Natural Histories of Form

Natural Histories of Form: Charles Darwin’s Aesthetic Science

by Ian Duncan

Arguing that aesthetic preference generates the historical forms of human racial and gender difference inThe Descent of Man, Charles Darwin offers an alternative account of aesthetic autonomy to the Kantian or idealist account. Darwin understands the aesthetic sense to be constitutive of scientific knowledge insofar as scientific knowledge entails the natural historian’s fine discrimination of formal differences and their dynamic interrelations within a unified system. Natural selection itself works this way, Darwin argues inThe Origin of Species; in The Descent of Man he makes the case for the natural basis of the aesthetic while relativizing particular aesthetic judgments. Libidinally charged—in Kantian phrase, “interested”—the aesthetic sense nevertheless comes historically adrift from its functional origin in rites of courtship.

The essay begins:

In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Charles Darwin sought to write the definitive version of an experimental genre of philosophical anthropology, the “natural history of man,” pioneered—and disputed—in the late Enlightenment by the Comte de Buffon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, and other major thinkers as the realization of a universal science of man. With the delivery of human species being to secular history and geography, the old question of human exceptionalism had come to bear with a new urgency on the point at which, and means by which, the human emerges from animal life and comes into its own. Friedrich Schiller’s treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795) forged a crucial link between this philosophical anthropology and divergent traditions, scientific and humanist, of nineteenth-century aesthetic inquiry. Where the history of man splintered among competing disciplinary claims on scientific authority, Schiller’s reframing of its main question, human becoming, as a project of individual development—an education—established a program for the modern humanities or liberal arts. The humanist legacy of the Aesthetic Education is well studied. Less so is its anticipation of Darwin’s key idea, that the aesthetic sense is the medium of a specifically human evolution, in The Descent of Man. More is at stake in the comparison between Schiller’s and Darwin’s conjectural histories of human emergence than an accounting of possible influence. Scrutiny of their common concerns and differences illuminates the originality of Darwin’s own contribution—still insufficiently appreciated—to nineteenth-century aesthetic theory.

On the Aesthetic Education of Man posits an instinct or faculty Schiller calls the “play-drive” (Spieltrieb), which affords the full realization of human nature through the aesthetic apprehension of form. The last letters of the Aesthetic Education sketch a conjectural natural history of this coming-into-humanity. The play-drive originates in animal life, in the body, in the “sheer plenitude of vitality, when superabundance of life is its own incentive to action.” Overflowing physiological function, the life force manifests itself as play. In the case of humans, it springs beyond the determinations of biology (need) and anthropology (custom):

Not content with introducing aesthetic superfluity into objects of necessity, the play-drive as it becomes ever freer finally tears itself away from the fetters of utility altogether, and beauty in and for itself alone begins to be an object of his striving. Man adorns himself. Disinterested and undirected pleasure is now numbered among the necessities of existence, and what is in fact unnecessary soon becomes the best part of his delight. (211) 

Torn from the fetters of utility, beauty in and for itself alone: Schiller’s conjectural history yields the dominant conception of the aesthetic in nineteenth-century writing—a crux, as we shall see, in recent accounts of sexual selection, the agency Darwin identified as shaping human evolution, by historians and philosophers of science.

