, which
by hindsight seem so very much cut from the same cloth.
Art History was a complex and internally unstable enterprise throughout

its two-century-long history. Since its beginnings, it has been deeply invest-
ed in the fabrication and maintenance of a modernity that linked Europe to
an ethically superior aesthetics grounded in eroticized object-relations, thereby
allaying the anxieties of cultural relativism, wherein Europe (and
Christendom) were, in their expanding encounter with alien cultures, but
one reality amongst many.50
It has been argued here that Art History was always a facet of a broader set
of practices that I have termed museography, and that to isolate Art History
and its history from the circumstances and motivations that conferred via-
bility and substance upon it would be to perpetuate the obstinacies of disci-
plinarity itself. Effectively remembering what the millennialist discipline
with the innocuous name of ‘the history of art’ did may, in its own ironic way,
and at the same time, require forgetting Art History: thinking it otherwise, so
as to recollect it more completely.
Notes
1 See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Mediaeval
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Frances Yates, The
Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) for introductions to the
subject. On nineteenth-century optical games and displays, see Jonathan Crary,
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). On the subject of museums and memory, see
D. Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Museums and Phantasms of Modernity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
2 On this subject, see D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy
Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Pess, 1989), especially Chapter
3, ‘The Panoptic Gaze and the Anamorphic Archive’, pp. 54–79. See also the ref-
erences in note 8, below.
3 A poignant example being the discussions about ‘visual culture’ studies, format-
ted as a questionnaire circulated amongst friends of the editors of the New York
art world journal October, vol. 77 (Summer 1996), pp. 25–70.
4 The term is derived from the title of a Borges story ‘Funes the Memorious’, about
an individual who remembered everything he had ever experienced; a funeous
object or place incorporates traces of its entire history or ontogeny in its very
structure. On the notion of funicity as employed in materials science, see D.
Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, p. 188, note 10.
5 See in this regard Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cairo, 1988), and Zeynip
Çelik, Displaying the Orient: The Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century
World’s Fairs (Berkeley and Oxford: University of Califormia Press, 1992) for
interesting analyses of the modern European culture of spectacle and display as
seen by non-Europeans.
6 Other ‘reading devices’ or explanatory instruments would be anthropology,
ethnography, history, the sciences, etc.; in short, any formal discursive formation.
Modern tourism, for example, might be usefully understood as a ‘scripting’ of the
world and its past(s) in a manner complementary or parallel to professional art
historical practice. In this regard, it might be recalled that, in England at least,

companies that by the end of the nineteenth century were to become the major
overseas tourist establishments (e.g., Cook’s) began as companies organizing
groups of ex-urban and provincial visitors to London museums and expositions
(beginning with the Crystal Palace exposition at mid-century).
7 On which, see D. Preziosi, ‘The Question of Art History’, in J. Chandler, A.
Davidson and H. Harootunian (eds) Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and
Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
which examines the origins of Harvard University’s Fogg Museum as the first
institution specifically designed to house the entire ensemble of what then con-
stituted art historical practices.
8 More has appeared on the subject during this time than during the entire two pre-
ceding centuries. While any list of recommendations will be largely idiosyncratic,
the following represents a useful introductory cross-section of recent easily avail-
able work: on the historical origins of modern museological practices, see O. Impey
and A. MacGregor (eds) The Origins of Museums: the Cabinet of Curiosities in
Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); A. Lugli,
Naturalia et Mirabilia: Il collezionismo enciclopedico nelle Wunderkammern
d’Europa (Milan, 1983); J-L. Deotte, Le Musée: L’Origine de l’esthétique (Paris,
1993); A. McClellan, Inventing the Louvre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994). See also E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge
(London: Routledge, 1992); S. M. Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992); K. Walsh, The Representation of the Past
(London: Routledge, 1992); and the anthologies D. J. Sherman and I. Rogoff (eds)
Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge, 1994); M.
Pointon (ed.) Art Apart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Other
useful introductions include: F. Dagognet, Le Musée sans Fin (Paris, 1993); Tony
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995); Carol Duncan,
Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1994); and S.
Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). See also D. Preziosi, Brain
of the Earth’s Body (above, note 1). Major multi-volume series of studies on all
aspects of museums and museology are currently being published by the Leicester
University Press in the UK, and, on a smaller scale, by the Smithsonian Institution
in the USA. The Journal of the History of Collections publishes important research
on museum history and theory.
9 On the subject of perspective, see two important new studies: H. Damisch,
The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994), and
J. Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
An extensive evaluation of both volumes, and of the role of vision and the gaze
in modern art historical practice, may be found in a recently completed UCLA
dissertation by Lyle Massey, publication forthcoming.
10 The classic studies are: M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), and The Archaeology of
Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); and see also T. J. Reiss, The
Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). On the rela-
tionship of European Freemasonry to these developments, particularly as regards
the origins of the modern museum (most of whose founders, in England, France,
and America were Masons), see D. Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body.
11 A preliminary version of part of this section was published under the same title
in The Art Bulletin, vol. LXXVII, no.1 (March 1995), pp. 13–15.
12 J. Lacan, ‘Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, Ecrits: A
Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 86.
13 See in relation to this Michel de Certeau, ‘Psychoanalysis and its History’, in M.
de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 3–16; and de Certeau,

The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press,
1988). Aspects of this question of historical juxtaposition and superimposition
may also be found in Ronald Schleifer, Robert Con Davis and Nancy Mergler,
Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 1–63.
14 See Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in H. White, Tropics
of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), pp. 121–134.
15 On the question of distinctions between ego and subject, see J. Butler, Bodies that
Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially Chapter 2, ‘The Lesbian Phallus
and the Morphological Imaginary’, pp. 57–91. See also Elizabeth Grosz, Space,
Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995) for an excellent discussion of
the work of Jacques Lacan in relationship to the subject of ego-formation, as well
as an insightful and thought-provoking critique of Butler.
16 Two explications of which within the parameters of traditional Art History and
aesthetic philosophy being Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) and
Arthur Danto, ‘Artworks and Real Things’ (1973), both of which are reprinted in
the Anthology Aesthetics Today (revised edition), edited by Morris Philipson and
Paul Gudel (New York: New American Library, 1980), pp. 214–239 and 322–336.
17 See Part 2 below.
18 Sir John Summerson, ‘What Is a Professor of Fine Art?’, a lecture on the occasion
of his inauguration as the first Ferens Professor of Fine Art in the University of
Hull (Hull, 1961), p. 17.
19 See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London:
Hogarth Press, 1977), particularly the chapter ‘The Line and Light’, pp. 91–104.
20 The exhortation on the first page of the very widely circulated book by David
Finn, How to Visit a Museum (New York: Abrams, 1985). For an important cri-
tique of this and related ‘communicational models’, see J. Derrida,
Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. R. Rand (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), pp. 52–54; and E. Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, Chapter 1, ‘Sexual
Signatures’, pp. 9–24. See also a discussion of the Finn volume and related issues
in D. Preziosi, ‘Brain of the Earth’s Body’, in P. Duro (ed.) The Rhetoric of the
Frame (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Preziosi,
‘Museums/Collecting’, in Robert Nelson and Richard Schiff (eds.) Critical Terms
for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
21 See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter and Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and
Perversion, for a general overview of the arguments here.
22 See Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, Chapter 4, ‘The Coy Science’, pp. 80–121.
23 On this subject as it pertains to the subject of modern national identity, see Karen
Lang, The German Monument, 1790–1914: Subjectivity, Memory, and National
Identity, UCLA doctoral dissertation, 1996, a portion of which is in The Art
Bulletin, vol. LXXIX, June 1997.
24 Essential to the burgeoning contemporary discourse on fetishism and modern
culture is the work of William Pietz; see especially his ‘Fetishism’, in Nelson and
Schiff (eds) Critical Terms for Art History; ‘The Problem of the Fetish’, Part 1, Res
9 (Spring 1985), pp. 12–13; Part 2, Res 13 (Spring 1987), pp. 23–45; and Part 3,
Res 16 (Autumn 1988), pp. 105–123. See also his ‘Fetishism and Materialism: The
Limits of Theory in Marx’, in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds) Fetishism as
Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 119–151. That
anthology has a number of especially useful discussions of the subject as it per-
tains to research in various fields, including Art History, such as A. Solomon-
Godeau, ‘The Legs of the Countess’, pp. 266–306, and K. Mercer, ‘Reading Radical
Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, pp. 307–329. The observa-
tions by anthology co-editor E. Apter regarding the ‘Eurocentric voyeurism of
“other-collecting”’ (p. 3) resonates with the perspectives being developed here.

Other important recent sources on the subject include Jean Baudrillard, For a
Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St Louis: Telos Press, 1981); Louis
Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in his Lenin and
Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review
Press , 1971), p. 162; and Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey and R. Rand
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 226–227. See also the impor-
tant essay by Vivian Sobchack, ‘The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic
Vision’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 12, no. 3 (1990), pp. 21–36. On
fetishism for Kant, see I. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans.
T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960), pp. 165–168; Hegel
discusses fetish worship in his Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1971), p. 42, and in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M.
Knox, vol.1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp. 315–316.
25 On which see above, note 5., and Claire Farago, ‘“Vision Itself has its History”:
“Race”, Nation, and Renaissance Art History’, in C. Farago (ed.) Reframing the
Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450–1650 (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 67–88.
26 See in this connection V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis,
Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1988), pp. 10 ff; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994), and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (revised and expanded
edition, London: Verso, 1991).
27 A discussion of this may be found in D. Preziosi, ‘The Wickerwork of Time’, in
Rethinking Art History, pp. 40–44 on historicism, see also, pp. 14 ff. See M.
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, especially Part II, ‘The Discursive
Regularities’, pp. 21–76.
28 Most prominent of the earliest such evolutionary histories was Giorgio Vasari’s
The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors from
Cimabue to Our Times of 1550, which led up to the work of Vasari’s own mentors
and presumed audience, Michelangelo and Raphael.
29 See above, note 5, and the following section below.
30 This issue is taken up in some detail in D. Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body in
connection with an examination of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Pitt
Rivers Museum in Oxford, and the Egyptian, Coptic, Islamic, and Greco-Roman
Museums in Cairo and Alexandria.
31 On the subject of Eurocentrism, see the important study by Vassilis
Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), which discusses the perennial antitheses of
Hebraic and Hellenic ethnocentrisms in the history of Europe, in connection
with what he terms ‘aesthetic faith’.
32 I owe this image to a fine paper by Zeynip Çelik, ‘“Islamic” Architecture in French
Colonial Discourse’, presented at the 1996 UCLA Levi Della Vida Conference, Los
Angeles, 11 May 1996.
33 On individuals as/on exhibit, see T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt., and Meg
Armstrong, ‘“A Jumble of Foreignness”: The Sublime Musayums of
Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions’, Cultural Critique no. 23 (Winter
1992–93), pp. 199–250. In the latter is a fascinating discussion of the exhibition
of a living Turk, pp. 222–223.
34 On which see J. Derrida, ‘The Colossal’, Part IV of ‘Parergon’ in his The Truth in
Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 119–147.
35 See Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, in T. Brennan, Salman
Rushdie and the Third World (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 44–70.
36 Which can be discovered or unearthed in the ‘best’ of, say, the carvings of the Inuit
peoples, or in aboriginal bark paintings, and which can thereby be marketed as

such; as ‘classic’ examples of a (native) genre. The marketing itself constitutes a
mode of canonizing and classicizing of the ‘typical’, which characteristically feeds
back on the contemporary production of ‘marketable’ ‘typical’ – i.e., ‘classical’ –
‘examples’ of a (reified) genre. See in this connection the discussion on the organ-
ization of the original Fogg Museum curriculum in Art History as beginning with
a compulsory indoctrination into good design practice as a prerequisite for study-
ing Art History, in Preziosi, ‘The Question of Art History’ (above, note 7). The role
of Fremasonry in this is discussed in Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body.
37 See the essays by Thomas Keenan, ‘The Point is to (Ex)Change it: Reading
Capital, Rhetorically’, in Apter and Pietz (eds) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse,
pp. 152–185, and by William Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of
Theory in Marx’, pp. 119–151.
38 On the question of the archive, see M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
especially Part III, ‘The Statement and the Archive’, pp. 79–131; J. Derrida, ‘Archive
Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 9–63.
39 On which see Eugenio Donato, ‘Flaubert and the Quest for Fiction’, in Donato,
The Script of Decadence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 64. See also
Henry Sussman, ‘Death and the Critics: Eugenio Donato’s Script of Decadence’,
Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 1995), pp. 74–87.
40 This is quite explicit in the writings of early museum founders in the late eigh-
teenth century; see, for example, Alexandre Lenoir, who spelled out the nature of
the political and pedagogical motivations and justifications for new museums in
Paris in his Musée des monuments (Paris, 1806), p. 36; see also F. Dagognet, Le
Musée sans Fin, pp. 103–123.
41 See Alain Schnapp, The Conquest of the Past, (London: British Museum
Publications, 1996).
42 See the interesting hypotheses developed by Whitney Davis in his essay
‘Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History’, Journal of
Homosexuality, vol. 27, no. 1/2 (1994), pp. 141–159, regarding this mode of erot-
ic conflation. If Davis is correct, then Winckelmann’s move resonates quite clear-
ly with certain strains of the very ancient European arts of memory, in particular
the work of lectio as propounded by Hugh of St Victor, who defines such ‘tropo-
logical’ interactions with textual entities as that of transforming a text onto and
into one’s self: see M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, Chapter 5, ‘Memory and
the Ethics of Reading’, pp. 156–188, and Appendix A, pp. 261–266.
43 On fetishism in Kant, see above, note 24.
44 A key nineteenth-century exemplar being the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford: see
D. Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body.
45 It may be asked if certain theoretical positions within the modern academic dis-
cipline of Art History correspond to different emphases upon one or another
dimension of this social and epistemological enterprise.
46 In one sense, these are all solutions to the problem of designing a memory,
whether one’s own or a machine’s. In which case, they represent recent metamor-
phoses of a very ancient and rich European tradition; see M. Carruthers, The
Book of Memory., pp. 16–45 and Chapter 5, pp. 156–188.
47 On which, see Michel de Certeau, ‘Psychoanalysis and its History’, in M. de
Certeau, Heterologies, pp. 3–16.
48 On the semiotic status of the disciplinary object as irreducibly ambivalent, see D.
Preziosi, ‘Brain of the Earth’s Body’, in P. Duro, The Rhetoric of the Frame and
‘Collecting/Museums’, in R. Nelson and R. Schiff, Critical Terms for Art History.
49 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, p. 86.
50 On relativism vs. relativity, see D. Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body, Chapter 4,
on Sir John Soane’s Museum (preserved in its final state at Soane’s death in 1837)
as the first fully realized art historical instance of the latter.
The crystalline veil
and the phallomorphic
5
imaginary 1
I WANT TO JUXTAPOSE HERE THREE

things: The Crystal Palace Exposition
in London in 1851; the orientalist
foundation of new museums in
Cairo four decades later; and the art
historical writings of Walter Benjamin published four decades after that. My
intention in this triangulation is both to highlight what was common to all
three and to use each to illuminate – really, to trouble – our understanding of
the others. While there is no evidence that Benjamin knew anything whatso-
ever about Egypt or its museums, he was certainly aware of the Crystal
Palace, and indeed in writing about the Paris Exposition of 1937, quoted a
poem about the Great Exposition of 1851, written in its own time, to support
his observations on one of the pavilions at the 1937 Exposition.
But I will begin with a different text: the opening stanzas of a rather
remarkable 150-page poem by an anonymous woman author, published in
the year after the Crystal Palace’s closing, 1852.
I, who late sang Belgravia’s charms – and strove

To paint her beauties, and her merits prove,
Now sing the CRYSTAL PALACE! – theme sublime,
{96} THE CRYSTALLINE VEIL AND THE PHALLOMORPHIC IMAGINARY
That shall astound the world throughout all time!

Aid me. Ye Muses! Aid! Your seat is here!
Ye murmuring fountains, charm my listening ear!
Fair sculptured forms, whose classic beauty bears
The spirit back to Rome’s enchanted years,
Lend to my strains the power of art divine,
And let your soul poetic breathe in mine!
Lo! As I roam o’er this unequalled spot,
Earth and its drearier scenes are all forgot;
The mighty minds that with resistless will,
Raised the fair temple, seem to haunt it still!
A solemn glory shines along these aisles,
And in the violet-tinted distance, smiles;
And Peace, with dove-like pinions, seems to brood
Above this swarming, countless multitude.
Ah! Priceless boon! Ah, blessing unconfined!
All hail to thee! Benignant power of mind!
Where’er I turn, are wonders wrought by thee!
And still, in these, the great First Cause I see,
Whose mercy gave that spark of Heavenly fire
To light man here, and direct him higher.
I gaze around – and thousands meet my eye –
I look within – the smallest unit, I!
Yet, with that wondrous power – my living soul,
I soar above, and contemplate the whole;
Nor only through these various scenes I range,
But search the shadowy future, and its change,
Far times – when this assembled crowd shall rest,
‘Dust unto dust’, within earth’s quiet breast,
And all the glory of our golden age,
Shall be a word – no more – in hist’ry’s page!
Yet shall this crystal pile – this mighty plan,
An influence wield upon the mind of man,
Free as itself, as wondrous and as vast,
And lasting still – whilst time itself shall last.
No narrow views – no rights exclusive, bar
THE CRYSTALLINE VEIL AND THE PHALLOMORPHIC IMAGINARY {97}
This brilliant scene – nor its enchantments mar!

The prince and serf, the peasant and the peer,
Alike may revel in the beauties here;
Alike must feel how feeble and how small,
Each man alone – how great, how glorious all!
And in this fairy world of labour, see
A type of what the actual world should be.
Here, in one Brotherhood, the nations greet
With but one heart – as ’neath one roof they meet.
How wide soe’er their home – uncouth their name,
Or wild their nature, here they feel the same.
The same bright visions glad their eager eyes,
The same strange marvels strike them with surprise;
Their bosoms beat with rapture, or with woe,
Whether from India’s heat, or Russia’s snow;
And each high work of art, or priceless gem,
Calls forth responsive, tear or smile from them.
They meet – as all in this cold world should meet,
(One Heaven above – one Earth beneath their feet),
In peace and simple faith – a quiet band
Of Brothers – greeting in a foreign land.
From East to West – from North to South they come,
As to a father’s feast, a common home;
Partake with joy of all that varied store,
And part at last – to meet again no more.2
It has been customary for some time (and for many it has been obligatory)
to believe that artworks are historically significant phenomena, and that art
itself has a ‘history’, the astute delineation of which would provide us with sig-
nificant insights into the (presumably parallel or complementary) histories of
individuals and of peoples – insights which, and not least of all, may be legible
as providing lessons for our own time. The modern institutions of art history,
art criticism, and museology are of course founded upon this enabling assump-
tion, one of whose several corollaries has been that changes in form are taken
to correspond (in any of a variety of direct or indirect ways) to changes in beliefs,
attitudes, mentalities, or intentions, or to changes in social, political, or cultural
conditions. This remains today a virtually irresistible fiction, and it has been one
of the cornerstones of the edifice of the modernities that we have built ourselves
into, whose exits have yet to lead elsewhere but to other spaces of similar design.3
There was no more brilliant stage upon which our modernity was to be
delineated, demonstrated, and factualized than the Great Exhibition of the
Arts and Manufactures of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851.4
This most radically translucent of nineteenth-century constructions may
well have been modernity’s most unsurpassable artifact. It was the lucent
embodiment and semiological summa of the principle of modern order
itself: infinitely expandable, scaleness, anonymous; transparently and style-
lessly abstract. A ‘mighty plan’, and ‘type of what the actual world should be’
that is in fact ‘lasting still’, everywhere in us and around us. The very blue-
print of the modern world order, it was, in the words of our poem, ‘as won-
drous and as vast’ as ‘the mind of man’ itself.
Simply put, it offered – as Freud was later to say of psychoanalysis5 – an
‘impartial instrument, like the infinitesimal calculus’ for making legible both
the differences and similarities, and the cognitive and ethical hierarchies
amongst peoples, by means of their juxtaposed and plainly seen products
and effects. All the world in a single frame: at once the modern apotheosis of
the old Wunderkammern (in which objects were catalysts for a fraternal
intercourse bent toward making conversational sense of a jumble of things),6
and the implicit ideal of the burgeoning arcades of Paris and other Euro-
American cities. The Crystal Palace, erected four years after the opening of
the British Museum across town in its present, faux-classical form, was the
system of modern museology (and art historicism) as such, stripped to the
skin. A dream from which we have yet to awaken.
Modern art history and museology (no less than the ‘Arcades Project’ of
Walter Benjamin) cannot be appreciated or substantially understood apart
from this ‘impartial instrument’, this ‘father’s feast’. A feast, moreover, that was
itself haunted by the presence of the greatest patriarch of them all, Victoria,
who was herself present (as a sort of permanent strolling exhibit) virtually
every day of the building’s 165-day in situ existence, and the mortal represen-
tative (a Grand Floating Signifier) of that ‘great First Cause’ seen behind all the
‘wonders wrought’ here in this ‘common home’ – the projective Umwelt (‘one
Heaven above – one Earth beneath’) of a British Imperial Imaginary; a ‘fair
temple’ whose ‘classic beauty bears the spirit back to Rome’s enchanted years’.
The modern disciplinary practices of art history and museology are both
among the more powerful effects of this ‘mighty plan’, and among moderni-
ty’s most indispensable instruments. Art history was and remains the ghost
in that crystalline machine, as it perpetually carries the memory of that
‘Muses seat’ as its innermost fixation. The blinding quiddity of this ‘crystal
pile’ was the mirror-stage of bourgeois modernity’s evolution, and its eidetic
image is permanently imprinted on the art historical gaze itself. An art his-
tory that, in imagining itself as an eye on the world, ceaselessly shuffles
through a windowless slide collection growing faster than the eye can focus.
The only art history, in fact, that we have; there is nothing outside of this
modernist weapon-of-mass-distraction’s endlessly proliferating text.
The Crystal Palace’s grand and ‘styleless’ system was replicated in count-
less expositions, museums, and city plans created throughout Europe and the
European-dominated and influenced world (rapidly becoming, in the nine-
teenth century, coterminous with the world as such). Its exhibitionary order
was the ideal horizon and the blueprint of patriarchal colonialism; the epis-
temological technology of orientalism as such.7 It was the laboratory table
upon which all things and peoples could be objectively and poignantly com-
pared and contrasted in a uniform light, and phylogenetically and ontoge-
netically ranked. All this in relation to a Europe that had been learning to
stage itself as the eyes and ears of the world; as the brain of the earth’s body.
The Crystal Palace – whose ‘bright visions’ and ‘brilliant scene’ were so pro-
fusely celebrated in the 150 pages of our poem – was the paradigm of the
loom of modernity on which sexuality, capitalism, and art have come to be
woven tightly together into a sturdy, enduring fabric which (despite the best
of intentions, as for example and most tragically, that of Walter Benjamin
himself) has in fact hardly frayed since (or which seems uncannily to weave
itself back together after the occasional critical rip).
The pantographic enterprise of the modern discipline of art history pre-
figured by Winckelmann, Kant, and Hegel was lucidly figured in the 1851
Great Exhibition – itself a phallomorphic imaginary for rendering visible
Europe’s Others.8 This visibility was both the proof and condition of the
presence of the Other, whose existence was thereby guaranteed by its exhi-
bitionary representation – which in effect precludes recognition of the
Other’s difference in favour of its phallocentric make-up: a covering up of
difference by a uniform visibility which de-Others others and domesticates
all difference, reducing it to mere variety and diversity. A phallic economy

