And so we have arrived at a moment where the après-coup finally dominates the historical moment. Waste, what the process of production leaves behind, has assumed a preponderant position in politics, economy and culture. Today, the writing of History and psychoanalysis meet up, via this notion of belatedness, in the field of art. The past is not only reactivated by the present; the very nature of ‘necessity’ (which is supposed to direct it) depends on the vagaries of the present. The work of art offers not just formal content, but corresponding interpretive and historical contexts. It practises genealogy. It remains to be seen how the artists and thinkers of our times will respond to this open question, and according to what criteria ‘historical rescue’ will occur; henceforth, it is no longer the prerogative of the materialist historian, but the business of all.
Notes
I. The Proletarian Unconscious
1Jacques-Alain Miller, conversation with Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, in Louis Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 181.
2Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, trans. Richard Veasey (New York: The New Press, 1995), 188.
3Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 659.
4Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis, 137–8.
5Ibid., 132.
6Ibid., 142.
7Ibid.
8Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 39.
9Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis, 22.
10Ibid.
11Ibid.
12Ibid., 41.
13Ibid., 42.
14Ibid., 44.
15Ibid., 45.
16Ibid., 46.
17Ibid., 57.
18Eric Marty, Louis Althusser, un sujet sans procés. Autonomie d’un passé très récent (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 273. (Althusser, The Future, 280.)
19Marty, Louis Althusser, 42.
20Althusser, The Future, 349.
21Didier Eribon, Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 26.
22Ibid., 27.
23Althusser, The Future, 23.
24Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (London: Verso, 2012), 214.
25Althusser, The Future, 221.
26Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 216.
27Ibid., 216.
28Ibid., 217.
29Ibid., 222.
30Ibid., 208.
31Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
32Clément Rosset, Traité de l’Idiotie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), 42.
33Clément Rosset, Le Réel et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 125.
34Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems’, in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Routledge, 1980), 21.
35Ibid., 22.
36See Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 2005).
37Jean-Claude Milner, L’Arrogance du Présent. Regards sur une décennie, 1965–1975 (Paris: Grasset, 2009), 150.
II. The Angel of the Masses
1Michel Thévoz, Le Théâtre du crime. Essai sur la peinture de David (Paris: Minuit, 1989), 40.
2Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1969), 149–50.
3Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2006), 174.
4Ibid., 198.
5Ibid., 265.
6Ibid.
7Ibid.
8Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2007), 257.
9Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), 264.
10Slavoj Žižek, A travers le réel (Paris: Éditions Lignes, 2010), 48.
11Louis, Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, trans. Jeffrey Melman (New York: Columbia University, Press, 1999), 57.
12Žižek, A travers le réel, 49.
13Benjamin, Illuminations, 255.
14Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, trans. Richard Veasey (New York: The New Press, 1995), 208.
15Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008), 84. [Trans: Not included in English-language edition; a different version of the essay, without the quoted passage, is found in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).]
16Quoted in Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 135.
17Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1971), 97.
18Ibid., 97.
19Ibid., 104.
20Ibid., 113–14.
21Rosalind Krauss, ‘A View of Modernism’, Artforum, September 1972.
22On this question, see Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009) and Altermodern (London: Tate Britain, 2009).
23Nicolas Bourriaud, Formes de vie (Paris: Denoël, 1999).
24In American television series especially attuned to the spirit of the times during the 2000s, the motor of the plot often proved to be a temporal operator, a conceptual switchboard – e.g., the basement of the abandoned hovel in Lost, where a rudder moves the island in space and time, or the pinboard in FlashForward, which the investigator uses to link clues and reconstruct thirty seconds of collective blackout, when humanity was projected into the future. In Homeland, the CIA agent also sets up a pinboard in her apartment.
25On this subject, see Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2002). For the musical domain, see Simon Reynolds, Retromania (New York: Faber & Faber, 2011).
26Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 94.
27George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 15.
28Muriel Pic, ‘La Fiction par les traces’, WGS (Paris: L’inculte, 2011), 156.
29Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 92.
30Ibid., 107.
31Ibid.
32Sigmund Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, Collected Papers (New York: Basic, 1959), 4: 270–1; quoted in Ginzburg, Clues, 99.
33Benjamin Buchloh, Essais historiques II (Villeurbanne: Art édition, 1992), 44.
34Quoted by Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1938–1940, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 48.
35Bruno Tackels, Walter Benjamin. Une vie dans les textes (Arles: Actes-sud, 2009), 626.