Commentary on the Aesthetic Education of Man has downplayed Schiller’s late turn to natural history, in which the aesthetic apprehension of form marks the transition from the animal to the human state. Discussions of the work’s Victorian legacy tend to prioritize one of the terms of Schiller’s title over the other, the aesthetic or education. The aesthetic education provides a disciplinary program for what Herder called a Bildung der Humanität, a “formation of humanity” or evolutionary perfection of human species being, in his most ambitious of late-Enlightenment philosophical anthropologies, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for a philosophy of the history of mankind). Pedagogical projects to foster and direct “the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature” in the individual person—constituting “our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality”—supply the precondition for projects of social and political reform in the best-known Victorian version of the aesthetic education, Matthew Arnold’s. In Culture and Anarchy Arnold pays tribute to Schiller’s legacy in the educational system bequeathed to the Prussian state by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Later Victorian affirmations of the aesthetic reacted against its conscription into didactic programs and regulative systems. Schiller’s Twenty-Second Letter became a “locus classicus for Victorian aesthetes,” according to Angela Leighton, as they sought to repatriate aesthetic experience to individual sensuous life. “In a truly successful work of art, the content should effect nothing, the form everything,” Schiller wrote, defining “the real secret of the master in any art: that he can make his form consume his material” (155–57). The Oxford editors of the Aesthetic Education note that the biological metaphor implicit in Schiller’s word vertilgen, “consume,” that is, digest, metabolize, disappears in Victorian reformulations, which “make it sound as though Schiller wants to empty art of subject-matter if not of content” (267; clxxvi). “To make form obliterate, or annihilate, the matter will be the difficult, sometimes guilty, sometimes provocative, aim of Schiller’s aestheticist followers,” Leighton comments, citing Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.

The triumph of form over content or material in order to constitute it as the proper object of aesthetic attention points behind Schiller to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, which prescribes form’s purification from contingent sensuous interest. More decisively than Schiller, Kant wrested the aesthetic away from its earlier modern meaning of “sensitive cognition” or “sensuous knowledge” (Alexander Baumgarten’s term), by positing sensuous intuition (the imagination) and cognition (the understanding) as distinct faculties, to prescribe the alignment of subjective perception with universal norms of judgment. German idealism broke with a largely British empiricist tradition of scientific aesthetics, developed in eighteenth-century medico-physiological treatises, which grounded aesthetic effects in sensation and the body—in William Hogarth and in Edmund Burke, the sexed and gendered body. The empiricist tradition, with its conception of aesthetic form as “a concordance between the human mind or body and the order of nature,” continued however to flourish in nineteenth-century Britain. Scholarship “has continued to under-estimate the importance of physiological and evolutionary aesthetics in shaping discussions of art and beauty in the 1870s and 1880s,” writes Jonathan Smith, citing John Ruskin’s late work Proserpina. Benjamin Morgan recovers the links between canonical writers on aesthetics, including Ruskin and Pater, and Victorian scientific materialists, whose “aspiration to uncover a formal patterning in nature eventually extended to an interest in a physiological patterning of the body and the nervous system, whose attunement or non-attunement to nature’s forms provided one explanation for the experience of beauty or ugliness.” Continue reading …

IAN DUNCAN is Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the editorial board of Representations. His books include Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge, 1992); Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007); and, most recently, Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton, 2019).

Radio Communism

“A Good Communist Style”:

Sounding Like a Communist in Twentieth-Century China

by M. Paulina Hartono

In this essay Paulina Hartono focuses on the history and politicization of radio announcers’ vocal delivery in China during the mid-twentieth century. She explores how Chinese Communist Party leaders used internal party debates, national policies, and broadcasting training to construct an ideal Communist voice whose qualities would ostensibly communicate party loyalty and serve as a sonic representation of political authority.

The essay begins:

Shortly after the Communists took power in China, three of the most famous radio broadcasters in their respective countries met together to discuss their experiences: Yuri Levitan and Olga Vysotska of the Soviet Union and Qi Yue of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Vysotska stated that the duty of their profession was “to find the shortest route to the people’s hearts.”[i] The idea that one ought to use one’s voice to move people was not lost on Qi. Radio broadcasters played a major role in the nation-state, both as the literal mouthpieces of the party and as transmitters of a carefully crafted sound. In an environment where political campaigns were pushed into a visual landscape of posters, banners, illustrated leaflets, and the like, an auditory world of early-PRC socialist political culture was taking shape. Radio broadcasters’ pronouncements were significant not only for their discourse—what they said—but also for their representation—how they sounded.