which reduces all differences to an endless parade of monosexualities (where
women are but lesser men, and non-Europeans lesser breeds aping their bet-
ters). This universal lucidity (what our poem calls this ‘common home’ and
‘father’s feast’) is thus a transparency that renders difference invisible; a
crystalline veil. The dream of a totally transparent society: the hijab of
Europe’s modernity.
The erasure of difference (this ‘abstraction’) in favour of a ‘universal’ and
uniform ‘fairy world of labour’ endows everything (as the effective condition
of their visibility in modernity) with a phallicized, commodified, and
fetishized value, making it evident that at the core of modernity (and perpet-
uated by the interlinked agendas of the museographic enterprises and disci-
plines) is precisely the conflation of aesthetics, ethics, and sexuality in the
commodity. This was the epistemological crux and midpoint of Benjamin’s
arcades project, in Susan Buck-Morss’s explication.9
In addition, in the Crystal Palace not only were seeing and knowing pow-
erfully conflated, but a curious ambivalence was also present, eloquently
marked in our poem, between a desire for critical distance from exotic oth-
ers, and a desire to get closer to things – an instance of what Gillian Rose and
Steve Pile have referred to as the constitutive ambivalence of a masculinist
gaze, with its feminization and (hetero)sexualization of objects. The Crystal
Palace constituted the modern degree-zero of masculine erotics of the gaze,
where, in Rose’s words, ‘the desire for full knowledge is indicated by trans-
parency, visibility, and perception’.10 Within the dominant nineteenth-centu-
ry European sexual politics of looking, the active look was encoded as mas-
culine, and the passive object was feminized. Just as it might be said that
women appeared, but men looked, in nineteenth-century Cairo, Egyptians
appeared while Europeans looked. In the Crystal Palace, sexual politics, cap-
italism, and orientalism were facets of the same modernist enterprise.
The colonialist exhibitionary order and its supportive modes of representa-

tion (in which objects are signs of some abstract system of meanings and val-
ues, whose reality is in turn made manifest ‘in’ material things and peoples)
came to constitute not only the stagecraft of museums and the disciplinary
practices of imperial capitalism, hygiene, and education, but also came to
provide the paradigm for the massive rebuilding of cities throughout the
Middle East during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this new
urban order, several features were common to European colonialist enter-
prises everywhere, and most especially characteristic of French and British
colonialism in Egypt.
Most importantly, very sharp distinctions were made between a modern,
Western quarter, and a native or indigenous Arab ‘old’ city, these being
endowed with very clearly opposed aesthetic and ethical values. The Western
town was the obverse of the native city. In the words of Henri Pieron in 1911,
the older city
must be preserved to show to future generations what the former city of the
Caliphs was like, before there was built alongside it an important cosmopolitan
colony completely separate from the native quarter.…There are two Cairos, the
modern, infinitely the more attractive one, and the old, which seems destined to
prolong its agony and not to revive, being unable to struggle against progress
and its inevitable consequences. One is the Cairo of artists, the other of hygien-
ists and modernists.11
Although the colonial order seemed to exclude the older native city of
Cairo (Al Qahira), in reality it included it by defining itself in a direct and
indispensably obverse relationship to it. Echoing similar observations by
Frantz Fanon, Timothy Mitchell has noted:
the argument that the native town must remain ‘Oriental’ did not mean preserving
it against the impact of the colonial order. The Oriental was a creation of that order,
and was needed for such an order to exist. Both economically and in a larger sense,
the colonial order depended upon at once creating and excluding its own opposite.
This dependence upon the old city for maintaining the modern identity
of the new town made the old city paradoxically integral to the modern city’s
own identity as modern: its invisible core reality. Part of this ordering of itself
extends, in short, throughout the fabric of the indigenous town. This is espe-
cially clear in the particular work of the Comité de Conservation des
Monuments de l’art arab (Committee for the Conservation of Monuments of
Arab Art), founded in 1882, and composed of European and Egyptian art
historians, archaeologists, and architects and urbanists.
What has become clear in recent years is the extent to which the Comité’s
encyclopedic ‘restoration’ projects were as often as not creations designed to
fashion an ‘old’ city in the European image of the ‘picturesque’ Cairo men-
tioned by Pieron: a Cairo familiar to the millions of visitors to the many
expositions universelles in Paris and elsewhere throughout the second half of
the nineteenth century that recreated romantic slices of a Cairo street, or that
behind the façade of a national pavilion created a confusing labyrinth of pic-
turesquely winding alleys.
In fact it was the construction of the modern western quarter of Cairo
with its high rents and prices that increasingly drove native Cairenes east-
ward into what was becoming the ‘old’ city, thus increasing its disorder and
poverty, and creating acute overpopulation and congestion beyond any real
hope of amelioration. The Comité’s ‘restorations’ of many prominent and
obscure buildings in the old city were designed in no small measure to cre-
ate a ‘theme parked’ façade of structures visible down the eastern ends of the
new boulevards and squares of the Western city, beckoning the European vis-
itor toward an exoticized past. The Comité accomplished literally thousands
of such ‘restorations’ throughout the city, ‘re’-creating a ‘mediaeval’ past in
conformity to European fantasies. It may be added that this dualistic urban
morphology materially replicates the masculinist geographical discourse
investigated by Rose, in which there is an often violent opposition between
the desire for ‘critical distance’ and separation from objects and people, and
the desire to get ‘under the skin’ of the Other.
The modern quarter, with its gridded streets, squares, opera house
(built for the première of Aida), streetcars, telegraph and railway stations,
cafés and restaurants, was all about transparency and visibility – the lack
of any panoptic or panoramic viewpoints in the ‘old’ city having been a
source of extreme frustration for tourists and foreigners for decades. (A
frustration, in short, that was essential to maintaining and sustaining
European curiosities and desires.) In fact, the new town visually enframed
a ‘mediaeval’ past embodied in an ‘old’ city increasingly morphed as a kind
of living urban museum: an embodiment of the European frameup of
Islamic culture as merely a bridge between the West’s own antiquity and
its modernity – which, after all, was the ultimate point of Orientalism as
such.
Such reframings were of course underway elsewhere in the nineteenth
century throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, as for example in Greece,
where the new nation-state reframed Ottoman Turkish culture as but a ‘for-
eign’ interlude between a ‘purely’ Hellenic antiquity and its anticipated more
purely Hellenic modernity. And of course such reframings continue well into
the second half of the twentieth century, when the Jewish colonization of
Palestine entailed the symbolic and literal erasure of a millennium and a half
of Arab Muslim and Christian culture in order to materially juxtapose and
sew up together the archaeological traces of a Judaic antiquity with Israeli
modernity.
For the Egyptian colonial system to function properly and efficiently, it
required a powerful investment in reframing the past of the country on many
fronts. This entailed above all the reorganization of the city itself, as just
mentioned, as the simulacrum of a (European) exhibition, an urban space
‘representing’ Egypt’s present and past in juxtaposition. Essential to this exhi-
bitionary order was a series of archival and taxonomic institutions with
homologous functions in different media and at different scales – hospitals,
prisons, schools, zoos, legal codes, army and police barracks, stock exchanges,
and, of course, museums.
In an 1887 essay, the linguist Michel Breal wrote that, in standing before a
picture:
Our eyes think they perceive contrasts of light and shade, on a canvas lit all over
by the same light. They see depths, where everything is on the same plane. If we
approach a few steps, the lines we thought we recognized break up and diasap-
pear, and in place of differently illuminated objects we find only layers of color
congealed on the canvas and trails of brightly colored dots, adjacent to one
another but not joined up. But as soon as we step back again, our sight, yielding
to long habit, blends the colors, distributes the light, puts the features together
again, and recognizes the work of the artist.12
In the modern enterprise of art historicism, the masses of objects in a

museum or exhibition came to be understood as analogous to the gobs of
colour and the abstract dots and dashes described by Michel Breal as on a
painted canvas. Only by taking up a proper ‘perspective’ and distance may
these bits and pieces be seen as joining up to create the image, the figure, the
physiognomy, of the character or mentality of a person, people, or period.
It is precisely the pursuit of such a perspectival position that constitutes the
modern discipline of art history as a politics of the gaze; an instrumental
technology for fabricating genealogies of value, character, race, spirit, or
mentality through the mediating fictions of style, intention, authorship,

and reflection.
The museum was the place within which the dramaturgy of the nation’s
origins and evolution would be staged in the most encyclopedic and synop-
tic manner, and also in the most dense and minute detail, at the level of the
juxtaposition of the individual citizen-subject with the object-relics staged so
as to be read as ‘representing’ moments in the evolving spirit, mentality, will,
and mind of the nation. Each such staged and framed fetish-object was
indeed an object-lesson, and a sign to be consumed by native and foreign
viewers – both in the masses of original and authentic artifacts archived in
institutional spaces, and in the literally millions of replicas with which the
country came increasingly to be saturated, as it remains today awash in mass-
es of tourist garbage.
Just as the reorganized city of Cairo was arranged in such a way as to
reveal or represent the abstract object behind the name ‘Egypt’, that idealist
or virtual entity knowable through its material embodiments, and legible to
those possessive of expert knowledge, so also did the ‘history’ of that object
become knowable in the chronological choreographies of museum space. It
was organized in such a way that its contents were arranged to reveal a pre-
existing evolutionary journey, adventure, or plan. Each object staged as a
sign, and each sign a link in a vast archival con-signment system in which all
the elements might articulate a synchronic slice (or a diachronic moment) of
‘Egypt’. The museum, in short, was a pantographic instrument for projecting
that larger abstraction, ‘Egypt’, up from its relics and minutiae. The museum
gallery was (and indeed still remains) one of those spaces within the enve-
lope of urban space where all the confusion of time and history are banished
in favour of legibility and narrative and causal sense.
The problem peculiar to Egypt was that to European eyes there was more
than one historical Egypt – an original, Pharaonic civilization with its own
4,000-year history, a Greco-Roman civilization just less than 1,000 years long
and succeeding and overlapping and partially assimilating the first; a
Christian (Coptic) culture, now itself 2,000 years old (Egypt being the first
Christian country), partly coterminous with the Greco-Roman, and tracing
its ethnic and linguistic roots to the older Pharaonic society; and an Islamic
civilization, introduced by Arab-speakers from the Arabian peninsula, and
now itself 1,400 years old. Egypt was historically a multi-ethnic and polyglot
country, the home to not-insignificant numbers of various different peo-

ples – Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Italians, Turks, and, over the past 500 years,
other European or Levantine communities, in Cairo and Alexandria.
The colonialist ‘solution’ to representing this social and cultural amalgam,
projected in the 1880s largely by the Comité, and realized over the following
quarter of a century, was the formation of four different museum institutions
housing the artworks and material culture of the Pharaonic, Greco-Roman,
Coptic Christian, and Arab Islamic ‘facets’ of, or ‘stages’ in, the modernizing
nation’s history.
The first museum, dedicated to the history of ancient Pharaonic Egypt –
what a recent A&E TV network advertisement referred to as ‘the oldest and
most important civilization in history’ and still bearing the name ‘The
Egyptian Museum’ – originally housed artifacts of all periods and cultures.
Founded under French patronage in 1835 near the Giza pyramids, it was
rebuilt in 1845, moved to a larger building in 1863 on the east bank of the
Nile (in Boulaq), and, after a brief sojurn in a Giza palace, was refounded in
its present neoclassical institutional form in 1902 on one of the modern city’s
immense central squares (Midan al-Tahrir), itself at the time bounded on the
west and south by the barracks of the British military. The chief dedicatory
inscription over the doorway of the building is in Latin.
Its location gave it pride of place amongst all the cultural institutions of the
new city, in a neighbourhood of major government ministries and foreign
embassies. By its designation as the Egyptian Museum, its patrons projected an
indigenous national authenticity, distinctiveness, and originality, in comparison
to which the cultural institutions and museums dedicated to other facets of the
country’s immensely long history – the Greco-Roman, the Christian, and the
Muslim – were marginalized as somehow less ‘authentic’. In being given urban
centrality, the pharaonic past of the country constituted that to which the
modern West was primarily (indeed, still today, virtually exclusively) interested.
From the year of its founding in 1882, the Comité undertook the massive
project of ‘separating out’ the artistic monuments of different ethnic and
religious communities, and dedicated itself to ‘exchanging’ artifacts of ‘dis-
tinct aesthetic categories’ (‘des objets purement musulmans contre les objets
purement coptes’) so as to ‘relieve the confusion’ of visitors. This resulted in
the foundation of separate ‘ethnically’ marked museums in the 1890s: the
Museum of Arab Art in 1893 (today the Islamic Museum), originally formed
by the Comité as a collection in 1883 in (what at the time was) the ruined
mosque of Al Hakim in the old city; the Coptic Museum, created in 1895 in
the Christian quarter of the city; and the Greco-Roman Museum, founded in
1892 in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria (the Greek and Roman capital
of Egypt), the latter referred to in twentieth-century guidebooks as the ‘link’
between the Egyptian and Coptic Museums in Cairo.
We have here a very clear sense of the urban landscape as itself a disciplinary
order, with its very striking juxtaposition of the new city and the ‘old’, the new
city with its long broad boulevards, intersecting at squares or roundabouts
(rond-points), on which were sited major governmental institutions and min-
istries, as well as hotels. Several major Haussmannesque boulevards were cut
through the old city, and the headquarters of the police and the major city
prison were placed on the boundary between the old and new quarters. The
Museum of Arab Art was situated in this liminal zone, across the boulevard
from the police headquarters, on a new major intersection. The Coptic
Museum was situated in the Coptic Christian quarter to the south, adjacent to
several ancient churches, and near the remains of the Roman settlement of
Babylon, the immediate precursor to the first Arab settlement, Fustat (641),
later of Cairo (al-Qahira, 969). This older old quarter (i.e., premodern, pre-
Islamic (pre-mediaeval), and post-ancient) was also, during both Roman and
Arab times, the chief Jewish quarter, and today the principal synagogue in the
area, the Ben Ezra Synagogue, near the Coptic Museum and the find-spot of the
important geniza documents, still survives in a kind of museological half-life.
These museums had as their primary function the representation of the
country’s history and the reformatting of its complex (and, to European eyes,
confusingly miscegenated and hybrid) identity as a succession of stages lead-
ing inexorably to the presentness and modernity of the new Westernized
nation-state. This new Egypt was in the process of becoming a nation-state
controlled by European-educated native elites – both Muslim and Christian
– endowed with cultural, financial, and technological aspirations, partnered
with their European mentors and advisors, and tied more and more tightly
to the global economies of the British and French empires. All of this entailed
an empowering of certain portions of the population as the subjects of rep-
resentation (primarily the Westernized Christian and Muslim elites), and
others (the non-Westernized indigenous populations of various religious
and ethnic affiliations) as objects of their representation.
Essential to the Orientalist enterprise was the solicitation of the support

of indigenous elites in this disciplinary project of representation. In the case
of Egypt, this took place through a very specific linkage of aesthetics and
ethics, within a hierarchical system of values linking together subjects and
their objects (and vice-versa). Again, it was the writings of the French social
theorist and historian Gustave Le Bon – one of the most widely read writers
in Egypt during the last quarter of the nineteenth century – which played a
key role. Essentially, Le Bon argued (in his book Lois psychologiques de l’évo-
lution des peuples, which had run through 12 editions by the turn of the
twentieth century in French, English, and Arabic) that:
What most differentiates Europeans from Orientals is that only the former pos-
sess an elite of superior men.…(This small phalanx of eminent men found
among a highly civilized people) constitutes the true incarnation of the forces of
a race. To it is due the progress realized in the sciences, the arts, in industry, in a
word in all the branches of a civilization.
Paris: Felix Alcan 1916, 44
So much ethnographic research in the latter half of the nineteenth centu-

ry seemed to demonstrate that the ‘less civilized’ peoples of the world were
egalitarian in social organization. From this followed the conclusion that
modern progress should be understood as a movement toward increasing
inequality – which may help explain the enormous popularity of Le Bon’s
theories amongst European ruling classes and indigenous Egyptian elites.
Echoes of the sentiments of Le Bon permeated the procès-verbales of the
weekly meetings of the Comité in Cairo in their ongoing discussions about the
proper disposition of the hundreds of thousands of artifacts and monuments
being unearthed and circulated amongst the newly founded Cairo museums.
These discussions invariably centred upon the worth or value of objects des-
tined for display, and there was a very clear (and unanimously shared) attitude
toward the role of the Cairo museums in exhibiting only the ‘best’ works of art;
by which was very specifically meant those works that the members of the
Comité regarded as the ‘truest’ representations and the most authentic effects of
a people’s spirit or mind. All the rest were to be sold, given away as souvenirs to
foreign dignitaries, or simply discarded. The museums in fact contained a ‘sale
room’ precisely for such a purpose, so as to aid the ongoing refinement of the
collection so that it might encompass only the most aesthetically worthy
objects.13 A process of the ‘refinement’ of objects which was not inconsistent

with the culling and marginalizing of inferior subjects and subject-peoples.
Back to London.
It is perhaps fitting that (despite its material descendants on other sites,
and even the incorporation of some of its actual physical members into these
other ‘crystal palaces’) the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition was a
momentary, six-month phenomenon: a brief and blinding flash in mid-cen-
tury that revealed, as would the quick shine of a torch in the night, an unex-
pected and uncanny landscape. The flash has remained imprinted on the
European optic nerve now for well over a century; the uncanny landscape
revealed is, in Walter Benjamin’s precise words, capitalism: that catastrophic
‘new dream sleep (that) fell over Europe’.14
It was in fact the Crystal Palace that powerfully put all this in the proper
scale and perspective for all to see. In so doing, this supreme taxonomic and
comparative instrument was arguably the first fully realized modernist institu-
tion. The Crystal Palace is in fact the historical realization and the implicit
ideal, the Ur-form and Gesamtkunstwerk, of what Benjamin’s Passagenwerk was
itself aiming to evoke, pantographically, from the Parisian arcades (and the
Paris 1937 Exposition). Benjamin, however, quoting another verse about the
Crystal Palace, saw the latter as an Ur-form of the Exposition’s ‘Pavilion of
Solidarity’15
There is little in the work of art history and museology even today that
can be said to escape effectively the de-Othering of others that had long been
emblematic of the condition of visibility in modernity. The key metaphori-
cal conundrum, the central obsession, of modernity was that the form of a
work is (and should be properly legible as) the figure of its truth. Every object
was to be framed as an object-lesson, and the art historical branch of the
nineteenth-century enterprise of historicism was designed quite pragmati-
cally to render the visible legible. Museological and art historical, theoretical,
and critical practices (together comprising the core of the social matrix of
what I call museography) were interlinked sites for the manufacture of the
present, in particular the present that constituted Europe in its relation to all
possible Others – that ‘modernity’, that co-option of all possible ethnocen-
trisms, that has since come to cover the planet through its extensions, imita-
tions and recapitulations everywhere. Art history is no less a factory for the
production of the fictions that make up the load-bearing walls of that
modernity – the phantasms of ethnicity, race, gender, nation, sex, indigene-

ity, otherness – through the key enabling fiction of all of these, ‘art’ itself.
Art history has since its Enlightenment origins been the site of a modern
semiotic and epistemological problem and paradox, one born out of a pow-
erfully enabling set of assumptions: that the art object’s visibility is a function
of its legibility as a symptom of everything and anything that could be plausi-
bly adduced as contributing to its appearance and morphology. A symptom
of lack; of what is absent and lacking, in short. It became eminently reason-
able to believe that the astute delineation of formal or stylistic genealogical
relationships among artworks would provide significant insights into the
(presumably parallel, complementary, or homologous) histories of individu-
als and peoples. The modern institutions of art history and museology are of
course founded upon this enabling assumption, wherein, as noted at the
beginning, changes in form (or a lack thereof) are taken to correspond to
changes (or a lack of change) in beliefs, attitudes, mentalities, or intentions, or
to changes (or not) in social, political, or cultural conditions.
Simply put, the artwork (and perforce any palpable cultural artifact, object,
or practice) is taken to bear a relationship of resemblance (a metaphorical –
and hence substitutional – relationship) as well as a part-to-whole relation (a
synecdochal – and hence metonymic or juxtapositional connection; an index)
to its circumstances of production. This situation – this synecdochal
metaphoricity – is precisely that of the pantograph, that horizontal, scissor-like
artistic implement by which one can scale up an image from a smaller to a
larger size (or vice-versa), thus retaining all the picture’s features and qualities
at an expanded size. As a pantographic enterprise, the analytic practice of the
historian or critic may be justly said to comprise the projection of the figure
of the object onto a larger horizon or screen – the social, cultural, historical,
ethnic, racial, national, etc., etc. In this regard, the artwork is a homuncular
entity, whose finality is the horizon of its ideal, projected fullness – the kinds
of ‘universal history’ that Walter Benjamin felt compelled to admire in the art
historical practices of the Viennese art historian and curator Alois Riegl.
What I am calling museography is thus itself a species of pantography,
which in turn is a dimension of allegory. Since the late eighteenth century,
museographic practices have functioned to render an object-domain called
‘the past’ synoptically visible so that it might operate in and upon ‘the pres-
ent’; so that this present might be seen as the demonstrable product of a
specifically delineated past; and so that the past so staged might be framed
and illuminated as an object of genealogical desire in its own right, config-
ured as that from which a properly socialized and disciplined modern sub-
ject (the citizen of the nation-state) might learn to desire descent (or, con-
versely, might learn to abhor and learn how to reject). In the most basic
terms, museology and art history are modes of disciplining thought – about
nations, individuals, ethnicities, races, genders, and classes, on behalf of social
agendas or political desires projective of that other dimension of the present,
that obverse of the past and its complementary fiction, ‘the future’.
Art history is thus a pantographic instrument for the evocation and con-
nection of two Imaginaries; for shunting an insatiable desire for wholeness
between two poles – two Edenic realms of integrity (where might be project-
ed, for example, a homogeneity or commensurability between the subject and
its objects; between people and their stuff). These are the vanishing point of
an originary past and the future horizon of its imaginary rebirth, resolution,
or reconstitution: that which the past is imagined to desire as its fulfilment,
through the agency of us in the present who work to bring it about. Or, to
paraphrase Jacques Lacan, the future anterior of what we shall have been for
what we are in the process of becoming.
Everything that art history has been for the past two centuries follows from
this theophanic dreamwork, and an appreciation of it is necessary to under-
standing the history of art history both institutionally, as a professional, aca-
demic discipline, and more widely, as a component part of correlative institu-
tions and practices (including, minimally, art criticism, history-writing, aes-
thetic philosophy, art-making, tourism, urbanism, museology, and the her-
itage industry). In the long run, the very looseness of this overall museo-
graphical matrix, the opportunistic adaptability of its component practices,
and the refracted echoes of one practice in another or others, have proven
especially effective in naturalizing the very idea of ‘art’ as a kind of innate and
‘universal’ human phenomenon, with varying but navigable manifestations
from one society to another. Once again, a condition of the very visibility of
Others in modernity’s ‘common home’ and ‘father’s feast’.
All of which has served to legitimize the principal function of art and art
history in modernity as powerful instruments, measures, and frames for
staging the social, cognitive, and ethical teleologies of all peoples: narrative
emplotments linking the past and future, origins and ends. The principal aim
of these museographic practices over the past two centuries has thus been the
co-production of modern subjects and objects – and by extension the natural-
ization of an entire nexus of dyadic concepts resonating with and framing
many facets of modern life. Much of what came to be erased or buried in the
European heartland was more starkly palpable in colonialist laboratories
such as Cairo’s late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century museums – as
well as in the new morphology of the city itself.
Walter Benjamin’s pantographic desire to redeem the meaningfulness of the
past through certain keys that would decipher the broad topography of moder-
nity, thereby unlocking the utopian promise that had become buried under the
Zeit-Traum, the nightmare of nineteenth-century capitalism; his tragic
attempt to articulate together Kabbalistic theologism with Marxist material-
ism, was of course doomed from the start – not least because it was cobbled
together out of the very materials he was trying to critique. But to say that
would be to open up an occasion for a more radical rereading of Benjamin, one
which, while long overdue, must yet fall outside the frame of this walk through
nineteenth-century Cairo and London. I leave you with our poet’s final words
about that unacknowledged ghost in Benjamin’s writings, the Crystal Palace:
Long did I wander through that fairy place