36Benjamin, Illuminations, 254.
37Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Conversations with Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 122.
38Ibid.
39Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 460.
40Ibid., 463.
41Louis Althusser, Psychanalyse et Sciences humaines. Deux conférences (1963–64) (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1996), 107.
42Louis Althusser, Sur la Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 108.
43Ibid., 75.
44Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2014), 191.
45Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 176.
46Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis, 31.
47Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 162.
48Quoted in Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, 130.
49Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 166.
50Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 199.
51Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2009), 55.
52Althusser, Sur la philosophie, 69.
53Conversation with Georges Adé, 1972, in Marcel Broodthaers (Paris: Galerie Nationale du jeu de Paume, 1992).
III. The Realist Project
1Catherine Strasser, Le Temps de la production (Strasbourg: École des arts décoratifs, 1997), 17.
2Youssef Ishaghpour, Courbet. Le Portrait de l’artiste dans son atelier (Strasbourg: Circé, 2011), 70.
3Ibid., 99.
4Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 10.
5Emile Zola, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Controverse sur Courbet et l’utilité sociale de l’art (Paris: 1001 Nuits), 47
6Strasser, Le Temps de la production, 26.
7Ishaghpour, Courbet, 25–6.
8Ibid., 104.
9Quoted in Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 130.
10Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, trans. Helen Atkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 170.
11Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, Volume II (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 61.
12Ibid., 62.
13Ibid., 63.
14Robert Sasso, Georges Bataille, le système du non-savoir. Une ontologie du jeu (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1978).
15Meyer Schapiro, ‘Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naïveté’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4: 3/4 (1941–42): 164–91.
16Jacques Charlier, Dans les règles de l’art (Brussels: Lebeer Hossmann, 1983), 43.
17Joseph Beuys, Par la présente, je n’appartiens plus au monde de l’art (Paris: L’Arche, 1988), 59.
18Quoted in Ann Temkin, Gabriel Orozco (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 130.
19Benjamin, Illuminations, 177.
Index
accident, 34, 37–8
and art, 31, 58
and history, 58
and ideal, 26
and materialism, 38
See also chance; encounter
Ackermann, Franz, 48
action, 67–8
actuality, 51–2
Adeagbo, George, 91
advertising, 68
Agamben, Giorgio, 50
aleatory materialism, 11–2, 34, 37
alienation, 4–5, 17, 20, 55
altermodern, 49
Althusser, Louis, xi, 56, 96
biography of, 10–2, 17
and cultural studies, 22
death of, 9
and Deleuze and Guattari, 6
disrepute of, xiii
and dissolution of École Freudienne, 2–4, 26
and Foucault, 16–7
The Future Lasts Forever, 9, 12, 17
and history, 40
and idealism, battle with, 7
on ideology, 44–5, 62, 65–7, 70–1, 73, 80
as killer, xiii, 9–10, 13
and madness, 15
on Marx, 41
on materialism, 18, 21, 34, 37–8, 81
necessity of, xii
new interest in, xiii–xv
on proletariat, 69
on psychoanalysis, 8–9, 63–4
on revolutionary party, 36
on subjectivity, 63
and The Usual Suspects, 14
on world, 37–8
Anatsui, El, 91
Andrée, Salomon, 59
Angel of History, 30, 38–9
angel of the masses, 30–1, 74
anthropology, and history, 57
art:
and accident, 31, 58
Dadaism, 86
as dynamogram, 51
and exclusion, x–xi
and history, 29–30, 34, 41, 56–60, 62
and humanity, 42
and ideal, 32
and idealism, 96
and ideology, 68, 72–3, 80, 97
and labour, 90, 95
Nouveau Réalisme, 54–5
and politics, ix–x, xiv, 43–4, 68