This essay examines the construction of a particular way of speaking in the People’s Republic of China by studying its most notable mouthpieces—its broadcasters. Directed to make their announcements “accurate, fresh, and lively,” these radio broadcasters were encouraged to be engaging to listen to, and, given the very audible platform they occupied, they also became national models of how to speak. Compared to the number of visual studies of Cold War China, sound studies are relatively few and focus mainly on the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast, this essay looks at China during the 1940s and 1950s during the early Mao period. Unlike the radio voice of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the voice of the PRC was less an index of class or education than a symbol of political belief. These particular and constructed vocal qualities were formalized and reinforced by radio announcers and propaganda officials following major national events, including war, national linguistic reform, and targeted political campaigns.

One of the difficulties of studying aural cultural production is synesthetic, as it is a slippery task to describe sonic qualities in discursive forms. Mladen Dolar once called voice the “remainder which cannot be made a signifier or disappear in meaning; the remainder that doesn’t make sense, a leftover, a cast-off . . . of the signifier.” Recent developments in the emerging field of voice studies reveal a rich and diverse range of research methodologies, including voice as a physical phenomenon (for example, laryngeal dynamics), as a sensory perception (cognitive processing of sound), and as a mediation through technology (such as the Auto-Tune processor). Moreover, as a political act, voice can map and reproduce an intricate system of coded power relations between speaker and listener, including those evident in class conflict, race relations, and gendered politics. As Miyako Inoue has argued in her deconstruction of Japanese women’s language, when culturally accepted notions of vocal qualities are ascribed to groups and not denaturalized, they can project static traditions and archetypes where dynamic cultural and political forces are actually present.

From the earliest years of the People’s Republic of China, officials saw radio as a tool for political and ideological education. The sounds of broadcasters’ voices were themselves exercises in a political education. They projected an imagined voice of the nation by using the national standardized accent and a sonic affect to project affinity with ordinary citizens, or “the People,” vaunted in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) culture and propaganda. Warmth, strength, and confidence were qualia that were closely associated with the voice and what it signified. Ultimately, and especially during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, radio announcers’ vocal qualities became synecdochal with their political personhood, purporting to reveal their own internal thoughts and feelings. Announcers needed to deploy the right pronunciation, energy, and emotion in order to express the full embodiment of the true believer in delivering radio content. In the eyes of propaganda department officials, failure to communicate properly could reveal a lack of commitment to the party.

Beyond China, the vocal styles in Soviet bloc radio seem to have shared a “socialist soundscape”: in the USSR, radio broadcasting grew out of a tradition that held the accent of the Moscow proletariat as its standard; even recently, in North Korea, the famed newscaster Ri Chun-hee has become well known for her emotionally charged broadcasts. Whether in China or elsewhere in the bloc, radio announcers were supposed to represent the voices of socialist-realist heroes, demonstrating that language ideology could convey more than discourse, grammar, and content. Continue reading …

M. PAULINA HARTONO is a scholar of Chinese science and technology, history, and media cultures and a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the history of radio broadcasting and reception in twentieth-century China.

The Birth of Italian TV

From Radio to Radio-visione: Italian Radio’s Television Experiments, 1939–1940

by Danielle Simon

In this study, Danielle Simon investigates a series of experimental television broadcasts undertaken by Italian Fascism’s national broadcasting entity, the Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche, in the years leading up to the Second World War. She explores both the official autarchical policies and the technological limitations that shaped the radio network’s early experiments with television to show that producers’ attitudes regarding medium specificity shaped decisions about programming and musical content. She goes on to suggest that these early sorties into televisual broadcasting left traces that can be seen in the style and political clout of Italian television even today.

The essay begins:

On 22 July 1939, viewers crowded into the television viewing room of the Villaggio Balneare (“bathing village”) set up in Rome’s Circus Maximus, sponsored by the television companies SAFAR and Fernseh. Six television sets, described by one Roman newspaper as somewhere between a mirror and a large radio, lined one wall. Spectators stood shoulder to shoulder in the packed hall, craning their necks to glimpse the images on these screens, each of which measured less than half the size of today’s 42-inch televisions. From the inset speakers rang the lilting tones and rollicking antics of Italian radio’s most popular musical performers and comedians. The crowd gasped, laughed, and applauded as the stars whose voices had graced their homes for more than a decade appeared to them for the first time on the small screen.