By quiet paths I oft had learnt to trace,
Dwelling on beauteous forms, familiar grown,
Yet finding still fresh marvels, all unknown –
Till faint at last with gazing, I began
To turn from Man’s unequalled works – to Man
Then on a quiet bench I sat – and found
Food for fresh thought in all that passed around:
Seeking – no hard nor thankless task – to trace
The Soul’s unuttered thoughts on every face!
In many a soft dilating eye, I saw
Joy mixed with wonder – eagerness with awe!
While sterner men, with philosophic thought,
Mused on what labour, led by Mind, had wrought,
And giddy fair ones gazed, but heeded less
The works of Art around them, than the dress;
Finding in gay capote, Parisian shawl,
Or lace-trimmed robe, more powerful charms than all.16
Which should serve as a powerful reminder that it has been fashion that
all along has been the Gesamtkunstwerk of modern life, and the highest form
of consumerism; the locus of our anxious comforts and the modernist hori-
zon-line of all our desires. The gaze of those ‘giddy fair ones’ of 1851 were
closer to the heart of what mattered than the musings of ‘sterner men, with
[their] philosophic thought’. The phantasmatic Cairo bequeathed us by the
Comité should come as no surprise.
Notes
1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Los Angeles at the UCLA confer-
ence on ‘Nation and the Cultural Perceptions of Identity’, 6 March 1999; and at
Central St Martin’s School of Art, London, 20 March 1999, in connection with a
seminar hosted by Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. The present ver-
sion of the text was delivered as a paper at the annual Kevorkian conference at
New York University, 26 March, 1999.
2 Anonymous, Recollections and Tales of the Crystal Palace (1852), pp. 3–6. This
remarkable 150-page poem by the unidentified authoress of Belgravia, A Poem
(2nd edn, 1852), is divided into six parts, devoted, respectively, to an overview of
the year of the Exhibition from its opening on 1 May to its Autumn close; morn-
ing in the Crystal Palace (with the joyous arrival of the Queen); a discussion of
the building’s resemblance to great edifices of ice seen by Arctic mariners, the
lamentation of a mother for her daughter lost in the crowds; a description of the
progress of two anonymous persons through the Exhibition one day; closing with
a discussion of ‘the ties that exist between a great Author and those of his Readers
who appreciate his works’ (p. 137). See the excerpt quoted at the end of this essay.
The Crystal Palace opened 1 May 1851, and closed 12 October, 165 days later.
3 These issues are taken up at length in my The Art of Art History: A Critical
Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), especially in the essay ‘The
Art of Art History’, pp. 507–525.
4 A useful introduction to the building and to a good sample of the recent litera-
ture is John McKean, Crystal Palace (London: Phaidon, 1994). The present essay
is in part a synopsis of Chapter 3, ‘The Crystalline Veil and the Phallomorphic
Imaginary’, of Brain of the Earth’s Body: Museums and Phantasms of Modernity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
5 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, James
Strachey (ed.), New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1953–74, Vol. XXI, p. 36.
6 See Tony Bennett, ‘Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction: On
Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics’, Configurations, vol. 6, no. 3 (1998),
pp. 345–371, and Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and
Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1994), pp. 100–109.
7 On art history as an inescapably orientalist enterprise, see my ‘The Art of Art
History’ cited above.
8 My perspectives here are indebted to the work of, and to work in the wake of,
Luce Irigaray. See the special issue of Diacritics, vol. 28, no.1 (Spring 1998), devot-
ed to her work, and especially the article by Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, ‘The
Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic Veil’, pp. 93–119; and
see also Luce Irigaray, ‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’ in Luce
Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985), pp. 41–68.
9 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989), p. 211.
10 Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 86; see also Steve Pile, The Body and the City:
Psychoanalysis, Pace, and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 91–95.
11 ‘Le Caire: Son esthétique dans la ville arabe et dans la ville moderne’, L’Egypte con-
temporain 5 (January 1912): 512.
12 Michel Breal, ‘Les idées latentes du langage’, Mélanges de mythologie et de linguis-
tique, 1887, p. 321. Regarding affinities between late-nineteenth-century linguis-
tic and art historical theories (and theoreticians), see D. Preziosi, Rethinking Art
History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1989), pp. 80–121.
13 The Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Islamic Museums for sure; the records are
unclear about the Coptic Museum’s early practices. By the 1950s, such practices
had effectively ceased.
14 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhausen, with the collaboration of Theodor W. Adorno and Gerschom
Scholem, 1972–, Vol. V: Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972–89), p. 494 (K 1a,8)
15 Cited in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 324, and n. 137.
16 Anonymous, Recollections and Tales of the Crystal Palace, pp. 34–35.
Romulus, Rebus, and
the gaze of Victoria
6
THE FIRST THREE LECTURES IN THIS

series have laid down theoretical,
methodological, and historical foun-
dations for what will begin today’s
talk, namely, a close examination of
several museum institutions that have been central to what I’ve been calling
the fabrication and maintenance of that Moebius strip of phantasmatic
dualisms of subjects and objects we call modernity, and which in my view
includes its various self-trumpeted ‘posts’.
But I’m not coming to this subject unencumbered or unbent. It will
become immediately clear in my talk about museums (let alone art history)
that I am implicated in the subject in a number of ways, so that it behoves
me to at least try and talk a bit about where I’m ‘coming from’, and what my
own stake in these issues concerns, at least in broad outline.
I want to preface what will follow with one reference, to the process of
writing history, as argued by Walter Benjamin, which, he says, no longer
means to describe events ‘the way they were’, but rather to grab a piece of the
past and separate it from the course of history; to ‘seize hold of a memory as
it flashes up at a moment of danger’.1
{116} ROMULUS, REBUS, AND THE GAZE OF VICTORIA
I want to seize hold of some dangerous memories and, in wrestling with

them, triangulate on the issues before us today. Today’s lecture is called ‘Romulus,
Rebus, and the Gaze of Victoria’; as the title suggests, it has three parts.
Romulus
I’ve been spending time recently at the National Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, in connection with research on museums and the
manufacture of modernities; and a chapter in one of the books I’ve been
writing forever is devoted to that museum.2 Last Summer, during my final
visit to the parts of the permanent exhibition I had just gotten permission to
photograph, I came across in one of the galleries a photograph of a large
anti-Nazi demonstration in New York City in 1937. It was an overview of a
large crowd in the street, and in its midst was a young man wearing a gray
fedora hat too old for him, wrapped in an over-large overcoat and, like most
of the adults around him, looking with rapt attention at the invisible speak-
er addressing the crowd.
I’d known about this man’s artistic and political activities in the 1930s for
a long time, but not about his participation in demonstrations of the kind
recorded here. The shock of this recognition of a young man who years later
was to become my father (and who had just died two weeks before my visit
to this museum) effectively derailed my photo-documentary programme;
and after quickly finishing that part of my work, I left the building and wan-
dered around the city for quite some time. I haven’t fully stopped walking,
and so today’s paper’s perambulatory quality might be seen as a continuation
of that walk, and perhaps a way for me to begin slowing down.
In seizing hold of this memory that, in Benjamin’s words, ‘flashed up at a
moment of danger’, I want to talk here about two other events which that
experience itself evoked or ‘grabbed from the past’, and which can now no
longer be fully separated in my memory from this one. Taken together, all
three give me an additional way to triangulate upon the articulation of art
historical and museological systems of meaning we began looking at last
time. Starting today we’ll begin looking more explicitly at museums as
archival artifacts or institutions.
Two incidents took place a few days apart several decades ago, their alternat-
ing juxtaposition and superimposition in my memory since that time a
ROMULUS, REBUS, AND THE GAZE OF VICTORIA {117}
source of continuing fascination. Although I can’t remember ever not

remembering both incidents as closely linked together, they had remained
mostly latent until my visit to the Holocaust museum in Washington last
Summer wrenched them back into view.
The first event was the reading of the ‘Prepositions’ chapter in my first
school grammar book. Each chapter of our textbook was headed by a dia-
gram or picture relevant to the current lesson. The illustration to this chap-
ter was the most intriguing, being made up of a whole roomful of preposi-
tions all placed relative to each other in a spatial field delineated minimally
by certain features – a raised dais on which there were a schematic table and
chair, and, nearby, a very large red ball on the lower ground line of the scene.
That picture has remained extremely vivid to this day: it occupied the upper
two-thirds of the left-hand page of this yellow hard-covered book. I also
remember that the vanishing point of the picture was in the upper right
quadrant of the scene.
All the common English prepositions were there: ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘over’, ‘under’,
‘above’, ‘around’, ‘outside’, ‘beside’, ‘before’, ‘behind’, ‘beneath’, and more, all in
their proper places relative to each other and to some shape or outlined form.
I learned my prepositions by learning to ‘picture’ the picture in which each
word had its correct relative position, as I remember learning the other parts
of speech, and the syntax of sentences, in analogous ways, thanks to our illus-
trated grammar book. I was to learn many years later about the 2,500-year-
old European tradition of the memory arts; at that time these were simply
neat tricks that actually worked, that any kid in the class seemed able to learn,
thanks to having an intelligent and creative teacher and this magical text-
book. Now that I think about it, she would also act out prepositions, adverbs,
and other parts of speech by crouching under tables, standing behind doors,
or dramatically hovering over the head of the girl (her name was Sandra
Savin or Monica Brady) whose persistently plaid back sat squarely in front of
me for the first hundred years of primary school.
One of my favourite things not long afterward was learning to parse sen-
tences, because we got to draw those amazing line diagrams with their many
subtended branches charting levels of affinity, conjunction, and dependency.
In making out those sketches, you got to actually see how the words meant:
how they worked together to map or build an idea or a sentence. It made you
imagine that maps were machines to really produce what they somehow also
seemed modestly to represent. It was like drawing and writing at the same
time (or some different, third thing), and was interesting not least because it
blurred the temporal separation of the two activities of art and grammar,
allotted as they were – oddly, as it seemed then – to different periods in the
same classroom each school day. Our teacher taught us to zip through whole
paragraphs after a while, and we also practised visualizing words when spo-
ken, and speaking and hearing them when written. Our homework often
resembled pages and pages of intricate diagrams that would have delighted a
Victorian botanist.
The second event took place that same week, I think, probably the
Saturday after or the Saturday before: the first museum visit I can recall as a
relatively sentient and ambulatory child. It was a trip with my father to the
American Museum of Natural History on the West Side of Central Park in
New York City, a building constructed about two decades after the Oxford
Museum we are in today. This was my choice; given his background as an
artist, he normally haunted the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other
places of chromatic tranquillity on the East Side. The walk across the park I
remember as endless, and subtly disorienting: you emerged at a differently
numbered east–west street on the other side, as if the park were a distorting
mirror separating two different cities, each slightly askew from the other, or
each a different view, a different dream, of the same city. My father’s city to
the east, what was to become mine to the west. Across a space never to this
day successfully sutured together.
What remains most vivid about the visit was the magnetism and seduc-
tive gravity of the place; the visceral feeling of being pulled everywhere by the
museum, and of not wanting to leave, not being able to leave, before I had
seen everything. (Everything in the world seemed to be there in one place:
who could leave?) The fascination was so powerful that I was sucked away
into the great swarms of other noisy children, the parent no doubt wishing
by then that he were communing with well-lit contemporary paintings on
white walls over in that other (eastside) city, his city, on the other side of the
looking-glass meadows, places that were at any rate devoid of dim and dusty
dioramas of Mohawk campsites and tottering tyrannosaur skeletons.
I remember scrambling up the cool, smooth, stone stairs to the next floor
in the museum, and very nearly being lost forever among the increasingly
tightly packed displays and vitrines, ending up in a maze-like gallery stuffed
with big glass cases. It was only after the museum had closed and the lights
had dimmed that I became aware I was alone, apart from the distant voices
of museum guards and a very irate and extremely embarrassed parent grad-
ually intruding upon my (now increasingly nocturnal) fascination. I had
found myself in a place where you really might have seen everything in the
world, where each thing had its real name attached, where every label
demanded to be read aloud, and where all things were arranged according to
their true relationships in time and space.
Unlike the famous carpet in Italo Calvino’s temple at the centre of the city
of Eudoxia in his book Invisible Cities, where each coloured line and pattern
reminded visitors of parts of their lives arranged in their true relationships to
one another, the objects in my museum were parts of the real world put
together according to their true relationships that were obscured by the noise
of the city outside.3 A place of pure and lucid geomancy.
I had found a place where you could walk through time by walking through
space. It was easy to disappear and not be found for a very long time, and I could
have happily stayed there forever. It was a great revelation to learn that people
spent whole lives working there. It was more surprising to learn, much later, that
not only had numerous children had similar experiences or dreams with this
and other museums, but that some adults had even written about it. Could my
own unique, personal experience have really been just another modern literary
trope? An inevitable artifact or by-product of the museum itself? Was my muse-
um a blueprint for (re)building the world outside? Or was it something else – a
geomantic or grammatical machine that both organized and produced, realized
and factualized, what it seemed merely to collect and record?
I have tried over the years to reckon with this enduring fascination with
paired memories now decades old, which still oscillate back and forth like the
alternating states, perhaps, of an optical illusion. Did these events actually
occur in the same week or were they separated by weeks or months? And why
do they always remember themselves and continue to this day to insist them-
selves simultaneously on me? This is a fascination which haunts the writing of
this lecture. My attempt to reckon with this fascination itself oscillates
between the two common senses of the word, in coping with my fascination
(that fascination itself involving at the same time a seduction and a binding)
and my thinking with it: learning to use its own language to think with; to
think myself through (as I am continuing to do here).
The compound valences of such fascinations and reckonings are not

unrelated to understanding archival, art historical, and museological phe-
nomena as such, and I say this not to gloss over what might be taken as an
unwarranted universalizing of my own idiosyncratic experiences. I’m not
speaking of delineating some deep ‘grammar’ of museums, or some museo-
semiology. I want us to consider just what might be revealed by juxtaposing
and superimposing (for example) prepositions and museums; by construing
museology as an orchestration of valences of expressivity.
Which reminds me of the description of the notorious turn-of-the-centu-
ry New York architect, Stanford White, recorded not long before he was shot
dead by the husband of his mistress, which insists itself here: ‘He walked
Broadway like an active, transitive verb, amidst a rabble of adverbs, preposi-
tions, and other insignificant parts of speech’. What if the objects we find in
museums were not strictly speaking the nominal phenomena beloved of art
historicism but adverbial or prepositional entities? One can imagine vast
museums made up of galleries devoted to the sum of all the rhetorical tropes
imagined and named by the most brilliant Greek philosopher, Roman ora-
tor, or Derridean literary critic: the Litotes Gallery, say, or the Memorial
Rotunda with statues of Metonymy, Metaphor, Synecdoche, Anaphora, and
their sisters, all arranged in space according to their true relationships to each
other; or even the Aristotelian Sculpture Gallery of Formal, Efficient,
Material, and Final Causes. Or one might even imagine a Tate Modern, liter-
ally organized, to paraphrase what its chief curator described a few months
ago, as a collection of artistic ‘tendencies’ – immediately conjuring up a kind
of zoological garden of caged ‘tendencies’ growling at passersby:
Abstraction!!…Corporeality!!…£250,000!!
Looked at in one light, the twin(ned) memories I’ve described could seem
to take on the character of a catalytic, originary, or even traumatic experience
(especially given that my first museum experience involved an encounter
with the police); an experience that might plausibly account for some subse-
quent behaviour – in this child’s case, reasonably perhaps, his enduring adult
fascination with the antics of that music hall quartet of art history, art criti-
cism, art making, and art marketing (whose greatest act was always to con-
vince us that they have finally broken up).
Yet it may also be an emblem of something which my memory will not
permit me to dis(re)member. A mental artifact constituting an archive – an
archive inscribed in me; in and as me, one might want to say, as an origin; an
anchor to the future anterior of a curriculum vitae. An exhortation to remem-
ber a future that by hindsight one might find pleasure in claiming its portents.
I’ll return later to this problem of the essential futurity of archival events and
of the museum; the idea, in short, that museums and archives are artifacts and
effects of a certain concept of the future; the products of a very particular sys-
tem of time, a modernist temporality whose skin poorly disguises the Euro-
Christian teleological muscle wrapped around the Judaic Messianic skeleton
beneath.
But if this twinned memory is an archive, it may be so precisely because
of the obstinate indeterminacy of which ‘came first’ – the grammar book or
the museum. The notion of the archive is equally bound up with the notion
of beginnings; of a beginning, an arche, the root word, after all, being an ordi-
nal term; the designation of a firstness in a series of events (en tei arche ein o
Logos…). The ‘archive’ literally enumerates who or what is first, second,
third…and holds out the possibility of the idea of a ‘last’ thing – which it also
perpetually postpones; I’ll return to that later.
You may also have heard the story I told as a classic instance of
interpellation – a description of some of the circumstantial mechanisms of
one child’s being fashioned as a social subject: of becoming a subject by being
sub-jected to and being summoned (by being seduced and fascinated – liter-
ally bound to and hooked into) the peculiar topological matrix of devices
and desires we associate with our modernity. Being fascinated into a museum
was like being walked through the innards of a metaphor.
It may be, then, that this small hyperactive synopticist in his ‘Museum of
Natural History’ (every word in that title an irony of immense proportions)
understood by his behaviour that once inside, there’s no real ‘outside’ ever
again, or at least not in the way he knew it before – the irony, perhaps, of all
exit signs. Certainly, after the museum, things outside the museum came to
be transformed from just plain (‘real’) stuff into things-not-in-museums.
‘Things’ were just never the same; once through the museum, the rest of the
world is a vitrine, and everything in the world a maquette of every thing in
the world.
It appears that what was set in motion (or put in place) over four decades
ago was the germ of an awareness of the paradox of fixed, clear boundaries
or distinctions between subjects and objects. There was an extraordinary
fascination with enacting these ambivalences; of losing one’s self in the frame
(whatever that ‘self ’ could have been at that time), of ‘putting oneself into the
picture’ as a way in finding one’s own place in this world of objects: to
become in a way a kind of object in one’s own right, and thereby to ‘repre-
sent’ something or ‘be’ somebody.
Which reminds me of the startling effect of seeing myself reflected in the
glass of vitrines looking at their contents – seeing myself seeing; seeing
myself as a mirrored image adjacent to other images in the display case. And
of course seeing the images of others seeing; even images of others seeing me
seeing myself, and seeing them seeing me watching them. This in fact became
a favourite museum game to be played sometimes alone but mostly with a
gaggle of friends: to hold perfectly still, in just the right light, aligning one’s
reflected image in a precise manner so as to have the whole display appear to
naturally incorporate one’s self. (Childhood really was different before com-
puter games.) Wishing earnestly to be seen by passers-by as objects in an
exhibit, rather like pretending to parents to be asleep. Before breaking up into
giggles at the consternation of passing adults and especially of museum
guards who really didn’t appreciate your lying under the tyrannosaurus
skeleton pretending to be wounded, dying prey. (Some of my friends grew up
to make a living at doing this kind of thing.)
That first flight into the museum, that first seduction, engendered a pow-
erful desire for some singular panoptic point implied – really, one felt,
promised – by each of the teasingly partial panoramas and views within that
great building. A point from which to take in the whole and see it all togeth-
er, all properly parsed and set in amber once and for all: The Big Picture and
The Whole Story. But this manufactured appetite for a genius loci – for find-
ing the ‘spirit’ or meaning of a place whose underlying system or logic was
visible only from a singular point – had many other venues in which these
socializations were staged. One of the more hyperactive of these (the last
story for now) was the game of what we called ‘Big Tag’, which involved chas-
ing each other at breakneck speeds across the rooftops of (mostly contigu-
ous, often not) high-rise apartment blocks in lower Manhattan. The aim
being to find places to really see the city, to rise above the maze of individual
streets, each block of which seemed, at ground level, a whole walled world in
itself. One of the objects of the game was to get to a point high and remote
enough and far enough away from the half-dozen or so others chasing you
that you could then shout out the names of all the landmarks you could see
from where you were, before you were touched or ‘tagged’. It entailed a cer-
tain honesty among peers, since the claim that, say, the Chrysler Building was
visible from where you stood, could always be checked out; dishonesty being
rewarded by being readily and very soundly beaten up.
Often this game was played in the neighbourhood of one grandmother
(her building was usually ‘home base’ since I had the key to the door to the
roof), who, with what I learned years later was her incipient Alzheimer’s, was
never able to remember names of particular relatives (including me) but
always knew them by whose child, cousin, sibling, or parent they were (my
structuralist grandma Rose, the grandmother of all metonymies), which led
her to amazingly baroque circumlocutions bearing an uncanny resemblance
to diagrams of parsed sentences, or prepositional tableaux. She always knew
the diagram, but the words in the lined spaces were increasingly being erased
from her mind (as became the case in recent years with my father, and will
someday [perhaps already] be my own fate).
To repeat: Any such panoptic desires which might have been encatalyzed in
the child would thus have been elicited by the frustratingly partial synopti-
cisms of museum, archive, or city; the fact that there are places where one can
see large portions or sections (but never the whole thing; as Merleau-Ponty
famously reminded us, that view is reserved for the God whose View is, so to
speak, ‘perpendicular’ to all possible mortal viewpoints). Any desire for lucid
totalization would thereby be simultaneously engendered and frustrated.
It seems reasonable to conclude that in some obscure way the child sensed
that the two things recalled above (the museum and the grammar book,
fused together like an enigmatic image in some ancient or mediaeval ars
memorativa), and since joined here by the litany of other things being evoked
by this paper as having been in the same childhood ‘time-frame’, may have
been versions of some obscure greater thing, or different ways of doing
something similar, or perhaps a similar attitude taken up toward different
things. He may have simply sensed that the deployment of objects in the
museum was ‘meant to be understood’ as akin to the relative deployment of
prepositional parts of speech, the branching of affinities in a parsed sentence,
or the topology of kinship relations. Rooms, galleries, as sentences or
episodes; the whole place a great episodic chain making up an epic story,
endlessly parsing itself or being parsed, to be spoken, to be enunciated
bodily, choreographically, by its perambulating users or visitors. It is as if the

stories, objects, people, and spaces of the museum were a rebus – not made
up of words and pictures on a page but actively produced choreographically,
gathered and sewn into sense by movement in space and time. Every man a
genius loci.
The museum and/as (hi)story. Or at least his story. The ‘he’ here; the ‘me’,
becomes increasingly anonymous, of course, as these mnemonic ripples
expand outward.
Michel Foucault described archives as built around emptiness or lack. Can
an absence itself be a document? An archival event? Can an empty space or
passage in a museum (one thinks necessarily of Daniel Liebeskind’s Berlin
museum) be read unambiguously as documenting a specific absence? What
kind of semiological relationship is the equation of emptiness and absence?
How might the sign or mark of evacuation or removal signify? Is a circum-
cised penis – a genital mutilation that, in marking and displaying an absence
of skin, claims to denote a distinction and a subject-position, an identity – a
monument or a document? Is this mark of an erect penis visible on a penis
in a flaccid state simply the sign of incipient arousal? How is a sign of future
potency an archival marker of ethnicity? The marker of potency, inscribed
(or, in fact, excised) onto a currently nonpotent or quiescent state of an
organ, of the desire or anticipation of future power? Is this merely the adopt-
ing, at the behest of a God, as essential to a compact with, a compacting and
juxtaposing of oneself to, the God who is by definition immaterial, of the
sign of a current or previous enslaving power, adopting a practice indigenous
to the enslavers (the ancient Egyptians), as a mark of future power and inde-
pendence of those enslaved?
Jacques Derrida began to look at some of this problem in his book Archive
Fever, where, juxtaposed to his all-too-brief discussion of what he terms the
enigma of circumcision as an ‘archival act’, is the following. He says:
I must put it aside here (this question of the enigma of circumcision), not with-
out some regret, along with that of the phylacteries, those archives of skin or
parchment covered with writing that Jewish men, here, too, and not Jewish
women, carry close to their body, on their arm and on their forehead: right on the
body (à même le corps) like the sign of circumcision, but with a being-right-on
(être-à-même) that this time does not exclude the detachment and the untying of
the ligament, of the substrate, and of the text simultaneously.4
We need to press Derrida further here, and superimpose his juxtaposi-

tions. Derrida astutely ‘re-members’ circumcision by suggesting its obverse
or twin (really two points on the same Moebius Strip that only seem separate
because of the fold) – the application of the phylactery, the skin inscribed
with text, onto the skin of the circumcised male. Let’s think these together for
a moment. Here we have a transferral, a translation, one might say (displace-
ment and condensation) of severed skin into text; and not without some
echo, one might also say, of that superimposition of Word and Godhead at
the opening of Genesis (‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was
with God (pros ton theon) and the Word was God…’) which begs the ques-
tion as to what exactly comes first. – Which is, of course, the essential ques-
tion, after all, of the archive as such, that question that always remains the
same: What/Who comes first? (the question of the arche; or origin or begin-
ning, or, literally, the first [thing]: ‘en te arkhe ein o Logos…’). In archiving
was the Word. In the beginning was the foreskin. But the true new beginning,
the archiving repeated in every generation, was its replacement (but else-
where on the body) by a new skin of text. The skin of text as a scrim on the
forehead (and/or left arm – the arm that generally does not write), a
reminder of the pact; a promise. How can the re-presencing of an absence be
a promise?
Derrida puts aside this question of circumcision – the removal of a por-
tion of skin – and of the phylactery – the application of a piece of skin
(parchment; paper…) covered with writing onto the body of the genitally
altered male – ‘with some regret’ as he says. He never returns to this question
nor addresses his regret. What I’d like to focus on is the double question of
who (or what) is the ‘artist’ (aside from the God or her representative per-
forming the circumcision) in this archive, and I’d like us to consider the
archive as the marker of loss – a mark of mourning. And a mark of sexua-
tion, of gendering, as itself, as Judith Butler has put it, the mourning of a loss
which was effected in order to think its loss and to act, to en-gender, perpet-
ually to repair the rift. A rift it (gender) perpetually and futilely re-creates.5
I have been trying to speak here in a complementary doubled register that
in part may be heard as the trace of an incompletable centripetal trajectory
aimed at finding/founding a subjectivity as a triangulation; as a cor-relation
between the visual practices of a father (and artist) and the ubiquitous prac-
tices of a lost grandfather (and poet) of whom I’ve not spoken but who died
the year that the paternal photo in the museum was taken, and whose own
writings were put onto the shelves of a certain child’s room before the time
of the primary school events just described. I haven’t even begun to deal here
in all this talk of doubling and oscillatory identities with the implications of
the possibility that the man in the museum photo may have been his twin
brother, whose name, of course, was Remus.
Rebus
At the center of an archive is a tomb…