and progress, 34
Proudhon on, 78
public, 69
and realism, x, 79
realist movement, 78
and reality, 27, 42–3, 75–6
and social production, 88
surrealism, 86–7
and unconscious, 8
undecidability of, 40–1
and unthought, 7
and waste, 27, 82, 85, 87, 94, 96
See also contemporary art; painting; photography
asterochronic reading, 52
authorship, 55
Badiou, Alain, xii, 30, 69
Bataille, Georges, xi, 81, 83, 85–6, 96
Baudelaire, Charles, 55
Baudrillard, Jean, xvi
Becher, Bernd, 89
Becher, Hilla, 89
belatedness, 41, 97
Belting, Hans, 81
Benjamin, Walter, xi, 44, 61, 87, 94, 96
on Angel of History, 30, 38–9
on constellation, 52
and cultural studies, 24
on history, 41, 56–8, 62
objects of study for, 54
on phantasmagoria, 69–71, 73
on progress of humanity, 34
on visual shocks, 46
Bertrand, André, 88
Beuys, Joseph, 89–91
black-and-white, 61
Borges, Jorge Luis, xvi, 40, 62
Bourriaud, Nicolas, Radicant, 49
Bove, Carol, 59
Breton, André, 83, 86
Broodthaers, Marcel, 72
Buchloh, Benjamin, 55
capital, 71
capitalism, 37, 90, 92
dream of, vii
evolution of, 39
history of, 41
and phantasmagoria, 69
and subjectivity, 68
Cattelan, Maurizio, 90–1
chance, 34, 39
and necessity, 39
See also accident; encounter
Charlier, Jacques, 88–91
class domination, 44
class struggle, and philosophy, 22
clinamen, 34
computers, 46, 60
Google, 75
internet, 46, 48, 51
conspiracy theory, 21
constellation, 25, 46–9, 51–2, 59, 62
Benjamin on, 52
and contemporary art, 48, 51
contemporary art:
and authorship, 55
and conceptual pulverization, 46
and constellation-motif, 48, 51
contaminated by call for efficiency, 68
and evidence, 62
and history, 61
and ideal, 32
and idealism, 7
and ideology, 73
and multiplicity, 47
and popular culture, 25
and precarity of world, 43
and waste, 55, 95
See also art
Courbet, Gustave, 73, 76–81
The Artist’s Studio, 76
labour/leisure in, 91
The Origin of the World, 80
and realism, 87
and realist thinking, x
and storytelling, 81
Crowley, Aleister, 59
cultural studies, xi, xv, 22–4, 26, 30, 85, 96
foundation of, 45
Dadaism, 86
David, Jacques-Louis, 29, 31
Dean, Tacita, 61
Delacroix, Eugène, 50
Deleuze, Gilles:
Anti-Oedipus, 5–8
on minor lit
erature, xv
Democritus, 34, 36
Denis, Maurice, 81
Derrida, Jacques, 18
Diatkine, René, 17
Dick, Philip K., 13, 19–21
divination, 52–3
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 53
Duchamp, Marcel, 29, 51, 82, 89
economics, 67, 85
Einarsson, Gardar Eide, 60
emergence, 11
encounter, 34–6
See also accident; chance
energy:
and time, 19
and waste, vii, ix
Epaminonda, Haris, 61
Epicurean theory, 34
eruption, 13
evidence, 62
exclusion, 84
figures of, xi
exform, 8, 27–8
and waste, x
expulsion, 73
Feldmann, Hans Peter, 58
Filliou, Robert, 88
Foucault, Michel, 9
and madness, 16–8, 26
Franklin, Benjamin, 5
free time, 91
Freud, Sigmund, 41, 54, 65
and realist thinking, x
Froment, Aurélien, 59
Fujiwara, Simon, 61
Gaillard, Cyprien, 60
Gander, Ryan, 59
genesis See origin
Ginzburg, Carlo, 52–3
Godard, Jean-Luc, xii
Gonzalez-Foerster, Dominique, 59
Google, 75
Greenberg, Clement, 33
Guattari, Felix:
Anti-Oedipus, 5–8
on minor literature, xv
Gursky, Andreas, 48
Hains, Raymond, 55
Hall, Stuart, 22, 39, 41, 58
Heath, Joseph, 20
heterochrony, 47, 60
heterogeneous, 48–9, 52
heterology, 83
Hirschhorn, Thomas, 59
history:
and accident, 26
Angel of History, 30, 38–9
and art, 29–30, 34, 41, 56–60, 62
artists rummage dump of, 60
belatedness, 41, 97
Benjamin on, 41, 56–8, 62
as constellation, 52
and contemporary art, 61
and idealism, 33, 39
and justice, 62
and materialism, 39
materialist historian, 56–7, 60, 70
narrative of, 32–3
and origin, 35
and painting, 45–6
and progress, 34, 40–1
and proletariat, 25
and subject, 18, 20
writing of, begins with ruins, 56
See also origin; storytelling; time
humanism, 46
humanity:
and art, 42
progress of, 34
Huyghe, Pierre, 7, 92
ideal:
and accident, 26
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