The images that so entranced the audience, and the devices that captured them, were the result of more than a decade of effort on the part of the Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche (EIAR), the radio broadcasting arm of the Fascist regime. EIAR had maintained exclusive control over Italian airwaves since its creation in 1927. Initially, EIAR’s subscriber list numbered around forty thousand, but that number jumped to more than one million by the end of the 1930s as the network worked to reach new listeners, particularly those located in rural areas, who were deemed especially valuable by the Fascist government. But even as Italian radio extended its reach and expanded its audiences, pressure came from the regime and from listeners to unite sound and image in the form of broadcast television. As early as 1929—only five years after the first Italian radio broadcast—engineers Alessandro Banfi and Sergio Bertolotti conducted experiments in transmitting images over radio waves from EIAR studios. A decade later, these experiments in “radio-vision” would lead to the events just described—the first transmission of images over radio waves, visible to the public from a viewing room.

More than simply another way to entertain EIAR’s growing population of subscribers, these experimental broadcasts served as evidence of Italian Fascism’s standing on the world stage. The Magneti Marelli equipment used for the transmissions, developed in consultation with engineers from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), was regularly cited as proof of Italy’s rapid technological development, and thus of the nation’s hard-won progress. EIAR lauded the political value of the television experiments in the pages of its weekly magazine, Radiocorriere, boasting that the television broadcasts were “the greatest, most curious attraction” within the exhibition, and a manifestation of “Fascist spirit.” By10 August, the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero reported that the Villaggio Balneare had seen at least twelve thousand visitors, nearly all of whom had visited the viewing room to marvel at the new technology. The spectacle demonstrated television’s ability to showcase “the most beautiful and vigorous images of the Italian race and art” and catapulted Italian technologies into the global marketplace.

What follows is a history of disappointment. Despite the network’s lofty ambitions, EIAR’s television experiments were short lived, discontinued less than two years after they began. Italian networks would not attempt television transmission again until a decade later. Yet the broadcasts revealed a politics of spectacle that placed images, seeing, and being seen at the center of modern political life. Events like EIAR’s television experiments reveal a much tighter linkage among culture, technology, commerce, and politics than is typically attributed to Fascist cultural policy or practice. In this article, I will explore the official policies, technological limitations, aesthetic premises, and programming decisions that shaped the radio network’s early experiments with television, ultimately suggesting that these early sorties into televisual broadcasting left traces that continue to shape the style and political clout of Italian television. Continue reading …

DANIELLE SIMON is a postdoctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. She is a former fellow of the American Academy in Rome (2016–2017) and received her doctorate in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020. Her research interests include emerging media technologies and musical performance, particularly opera, and radio broadcasting during the years of Fascism in Italy. Her current book project examines transnational radio broadcasts from Italy to the United States and Latin America during and after the Fascist period.

New Issue, Representations 151

NOW AVAILABLE

Representations 151, Summer 2020

Upcoming in Representations 152: Erica Weaver on distraction and attention in the medieval schoolroom; Nicole T. Hughes on the staging of The Conquest of Jerusalem in Tlaxcala, New Spain, 1539; Lorna Hutson on the disputed body politic of England and Scotland during the Elizabethan period; Sebastian Klinger on Hugo Ball, Carl Schmitt, and political theology in the 1920s; and Timothy Hampton on rock domesticity and Dylan’s pastoral mode at the end of the 1960s. Available in November.

Person Woman Man Camera (King)

A look back at Catherine Malabou’s “The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies”

If, as Foucault wrote, “we need to cut off the king’s head,” our further task, according to French philosopher Catherine Malabou in a 2014 essay, is to “situate the point where biology and history, the living subject and the political subject, meet or touch.”

Read Malabou’s short essay in Representations 127 now, and look forward to more on the King’s Two Bodies concept in Lorna Hutson’s “On the Knees of the Body Politic,” forthcoming in Representations 151, available in August.