All of what you have just heard has dredged up another event in another
museum: another traumatic rift, which insists itself here. There is an 1841
lithograph of a scene in the Jewish cemetery in the Kasim Pasha district of
Istanbul, depicting the reading of prayers for the deceased, whose tomb we
may believe is that represented here, next to which is seated a woman whom
we may also believe to be the grieving widow. A grieving widow whose very
powerful engagement with the viewer – and, we may also believe, the young
painter, who was to marry the following year – elicits desire in the midst of
death, framed by death, rejecting death whilst juxtaposed to it, superimposed
on it, and the dead body in his tomb.
I first saw this lithograph in the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens, and
remain haunted by it for various reasons, some of which are impossible to
speak of here and not only because of time – the painter, whose name was
Amadeo, was an ancestor of the young man whose picture I saw in the
Holocaust Museum in Washington this past Summer – but also for two rea-
sons that relate directly to what I’ve already said and which concern what has
brought us together here and about which I am continually trying to talk,
that is, to circum-locute; to circle around and wrestle with.
The first reason concerns the relationship between archival activity and the
death drive; the impulse to flee a death which always pursues us like a night
that never ceases rolling up behind our backs and which consequently propels
us forward archivally, which is to say, perforce, erotically. The economy of eros
is that of the archive; of the museum; eros properly denoting want or lack; a
sign of what is missing. Both loving (what the late Roland Barthes called the
pure elixir of anxiety) and archiving depend for their perpetuation on main-
taining a state of tension that guarantees the non-achievement of final closure
or completion, beyond the transitory satisfactions of answers; beyond the sat-

isfactions of being sated. This is not unrelated to my own perambulatory wan-
dering around this nexus of proliferating memories, a spiralling, centripetal
walk whose centre point continually recedes into smaller dimensions, fractal-
ly connected. Like a picture of someone looking at a picture which contains
someone looking at a picture of someone looking at a picture.
The second reason concerns the double tension between understanding
subjects as homogeneous and heterogeneous, and between the desire for a
synoptic point of resolution in which all things disparate are resolved into
uniformity – like some kind of ‘Last Judgement’, where all the dispersed
body-part relics of a saint are rejoined together in heaven – and the desire for
its antithesis, in which all uniformities are construed as masking a more fun-
damental heterogeneity and disjunctiveness. There is a related phenomenon
called up by this tension, which I’ve alluded to before. This is the practice of
explanation by ‘origins’, which is commonly taken to refer to a progression of
states from a simpler unity or punctum to a complex, compounded, evolved,
or degraded and chaotic current condition.
In fact, in the work of this recently arrived, 25-year-old European painter,
who lived the rest of his life in Istanbul, recording the costumes, customs,
and scenes of daily life both here and in Egypt, Palestine, and the Balkans,
this is an unusual scene not only in its sombre narrative character – he made
his living painting colourful scenes of the city and its characters for visiting
European and especially British tourists – but also in its unabashedly direct
engagement of a figure – and a female figure at that – with the viewer. The
widow is a player in a highly charged emotional scene in which her behav-
iour contradicts artistic conventions and social expectations. What might be
expected as a depiction of grief and mourning is transformed by the
woman’s gaze into not only a defiance of death but a challenge to the viewer
which is not simply proprietary but erotic. She is not merely a person chal-
lenging our presence as intruders into a private scene of family mourning;
she is a woman erotically engaging the viewer directly and openly, whilst
prayers of remembrance are being read right in front of her.
Of course I am projecting into this scene, am I not, something that may be
wholly fictitious? She – and I like to think that her name is Hannah – may be
the daughter of a dead parent, or the sister of a deceased sibling or other rel-
ative, performing filial duty on a day of remembrance. She may not in fact be
the widow of a husband just recently dead. Yet precisely because of the man-
ner of her engagement of the viewer/artist, not long after to be married to a
young widow in this community, the speculation may not be off the mark.
What I want to call attention to is the presumed (auto)biographical and
archival act of an artist depicting (semi-fictional?) characters, the dramaturgy
and stagecraft presented here very closely engaging what I’ve just been talking
about. I’ve dredged up into the present certain ‘historical’ matter; I’ve fore-
grounded the depiction of a singular act in its ceremonial setting; seizing a piece
of something – an erotically engaging gaze – that for a variety of intensely per-
sonal reasons is absolutely present and alive; and staging it here as a beginning,
an arche, of a life. In fact it is I who am seized up by this seizure, in recognizing
a moment of drama and danger in an act that ruptures the ceremony taking
place in what was – an instant earlier – in front of her. She’s seated with her body
facing the reader, but her turned head changes the entire topology: her eyes are
outside the frame. She no longer attends to the reader looming over her with his
book; she is engaging us, or at least the young foreign painter. Like a character
in a novel directly addressing the reader while remaining on the whole within
the third or ‘historical’ person: describing while problematizing, ironicizing the
objectivity of description itself. In fact the scene is a picture of desire and its
effects on the frame of life in what Lacan called the Symbolic Order of daily life;
de-stabilizing, blasting open, flooding out beyond the boundaries.
Which raises several obvious questions regarding the nature of pictorial
figuration; questions of integrity and homogeneity; and of the interdepend-
ence of artifacts or objects and subjects – which, again, is the key issue haunt-
ing this series of talks. Here, the picture surface is a screen that both separates
and connects the past and present. This ‘Hannah’ looks away from the man
reading; away from the tomb of her husband, toward a future on our side of
the screen; a future she engages with – and not in some general way (she’s not
merely looking out over the city in the background, meditating on her
future) – but which she engages very specifically and concretely in the eyes of
the viewer, the artist, us. Her future as our reading of her. Of my reading of her.
Of my reckoning with her effect on my shifting subject position(s).
An understanding of the depiction is dependent upon a concept of the
image as essentially incomplete, as part of a process, perhaps indefinite or
infinite, linked to the future. To ‘read’ the image is to sew together the pieces
of a rebus of disparate things into an archive which by its nature is depend-
ent on the concept of the future; of futurity; in which parts of this artifact are
composed into an arche, a beginning, a firstness, eliciting, calling forth and
engendering, what shall henceforth be subsequent. So where is the archive’s
beginning; its arche? What this figure I’m naming ‘Hannah’ ostensifies in
short is the indeterminacy of beginnings and ends. To ‘read’ an image, an
archive, undoes it. To remember is to literally dis-member memory.
A common rebus is sewn into sense by pronouncing it in a way which
takes literally certain elements – say letters – and the sounds of the names or
parts of the names of objects or part-objects interspersed with them. What
sews this rebus into sense is not voice as such, even though my art historical
voice is narrating this tale, but rather the tracing of a trajectory; a lineage, a
history, of desire: of female desire and its eliciting engagement; the inscrip-
tion of a line, an arc, linking the remains of a man being committed to mem-
ory by the reading of a text – being transformed into and becoming (a) text,
a phylactery even – through the surviving partner whose turning away from
him articulates him as past, rendering him dead – into a future elicited,
seized up by a gaze engaging the eye of the viewer, and initiating a chain of
events which will have led to this act being legible here, at this moment
and in this place, as a beginning; not least that which I am voicing here, on
1 February 2001 in Oxford, and not at all anonymously, and for the first time,
as my own, in a painting by a man who is painting the distracted mourning
of his future wife for her previous husband. Let’s be clear about this man.
Let’s be clear about this woman: she embodies at the same time, but in dif-
ferent directions, mourning and desire; melancholia and performativity. She is
at the same time a relay and a link in an endless chain of episodes, of men,
stretching back to a compact with a God who demanded that henceforth there
should be worn on the body a sign of futurity devised out of a sign-token of the
severed piece of flesh which rendered the appearance of the remaining phallic
organ a pointer to future potency and power in its impotent or quiescent state.
There’s much more, including the third part of this text (‘…and the Gaze of
Victoria’), that time precludes me from reading, and which in any case would
principally have been a foretaste of the next two lectures. The next two insti-
tutions we will examine constitute together our collective foundation in the
modernity that I have been trying to perform here today in a series of
anamorphic oscillations.
Our promised selves are always hidden in the holes in discourse, or just
around the next corner, or outside the frame of the painting, or beyond,
before, or posterior to, the margins of our lives. Or further along the contin-
uously twisted Moebius strip making up the modernist deployment of ‘sub-
jects’ and their ‘objects’, whose opposition, as I suggested at the beginning of
this series of talks, is the artifact of a refusal to see them as the dynamically
variable effects of the forces of power and desire; as the two anamorphic
states of the same modern self which, while materially singular and contigu-
ous, are each invisible to each other from the place of the other. Taking that
seriously could be tantamount to beginning to appreciate the indistinguisha-
bility of artist and archive: a most dangerous and terror-laden proposition to
be sure. Next time, on Wednesday 14 February, St Valentine’s Day, we’ll look
at one institution where an artist, Sir John Soane, and an archive – his
Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London – grew together and in tandem
over a quarter of a century. The following week we’ll look at Queen Victoria’s
archive, the Crystal Palace, and consider the proposition that the effective
‘Father’ of modern art history (its Aristotelian Efficient Cause) was not
Winckelmann, Kant, or Hegel, but Queen Victoria herself.
In the next two lectures, then, we’ll consider the implications of these two
institutions for understanding the roles of art history and museology in fab-
ricating, factualizing, and maintaining the phantasms making up the realities
that, in our modernity, they seem simply to reflect and recount.
Notes
1 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape,
1970), p. 257.
2 On the museum itself, see Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory. The Struggle
to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995);
Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the
Holocaust (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); on
holocaust memorials more generally, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1993); also see Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History,
Theory, Trauma (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
3 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 96–97.
4 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 42.
5 See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), esp.
Chapter 3, ‘Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex’, pp. 93–120.
Seeing through art
history:
7
Showing scars of
legibility
Johanne Lamoureux
Prologue: another French
paradox
IN ONE OF HIS ESSAYS ON AMERICA, JEAN
Baudrillard humorously contrasts, in
one of his more famous generalizations, the stereotypical response of a
European intellectual with one by an American. This small excerpt about
bravado reads as follows:
Their [the Americans] intellectual conduct is pleasant, a model of gentleness.

They make no claim to what we call intelligence and they do not feel threatened
by other people’s. For them, this is merely a particular cast of mind in which one
should not indulge unduly. They do not therefore move spontaneously to deny
or contest; their natural inclination is towards agreement. When we say “I agree
with you”, we do so to contest what follows. When an American says he agrees,
it is because, in all honesty, he can see no reason to demur. But quite often he will
confirm your analysis by facts, statistics, or lived experience, thereby divesting it
of all conceptual value.2
In sum, while this passage leaves open the question of the sincerity of the
ritual compliments of the first type (that moreover one could deem more
French than European), Baudrillard considers the admiration of the second
{132} SHOWING SCARS OF LEGIBILITY
type more pernicious in its effects. The European will acquiesce in order to
formulate better a divergence of opinions, of thought; he works toward a
debate of ideas. The American, in submitting the statement to the corrobo-
ration of facts and the supporting statements of authors, and ‘in believing in
the facts, but not in their truth value’,3 contests the very performativity of the
speaker’s thought. In spite of the caricature that separates the European
intellectual from his American counterpart, and despite the false antinomy
that Baudrillard draws between the conceptual elaboration and the factual
support, this little fable from Amérique has long made me smile and imagine
a different set of intermediary figures. One could, for example, anticipate an
intellectual turn which would be manifested by condensing the aspects of
each of the two protagonists schematically described by Baudrillard. The
objectives of a European intellectual (an assent masking the reverse argu-
mentation) and the methods of the American intellectual (a factual corrob-
oration annulling the conceptual value of the initial statement). Baudrillard’s
caricature also illustrates rather well the dilemma into which the present
anthology of texts by Donald Preziosi places its eventual commentator,
myself in particular, as it takes into account that which interests me in the
lapidary propositions and meteoric equations that this collection of essays
contains.
I discovered Preziosi’s writings during the decade of the 1980s, which I
had largely dedicated, within the scope of my doctoral thesis,4 to a study of a
well-known but nevertheless neglected work from the end of the eighteenth
century: Le Projet d’aménagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre by Hubert
Robert. Therefore I found myself so to speak before Preziosi’s texts in the
position of an American enthusiast who would say: ‘You are entirely correct
and permit me to present to you this scenario which confirms point by point
the theses you advance’. Certain art historians, most of them probably, would
be delighted by my contribution; after all, nothing is better than a good
demonstration intent on the image, and one would guess that Preziosi him-
self would not be entirely indifferent to it; the most lapidary authors can
enjoy works that seem to prove them right. However, on one hand, one
would not know how to confirm, through the detailed contextualization of a
work, the leitmotifs which weave through Preziosi’s present book without, at
the same time, contradicting the very principle that supports them (‘art did
not precede art history’)5 or that seeks to problematize them (‘the eviden-
SHOWING SCARS OF LEGIBILITY {133}
tiary status of the art object’). In effect, the establishment of a correlation,

as elegant as it would be, between the theses of the essays collected here
and the documentary support of a scenario which would come to support
them carries the critical commentary along in a way that Preziosi avoids
almost systematically and deliberately, at least in the present work: the
exemplification of his demonstrative prowess. In effect, it is necessary for
him to privilege a declarative rhetoric whose performativity is assured, as
we will see, by a game of redundance and repetitions which metaphorical-
ly evoke the ossification of the studied discipline, in refusing to flesh out
his theses by example and by confounding exemplification and historical
explication.
Nevertheless, despite my European formation, I will first engage in such
an enterprise of fleshing out, pretending to believe that one could reduce the
declarations of In the Aftermath of Art to the paradoxical status of legend
(caption), of a work which would have tranquilly anticipated them, in that
way calling into question the constructivist character of the remarks I have
been invited to present, in this English construction.
Travelling forward
So picture this. A painting whose documentary abuses have been granted
legitimacy through its context of its production and the alibis that fur-
nished the critical reputation of its author and the title under which it will
have been registered in the catalogue of the Salon of 1796: ‘Project to light
the gallery of the Museum through the vault and to divide it up without
taking away the view of the length of the premises’, designated more lacon-
ically as the Projet d’aménagement de Grande Galerie.6 The author was
Hubert Robert, a painter renowned for his ruins and his galleries as well
as his decorations and gardens. Recently rescued in extremis from the
Saint-Pélagic prison where David had been taken, Robert was at this time
made part of the committee charged with the planning of the new Louvre
museum. Who better than a painter of architecture, and moreover of
architectural ruins, to demonstrate the virtues of overhead lighting that
sabotages the borders between interior and exterior, and transforms the
museum into a mega-passageway and the gallery into a space that, in a
way, prefigures Haussmann’s boulevards?7 Since the 1930s, the Louvre rec-
ognized the part that the work of Hubert Robert played in its institutional
history, and that is the most ambiguous acknowledgement that a painter

could be accorded. The rule of the game of Western art demands instead
that an artist make a place for himself at the museum and not that he reor-
ganize the arrangement in order to enhance the works of his predecessors.
Nevertheless, in the commemorative excitement of the bicentenary of the
Museum, and in the perspective of its enlargement into the Grand Louvre
endowed with a pyramid of glass, when Robert’s contribution was stressed,
it was always to reduce the painter to the status of illustrator and decorator
of the Louvre, and never in order to bring to light the moment when his
series of paintings on the Museum indicated a keen understanding of the
epistemological modifications in the development of this new institution.8
In place of the usual compositional painting formula of the private collec-
tion (a formula incarnated in the celebrated galleries of Teniers), Robert risked
an audacious solution that the historians of the Louvre more often than not
reduce to a simple anticipation of the merits and advantageous effects of over-
head lighting in the Grand Gallery or to an automatic recourse to the motif of
the gallery in perspective that the painter had by then included in his paintings
of ruins for close to 40 years. It is of little importance, in fact, because it was a
matter this time of imagining the museum to come and, in this regard, the spa-
tial plan put forward by Robert was done in a way that the contents of the
national collection were practically effaced to the advantage of the new appara-
tus: the Museum. Emblematized by the tunnel-like perspective familiar to
Robert, the Museum came to see its treasures according to a plan that hid the
game of recognition and aesthetic appreciation from view. The paintings were
reduced to a series of frames, viewed more and more in profile, as the orthogo-
nal lines they constitute plunge into linear space and time. Our oblique view of
these invisible masterpieces makes the anamorphic position the one the viewer
ought to assume of Robert’s painting in his discovery of the new museal plan:
the linkage of paintings which were important less for their singularity than by
their place – between two others – that they were assigned to and by the path in
which they aspire us. Robert abandoned here the traditional pictural represen-
tation of collections of paintings in order to suggest the experience of the visi-
tor in a gallery of portraits. Doing this, he gives himself over to a writing of his-
tory as long as this practice, so well seen by Michel de Certeau,
remains bound up with its archaeology of the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
tury[…]to the gallery of history such as one still sees at the château of
Beauregard: a suite of portraits, of effigies or emblems painted on the wall before

being described by the text, organized in agreement between a space (the muse-
um) and a route (the visit). Historiography has the same structure of pictures
articulated by a trajectory. It re-presents the dead along a narrative itinerary.9
Envisaged along these lines, Robert’s painting appears absolutely aligned

with the historicism that accompanies the birth of the modern museum.
However, it is also a matter of a painting (of two paintings since Le Projet its
accompanied by a pendant representing the Gallery of the Louvre in ruins
that I will not comment on here) that allies very closely to the political, moral
and aesthetic deliberations which occupied the foreground of the institu-
tions at the moment of their realization. Thus, Robert seems to have con-
structed his perspectival machine in the wake of Varon. Varon, a member of
the Second Conservatoire administering the Museum, presented ‘the picture
of our manner of administration and management of the Gallery’ to the
Comité d’instruction public on 26 May 1794. In it, Varon recommended light-
ing the Grand Gallery through the vault and decreed that ‘the Gallery will
offer an uninterrupted path of the progress of the arts and the degrees of per-
fection to which they were carried by all people who had successively culti-
vated them’.10 Two years later, at the time when Robert prepared to exhibit his
painting for the first time, the Conservatoire decided upon a permanent
exposition organized by schools: ‘The French school will fill the first section
to the left and right of the entrance into the Gallery; the Flemish school will
follow in the same order; and the Italian school will come at the end’.11 Now,
the few paintings that can be identified on the lateral walls of the Gallery’s
tunnel place us abreast of the Italian school section. This is to say that Robert
chose in his painting to invert the path foreseen in the instructions of the
Conservatoire in a way that suggests to us an itinerary that situates the French
school at the end of this chronological development, at the promising hori-
zon of this history of the progress of the human spirit orchestrated by the
Republic ‘one and indivisible’, and incarnating there its ultimate form. It will
have been understood that, in resorting to this radical break with a gallery
organized perspectivally, Robert achieved more than the spatialization of a
linear time frame of history (such as had been seen already in the arrange-
ment of portrait galleries). His painting succeeded in translating into spatial
and architectural terms all the ideological values largely determined by the
context of production of the painting in the middle of the last decade of the
eighteenth century. The list is long of the congruences between that which
Robert brought to light and Preziosi’s texts here exhibited under the rubric
of the technologies of modernity.
In Le Projet d’aménagement, the Museum, with its half-hidden collections,
was present as space, but this space did not have the enveloping, matrix-like
quality of the scenic box, and its decoration is of less importance than the
fact that an axis, a vector, or a direction was imposed on the space. The muse-
um was reduced to a perspective, but it transformed that perspective into a
‘narrative structure’ that did not permit the telling of ‘Truth, Right and
Reason’ as Preziosi suggests, but instead spatially incarnated a key concept of
Varon in text (or the work of his contemporary Condorcet):12 that of
Progress, which had already been laconically defined in an article in Diderot’s
and Alembert’s Encyclopédie as a ‘movement toward the future’. By quite cor-
rectly comparing the invention of the museum to that of perspective,
Preziosi understands that the museum was as well one of the most significant
instruments in the formation of the modern subject. Robert’s painting clev-
erly perverted the structural equivalence between the point of view and the
vanishing point.13 The viewer it postulated, be it Robert’s colleagues of the
Conservatoire or the visitors to the Salon of 1796, occupied the point of view
as an individual subject, and this reflected back at him: the place wherein lay
the radiant promise of the French school that even then had scarcely borne
fruit, where perspective was resolved into a vanishing point. This is the
epiphany of the Nation-Subject, and of the ‘Republic one and indivisible’
with which the viewer is invited to merge. The museum’s use was well and
truly a ‘legitimation of the Nation-State’,14 and of the superiority of France in
the context of a European hegemony where, as the ingenious Preziosi says,
art – the phantasm of the universality of art – is similar to the function of
Esperanto or a lingua franca. In this sense, as Preziosi writes, the newly born
institution, as exemplified by Robert, ‘constructs the past in order to justify
the present’.15 There is no better example to illustrate that ‘all in the museum
spaces leads to the present’.
What emerges from the preceding paragraphs is the insistence above all
on the ‘evidentiary status of the art object’. However, as Preziosi indicates, the
art object constructed by the museum and art history (the museum as an
actualization of the history of art, and art history as the virtualization of the
museum) is in other respects postulated in its singularity. This idea seems
neglected by the scenography of the works that Robert’s painting shows. One
understands the historical text in its unfolding and its momentum, but
almost never in the details of an individual work. The orthogonal lines link
together the works of the collection, doubly underlining the parergonal func-
tion of the museum, as a framing of art and of the citizen;16 in the first place
because the works enframe the space as a tunnelling void, and second,
because the works are themselves elliptically signified as ‘links’ by the frames,
the parergonal character of which has been well established.17 Thus, one sees
that these are the historicist exigencies of the Louvre and of Robert’s paint-
ing that favoured our anamorphic position. Yet again, this does not solely
represent one side of the equation envisaged by Preziosi, which also evokes
the anaphoric dimension of the system. We thus continue to look at the
affront of the painting’s corroboration. Robert’s painting does not omit this
anaphoric dimension. Nevertheless, the singularity of the painting and the
anaphoric work of the museum are presented elsewhere than on the walls of
the Grand Gallery. In order to discover them, it is necessary to engage with
the fetish.
In several of his writings, Preziosi characterizes the art object, and the sta-
tus of the animated object realized at the museum, as the Other of the fetish.
In the epistemological perspective of his work, the idea signals the syn-
chronicity between the invention of the modern museum and the concept of
fetishism by which, in 1760, President de Brosses began his non-theological
account of belief, an anthropological view, modern and racist, about reli-
gious conduct.18 Robert’s painting should help us delve more closely into the
connections posed by de Brosses’ work, following a detour through the
anthropological and sociological works by Bruno Latour and Nathalie
Heinich on the fetish.
In an article that proposes a ‘person function’, conceived on the model of
the author function long ago analysed by Foucault, Nathalie Heinich com-
piled a list of three types of person-objects: the relic, the fetish, and the work
of art.19 The first obtains its status by having belonged to a particular person,
the second one acts as a person, and the third one is treated as a person and
seen as possessing the same insubstitutibility. The author is not interested in
the use and articulation of these three types throughout history, alhtough
such an in-depth inquiry remains much needed in order to learn when and
how the three types appear, coexist, sometimes overlap, are redefined, and
survive. However, it is an inquiry that at once exceeds my expertise, and the

aims of the present commentary. I can say only that within this typology of
person-object, the work of art appears as a belated invention. The Middle
Ages were familiar with the relic and, up to a certain point, the fetish (in the
anthropological sense but not in the psychoanalytical one) if one thinks
about the powers imputed to the icon and to the entire sphere of the imago
about which Hans Belting produced an erudite work.20 Of course, in the
Renaissance, one certainly finds testimony that attests to the emergence of a
third type, one which is far from always being separate from the other two
(and in a certain measure, this still remains true during the second half of the
eighteenth century, in spite of the hypertrophy that it knew then).
Returning for a moment to Le Projet d’aménagement, one can see in the
foreground a painting in the national collection that enjoys a particular sta-
tus. This painting is separate from the neatly laid-out arrangement on the
walls because an old copyist (namely, a self-portrait of Robert) applies him-
self to copy it. It is posed on an easel, set obliquely, but more frontally
nonetheless than any of the other paintings represented, and it is set off by a
drape acting as a canopy. The painting in question is the Holy Family by
Raphael, represented here in a significant disalignment from the lateral rows
of paintings surrounding it. According to the terms used in the minutes of
the Conservatoire, the works thus presented were ‘displaced paintings’.
Independent of the canonical value of Raphael to his era, independent of the
personal reasons that Robert had for selecting this canvas, the choice is
revealing. In effect he focused on a work whose authenticity was in no doubt,
and whose provenance appeared rigorously legitimate.
At the moment when Robert’s painting was first exhibited in public, with-
in the context of the Salon of 1796, the ‘question of displaced works’ shifted
into another reality of burning topicality. Indeed, it was during this same
period when the famous Lettres à Miranda by Quatremère de Quincy were
published concerning the displacement of Roman monuments following the
Napoleonic victories in the Italian campaign. In the preface to the recent re-
edition of the Lettres, Édouard Pommier21 has shown that in the summer of
1796 (some months before the exhibition of the Projet in the Salon in
October of that same year), their publication did more to close than open the
debate on current ‘repatriation’ or ‘spoliation’, according to the opposing
points of view. This polemic followed the political measures elaborated since
1791 and took place, in the two years preceding Quatremère’s work, in sev-
eral journal articles that debated the right of revolutionary France to declare
itself the legitimate inheritor of universal patrimony.22 Hubert Robert’s role
in the turn of events in this controversy following the publication of the
Lettres remains obscure. Pommier, supported by two articles from the era,
counted him (along with David and Quatremère) among the 50 signatories
to the petition of 16 August 1796 that demanded the abandonment of the
project of displacement, but his name does not appear on the list that comes
at the end of the petition annexed to his presentation of the Lettres.23 In such
a context, the presence of a Raphael acquired by Francis I during the lifetime
of the artist in the foreground of the Projet appears as a possession superior-
ly authentic, although since that time the contribution of Raphael’s work-
shop to the picture has often been stressed. This treasure then attests as well
to the legitimacy of its provenance.
Quatremère is often perceived today as a paradoxical right-wing precur-
sor of Walter Benjamin because of the role he attributes to the wider context
of works. ‘The countryside is the museum’ incarnates the formula that
recently became celebrated by those, it seems, who defend the original con-
text of art works. However, it was less the cult of the original context that
motivated Quatremère than the conviction that the museum is a destination
incompatible with a just appreciation of art.24 In its decontextualization
(which ancient Rome had already done with the masterpieces of Greece;
Quatremère himself defended at the time the removal of the marbles of the
Parthenon by Lord Elgin), the museum makes art works sacred and devalued
at the same time.25 Either way it cannot accomplish the programme of
instruction that served as his excuse.
Above all, I would like to address the accusations relative to the museal
sacralization because this is where the museum is tied to the aporia of
fetishization. In his attack on this perverse effect of musification,
Quatremère, who did not distinguish, as did Heinich, the relic from the
fetish, accorded to the figure of Raphael an exemplary role similar to that of
the ‘displaced painting’ in Robert’s Le Projet d’aménagement. He wrote:
However, this Raphael that is coveted more because of superstition and vanity
than by taste or the love of beauty, how little they know the value of his genius!
All the collections want to have a true or false piece of him, a little like how
churches in times past wanted to have a piece of the true cross. Unfortunately,
this virtue attached to a school as a whole does not communicate itself, as in a

relic, to each part detached from this school.26
The particular example of the relic used by Quatremère is eloquent and

resonates with the well-established Christian mythology that, since Vasari,
has surrounded the painter from Urbino.27 However, an artistic relic is not at
all a religious relic. The art collection is a story of autographic relics. Rome
can well boast of having the alleged skull of Raphael (by which President de
Brosses, inventor of fetishism, was moved at the time of his trip to Rome,
handling it and finding ‘in truth this skull is more handsome than the oth-
ers’).28 The museum does not seek a fragment of the belongings or of the
person of the artist; it makes claims to a ‘piece’ from his hand.
It is in this coincidence of the hand-made and the cult dedicated to the art
object that the relic slips toward the fetish, understood here primarily in its
anthropological sense, but still open to its psychoanalytic sense. Bruno
Latour’s work in ‘symmetrical anthropology’,29 on the modern connections
to the fetish, has served as an admirable resolution of the apparent paradox
constitutive of this notion. Reflective of the reaction of the Portuguese when
face to face with Africans, Latour formulated the encounter as follows:
You cannot say both that you have fabricated your fetishes and that they are true
divinities, you must choose, it is one or the other; unless, they add with indigna-
tion, you have no brains and are as insensible to the principle of contradiction
as you would be to the sin of idolatry.30
This citation reminds us with a certain vigour that before we envisage an

art object as the Other of the fetish; it is important to know at what point the
question of the fetish calls into play the question of the other. Or, to use
Latour’s words:31 ‘How does one define an anti-fetishist? It is one who accus-
es another of being a fetishist.’ However, this accusation is futile because a
fetishist and an anti-fetishist are both entirely caught in belief, and this
enmeshment marks the modernity of the anti-fetishist since ‘it is the mod-
ernist who believes that the Other believes’,32 which is to say that this is some-
one blind to his own belief. (For example, Baudrillard believing that
Americans believe in facts?)
Latour situates symmetrically the belief of the Portuguese toward their
own cult objects, their ‘amulets of the Virgin’. However, Preziosi’s invitation
to think about the art object in its relation to the fetish is a course that allows
us to know this last notion in a dynamic that ties it to a phenomenon con-
temporaneous with its formulation. Before exploring how the art object is
put into play and defined by the museum as ‘the fetish of the anti-fetishists’,
it is still necessary to explain in a little more detail the significance of Latour’s
work on the question. As his little book reveals, it is that moderns are in the-
ory opposed to the fetish,33 whereas in practice, they did not stop traversing
the border between one and the other.34 The anthropologist demonstrates
this in his field of study, the sociology of the sciences, and more particularly
as he discusses the case of Louis Pasteur, who ‘affirmed in the same breath
that the fermenting agent in his lactic acid is real because he has carefully
constructed, with his own hands, the stage where it – the fermenting agent –
revealed itself all by itself ’.35
Underlining the etymological relationship between fact and fetish (from
the Portuguese factitio), Latour remarked that ‘each of the two words sym-
metrically insists upon the inverse nuance of the other. The word “fact”
seems to refer to exterior reality, the word “fetish” to the foolish beliefs of
the subject.’36 His acute analysis leads him to write: ‘The choice that the
moderns propose is not the one between realism and constructivism, it is
between this choice itself and a practical existence that does not understand
the utterance or importance of such a choice’.37 It is in order to apprehend
the movement, incessantly occluded by the split which the moderns sup-
port between theory and practice, that Latour invented an ingenious port-
manteau word which signals the notional hybridity that the split hides: the
factish.
According to Latour, fetish and fact are indissociably tied together and
this hybridity, this continuous and continual passage, are designated as
the factish. This proposition does not undermine the pertinence of what
Preziosi says on the art object as the other of the fetish, as a laic fetish,
because the art historian and the sociologist of belief, allow us to meas-
ure the gap between that which the first scenographers of the museum
talked about and that which they did: the gap where the two terms of the
antinomy fact–fetish become entangled. Of course the art object will be
constructed by the ‘technologies that are the museum and art history’, like
a marker of civilization that seems entirely to oppose the irrational and
naive object that is the fetish; but this apparent opposition hides their
profound relationship. Like the camdoblé which, if one listens to those

involved in its practice, is seen to be acting because it is constructed by the
human hands (and not in spite of it), the art object is a fabricated object
that, because it is made by the hand of man, is imagined as transcendent
of its historical conditions of production. This is one such Western
mythology of the masterpiece which the Holy Family by Raphael incar-
nates when cut off from the historical device of the Grand Gallery paint-
ed by Robert. Inspired by this symmetry, it is then also necessary to call
into question the vision of the Louvre Museum as a tunnel flooded with
light where the rows of works unfold to attest to the progress of the
human spirit under the synecdoche of art. The museum, from its very
formation, exacerbates as well the facticity of the object and its fetishistic
investment. To be convinced of the first aspect, one only has to glance
through the minutes of the first meetings of the Conservatoire for the
Louvre to discover the new insistence upon establishing the originality of
the works (along with the urgency of getting rid of secondary works and
copies), and to note the confusion caused by the lack of certainty as to the
attribution of signatures and the recognition of the subjects painted.
However, this desire comes hand in hand with the exaltation over the
great works, and with the belief in the metonymic function of the mas-
terpiece, an enclosed fragment susceptible to stand for an entire body of
works (a belief denounced by Quatremère about what he still called the
‘relics’ of Raphael, Raphael seeming to be a particularly well-chosen case,
given the eclectic character of his work).38 Moreover, the exaltation was
based, within the context of the establishment of national museums, on
the postulate that these masterpieces, collected and exhibited to public
view, will succeed in modifying the real in elevating the production of
artists of the present day. The fetish is in action, the work of art is perfor-
mative.
The museum professional and her fellow the art historian are, to forge a
neologism, ‘factists’, and as such, one can say along with Preziosi, that art is
the paradigm that shapes the museum and art history as emblems of moder-
nity.39 Before reflecting on the manner in which the texts of the present
anthology assume this affirmation and shape it through their very enuncia-
tion, I must return briefly to Quatremère, to Raphael, and to the problem of
‘displacement’. The Lettres of Quatremère invite one to consider another
fetishistic valence in the museal institution, understood this time according

to the psychoanalytic sense of fetishism. It has become quite common to par-
allel the vandalism of the French Revolution and the birth of the institution
of museums: the proliferation of seized objects and fragments of all sorts
would have favoured the development and expansion of the museological
project; Lenoir’s museum is a perfect example of this argument that the the-
ories of Quatremère invert. To his eyes, the vandalism of the Revolution and
the displacement of Rome’s monuments were part of the same iconoclastic
logic. The museum is no longer envisioned as a consequence of this but as a
condition of it. Without this horizon, no justification is acceptable for the dis-
placements. Through its totalizing fantasy, the museum causes the ‘dismem-
berment’ of the collections, the schools, sites and the bodies of artists such as
Raphael, and aims to fill the breach glimpsed in a past without possible clo-
sure, irremediably lost.40 In presenting his sixth letter, Quatremère wrote: ‘My
friend, it is with Raphael that I have completed my last letter on the antique:
it is with Raphael that I will begin this, in which I can converse with you
about diverse schools of painting in Italy and of the danger that there would
be in subduing their power through the new dismemberments’.41 This extract
precedes the passage cited above on the ‘relics’ of Raphael. It is profoundly
tied to the discussion of the metonymic function of paintings in the collec-
tions to which they were exiled. Quatremère indicated many times that once
the works were displaced, they could not overcome this decontextualization,
and consequently, are seen merely as ‘imitation ruins’ (is this so surprising
then to find Robert, the painter of Roman ruins, involved in the French
museological enterprise?). They only exposed not only their uprooting.
Basically, Quatremère attempted to undermine the fetishes of the anti-
fetishists in maintaining that their power was nullified because they exhibit-
ed only the fetishistic operation, the displacement of fragments, that rendered
them possible and that stressed the shock of the gap they were supposed to
complete.
It is clear that art history as a system (Winckelmann), the Grand Gallery as
a non-interrupted succession of the progress of the arts (Varon, Robert), and
the work of art as a complete fragment (the German Romantics) were all con-
temporary strategies used to fabricate the plenitude of the past, and to restore
the breached completeness of the antique. The history of art such as it was
spatialized and deployed in Robert’s Projet d’aménagement avoided this gap by
diverting the visitor with its walls uniformly covered with works. Raphael’s dis-
placed painting even provided one work too many once the gap it left in the suc-
cession was not visible in the representation, . The displacement of the works
seems the first stage of the fetishistic operation from which art history and the
museum proceed: their fetishistic sacralization of the art object that screens the
manner in which they are themselves constituted as fetishes. Where some
(Quatremère and his partisans) evoke the plenitude of Rome (‘the countryside
is the museum’), others see only an incompleteness that the ‘epistemological
technologies’ of which Preziosi speaks can alone remedy, can alone render
bearable. But at what price?
In the collusion between art history and museography, the historicist
remembering of the new institution is thus posed like the disclaimed reverse
of the dismemberment on which it is based. In Preziosi’s present anthology of
essays, the opposition of these terms is reiterated two times in as many arti-
cles. This redundancy is not isolated and one can find more examples of it.
The relationships between the titles of the articles, the reiteration of the same
citations (Balzac, Lacan) or the same non-explicit examples (Marconi or
Esperanto), the scansion of familiar or extreme formulations, only accentu-
ate this apparent compulsion for repetition. Yet, in the press of these exam-
ples that, it seems to me that Preziosi imposes the antinomy of dismember
and re-member with great urgency as well through his content and through
his virtues of mise en abyme. For in spite of its relative banality, it is the for-
mulation that best allows one to grasp the rhetorical performance of In the
Aftermath of Art, the textual operations which support it, the stakes which
they serve, and the effects for which they aim.
A creature for art history: monster on a raft
So, either all or nothing. In order to recover historic life, it would be necessary
to patiently follow all its paths, all its forms, all its elements. However, it is nec-
essary as well, with a still greater passion, to reshape and restore the play of all
that, the reciprocal action of these diverse forces, in a powerful movement that
would again become life itself.
A master of whom I had, of course not the genius, but with the violent will,
Géricault, at entering the Louvre (the Louvre of that time, when all the art of
Europe was brought together there), did not seem disconcerted: He said: ‘Very
good! I am going to read it’. In rapid sketches that he never signed, he continued
to capture and appropriate all of it. And except for 1815, he kept his word.42
In this extract from his Préface à l’Histoire de France, Michelet celebrates the
artist at the museum as a model for this historian who, like him, searches for
‘the resurrection of the integral life’. Evidently, after 1815 and the return of
the art works under the Restoration, the Musée Napoléon found itself, in its
turn, a little disfigured, if not dismembered. That would not have held back
Géricault’s project of appropriation, this pure effect of the museum, this col-
lection of ‘rapid sketches’ that renders ‘the non-interrupted succession of the
progress of the arts’ recast into a discontinuity of styles that were going to be
redeployed on the terrain of academic apprenticeship.
One must look at the work of Albert Boime on the programme of teach-
ing in the Academy and in studios at the beginning of the nineteenth centu-
ry to understand the minutely detailed procedures of training and appren-
ticeship considered at the time to be the most favourable for the develop-
ment of talent and for the preservation of the contemporary ideal of artistic
excellence. In spite of the relative valorization of painted sketches or the new
interest in landscape that reigned in the Academy then, these procedures still
relied in large part on an enterprise of dismemberment of the body, indeed
of the face, and on its harmonious reassembly.43 This systematic manner of
attaining the ideal of academic beauty is curiously symmetrical to the way in
which, in the same time period that Géricault began his great synthetic proj-
ect in frequenting the Louvre and Guerin’s studio, Mary Shelley undertook
to reinvent the paragon of the monster in her 1816 story, Frankenstein.
Before Shelley, the classic monster was a montage of elements drawn from
different species whose diverse parts continued to be discernible and whose
hybridity was the principal signifier. Vasari wrote how Leonardo amused
himself by creating marvellous little creatures in his studio, grafting the
wings of the bat onto the body of a lizard; the incongruity of the different
species emblematized monstrousness, and when the monstrosity was elabo-
rated from a single species (one thinks here of acéphales or unipods of
medieval illuminations), its monstrousness resided in the anomaly of the
montage. The Creature invented by Shelley in Frankenstein resites the mon-
strous because the different fragments and body parts used in the transgres-
sive experience of Victor Frankenstein came from the same species and their
reassembly was rigorously faithful to the standards of human anatomy;

however, their concatenation failed to produce a harmonious whole. The
materials used resisted a perfect fit. This is a risk that fictive ‘biotechnologies’
of the nineteenth century shared with academic apprenticeships.44 Jules
Breton commented on it as follows:
The great error of most pupils was to go out of their way to include in their fig-
ure-drawings details which bore little relationship to one another, such as noses
and mouths that did not match. In drawing from models they would show mus-
cles that did not fit the construction as a whole.45
Disregarding the weak visual markers that defined the monstrosity of the
Creature in the novel by Shelley,46 the exaltation of this modern myth by the
cinema reinterprets them by making them entirely supported by an opera-
tion of re-membering. In place of the references to yellow skin (which is to say
the decomposition of stolen material), the cinema made the monster a being
of scars and sutures – always rather arbitrarily situated – to signify and dis-
tinguish it. In the eponymous film by James Whale (1931), when
Frankenstein looks upon his Adam for the first time, he exclaims: ‘No blood.
No decay. Just a few stitches!’ The monstrosity of the Creature is lodged in
the insistent, superfluous, and unjustified montage. (If an arm was grafted
on, why add a different hand if not to show a scar on the wrist? If a head was
transplanted, why is the face full of sutures?) In this, and this only, is
inscribed the counterpoint to the ideal of academic beauty which must ulti-
mately ‘dissimulate the effect of patchwork’.47
This is of course where Géricault’s performance, the tour de force of his
appropriative practice, deviates from the work of Frankenstein. Both
Theodore and Victor stock up on ‘provisions’ at the morgue, as the young
British author makes clear in her novel and which is also indicated by the
Études des jambes et des bras by Géricault or by the evidence of his contem-
poraries who had visited his studio during the completion of the Raft of the
Medusa. However, Géricault’s grand machine will betray nothing of its
macabre process recovering it under another montage, that of an impecca-
ble work of citational surgery that served as a translucent membrane: pieces
and styles could sometimes be isolated, such as the formidable black back in
the style of Michelangelo but nothing was allowed to be carried as far as a
literal dismemberment, a stage which nonetheless took place, like a secret

procedure, gesturing toward the cannibal dismemberment which had
allowed some of the crew of the Medusa to survive the shipwreck. I would
like to suggest that in In the Aftermath of Art, Preziosi practises a history of
art like Victor Frankenstein or Kenneth Branagh. Since the final scene of the
most recent cinemagraphic version of the myth, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1994), the monster is fittingly installed in the middle of a raft that is get-
ting ready to sink with the mortal remains of the ‘modern Prometheus’.
Dismembering and remembering, remembering and forgetting: the entire
novel by Mary Shelley, particularly the discourse on the monster, turns on
putting these terms in relation to one another. In the account that he makes
of his existence, the Creature without a name seems at first obsessed by his
failure to recall the past. ‘It is with much difficulty that I recall the first day of
my existence.’48 The series of textual encounters, through which the monster
reconstructs, little by little, the history of human institutions, then his own,
and finally the mythological resonances that tie the two together, is strongly
eloquent. He miraculously masters language (the lingua franca) in listening
to a readingof Le Ruines (1791) by Volney; one cannot remain untouched by
the fact that, for the Creature made the collection of human fragments the
first book encountered would have been this philosophical–political medita-
tion, since forgotten, on the fragility of empires and on the vanity of human
power, a meditation emblematized by the scattered remains of civilizations.
The Monster next discovers Frankenstein’s laboratory notebook which
unlocks for him the secret of his own disgusting genesis. Finally, by chance,
he picks up some classics of literature that introduce him to contemporary
sensibility (The Sorrows of the Young Werther) and awaken him to the mytho-
graphic resonances of his history: after reading Paradise Lost by Milton, he
perceives himself as a new Adam. Throughout his confessions, the monster
is torn between both the desire to reconstitute his history and the desire to
forget the past as soon as he remembers it, as he discovers in his past the
insupportable fragments that push him to carry out the destruction around
him. However, just as the history of humanity appears to him written under
the aegis of remains and debris, his actions also seem fatally determined by
an instinct of dismemberment and, in the perspective of an exemplary
revenge, by the desire to be ‘the author of the ruin’, that will befall Victor
Frankenstein.49
Writing art history: on the block