Catherine Malabou is Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School/EGS and Professor of Modern European Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. .

Debarati Sanyal on Black Struggle

The Social Contract and the Game of Monopoly: Listening to Kimberly Jones on Black Lives

A short essay by Debarati Sanyal posted on In the Midst, blog of the journal Critical Times, June 29, 2020

In the piece, Sanyal discusses an impromptu monologue by activist Kimberley Jones that has since gone viral. She writes, “Jones challenges us to examine a social contract that has always been rigged, that remains grounded in property rights instead of human rights.”

Debarati Sanyal is professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Representations editorial board. The author of The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (2006) and Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (2015), translated in French as Mémoire et complicité: Au prisme de la Shoah (2019), she is completing a book on borders, race and aesthetics in the European refugee “crisis.” Her essay Calais’s “Jungle”: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance appeared in Representations 139.

“True Wit Is Nature”

“True Wit Is Nature”: Wimsatt, Pope, and the Power of Style

by Helen Deutsch

UCLA’s Helen Deutsch here puts Yale critic and cofounder of the New Criticism William K. Wimsatt into the balance with the most influential poet of eighteenth-century England, Alexander Pope. A scholar-collector with a lifelong penchant for Pope’s poetry and iconography, Wimsatt molds his influential theoretical paradoxes of abstract particularity after the uniquely embodied poet, who made himself inseparable from his art. The elusive power of style connects universal truth to worldly materiality for both writers, giving theoretical abstraction a human likeness.

The essay opens:

William K. Wimsatt with Roubiliac’s busts of Pope at the National Portrait Gallery, 1961. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London.

 

I begin with a photo and what first appears to be a visual joke. William K. Wimsatt, New Critical patriarch of the theoretical Yale Critics, stern dispeller of the intentional and affective fallacies, and devotee of the abstract poetic object he deemed the “verbal icon,” looms over a table, upon which are precariously displayed six marble busts of the great eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope by the poet’s contemporary, the French sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac. The bareheaded and be-mantled neoclassical busts, each varying subtly from the next, join in a contemplatively oblique stare—into the future? the distant past? the eyes of the viewer?—while Wimsatt, modestly positioned at the left edge of the table, gazes straight into the camera. On the wall behind Wimsatt are empty picture hangers, below which are captions: it seems that an exhibit has been taken down and the curator, haunted by his doubled shadow, is preserving one last look. Wimsatt’s is the proud gaze of an avid collector—of stamps, Native American artifacts, and minerals (this last item also a penchant of Pope’s, who festooned the walls of his famous grotto at Twickenham with exotic rocks and curios)—whose convocation of busts was the prize of years of avid pursuit across England of images of the diminutive poet known for his beautiful head and curved spine. These adventures took Wimsatt into the homes of aristocratic families whose ancestors had befriended Pope, where the busts had long proclaimed the owner’s political affiliation and personal distinction. The busts themselves seem to cast white shadows beneath the table, inverting Wimsatt’s dark ones.

Scholars of English literature do not usually imagine Wimsatt, whose authority and influence are legendary for the profession, in such distinctive company. Wimsatt’s polemical essays on the affective and intentional fallacies, written in collaboration with the philosopher Monroe Beardsley, in his classic The Verbal Icon (1954) attempted to wrest poetry from the grip of the author’s biography on the one hand and the reader’s affective response on the other. Criticism for Wimsatt was a science; its mandate was meticulous textual analysis, and its goal was objectivity. His fame, late in his career, as a stern enforcer of the rules was captured in a spoof song, “Big Bad Bill” (to the tune of the popular ballad “Big Bad John”), by his former student Doug Canfield: “Let’s cut out this impressionism / And not make poetry confessionism; / Let’s make the Object the real test: / The Old New Critics are still the best.” What then to make of Wimsatt’s career-long fascination with the first self-supporting professional poet in English literature, a poet who spent his career writing about himself? In the photo’s balance of contraries, Big Bad Bill behind multiple renditions of the man who once called himself the little Alexander whom all the women laugh at, we can locate a different and equally important aspect of Wimsatt’s criticism: the idea of style.