The articles and essays collected in this work are distinguished from
Rethinking Art History published by Preziosi in 1989 by his refusal of all
demonstration. In comparison to that canonical work, In the Aftermath of Art
would have been shaped more through a concern for ‘monstration’. The dou-
ble meaning of the term conflates the meaning of a shown object (not
explained) and a monstrous object (not homogeneous). The new art history,
in its dizzying modalities and singular emphases, accustoms us to critique
and to deconstruct the canon and litanies of traditional art history. Preziosi’s
book implies that this incredible vigour has not been sufficient to leave the
established paths of the discipline, the conditions that made art history a dis-
cipline, or the very horizon of disciplinarity. The way in which he deploys his
new agenda here, the new pertinence of cultural studies, seems almost paro-
dic since it is presented without explication, and practically demands that the
reader adhere to it by virtue of belief, the blind belief of the anti-fetishists for
whom Bruno Latour’s symmetrical anthropology does not exist.
The monstration at work, In the Aftermath of Art, is manifest not only in
the mode of declarative exposition that the texts favours, but also in the
enunciative procedures of the composition. In the play of paragraphs, of
examples, of titles and citations that reappear as they do from one article to
the next, the book suggests a conceptually regulated construction through
the cut and paste of the personal computer, the shift of entire blocks of text
that repeats and exacerbates the formulaic dimension of the whole.
Nevertheless, this is not the concern. The functions of cut and paste on the
computer, in their current usage, indeed facilitate displacement, but they as
well erase the bricolage of the text. One writes texts by displacing the blocks,
but one avoids copying them within the same work. However, the present
book replays the same formulas in ways that pointedly reveal the operation
of montage that makes it possible, the pattern of sutures and scars that con-
stitute the membrure opaque (and no longer the translucent membrane).
The reiterations of the pair dismember/re-member, as the thread of the
book, thus run the risk of not being understood as anything more than the
effect of a litany. As a result, the repetition comes to be a travesty of the value
of the utterance, these diverse shifts produced by the specific contextual inser-
tions, that a reading that becomes too fascinated by the timely recurrence of
the same elements would not know how to spot. These recurrences and repe-
titions are to be read not only in their punctual apparitions, within a paragraph
where they stick out, but also where they are next to and overlap certain of the
other textual blocks, touching on them as well and suggesting a sort of discon-
tinuous pattern, a constellation of complementary motifs. For example, the
block ‘dismember to remember’ is constantly placed in close relations with a
series of blocks which are also repeated in proximity to the phrase: the fabrica-
tion of the past in order to justify the present, the injunction to forget the his-
tory of art, and, above all, the anamorphic function of the museum and art his-
tory. This last motif ought not to surprise us. It renders understandable tho-
rugh the utterance itself, that the strategy of writing in blocks precisely redou-
bles the anamorphic character of the epistemological system designated by
Preziosi: on one hand, the play of the block in the text and its relations to other
blocks demand that the reader modify her angle of approach, to the extent that
the text proposes/imposes a sort of oblique apprehension; on the other hand,
the block confounds, freeing itself from the substance of the reading. The
recognition of a block rendered too familiar, emptied of its impact, disturbed
in its signification by the repetition, produces a variant of the erectile effect that
Lacan evokes regarding anamorphosis,50 and that Slavoj Zizek, in his Lacanian
analysis of the phallocentric films of Hitchcock, comments on in these terms:
‘[P]hallic’ is precisely the detail that does not fit, that sticks out from the idyllic
surface scene and denatures it, renders it uncanny. It is the point of anamorpho-
sis in a picture: the element that, when viewed straightforwardly, remains a
meaningless stain, but which, as soon as we look at the picture from a precisely
determined lateral perspective, all of a sudden acquires well-known contours.51
This anamorphic effect of a strategy of writing by blocks (provided of

course that they are spaced exactly enough apart so that each of them stands
out), in accumulating the ‘thrusts’ of the textual fragments, mitigates the
nuances and shifts which are nonetheless introduced throughout the declar-
ative rhetoric and the apparent rigidity of the text fabricated by the recur-
rence of ‘pieces’. I will permit myself one last example that relates to the shifts
of meaning in the recurrence of the block ‘dismember–remember’.52 Preziosi
first presents the opposition of these terms as an operation of the museum
itself in the fabrication of the past (an operation that I attempted to corrob-
orate, like Baudrillard’s American might have with the presentation of
Robert’s Projet and Quatremère’s Lettres). Yet elsewhere he resorts to this
same opposition so as to invite us this time to ‘forget the history of art’. This
is at the moment when we are ourselves invited to dis-member/re-member,
but is it also an invitation as well to repeat the inaugural operation of the
infernal coupling of the museum and the history of art?
At first let me say yes, but with a vengeance. At least this is what I would want
to suggest with my long digression on Géricault and Shelley. The museum
dismembers and remembers in the way that Géricault, inspired by the Louvre, in
his turn inspired Michelet’s history in his phantasm of resurrection of integral
life. Let’s say bluntly that Preziosi does what Mary Shelley did: he injects the
gothic into the phantasmagoric story of the neoclassical origins of art history; he
dis-members and recognizes the fragmentary morbidity of the material at his
disposal, and he proposes a model much like the subjectivity of the monstrous
Creature, like the consciousness of the subject re-membered. Moreover,
throughout his book, contrary to the Museum, contrary to the triumphal march
down Robert’s tunnel where the background of the paintings depicted in the
canvas often merge with the walls of the museum as though they were an inte-
gral part of it, where the flight of thin frames causes the axis of historical dis-
course to topple into the axis of perspective, Preziosi refuses particularly to efface
the traces of the process of remembering (which one must not confuse with an
actual re-memberment because the anamorphosis is a ‘phallic phantasm’, as
Lacan makes clear: this would be the phallus as a ghost limb). This manner of
instancing the dis-member/re-member allows one to forget the history of art,
which is to say, to reject its regime of dissolving sutures and occult grafts.
The academic idea of the beautiful and the Romantic monster: it is
through distinguishing between the two models of fiction, contemporaneous
with the invention of the technologies of modernity, that I have tried to clar-
ify the project that Preziosi covers in the expression ‘the art of art history’.
The stake rests in the recognition, or at least taking into account, ‘art history
as art’, since not to do so would entail the risk of being deluded by the his-
toricism of the inverse postulate, ‘art as art history’. This project does not go
so far as to affirm that art precedes the history of art; for the latter is fash-
ioned, as are many other aspects of modernity, on the model of the notion of
art that it constructs.53 One forgets too often today to what degree, during the
pivotal period of the last third of the eighteenth century, the production of
art and the fabrication of its past were not conceived of as autonomous activ-
ities. Consequently, at the session of 21 June 1794, the conservators declared:
All the members of the Conservatoire are artists and they only own to that sta-
tus their title of curators of precious art monuments. It is their duty to justify
their selection by devoting the little time they have left after the composition and
conservation of the Museum in order to compete with their brother artists, to
eternalize, through monuments worthy of the French people, the events of our
sublime revolution, being intimately convinced that the intention of the legisla-
ture had never been to deny this faculty to them.54
Falconet reproached Winckelmann for not being an artist like Alberti or

Vasari, and he found throughout Winckelmann’s The History of the Art of
Antiquity the traces of this lack. It is not surprising that from the beginning
of the critical success of the art historian in Germany, and still today in the
renewal of interest that he arouses,55 his poetic promotion seems to have
been an important stake. Herder asserted as early as 1778 that ‘the style of his
writing will endure for as long a time as the German language will exist’.56
Also, Goethe had even higher praise 30 years later as he wrote of ‘our amaze-
ment and our joy when we see Winckelmann himself write like a poet, a poet
whose great value one cannot ignore when he begins to describe the stat-
ues.’.57 The poetic dimension or function of the historic text is constitutive of
the disciplinary practice of art history, but it does not seem to have hindered
the homogenizing and totalizing aim of its project.
In this regard, the title of the work In the Aftermath of Art could appear
ambiguous. Thus it is important to understand that this title does not act
as an invitation to cultivate the transparence of a discipline that would be
perfectly and absolutely instrumentalized; or to the contrary, of denounc-
ing the false opacity of it. It is rather an affirmation of the necessary lucid-
ity of the historian’s eye, sensible at the same time to the artifice of the
montage and to the underlying conditions that render it possible. ‘To see
through’, in the same way that one would look through a painted window
by Magritte: in other words, to connect, beyond the disciplinary confines of
art history, with the conditions and operations that inscribe a larger epis-
temological configuration in it, and in relation to which it only possesses a
little autonomy, if not the same phantasmic autonomy that its colleagues
are also imagined to possess. Just as Robert’s Projet d’aménagement suc-
ceeded in the tour de force of rendering visible the operation through which
the legibility of history was practised precisely to the detriment of visibili-
ty, it is perceptiveness that also directs us in Preziosi’s title, but it is not what
would lead us to discover once again that the Emperor has no clothes, it is
that which allows us to observe that his body is stitched. The scars are telling
and the seams are tight. There will be no perfect fit.
Notes
1 The title of this commentary refers to the earlier, planned title of this volume, Seeing
Through Art History. The final title for publication was In the Aftermath of Art.
2 Jean Baudrillard, America (London, New York: Verso, 1988), p. 87.
3 Ibid., p. 84.
4 Johanne Lamoureux, Tabula rasa. Chiasmes de la ruine et du tableau. Hubert
Robert et Diderot, doctoral thesis, presented to the École des Hautes Études en
Science sociales, 1990.
5 Donald Preziosi, supra “The Art of art history”, p. 92
6 Musée du Louvre, R.F. 1975–10.
7 André Corboz, ‘Peinture militante et architecture révolutionnaire. À propos du
thème du tunnel chez Hubert Robert’, Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur,
no. 20, 1978.
8 Marie-Catherine Sahut and Nicole Garnier, Le Louvre d’Hubert Robert (Paris:
Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1979).
9 Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 117–118.
10 Arch. Louvre Z2, 1794, 26 May, a report of the Conservatoires of the national
Museum of the arts, made by Varon, one of its members, to the Comité d’instruc-
tion publique, 7 prairial in year 2 of the Republic one and indivisible. Cited in
Yveline Cantarel-Besson, Le naissance du musée du Louvre (Paris: Réunion des
Musées nationaux, 1981), vol. II, p. 229 (my emphasis).
11 Ibid., vol. I, p. xxx.
12 Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain [1795]
(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1988).
13 On perspective as a formal structure of enunciation, see Louis Marin, Détruire la
peinture (Paris, Galilée: 1977). Also see the incisive work by Hubert Damisch,
L’Origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1991).
14 See in the present work under the following articles: ‘The Question of Art
History’, ‘Collecting/Museums’.
15 This leitmotif appears in ‘The Question of Art History’ and ‘Seeing through Art
History’.
16 On the role of the museum as formative in socialization, see Tony Bennett, ‘The
Exhibitionary Complex’, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995),
pp. 59–88.
17 The commentary here obviously refers to Jacques Derrida in La Vérité en peinture
(Paris: Champs-Flammarion, 1978).
18 Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches [1760] (Paris: Fayard, 1988).
19 Nathalie Heinich, ‘Les objets-personnes. Fétiches, reliques et œuvres d’art’,
Sociologie de l’art, vol. 6, pp. 25–56.
20 Hans Belting, Image et culte. Une histoire de l’art avant l’époque de l’art (Paris:
Cerf, 1998).
21 Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres à Miranda sur le déplacement des Monuments de
l’Art de l’Italie (1796), introduction and notes by Édouard Pommier (Paris:
Macula, 1989), p. 18.
22 Ibid, p. 19.
23 Ibid., pp. 56 and 142.
24 Here, I would like to thank the students in my seminar on museology and the histo-
ry of art that I offered in Winter 2000 on the related questions of fetishism and icon-
oclasm. The present essay owes much to the absorbing discussions during this semi-
nar. Particularly, I would like to thank Andrée-Anne Clermont for her fine observa-
tions on the problem of the origins and conclusions of Quatremère’s thought.
25 Quatremère de Quincy, op. cit., p. 46. In order to better situate Quatremère’s posi-
tions in connection with artistic value and the commodity value of art, see Daniel
J. Sherman, ‘Quatremère/Benjamin/Marx: Art museums, Aura and Commodity
Fetishism’, Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, Daniel J. Sherman
and Irit Rogoff (eds.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994),
pp. 123–153.
26 Quatremère de Quincy, op. cit., Lettre VI, p. 124.
27 Giorgio Vasari, Les Vies des meilleurs peintres, sculpteurs et architectes (Paris:
Berger- Levrault, 1983), vol. V, p. 223. See as well the commentary of Louis Marin
on the role of the Transfiguration by Raphael in the establishment by Vasari of
this Christian connection, ‘Transfiguration-Defiguration’, Pouvoirs de l’image
(Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 250–260.
28 Président de Brosses, Lettres d’Italie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987), vol. II,
p. 196.
29 Bruno Latour, Petite réflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches (Paris: Les
empêcheurs de tourner en rond, 1996).
30 Ibid., p. 16.
31 Ibid., p. 24.
32 Ibid., p. 15.
33 Ibid., pp. 29–30. ‘The Moderns believe that there is an essential difference
between object and fetish.’
34 Ibid., p. 35. ‘For the Moderns, it is the same inasmuch as the production of the
exact sciences never makes use of this difference on which they nevertheless seem
so much to insist.’
35 Ibid., p. 36.
36 Ibid., p. 44.
37 Ibid., p. 47.
38 The assimilation by Raphael of diverse styles, such as those of Perugino and
Michelangelo, and in moving through the style of Leonardo, is one of the themes
that has been established in the painter’s reputation since Vasari’s writings on
him. Giorgio Vasari, op. cit., vol. V.
39 See, in the present volume, ‘Collecting/Museums’.
40 The recent commentaries of Alex Potts [Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the
Origins of Art History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994)] and
of Whitney Davis [‘Winckelmann Divided: Mourning and the Death of Art
History’, reprinted in The Art of Art History, Donald Preziosi (ed.) (Oxford, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 40–51] emphasize that the theme of
mourning and melancholy found in the conclusion of the history of art written by
Winckelmann becomes understandable through the metaphor of the art historian
being engaged in contemplating, from the shore, the vessel that carries his soul. I
would like to emphasize very briefly here that in the years following the publication
of these pages by Winckelmann, painters illustrated the origin of their medium in
the same spirit by popularizing the theme of the girl of the Corinthian potter writ-
ten about under the most current heading of the origin of painting. It is a story told
in Book XXXV of Pliny’s Natural History, and according to it, a young woman, on
the point of being abandoned, immortalizes in a single stroke the profile of her
beloved. On the infatuation with this theme that Rosenblum situates between 1770
and 1820, see his article,‘A problem in the iconography of Romantic Classicism’, Art
Bulletin vol. XXXIX, December, 1957. A similar thematic nucleus would have
served art history then painting in order to automythograph their origins: the his-
tory of ancient art suggests in some way the model of the origins of contemporary
practice as fabulous, less for Winckelmann’s final metaphor than to be an entry into
the play of a space of reenactment for Pliny’s story, that confers on the art historian
the position of inventor, mourning symmetrically with the Corinthian lover.

41 Quatremère de Quincy, op. cit., p. 124.
42 Jules Michelet, Préface à l’Histoire de France, for the edition of 1869, cited in Guy
Bourdé and Hervé Martin, Les écoles historiques (Paris: Seuil, coll. ‘Points Histoire’,
1983), pp. 132–133.
43 Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 26. In keeping with the
belief that art should be systematic and disciplined, drawing instruction in the ate-
liers and drawing schools was divided into logical categories and a hierarchy of
modes. On the elementary level, these generally comprised a sequence of engrav-
ing-models of individual facial and bodily features following this pattern; a first
series, including eyes, nose and lips; a combination of all three features, followed
by a profile and front view of this combination; a sequence first of chin studies, a
second series of ear models, and a third series combining all of the above features
and culminating with models of the head. After the head was mastered, the pupil
copied hands, feet, legs and finally the full figure. The student could attain these
different stages then using plaster models, in order to master the bosse, up to final-
ly reaching the level where they draw copies from a living model.
44 The actual model of the new monstrosity introduced through biogenetic manipula-
tions are of yet another order: there is a melange of species without apparent suture,
and the ideal standardization of the manipulated product that signifies it as a mon-
strous invention, an invisible transgression of the species, and which, in this efface-
ment of the sutures, triggers uncertainty. See on this subject, Johanne Lamoureux,
Irene F. Whittome, Bio-fictions (Québec: Musée du Québec, 2000), pp. 26 ff.
45 Ibid., p. 31.
46 The principal marker of monstrosity in the novel is no longer the hybrid, nor yet
the suture, it is the excess in the Creature’s size, force, agility, sensibility and com-
portment. The Creature is Romantic. The only visual indicators in the descrip-
tion of the monster indicate its colour (a little yellow, with black lips) that indi-
cate the morbidity of the materials used.
47 Ibid., p. 38.
48 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein ou le Prométhée moderne (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion,
1979) (chapter XI), p. 175.
49 Ibid. Struck by one of the inhabitants of the house where he secretly found refuge,
the monster declares: ‘I should have torn him limb from limb, like the lion tears
apart his prey’. (p. 216); at the moment when he committed his first crime, he
hears his young victim exclaim: ‘You want to eat me and tear me into pieces’
(p. 224). For the desire to carry the ruin to its author, see p. 173.
50 Jacques Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil,
1973), pp. 82–83.
51 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), p. 90.
52 On this alignment between the discipline of art history and its object, see Georges
Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris: Minuit, 1990).
53 Yveline Cantarel-Besson, op. cit., vol. I, p. xv.
54 See Alex Potts, op. cit., pp. 50–51. Evoking the historical model of rise and decline
according to Winckelmann, Potts stresses Winckelmann’s debt toward certain
narrative structures that may well give a coherence to his writings. ‘Winckelmann
was asserting that the history of art presents a logical unfolding that conforms to
the Aristotelian notion of a whole or complete action in fictional writing. But this
was a coherence Aristotle himself denied to history.’
55 Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Le Tombeau de Winckelmann’, in Le Tombeau de
Winckelmann (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 1993), p. 7.
56 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Winckelmann’, in Le Tombeau de Winckelmann,
p. 100.
Index
academic discipline, artwork as medium antimony fact-fetish, two terms of

of communication and/or expres- become entangled 141
sion 40, 52n32 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa, every topic
accounting for a new ‘totality’ of art, formulated as a quaestio 21
social-historical phenomenon 36 Archimedean footholds, critical effectiv-
Age of Reagan, Jameson of (1980s) in ity and 14
tune with 8 Archimedean point 13–14
Alexandria 5, 106 architecture, privileged place in Jameson’s
Althusser, Louis, concept of ideology and recent lectures and essays 9
its Lacanian under-pinnings 15, archival activity, relationship with the
25n30; ideology as ‘imaginary repre- death drive 126
sentation of subject’s relationship to archive, consider as marker of loss, mark
his or her Real conditions of exis- of mourning 125; no passive store-
tence’ 16, 18 house or data bank but critical
Amadeo, ancestor of young man seen in instrument 81
Holocaust Museum (Washington) 126 art 57–9, 64–5; ‘behind glass – the history
American enthusiast, Preziosi’s texts and glass’ we have Professors of Fine Art’
132 37; both an object and an instrument
American Museum of Natural History 75–6; central to machinery of his-
(Central Park New York), visit by toricism and essentialism, esperanto
Preziosi 118–19, 121 of European hegemony 76; civilized
American newspapers, lugubrious and and complementary obverse of sexu-
vulgar art historicism 12 ality 80; constantly receding from
American, the, contests the very perfor- modern life 35; did not precede Art
mativity of speaker’s thought 132 History 80; esperanto of Western
anamorphic function of the museum hegemony 65; has a ‘history’ 97;
and art history 149 hypothesis as universal human phe-
anamorphic positions, ‘history’ of art nomenon essential to commensura-
may be seen as unfolding 46 bility 85; idea of as radically uncon-
{156} INDEX
ceptualizable 2; kind of innate and work’s origins require accounting of

‘universal’ human phenomenon 110; many factors 39
metalanguage of history fabricated art historical branch of nineteenth-cen-
by museum and its museographies tury historicism, render the visible
76; metalanguage of museum’s histo- legible 108
riographical and psychical confabu- art historical cyberpreneurs, merger or
lation 59; object par excellence of synthesis of museology and museog-
Enlightenment disciplinarity 58; par- raphy 63
adigm of all production from art historical and museological attention
Industrial Revolution 57,; provided to concrete specificity, characteristic
means for envisioning all times and of modern disciplinary practice 49,
places and peoples 65–6; re-narra- 54n49
tivizes and re-centres history 76; art historical and museological practice,
retroactive rewriting of history of allegorical figures and 46
human societies 57; secret truth to be art historical object, elsewhere of the sub-
uncovered about all peoples every- ject, place where unsayable truths
where 80; structures thought and are written 88
reorders perception 66–7; universal art historical objects, object-lessons of
method of (re)narrativizing and documentary import and 81
(re)centering ‘history’ 65 art historical period, comparable simi-
art of Art History, circulates in virtual larities of style and 81, 93n27
space whose dimensions are result of art historical practice, exegetical and
triple superimpositions 88; cryptographic 38; new approaches
Enlightenment invention designed/ to study of visual arts 30; restoration
destined to become universal of circumstances that surround
language of truth 82; idea of beauti- work’s production 38
ful and Romantic monster and 150; art historical study, compound existen-
instrument of universalist Enlighten- tial status 42
ment vision and means of qualitative art historicism, objects in museum
distinctions between individuals 85; understood as analogous to gobs of
Latin of modernity, universal medi- colour on painted canvas 103
um of truth 82; paradigm of all pro- Art History, child of photography 86;
duction 75; relationship to fetishism comprehending past is prerequisite
73; traces of supervision in 88 to coping with its present 89; eviden-
art of Art History and aesthetic philoso- tial institution and, semiotic and
phy, modern European invention 75 eucharistic 49, 54n51; existed in tan-
art of Art History and its museology, dem with the museum 43; fabrica-
instrument for thinking representation of a past for staging and trans-
tionally and historically 79 forming the present 85–6, 94n40;
‘art of art history, the’ (1998) 5, 69 factory for production of fictions
‘art criticism’, born occluding whilst that make up load-bearing walls of
instantiating the magic realms of modernity 108–9; foundational
exchange value 85, 94n37 dilemma of formation of discipline
art and fetish, historically came to occu- of 49; foundations as systemic and
py opposite poles 80 ‘scientific’ practice 30; ghost in that
art historian, a ‘subject-supposed-to- crystalline machine 99; imagining
know 63 itself as an eye on the world, cease-
art historians, differences among various lessly shuffles through a windowless
disciplinary methodologies 30; slide collection growing faster than
interest in historical origins of aca- an eye can focus 99; internally unsta-
demic discipline 30; origin of a work ble enterprise 90; makes colonial
located in internal conditions of subjects of us all 77; mode of writing
production 39; try to read in the addressed to the present 43; modern
specimens the signs of time and 38; nation-state and its epitome, the cit-
INDEX {157}
izen 79, 92n23; one of the voices, Art History otherwise, two kinds of iner-
major popular historical novel in tias and 70–71
and of museological space 71–2, art history in space and time 83–6
90n6; opposite of art making 37; art museum object, imagined function-
orbit or the novel and the museum ing in manner similar to an ego 75,
71; origins of that might be termed 92n15
‘museography’ 70; pantographic art object, fabricated object because con-
enterprise of was figured in Great structed by hand of man 142; rela-
Exhibition 99; pantographic instru- tionship to art history homologous
ment for evocation of two to manuscript to literary history 43
Imaginaries 110; restoration of the art object exists as art, simulated, repli-
past into the present 42; rooted in cated, modelled and 42
ideology of representational adequa- Art-History and rise of modern paint-
cy 69; science through critical histo- ing, same historical pressures 36,
riography of discursive practice of 52n21
88; similar in scientificity to nine- articulation and justification of Art
teenth century disciplines 41–2, History, constructed of indefinitely
53n36; teleological goals of 43; theo- extendible archive 85, 94n38
phanic dreamwork for past two cen- ‘artifice’ of museological stagecraft, char-
turies 110; virtual space in three acter of ‘object’ rendered visible 61
dimensions 87; window onto vast artisanry, one of defining characteristics
imaginary universal museum 72 of humanness 85
Art History, aesthetic philosophy, muse- artisanry or ‘art’ of all peoples, totalizing
ology and art-making, historically space-time of museography 84
co-constructed social practices 80 artist, the, paragon of agency in modern
art history, art criticism and museology, world 57
founded upon enabling assumption 97 ‘artistic tradition’, formatted through
‘art history’ of Art History 70 terms of epistemological technology
art history and dramaturgy of museum, and its system of representation 66
addressed to fabricating present as artwork, beliefs are historically signifi-
product of the past 44 cant phenomena 97; everything
Art History and fetishism 79–83 about is significant in some way 41;
Art History, from eurocentric point of occasion for individual meditation
view, constru(ct)ed as universal and alignment of individual viewing
empirical science and 84 subject 48; pertinence staged incre-
art history and museography, historicist mentally as moment in evolution of
remembering of new institution tradition and 46; reflective of its ori-
posed like disclaimed reverse of the gin in determinable fashion 39; rela-
dismemberment 144 tionship of resemblance to circum-
art history and museology, enabling stances of production 109
assumption and 109; guided by artworks, participate in articulate net-
deeply set metaphor 48; labours, work of material relationships 43
lines of personification and charac- artworks, monuments, archives and his-
terization 47–8; legitimize their tories, sites where hidden truth of
truths as original and 47; little in the citizen is to be rediscovered 88,
that can escape the de-Othering of 94n46
others 108; modern disciplinary atrium or lobby of Bonaventure Hotel,
practices, powerful effects of this complex shape 11
‘mighty plan’ 99
art history and the museum. idea of his- Balzac, Honoré, Louis Lambert 29, 144
torical period unified and homoge- Barthes, Roland, elixir of anxiety 126
neous 47, 54n47 Baudrillard, Jean, essay on America
art history and museums of art, condi- 131–2, 140, 150
tions of reading objects and images 46 Belting, Hans, imago and 138, 152n20
{158} INDEX
Benjamin, Walter 6, 99; allegorical fig- looked 100; Hausmannesque boule-

ures that express ‘will to symbolic vards cut through the old city 106;
totality’ 46, 54n44; ‘Arcades project’ modern quarter, all about trans-
98, 100, 108; capitalism: catastrophic parency and visibility 102; reorgani-
‘new dream sleep fell over Europe zation as urban space representing
108, 113n14; conference on in Egypt’s present and past 103
London 5; memory ‘flashed up at a Cairo museums, exhibiting only ‘best’
moment of danger’ 116; panto- works of art, rest sold or given away
graphic desire to redeem meaning- 107; ‘sale room’ to aid refinement of
fulness of past through certain keys the collection 107–8, 113n13
111, 113n16; poet’s words about Cairo new museums (1890s) 5, 95
unacknowledged ghost in his writ- Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities 119
ings 111; Quatremère paradoxical Camillo, Giulio, of the Renaissance 50,
precursor of 139; Viennese art histo- 54n53
rian Alois Riegl and 109; writing his- Centre Pompidou in Paris, characteristic
tory and 115, 130n1; writings postmodern building 12
(1930s) 95 centripetal trajectory, finding/founding
biosphere, touched by museological a subjectivity as a triangulation 125
practice of some kind 58 certain modes of explanation, privileged
blinding quiddity of ‘crystal pile’, mirror- over others 39
stage of bourgeois modernity’s evo- child, enigmatic image of museum and
lution 99 grammar book in ancient ars memo-
Boime, Albert 145, 154n43 rativa 123
Bonaventure Hotel (Los Angeles), cinema, made Frankenstein monster of
accomplishes this generation of con- scars and sutures 146
fusion in four ways 10–11, 16; con- circumcised penis, genital mutilation or
trast to elite and Utopian austerities an identity 124
of great architectural modernisms circumcision, enigma of as ‘archival act’
10, 24n11; designed by John 124
Portman 9; hyperspace with new clarity, moment of the after-effect (après-
hyper-crowd 12; rooms in the worst coup) 1
of taste 11 classic monster, montage of elements,
Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, museums hybridity principal signifier 145
and the phantasms of Modernity 6 ‘Collecting/museums’ (1996) essay 5, 55
Breal, Michel, what we see in standing colonial order, seemed to exclude older
before a picture 103, 113n12 native city of Cairo (Al Qahira) 101
Breton, Jules 146, 154n45 colonialist exhibitionary order, para-
British Museum (1847) 98 digm for rebuilding of cities in
Buck-Morss, Susan 100, 113n9 Middle east 100–1
Burckhardt, J.C. 36 Comité, echoes of Le Bon permeated
Butler, Judith 125, 130n5 proces-verbales of meetings 107;
encyclopedic ‘restoration’ projects
Cairo, argument that native town must creations to fashion an ‘old’ city in
remain ‘Oriental’ did not preserve it European image 101–2; four differ-
against colonial order 101; arranged ent museum institutions 105;
to reveal abstract object behind restorations designed to create a
name ‘Egypt’ 104; Ben Ezra ‘theme parked’ façade 102
Synagogue near Coptic Museum Comité de Conservation des Monuments
106; colonialist laboratories of de l‘art arab (Committee for the
museums and 111; construction of Conservation of Monuments of
modern western drove Cairenes east Arab Art) see Comité
into ‘old’ city 102; Coptic Museum Comité’instruction public (26 May 1794),
(1895) in Christian quarter 106; Varon and lighting the Grand
Egyptians appeared while Europeans Gallery 135
INDEX {159}
commemoration, realised through disci- cut and paste of computer, facilitate dis-
plined individual and use of muse- placement and erase bricolage of text
um 74 148
concept of praxis, suspect 20, 27n59
Condorcet, Marquis de 136 dangerous memories, triangulate on
Conservatoire, 21 June (1794) 151, 155n54; issues today 116
decided upon permanent exposition Dante, ethical cosmos of 50
organized by schools 135; minutes to David, Jaques-Louis, against displace-
discover originality of the works 142 ment of works 139
constitutive ambivalence of masculinist De Certeau, Michel 62, 134
gaze. feminization and (hetro)sexu- De-, Dis-, Ex- journal 5
alization of objects 100 de-Others others, domesticates all differ-
contemporary world, virtually anything ence 99–100
can be deployed as specimen in death of history, politics and narrative,
museum 58 aspects of transformation which
contributions of parts of artwork, varied marked break with Archaism 7
and disparate 41 demoralizing and depressing original
coping with fascination, thinking with it new global space, moment of truth of
119 postmodernism 14
Corbusier’s buildings on pilotis, Utopian Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever 6, 124,
gestures 13 130n4; enigma of circumcision as
Courbet, Gustave 36 ‘archival act’ 124, 130n4; ‘re-mem-
Courtauld Institute (University of bers’ circumcision by suggesting its
London 1933) 36 obverse 125
creature for art history: monster on a raft Diderot’s amd Alembert’ s Encyclopédie,
144–7 progress defined as ‘movement
critical distance, abolished in new space toward the future’ 136
of postmodernism 14; desire to get difference, erasure of endows everything
‘under the skin’ of the Other 102; with phallicized, commodified and
exotic others and desire to get closer fetishized value 100
to things 100 disciplinarity of art history, dialogic con-
Critical Inquiry journal 4 cern with human past 42
Critical Terms for Art History 5 disciplinary discursive field, art histori-
‘Critical Voices’ in art history, where is ans and truth about artwork 39–40
the ‘critical voice? 3 discipline of art history, conception of
Crystal Palace Exposition (London 1851) art as human phenomenon 37;
5, 95, 98; ambivalence expressed in the proper or adequate accounting for
poem 100; modern degree-zero of origins of works of art 39
masculine erotics of the gaze 100; discourse on art, idea of the modern
modernity’s most unsurpassable arti- nation-state as an entity and 47
fact 98; paradigm of modernity on ‘dismember-remember’ 149, 154n52
which sexuality, capitalism and art dismember/ re-member as thread of
have come to be woven into a sturdy Seeing Through Art History, ‘dismem-
enduring fabric 99; poem about ber to remember’effect of litany 148
Crystal Place (1852) 95–7, 99; replicat- Dispatches, opens up ‘the place of a
ed in expositions, museums and city whole new reflectivity’ 12
plans throughout Europe 99; sexual displaced works, shifted into another
politics, capitalism and orientalism reality of topicality (1796) 138
facets of same modernist enterprise displacement, first stage of the fetishistic
100; six-month phenomenon 108; operation that procedes from art
women appeared, men looked 100 history and the museum 144; prob-
‘Crystalline veil and the phallomorphic lem of 142–3
imaginary’ (1999) 5, 95 disputationes de quolibet, every topic for-
curriculum, may be ‘in’ chain of texts 2 mulated as a quaestio 21
{160} INDEX
double-bind, two contradictory notions epiphany of the Nation-Subject, ‘Republic

of signification or semiosis 19 one and indivisible’made tangible
doubling and oscillatory identities, man 136
in museum photo Remus 126 erect penis visible on flaccid penis, sign
dramaturgical devices, display of evi- of incipient arousal? 124
dence for ‘truth’ of artworks 45 escalators and elevators, Bonaventure
drawing and writing, blurred temporal Hotel 11
separation of art and grammar 118 Esperanto 65, 136, 144
Eaton Centre shopping mall in Toronto, Esperanto or a lingua franca 136
characteristic postmodern building ethical artists, exhorted to compose our
12 lives as works of art 75
economy of eros, that of the archive 126 ethical practice of the self 57
Egypt, becoming a nation-state con- ethics and aesthetics, portions of museo-
trolled by European-educated native logical Moebius strip 60
elites 106–7; Christian (Coptic) Eton Centre shopping mall (Toronto),
Egypt, 2000 years old 104; Greco- postmodern building 12
Roman civilization, 1000 years long eucharistic modernism, single point of
104; Greco-Roman Museum (1892) view 19
in Mediterranean city of Alexandria Europe, the brain of the earth’s body 79,
106; historically a multi-ethnic and 83, 99; not only collection of art-
polyglot country 105; Islamic civi- works but organizing principle of col-
lization 104–5; linkage of aesthetics lecting 76, 92n17; ‘objectified’ as
and ethics linking subjects and anterior 65; one of premier episte-
objects 107; Museum of Arab Art mological technologies of the
(1893) 106; Pharaonic civilization, Enlightenment 72
4000-year history and 104; problem Europe is museum space, non-
that to European eyes there was European speciments become speci-
more than one historical Egypt 104 mens and their visibility is rendered
Egyptian colonial system, required legible 84
investment in reframing the past on European aesthetic principles, unmarked
many fronts 103 centre or Cartesian zero-point 84
Egyptian Museum, founded under European ceremonial engagement,
French patronage near Giza pyra- museums and 71
mids 5, 105 European museology and museography,
Egyptian museums, function to represent no ‘artistic tradition’ which is not
country’s history and identity 106 fabricated through 77
Eiffel Tower 83, 93n34,35 European painter (Istanbul), recording
eighteenth century, production of art costumes, customs in Egypt,
and fabrication of its past 151 Palestine and the Balkans 127
Elgin marbles, Quatremère defended European ‘progress’ in the arts, con-
removal from the Parthenon 139, tradistinction to ‘decline of world of
153n25 Islam 81–2, 93n29
Enlightenment, enigma of, art and 79 European sexual politics of looking,
Enlightenment invention of ‘aesthetic’, active look encoded as masculine,
classification of forms of subject- passive object was feminized 100
object across different societies 77 European, the, acquiesce to formulate
Enlightenment invention of art, a par- better a divergence of opinions 132
ergonal instrumentality 59 Europe’s principal Other, the world of
Enlightenment invention of modern Islam 82
museum, profound and far-reaching everywhere, games of masking, reversal
73 and ambiguity 62
Enlightenment, the 56–8, 76, 88 evidentiary institution, relation to histo-
Enlightenment’s Other, ‘safely displaced ry of museological display 30
synecdoche of 79 ‘evidentiary status of the art object’ 136
INDEX {161}
evidentiary system, fundamental assump- embedded in the archival system 35;

tions 41 relationship between aesthetic char-
exaltation over great works, metonymic acter of a people’s works of visual
function of the masterpiece and 142 art and nation’s social, moral and
exhibition, fragment of some absent and ethical character 33; scientific labo-
fuller whole 70 ratory 41
exhibition and art historical practice, ‘Fogg Method’ of formalist connoisseur-
genres of imaginative fiction 74–5 ship 33–4, 51n9
exhibitionary representation, precludes form of artwork, assumed to have dis-
recognition of the Other’s difference coverable ‘laws’ 41, 53n35
in favour of its phallocentric make- form and content, deeply and essentially
up 99 congruent 49
Eyck, Aldo van 14 form of the work, figure of its truth 49,
54n50
fabrication of past, in order to justify the formalism and contextualism, prefabri-
present 149 cated positions in system of repre-
“fact”, seems to refer to exterior reality sentation 62
141 Foucault, Michel, archives as built
factish, portmanteau word invented by around emptiness or lack 124
Latour, notional hybridity 141 framed and storied artifacts or monu-
Family-of-Man-and/as-Its-Works, we ments, invested with a decorum 88
are all relatives in 78 Frankenstein, activities of 147, 154n49;
Fanon, Frantz 101 body parts used came from same
fantasmatic Cairo, bequeathed by species 145–6, 154n44; materials
Comité should come as no surprise used for concatenation failed to pro-
112 duce harmonious whole 146
fashion, Gesamtkunstwerk of modern life French Revolution, vandalism of and
and highest form of consumerism birth of institution of museums 143
112 Freud, Sigmund, psychoanalysis and 98,
fetish, definition 79–80; from Latin 112n5
factitius 79 Fry, Roger 36
“fetish”, seems to refer to foolish beliefs
of the subject 141 game of ‘Big Tag’, chasing across rooftops
fetisso, small objects used in trade between in lower Manhattan 122–3
West Africans and Europeans 79 gaze of Victoria 129–30
Finn, David, visiting a museum and genius loci, every man a 124
48–9, 54n48 Géricault, Théodor 144–6, 154n42; can-
flotation of contradictory versions of nibal dismemberment which had
semiosis, foundation of modern dis- allowed some of the crew of Medusa
ciplinary knowledge and 19, 27n47 to survive shipwreck 147; Etudes des
Fogg Art Museum (1895) 30–31, 50n4; jambes et des bras 146; inspired
archival mass as pioneered by 48; Michelet’s history in his phantasm of
central data bank, formatted slide resurrection of integral life 150; Raft
and photographic print items 34; of the Medusa 146
every slide is a still in a historicist Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, praise of
movie 35; laboratory technologies Winckelmann 151
formalized by 37–8; organized in an Gothic cathedral design and Scholastic
anamorphic manner, units in philosophy, limited to few examples
archive visible from prefabricated 22
stances 34–5; pardigmatic instance grandmother, Alzheimer’s and 123
of scientific labour 49–50; pedagog- Great Exhibition of the Arts and
ical requirements, history of artistic Manufactures of All Nations, Crystal
practice in the light of that narra- Palace (London 1851) see Crystal
tive’s relationship to others is Palace Exposition (London 1851)
{162} INDEX
Greece, new nation-state reframed waiting to be told once and for all
Ottoman Turkish culture 102–3 18
Greswell, Reverend Richard (Oxford), history of art, narrative duration, repre-
founder of Oxford Museum 36 sentation and explanation for histo-
ry 47
Hannah, drama and danger, act that homologous evidence, evinced from
ruptures the ceremony in front of other arts especially its literature 34,
her 128; erotically engaging the 51n10
viewer directly and openly 127; Honnecourt, Villard de, Album 22, 27n60
looks away from tomb of husband Horton Plaza urban mall (San Diego),
to future on our side of the screen multi-level pastiche-maze of 22
128; may be daughter of dead par- human creativity, shadow of divine cre-
ent or sister of deceased sibling ativity, its mortal echo 48
127; ostensifies indeterminacy of hyperspace, postmodern city and 9, 24n7
beginnings and ends 129; ‘read’ hyperspatial postmodernism and multi-
image of , sew together pieces of national capitalism, unknowable, are
rebus of disparate things into ‘unrepresentable, unmappable 17
archive dependant on concept of
future 128–9 identity and history, reflected source and
Haussmann, Georges Eugène 106, 133 truth, hall of mirrors 89, 94n49
Hegel, G.W.F. 5, 47, 86, 99 Image of the City, spawned low-level sub-
Heinich, Nathalie, distinction of relic discipline, “cognitive mapping” and
from fetish 139; person-objects: the 15
relic, the fetish and the work of art imaginary sense of the city, absent total-
137–8, 152n19 ity 17
Herder, Johann Gottfried 151 imaginary spaces, lead to modernity of a
Herr, Michael, Dispatches quoted by European present 84
Jameson 12, 24n18 impulse to flee death, propels us forward
High Scholasticism, historical phenome- archivally perforce erotically 126
na, existence of homology between indistinguishability of artist and archive,
logical and systemic structure of dangerous and terror-laden proposi-
Scholastic texts 20 tion 130
historicist labour, metaphor is vision of individuality, highly contested space 19,
ideal human selfhood 47 27n48
histories of non-European art, virtual institutionalization in countries to pro-
museum has narrative structure 84 fessionalizing of disciplines in nine-
historiographic grand tour, leading to teenth century 30
modernity and presentness, the intentionality, vanishing point or
always-alreadyness of Europe 65 explanatory horizon of causality 78,
historiography, places past and present 92n20
beside each other 62 interpellation, classic story, child being
history 56–7, 65–7; disciplinary practice fascinated into a museum 121
of writing, referential field and 59 introductions, synoptic ‘overviews’ of
‘history’, disciplined practice of writing complex intellectual space 3
and referential fields of scriptural
practice 76 Jameson, Fredric, ‘analysis of full-blown
history, home to long nightmare of and postmodern building’ 10; ‘Cognitive
the untrascendable Real(ities) 8; Mapping’ 4, 8, 14; cognitive map-
individualistic notion as ‘single vast ping, extrapolations to ‘totality of
unfinished plot 20, 27n50; instru- class relations 16; ‘cognitive map-
ment for releasing human con- ping’ requires coordination of exis-
sciousness from constraints of tential data 16–17; ‘dehistoricizing’ is
Archaic age 7; not merely any text in fact supremely historical 23;
but The text, a Real text 19; story dilemma accounting for central
INDEX {163}
Christian mystery (hoc est corpus Lamoureux, Johanne, ‘critical commen-

meum) 19; dilemma of contempo- tary’ by 3, 131–52
rary socialist vision 17, 26n39; lapidary authors, enjoy works that prove
dilemma, nexus of intersecting and them right 132
co-implicative double-binds of clas- Latour, Bruno, on fetish 137; ‘how does
sic configuration 18; era of High one define an anti-fetishist?’ 140;
Scholasticism would be mappable moderns in theory opposed to the
age 21; Marxism is place of coexis- fetish 141, 153n33; situates symmet-
tive with space of History 18; rically belief of Portuguese toward
Political Unconscious, The (1981) 4, own cult objects 141; ‘symmetrical
8, 17–18; ‘Postmodernism or the anthropology’ on modern connec-
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ tions to fetish 140, 153n29
(1984) 9; Real(ism), collapsing Le Bon, Gustave, Lois psychologiques de
together of ‘three ages’ of cartogra- l’évolution des peuples 107
phy 23; reverse-turn, Bonaventure learning to parse sentences, line dia-
Hotel was populist structure in lan- grams to see how the words meant
guage of its ambient urban fabric 117
12–13; Utopian and totalizing reso- Lefebvre, Henri, conference (1984) at
lutions as Imaginary wish-fulfil- Santa Cruz 14
ments 8, 23n5; work on postmod- legibility, place where everything but
ernism, attending to question of original blur misaligned and 64
space 9; writings on art and architec- leitmotifs in Preziosi’s book, one would
ture, critics and 20 not know how to confirm them
Jewish antiquity, reduced to ancient arti- 132–3
facts suspended in ethnically Lenin’s, the older imperialist global net-
cleansed sandbox of time 103 work 114
Jewish cemetery (Kasim Pasha Istanbul), Lenoir’s museum, example of argument
lithograph of grieving widow 126 see that Quatremère’s theories invert
under Hannah 143
Jewish colonization of Palestine, symbol- Lettres à Miranda, displacement of
ic and literal erasure of Arab Muslim Roman monuments after Napoleonic
and Christian culture 103 victories in Italy 138
Jewish museum of Greece (Athens) 6, Liebeskind, Daniel (Jewish Museum
126 Berlin), documenting specific
J.Paul Getty Museum (Malibu) 44 absence 124
life led, lived in projected and anticipato-
Kant, Immanuel 5, 86, 99, 130 ry light 2
Kofman, Sarah, Camera Lucinda (1973) literally dis-member memory, to remem-
1–2 ber129
Kunst-und-Wunderkammern (sixteenth Louvre, the, anaphoric work are present-
and seventeenth centuries) 55 ed elsewhere than on the walls of the
Grand Gallery 137; Grand Gallery
La vi(ll)e en rose: reading Jameson map- non-interrupted succession of the
ping space (1988) 4, 7, 9 progress of the arts 143; historicist
laboratory technologies, orchestrated exegencies and of Robert’s painting
and formalized by Fogg Museum favoured anamorphic position 137;
and 37–8 question vision of as tunnel flooded
Lacan, Jacques 46–7, 54n45, 62, 73n12, with light 142
110, 144; anamorphosis is a ‘phallic loving and archiving, tension that guaran-
phantasm’ 150; erectile effect he tees non-achievement of closure 126
evokes regarding anamorphosis 149, Lower Manhattan Neo-Deconstructivist
154n50; Symbolic Order of daily life; parking meter graffiti 66
de-stablizing, blasting open, flood- Lukácsian perspective, moral denuncia-
ing out beyond the boundaries 128 tion of the other 13
{164} INDEX
Lynch, Kevin, city experience, sense of as modern exposition, each mode successor
absent totality 16; classic studies of of older ‘arts‘, ‘books’ or ‘houses’ of
residents of Boston, Los Angeles and memory 70, 90n1
Jersey City 15; Image of the City, modern historically organized museum,
The(1960) 15; research in American earlier idiosyncratically organized
cities and ‘cognitive maps’ 15 collections 55
modern linguistics, arbitrariness in lan-
Macdonald, Bradley J. 4 guage and linguistics 86
magnetic compass, sextant and theodo- modern museum, Enlightenment inven-
lite, relationship to uniform totality tion , profound implications 73,
16 91n9; evidentiary and documentary
Mannerism 66 artifact 72; separate and distinct
mappability, promoted and enhanced by antecedents 70, 90n2
perfection into fine art of reconcilia- modern nation-state, evolution of
tion of opposites 21 enabled by national mythologies 71;
Marconi, G. 144; invention of wireless key operating components of effi-
radio, art historical theory and 86 cient functioning of 70
Marxism, struggle to wrest realm of modern progress, should be understood
Freedom from realm of Necessity 18 as movement towards increasing
Marxism of PU, criticism of its competi- inequality 107
tors as being ideological 19 modernity, academic idea of the beauti-
Marxist theory, urgent task is whole new ful and the Romantic monster 150;
logic of collective dynamics 19 art and art history powerful instru-
Marx’s, move vis-à-vis newly unified ments and 110; art is paradigm that
space national markets 14 shapes museum and art history as
mental map of city space, extrapolated to emblems of 142, 153n39; art and sex
map of social global totality 15–16 are commensurate 80; central obses-
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, whole view is sion was that the form of a work is
reserved for God 123 the figure of truth 108; congruencies,
metaphoric orientation, grounded in Preziosi’s texts and what Robert
analogical reasoning 49 brought to light 136; essays as facets
Michelet, Jules, Préface à l’Histoire de and raison d’être of art as such in 4;
France 145 ethics and aesthetics, palimpsests of
Middle Ages, familiar with the relic and each other in day-to-day 58; idea of
the fetish 138 ‘the man and work’, undying ideolo-
mis-en-sequence of objects, preservation gy/theology of 3; Moebius strip of
of spirit of departed person /group phantasmatic dualism of subjects
43 and objects 115; nation-state as an
Mitchell, Timothy 101 effect of the aestheticization of social
MLA convention, held in Bonaventure relations 83; notion of art it con-
Hotel 12 structs 150, 155n53; paradoxical
modern art and Art-History, pressure of status quo of nationalism 89; prob-
achievements of centuries 37 lematic of anamorphism, the essay
modern art history and museology, can- and 2; to speak of things is to speak
not be appreciated apart from of persons 75
Crystal Palace 98 modernity art of Art History is Latin of 82
modern artist, new and independent moderns, in practice traverse border
relationship with mass of past art 37 between fetish and anti-fetish 141
modern discipline of art history, causali- Mona Lisa, appearing not to smile 71
ty as its particular concern 38 Monet at Giverny 46
modern discourse, ‘objecthood’ of art 76, Moore, Charles Herbert (1871), taught
92n16, 92n92 at Lawrence Scientific School 32
modern discourse on art criticism, muse- Moore, Henry 35, 76
ology, art market, connoisseurship 49 multinational capitalism, sinewy skele-
INDEX {165}
ton of contemporary building and museological stagecraft, correlative to