Of all his collections, none was more personal than Wimsatt’s assemblage of images of Pope, put on display in the exhibit recorded in the photograph at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 1961; Wimsatt typed out the catalog himself and included items from his own personal collection. This effort was expanded and commemorated in his monumental 1965 study The Portraits of Alexander Pope, which bears an image of a Roubiliac bust on its cover. In an homage to Wimsatt written shortly after his death in 1975, his Yale colleague René Wellek rightly observes that the Pope catalog “traces the archetypes of the portrait so meticulously that the method can serve as a model for similar investigations into the history of portrait painting and of sculpture.” A substantial addendum to the catalog’s compendium of originals and multiple imitations, which Wimsatt spent twenty-five years researching and which, like all great collections, would never be complete, was published posthumously. Wimsatt’s sustained engagement with Pope as author and image might seem from our current vantage point to contradict his work’s fundamental tenets. Yet while Wimsatt famously, if complexly, defined the work of art as an object free of both authorial intention and the reader’s affective response, he nevertheless gave that object a persistently heavy weight, linking it to the visual and material world by its very definition as icon. The balances of generality and particularity that exemplified the literary text for Wimsatt, specifically the paradoxes of the concrete universal’s detailed abstraction and the verbal icon’s dual status as object and image, are rooted in the age that gave us the professional author and inspired and epitomized by the eighteenth-century poet who made himself inseparable from his art. As ephemeral as Belinda’s lock, yet as weighty as a marble bust, Pope’s poems are at once historically particular, personal, and immediate. Concrete universals with a distinctive human voice, they give ballast to Wimsatt’s theorizing, informing his conceptions of poetry, criticism, and the thing that unites the two—style.

…The enduring presence of Pope across Wimsatt’s scholarly oeuvre thus shadows the assessment of Wimsatt’s own reputation as a foundational icon of criticism, making his universals personally concrete. While at the time of his death in 1975, Wellek could state with confidence that “Wimsatt will be remembered mainly as a theorist of literature,” the headline of his New York Times obituary memorialized him as “Yale expert on 1700’s authors.” The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (1941), based on Wimsatt’s dissertation, began with a chapter on style and meaning. In his second book, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson (1948), Wimsatt described his endeavor, one worthy of a literary-critical James Boswell, as a “history of Johnson’s mind” rooted in the unique properties of Johnson’s scientific language, words that do the metaphorical work of connecting body to mind and the world to the text. While Johnson served as Wimsatt’s exemplary test case for stylistic analysis, Pope, in all his embodied uniqueness, informed Wimsatt’s attempts to conceive of style in the abstract. Style for Wimsatt was always inseparable from meaning, just as, and perhaps because, the author was never fully absent from the text. That Pope should get two essays to himself in The Verbal Icon and is the only author to make top billing in an essay title in that volume drives this point home. That Wimsatt named his own son Alexander makes it personal.