10 archival space of art historical prac-
multiple entrance systems in Bonaventure tice 45–6; paradoxical, enigmatic
Hotel 11 and indeterminate field of legibility
museal sacralization, museum tied to 61; virtually unchanged since nine-
apories of fetishization 139 teenth century 62–3
Musée Napoleon, return of art works museological stagecraft and museo-
(1815) 145 graphical citation, dependent on
muselogical artifact, contemplation sleights-of-hand 62
inside and outside of ‘history 48 museological system, stagecraft of post-
museographical archive, epistemological Revolutionary Louvre (1800s) to NY
technology of indispensable to social MOM (1930s) 66
and political formation of nation 81 museological tableau, geomantic 43
museographical space, ethically eroti- museolography, elements including Art
cized objects are rendered legible in History, coded rhetorical tropes 74
storied site 87 museology, became key art of this
museography, aim the co-production of museography, House of Historicist
modern subjects and objects 111; Art Memory 86; ideology of representa-
History a facet of broader set of tional adequation 56; as orchestra-
practices of 90; bridge between reli- tion of valences of expressivity 120;
gion, ethics and ideologies of practices of, concordance between
Enlightenment 75; might have been religion, psychology and 58; storied
‘science’ of idea of the nation and of space of 70; sustained particular ide-
discovery of the truth of individuals ological practices and affordances of
88; museology’s ‘imaginary else- historicism 56; universal coloniza-
where’ 64; species of pantography tion of world’s cultures, totalizing
which in turn is dimension of alle- notion of Art 57
gory 109 museology of art, judicious assemblage
museography and its museologies, of objects evocative of time and 43,
grounded upon metaphoric, 53n38
metonymic and anaphoric associa- museology and Art History, cybernetic
tions 80 or navigational instruments and 82;
museography and museology, concern modes of disciplining thought and
with spectacle, stagecraft and dram- 110
aturgy 86; modern(ist) concordance museology and museography 73–9;
of politics, religion, ethics and aes- enabled identity and allegiance from
thetics 82 ethnic group to the individual 66;
museological and art historical practice, instrumental ways of distributing
seen as correlative and 48 the space of memory 78; instru-
museological artwork, semiotic and ments of Europeanization of the
epistemlogical status of 60 world 65, 76–7; object-histories as
museological display, delimitation of surrogates for developmental histo-
designed or appropriated space to ries of persons and 81; organized in
time periods, styles or schools of art centripetal fashion 55; properties
45 and features of storied spaces 73
museological ‘past’, instrument for the museum, anything can be staged or
imaginative production of present deployed in a 72; appears to mas-
74 querade as heterotopic lumber-yard
museological space, correlative to art his- of alternative models of agency 77;
torical space and 43–4; every item in citizenry of modernizing nation-
is a specimen 70; passage through states and 56; confrontation of view-
formatted as simulation of travel er and artwork, one aspect of art his-
through historical time 56; there is torical practice 48; difficult to imag-
no ‘illusion’, there is only ‘illusion’ 64 ine world in which made thing could
{166} INDEX
be anything but reflection, effect, Museum of Modern Art (New York) 44

product, sign of some prior state 67; museum object, does not strictly coincide
disposability of read as mark of its with the subject 64; referential and
totalizing achievement 58; does not differential 61; for the spectator is in
seek belongings of artist, claims to position like the ‘blur’ in anamorphic
‘piece’ of his hand 140; dramaturgy of picture 63–4; window on history and
nation’s origins/evolution staged in evolution of styles and 60
synoptic manner 104; first seduction, museum objects, simulacra of subjects
powerful desire for some panoptic who produce them 59; there and not
point 122; imaginary exploration of there in two ways 61–2
linkages between subjects and objects museum subject, sees ways it can con-
75; imaginary space-time and storied struct or compose its life 60
space: historically inflected or museum user, object’s material proper-
funeous site 71, 90n4; inexhaustible ties present and absent 62
variety of human artistic expression museum users, museums teaching how
and 43; instrument for production of to read and what is to be seen 71
gendered subjects 78; pantograph museum visitor, opportunity to see evi-
instrument for projecting larger dence of human in all its varieties 44
abstraction ‘Egypt’ 104; parergonal museums, autoscopic function 64; con-
function as framing of art and the cit- stru(ct)ed as repositories or collec-
izen 137, 152n16; place of pure and tions of objects 56; dis-arm us to
lucid geomancy 119; powerful and make us re-member ourselves 64;
effective crucible 57; powerful gendre exemplary models for ‘reading’
of modern fiction 56; present of is objects and 71; heterotopic sites,
outcome of particular past 74; for compensating for contradictions of
Preziozi was significant in formation daily life 59–60; imagine galleries
of modern subject 136; reduced to a devoted to rhetorical tropes 120;
perspective but did not permit telling separating out of the present a certain
of ‘Truth, Right and Reason 136; specific ‘past’ 73–4; serve decidedly
stage for socialization 75; successful autoscopic function 64; teach us how
because adequations must continu- to be picture-perfect 60
ally (re)-adjust 64–5; superimposi- museums of art, functioned as eviden-
tion of subjects and objects creates tiary institutions 43; legitimize
blurring of gender distinctions 78; nation-state or the Volk 47
theatre for adequation of and I/eye museums and museology, literature on
confronting world-as-object 64; in twentieth century 72, 91n8
things outside transformed into museums and mysteries, teach how to
things-not-in-museums 121; through think and put two and two together 74
its totalizing fantasy causes dismem- museums and other modernist artifacts,
berment of collections 143, 154n40; museographic practices and 70
two modes of knowing embodied in ‘mutation in built space itself’, a ‘hyper-
work of the 49; use well and truly a space of postmodern architecture 9
‘legitimation of the Nation-State and ‘mutual inferability of parts’ in Gothic
136, 152n14; users’imaginary con- space, historical age of a ‘High
ceptions of self and social order 58; Scholastic’ order 22
within each object is a trap for the mythic nationalism, belief that products
gaze 78, 92n19 share unique properties of form,
museum and art history, frame the art- decorum or spirit 81
work or its photographic simu-
lacrum 48; superimposed coordination, the, ark of a people: finite and
nates and 88 bounded artifact with trajectory in
museum institutions, central to fabrica- time 82
tion and maintenance of Moebius nation-statism, apparatus of museum
strip 115 and the disciplinarity of art 66
INDEX {167}
National Holocaust Memorial Museum object of art historical analysis, situated

(Washington) 6, 116, 150n2 in interrogative field 40
naturalization, ancillary instruments for object-as-product framework, object has
scripting and 80, 93n26 evidential status and 40
nature of relationship between signifier ‘objecthood’ of art 76, 92n16; metaphys-
and signified, two variations 19 ical baggage and 59
necessity, inexorable form of events 18 objects, ‘place’ in encyclopedic and uni-
Necker cube, oscillating determinacy versal history of art projected onto
and 61 horizon of the future 46
need/desire to reckon with the institu- objects and images, choreographed with
tion, perpetuation of Imaginary motile bodies of beholders 43; evi-
order in daily life of systems of the dential status when construed
Symbolic 64 metonymically, synecdochally or
Netherlandist art, painting of seven- indexically 48
teenth-century and bateaux-mouch- object’s meaning, ‘elsewhere’ (in museo-
es in twentieth century 48 graphical space) 61
‘new’ agendas for history and criticism 9 object’s significance, both present and
‘new art histories’, expanded ground of absent 62; network of associations,
existing canons and orthodoxies 71, formal or thematic relationships
90n3 60
‘new art history’ 30 objects and their subjects, seen as muse-
‘new’ Marxist hermeneutics 8 ological productions 57
new modern social subject, constituted observer, traces of specificity in material
as anamorphic perspectives on bits products of spatio-temporal frame
of its own life and 60 45
‘new political art’, must hold firm to ‘the old-fashioned ideological critique, moral
truth of postmodernism’ and 17 denunciation of the other becomes
nineteenth century ethnographic unavailable 13
research, ‘less civilized’ peoples of one’s subject position, always anamor-
the world were egalitarian in social phic , effect of triangulation 2
organization 107 order of the system, constructs and legit-
Norton, Charles Eliot 30; attended John imizes questions that might be put
Ruskin’s lectures on Italian art at to sympathetic data 49
Oxford 33, 51n10; characteristics of ordinary habitation in the modern
a people found in visual art and lit- world, dramaturgy of the self 57
erature 41; curriculum for Fogg Orientalist enterprise, solicitation of
Museum 32; engaged Moore for his support of indigenous elites essen-
new curriculum 32–3; ethical prac- tial in this disciplinary project of
tice of the self and its works 50, 54n52; representation 107
Ruskinian notions regarding art original artwork, siting in landscape as
work as evidential 40 an evidential specimen 48
not a conclusion, a proposition 87–90 orthogonal lines, link works of collection
novel and museum, desire for panoptic underlining parergonal function of
or panoramic points of view 74 museum 137, 152n16
oscillating determinacy, invisible in
object, can only confront subject from ‘ordinary’ light 61
place where subject is not 64; fore- Other, the necessary support and defin-
grounded as unique and irreplace- ing instance of the modernity of
able 61; instrument of enterprise, Europe 79, 93n25; reformatted so
name of the language of study 59; as to be legible in plausible fashion
materially part of its position in his- 74
toriographic theatre 61; Other of the our promised selves, hidden in holes in
fetish 140; semiotic status both ref- discourse or outside frame of paint-
erential and differential 62 ing 130
{168} INDEX
paired memories, insist themselves simul- cognitive mapping on social as well

taneously on author 119 as spatial scale 16
Panofsky, Erwin, ‘Gothic Architecture Political Unconscious, The see PU
and Scholasticism’ (1951) 20, 27n56; Pommier, Edouard, Lettres 138, 153n21;
history of French Gothic cathedral petition (16 August 1796) that
building 21; saw in Gothic space demanded abandonment of dis-
what Jameson cannot find in post- placement 139
modern hyperspace 22 Portman, John 9, 11–12
paradox of fixed clear boundaries, dis- portulan sea-charts, foregrounding
tinctions between subjects and coastal features 16
objects 121 postmodern bodies, bereft of spatial
Parc de la Villette (Paris), 30 fragmented coordinates 14
‘folies’ of Bernard Tschumi 22; gar- postmodern hyperspace, induces us to
den designed by Eisenmann and ‘grow new organs’ and 10
Derrida 22–3 postmodern hyperspatial Bonaventure,
Paris Exposition (1900), location of contrasts with spaces of monuments
French colonies of Algeria and of International Style of high mod-
Tunisia 83, 93n33 ernism 13
Paris Exposition (1937) 95 postmodern writing and painting,
past buried under Zeit-Traum, night- glimpses into this postmodernist
mare of nineteenth-century capital- sublime 10
ism 111 postmodernism, chief problem is its
Pasteur, Louis, fermenting agent in his ‘unmappability’ 13
lactic acid and 141, 153n35 prepositions, chapter in school grammar
period, gradual changes in things and 81 book 117
permissibility of suicide among several prepositions and museums, juxtaposing
authorities, correct and incorrect and superimposing 120
view 21 President de Brosses (1760), inventor of
perspectival position, art history as a pol- fetishism, skull of Raphael and 140,
itics of the gaze 103–4 153n28; non-theological account of
pertinence of a work, formatted as a his beliefs about religious conduct
function of contextual relationships 137, 152n18
45 Preziosi, Donald, anaphoric dimension of
phallic economy, reduces all differences the system 137; another ‘critical com-
to parade of monosexualities 100 mentary’ 3; antimony of dismember
photograph, anti-Nazi demonstration and re-member 144; art object as the
(New York 1937) 116; father of other of the fetish, as a laic fetish 141;
Preziosi116, 126 art object postulated in its singulari-
photographic technology, Fogg Museum ty 136; art object in relation to the
as scientific institution 31 fetish and 141; art paradigm that
photography, made it possible for whole shapes the museum and art history
populations to think art historically as emblems of modernity 142,
86 153n39; art similar to Esperanto or a
phylacteries, archives of skin or parch- lingua franca 136; avoids the exem-
ment 124–5 plification of his demonstrative
Picasso, Pablo 35, 76; after Guernica 46; prowess 133; Baudrillard’s caricature
persona stamped from his signature illustrates dilemma in texts of 132;
as from ceramics and 48 characterizes art object as the Other
pictorial figuration, questions of integri- of the fetish 137; ‘forget the history of
ty and homogeneity and 128 art history’ 150; incompleteness that
Pieron, Henri, on Cairo 101–2 ‘epistemological technologies’ alone
Pietz, William 79, 92n24 can remedy 144; injects gothic into
Pile, Steve 100 phantasmagoric story of neoclassical
political form of postmoderism, global origins of art history 150; monstra-
INDEX {169}
tion in Seeing Through Art history questions of art historical practice 30,
manifest in enunciation of composi- 50n2
tion 148; practises history of art like Questions of Evidence 5
Victor Frankenstein and Kenneth
Branagh 147; refuses to efface traces Raphael, accorded an exemplary role by
of process of remembering 150; Quatremère similar to Robert’s
Rethinking Art History (1989) 148; Projet 139–40; the Holy Family pre-
writing in blocks redoubles anamor- sented as ‘displaced painting’ 138–9,
phic character of epistemological 142–3; Quatremère’s sixth letter and
system designated by 149 143, 153n41
principles of homology, visual logic seen reality effect, erected to museological the-
in Aquinas’ system of similitudes 21 atre 47, 54n46
privileged viewpoint, assumptions are Rebus 126–30
profound 3 rebus, stories, objects, people and spaces
Projet, accompanied by pendant repre- of museum 124
senting Gallery of Louvre in ruins rebus sewn into sense, takes literally cer-
135; before exhibition Lettres and tain letters and 129
debate on ‘spoliation’ 138; during, recent design, works to foreground that
the museum was present as space repressed ficticity of Bonaventure
and 136; painting in national collec- Hotel 22
tion that enjoys particular status ‘refinement’ of objects, not inconsistent
138; walls uniformly covered with with culling inferior subjects and
works with no gap 144 subject-peoples 108
Projet d’aménagement de la Grand reflective glass skin or cladding, placeless
Galerie du Louvre, Le see Projet dissociation of Bonaventure 11
psychoanalysis, recognizes the past in the relic slips towards fetish, cult dedicated
present 62 to the art object and 140
psychoanalysis and historiography, two Renaissance, third type of person-object,
different ways of distributing space work of art 138
of memory 62 repositioning individual/collective sub-
PU 4; critical astonishment (1980s) 8; jects, perspectival clarity of ‘cogni-
play of sedimented and conflictual tive mapping’ 17
realities 20 revolutionary France, debated right of to
‘putting oneself ’ into the ‘picture’, finding legitimate inheritor of universal pat-
one’s place in world of objects 122 rimony 139, 153n22
Robert, Hubert, chose in his painting to
Quatremère de Quincy, evokes the plen- invert the path foreseen in instruc-
titude of Rome 144; Lettres à tions of Conservatoire 135; ‘con-
Miranda 138–9, 143, 150, 153n21; structs the past to justify the pres-
museum is a destination incompati- ent’ 136, 152n15; contribution
ble with a just appreciation of art stressed at bicentenary 134; his
139, 153n24; once works displaced painting should help delve more
they could not overcome this decon- closely into connections posed by
textualization 143; relic used by de Brosses’ work 137; obscure role
involved with well-established in debate following Lettres 139;
Christian mythology, 140, 153n27; painter of Roman ruins 143; paint-
relics of Raphael and eclectic charac- ing appears aligned with the his-
ter of his work 142, 153n38; vandal- toricism that accompanies birth of
ism of Revolution and displacement the modern museum 135; painting
of Rome’s monuments and 143 perverted structural equivalence
Question of Art history (1992) 4, 29 between point of view and vanish-
question of what art objects may be evi- ing point 136, 152n13; perspectival
dence, elucidation of art historical machine in wake of Varon 135;
evidence 30 planning of the new Louvre muse-
{170} INDEX
um 133, 143, 150, 152n6; Projet subject in [hyper] history 18–23

132–3, 144, 150, 152 subject in hyperspace 14–18
Romulus 116–26 ‘subject’ in a world of ‘objects’, what can
‘Romulus, Rebus and the gaze of it mean? 72
Victoria’ (2001) 6, 115 subsumption of contemporary post-
Rose, Gillian 100, 113n9; masculinist structuralisms 19
geographical discourse and 102 Summa of optical instruments, position
Ruskin, John 36 within the museum 77
Rutsky, R.L. 4 Summa of opticality, viewer’s identity to
an Otherness whose own identity is
science, history and psychoanalysis and both present and absent 64
88, 94n47 Summerson, Sir John (Ferens Professor
seeing myself seeing, seeing myself as of Fine Art at Hull University) 35;
mirrored image adjacent to other Art is behind glass – the history glass
images 122 76, 92n18; ‘history glass is like
Seeing Through Art History 144; cut and microscope slide in science laborato-
paste of personal computer 148 ry 38; lecture ‘What is a Professor of
seen by passers-by as objects, pretending Fine Art? 36, 52n20; ‘totalitarian’ art
to parents to be asleep 122 history 37, 52n26; ‘totalitarian’
sexuality, privileged by European society museums devoted to encyclopedic
as essence of the self 80 histories of art and 44, 50
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (1816) 145, superimposition of Word and Godhead,
150; terms in relation to one anoth- opening of Genesis 125
er, dismembering and rembering, superimposition, (first) of objects and
remembering and forgetting 147 subjects, subject seen through screen
shibboleths of post-Marxism, Jameson of the erotic fetishization of another
and 8 subject 87, 94n42; (second) linkage
signification of artwork, determinate of erotics and ethics 87, 94n43;
and not arbitrary to reading 41 (third) historicization of ethically
Slade, Felix, bequest of (1870) 36 eroticized objects 87, 94n44
Slade lectures (Oxford 2001) 5–6 superimpositions, result of is spatiotempo-
Social Text colleague, interview with ral economy of modernity and 87–8
Jameson 14, 25n29 symbol and analogue, to map global
Social Text journal (1979) 8 multinational and decentred com-
society, economic or political institutions municational network 12, 24n6
secondary to morality 41, 53n34 synechdochal reminders, present is
space of postmodern warfare 12 product of historical evolution of
specimization, prerequisite to produc- values and 44
tion of useful knowledge 80 synedochal metaphoricity, pantagraph,
stage/craft 60–63 artistic implement to scale up an
staged and storied artifact, emblem of and image 109
catalyst for subject’s ‘own’ desire 63
Strategies, new critical theory journal 4 Tate Modern, imagine it organized as
Strategies for Theory: From Marx to collection of artistic ‘tendencies’ 120
Madonna 4 tension, double between understanding
study of art, paralleled with study of lit- subjects as homogeneous and het-
erature 42 erogeneous 127
subject 59–60, 63–4; ‘bound over’ to lay- tension that guarantees non-achieve-
ing down gaze in favour of extraor- ment of closure, loving and archiv-
dinary object 64; induced to imagine ing 126
a gaze which is ‘outside’ the field of texts, to be constru(ct)ed both in tandem
vision 63; world of ‘objects’ where and seriatim 3
some are legible or construed as third age of cartography, Mercator pro-
representative of others 72 jection and invention of the globe 17
INDEX {171}
totalizing force, although not H egelian visibility of Others, in modernity’s ‘com-

Absolute Spirit, nor Party, nor Stalin mon home’ and ‘father’s feast’ 110
but Capital itself 8 ‘visual illusion’, wherein is oscillating
triangulate, articulation of art historical determinacy 61
and museological systems of mean- visualizing words, spoken and speaking
ing 116 and hearing them when written 118
Trocadero Palace, ‘Neo-Islamic’ style
façade 83 Waagen, G.E. (Germany art history pro-
trying to perform, series of anamorphic fessorship 1844) 36, 52n19
oscillations 129 Weber, Sam, ‘Capitalizing History’
twin memories, character of catalytic, 18–19, 26n43; delineated the
originary or traumatic experience Jamesonian double-bind in PU 18;
120–21 ultimately Jameson universalizes the
individual 20
Universal World History of Art 84 Western art, demands that artist make a
University of Illinois (1983), major con- place for himself at the museum 134
ference on Marxism 14, 25n27 Wexner Center for the Visual Arts
untranscendable History, goes outside (Columbus), Eisenmann and Trott
the postmodern paradigm 23, 28n61 22
urban alienation, ‘directly proportional’ Whale, James (1931), film maker 146
to mental unmappability of local White, Hayden, ‘Getting Out of history’ 7
cityscapes 15 White, Stanford. ‘He walked Broadway
like an active transitive verb’ 120
Varon (member of Second Conservatoire) widow, charged emotional scene and
135–6, 143 127; mourning and desire, melan-
Vasari, Giorgio 140, 153n27; on cholia and performativity 129 see
Leonardo and incongruity of also Hannah
emblematized monstrousness 145 Winckelmann,J.J. 5, 47, 86, 99, 130, 143;
Victoria, Queen, visited Crystal Palace History of the Art of Antiquity 151,
frequently 98, 130 155n55; reproached by Falconet for
Vietnam war, terrible postmodern war not being like Alberti or Vasari 151
13 works of art, construed as most distinc-
viewer, predicative or interrogative frame- tive and telling of human products
works 46 65; ethical artists exhorted to com-
viewer/artist, soon to marry young pose our lives as 57; literature and
widow (Hannah), speculation and 33–4, 51n13; question of what they
128 might be evidence of and for 39
viewers position in exhibitionary space, world, a vitrine and everything in it
prefabricated and bespoke 78, 92n21 maquette of every thing in the world
virtual or eucharistic object, paradoxical 121
nature of 79, 92n22 world of the postmodern, creates dilem-
virtual realities, engendered by museums ma for certain Left politics 13
and art histories 60 writing art history: on the block 148–52
virtually unimaginable quantum leap in Wunderkammern, objects catalysts for
technological alienation, equivalent fraternal intercourse 98, 112n6
to Vietnam war 13 Zizek, Slavoj, Lacanian analysis of phal-
visibility, both the proof and condition locentric films of Hitchcock 149,
of the presence of the Other 99 154n51
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DONALD PREZIOSI’S LATEST COLLECTION OF ESSAYS,

By juxtaposing issues and problems originally

Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context

Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication

England and its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste

The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste

Beauty is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design

Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic

Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page

Difference/Indifference: Meetings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and

Art History as Cultural History: Warburg's Projects

Critical Vices: The Myths of Postmodern Theory

Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work

Practice: Architecture, Technique, and Representation

Music Inside Out: Going Too Far in Musical Essays

Looking Back to the Future: 1990–1970

Art and Ventriloquism

In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics

The Idealized Body: Theories and Improvement in Art and Science

Art After Ideology

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2006 Donald Preziosi

Typeset in Minion by Taylor & Francis Books

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN10: 0-415-36230–X (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-36230-6 (hbk)

Series Editor’s Preface viii

Introduction: Subjects, objects

1. La vi(ll)e en rose: reading

2. The question of art history 29

4. The art of Art History 69

5. The crystalline veil and the

6. Romulus, Rebus, and the gaze

7. Seeing through art history:

THOUGH IT APPEARS FIRST IN THIS VOLUME,

1 Preziosi, Donald, ‘La Vi(ll)e en Rose: Reading Jameson Mapping Space’ in

Clear meaning … does not

implications but the inevitable reciprocity of ‘past’ and ‘future’ constituting

and in particular by (y)our rearrangements of them, engendering connec-

Some background to the essays

Is it not possible that the

You will therefore note in passing that a certain unifying and

circumspection. While a full-scale reassessment is beyond the scope of these

The latter remarks, taken from a celebrated essay of 1984 entitled

[postmodern texts] afford us some glimpse into a postmodern or technological

Postmodern writing (and painting) afford us only ‘glimpses’ into this

1 the complexities of its multiple entrance systems on several levels: ‘these

This is all truly astonishing: is he kidding? Is this intended as a hilarious

But as I am anxious that Portman’s space not be perceived as something either

Jameson goes on to discuss and quote at some length a book by Michael

It is equally consonant with the world of postmodernist writing or paint-

Jameson is in effect claiming that the ‘demoralizing and depressing origi-

The subject in hyperspace

To understand Jameson’s proposals for resolving the dilemmas he has project-

Urban alienation is thus taken by Jameson to be ‘directly proportional’ to the

For Jameson, cognitive mapping would involve such extrapolations to ‘the