Wimsatt’s lifelong preoccupation with Pope and the successfully realized intentions of eighteenth-century authors reminds us that he practiced theory as part of a group of scholars who studied the poet whose spine, so his contemporaries speculated, was bent by excessive devotion to literature. For Wimsatt and his fellow scholar-collectors at Yale, Pope embodied the ways in which art is inseparable from the material world it represents. Yet by 1975 Wimsatt himself, with all his eccentricities and eighteenth-century preoccupations, his “towering figure” of nearly seven feet sublimated into disembodied monumental status, had taken his place in Yale’s history, a history at the heart of our profession, by disappearing into the theoretical ether. We can see an alternative trajectory in the evolution of cover choices for Wimsatt’s Rinehart edition of the poetry and prose of Alexander Pope, part of a series used in many undergraduate classrooms. Wimsatt noted in a talk given to Yale undergraduates in 1959 that his obsession with Pope’s iconography began with his search for a proper cover image. First published with a plain generic cover in 1951, the 1972 edition published shortly before Wimsatt’s death shows William Hoare’s red crayon drawing, a rare full-length image of Pope, an “original taken without his knowledge,” curved spine and all (fig. 2). When we view the verbal icon through the lens of Wimsatt’s fascination with Pope, its author seems to kick it, like Johnson famously did the stone in response to Bishop Berkeley’s assertion of the nonexistence of matter, to refute it thus. The timeless abstraction of Wimsatt’s theory, in other words, is haunted by the distinctively embodied and loquacious ghost of the poet who complained in Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot that “ev’ry Coxcomb knows me by my Style.” If personification, as Marc Redfield has suggested, is the key to understanding theory at Yale—Harold Bloom standing for aesthetics, Paul de Man standing for theory—what does Wimsatt, behind the busts of Pope, stand for? Perhaps he is standing for style. Resisting autobiography as Romantic de-facement, he pursues the multiple versions of the face of the particular author in which the animate and inanimate forces of language unite, grounding his militant objectivity in embodied particularity in the style of Pope. Continue reading …

HELEN DEUTSCH is Professor of English and Director of the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. She has been writing about Alexander Pope for the entirety of her adult life and is now at work on a book on Jonathan Swift and Edward Said.

Two for These Times

The uprisings in recent weeks against police brutality and institutionalized racism in the United States has brought the long wound of slavery into greater relief for everyone, whether we’re out in the streets or listening to newscasts. In recognition of this moment’s fury and demand for justice, we offer two special issues from our archives that address the issue of slavery head-on. Their engagements with questions of reparation, identity, dispossession, and the archive remain brilliantly, if painfully, pertinent today. All content in these issues is free through the end of 2020.

Special Issue (Representations 92):
Redress 
Edited by Saidiya Hartman and Stephen Best

STEPHEN BEST and SAIDIYA HARTMAN
Fugitive Justice

HERMAN L. BENNETT
‘‘Sons of Adam’’: Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject

COLIN J. DAYAN
Legal Terrors

ROBERT WESTLEY
The Accursed Share: Genealogy, Temporality, and the Problem of Value in Black Reparations Discourse

BRYAN WAGNER
Disarmed and Dangerous: The Strange Career of Bras-Coupe´

DAVID LLOYD
The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger


Special Issue (Representations 113):
New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual
Edited by Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

HUEY COPELAND and KRISTA THOMPSON
Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual

DARCY GRIMALDO GRIGSBY
Negative-Positive Truths

KRISTA THOMPSON
The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies

ARTISTS’ PORTFOLIOS
Hank Willis Thomas, Fred Wilson, Christopher Cozier

HUEY COPELAND
Runaway Subjects

MARCUS WOOD
The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia as a New Model for the Memory of Slavery

COMMENTARY
STEPHEN BEST
Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive

 

Medium’s Medium

In recognition of the impact of Covid-19 on campus instruction and the rise of unplanned distance learning, UC Press is pleased to make Representations and all of its online journals content free to all through June 2020.

The Medium Concept

by Anna Schechtman

In the second half of the twentieth century, in the very decades when the concept of “media” entered the vernacular, the “medium concept” began to shape American art criticism and curation. This was no coincidence: “mediums” emerged as a category for the organization and appreciation of art as the dialectical counterpart to media, and in response to the cultural imperialism of its mass-produced forms. As art became increasingly public, mediums became the public face of art.

The essay begins:

In 2006 New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) established the Department of Media, its first new curatorial department since 1971. A press release heralding the new department described MoMA as a “pioneer in the exhibition, acquisition and conservation of media art since the late 1960s.” It clarified that works of “media art” were “time- and sound-based,” as opposed to the mostly static and strictly visual works in MoMA’s departments of Architecture and Design, Drawings, Painting and Sculpture, Photography, and Prints and Illustrated Books. But there was, of course, another MoMA department that housed “time- and sound-based” art—the Department of Film—which, since 1935, had been collecting and conserving celluloid reels and digital projections from Hollywood and international film productions. Unlike those audiovisual works, however, “media art,” the release said, was “made for and presented in a gallery setting.” Works that met these criteria included performance art, video art, and installation art—all three of which, since their emergence in the late-1960s, have variously and often arbitrarily been called intermedia, multimedia, or mixed media art. Why, then, after forty years of collecting such work, did the museum finally institute a department of it in media’s name? The answer is partly functional: the conservation and display of installation and video art is technically different from that needed for oil-on-canvas or 16 mm celluloid works; a new department could better accommodate these differences. But it’s also epistemological and ideological: when media became a department at MoMA, it also became a medium—captured by the formalist logic of American art criticism after World War II and assimilated, however awkwardly, into the medium-specific organizational structure of the country’s premier modern art museum.

On the day of the new department’s founding, MoMA’s director Glenn D. Lowry confirmed that the newly appointed chief curator of media had “demonstrated a keen understanding of the dynamic potential of this medium.” This medium, that is, media. With this statement, Lowry not only instituted a linguistic paradox, he also dramatized—to the point of satire—a decades-old antinomy within the discipline of art history between mediums (specialized subcategories of “art,” including but not limited to those represented by MoMA’s departments) and media (an imbroglio of cultural production of little aesthetic value or political virtue). Since the 1960s, art critics and historians have been using the un-Latinate plural “mediums” to distinguish, and rhetorically elevate, works of art from the cultural chaos of “mass media,” “the media,” and, for that matter, the growing postwar trend of inter-, multi-, and mixed media works of art. The distinction rests on a precarious but potent conceit: that the history of modern art is autonomous, not only from the noxious commercialism of the culture industries, but also from the communication technologies that have supported them—especially, as the century progressed, from television, video, and digital images.

So mediums, not media. Rosalind Krauss was clearest about this mostly tacit disciplinary tic when she wrote, in a footnote to her 1999 manifesto Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition: “Throughout this text I will use mediums as the plural of medium in order to avoid a confusion with media, which I am reserving for the technologies of communication indicated by that latter term.” Her distinction, however, confuses as it clarifies: after all, the “different mediums” represented in her essay include painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and film—all of which could reasonably be called “technologies of communication” (and thus media, in her taxonomy) in different discursive fields. One could say, for example, that they are technologies that communicate images, aesthetic value, affective responses, spiritual transcendence, history, and, of course, capital. But it is precisely the field of art history—and, in particular, the modernist category of art that, as Krauss acknowledged, has attached aesthetic and political value to mediums in their specificity since the 1960s—that she was trying to protect from the corruption of media in Voyage on the North Sea:

At first I thought I could simply draw a line under the word medium, bury it like so much critical toxic waste, and walk away from it into a world of lexical freedom. “Medium” seemed too contaminated, too ideologically, too dogmatically, too discursively loaded . . . If I have decided in the end to retain the word “medium,” it is because for all the misunderstandings and abuses attached to it, this is the term that opens onto the discursive field I want to address.

Krauss was writing at the start of the new millennium, when a wave of installation art, apparently indifferent to the traditions of discrete mediums, crested onto the international art scene. The installation art trend was a product of what she called “the post-medium condition”—itself a time of formal confusion among the arts that she loosely traced back to the late 1960s. To eliminate “medium” from her critical lexicon would be to fall prey to this wave’s seductive undertow. Instead, Krauss parted the sea of contemporary art into the good and bad “post-medium” works. The good: those artists who “have embraced the idea of differential specificity, which is to say the medium as such, which they understand they will now have to reinvent or rearticulate.” And the bad: those artists, “now cut free from the guarantees of artistic tradition,” who “engage in the international fashion of installation art and intermedia work, in which art . . . finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.” In other words, Krauss distinguished between media—its bastard forms, its subjugation to the market—and art that reinvents mediums for a critical discourse no longer trained to its logic.

Krauss was adapting modernist criteria to postmodern art production (the cognate of her subtitle and Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition is dispositive here). And this, too, was MoMA’s project in 2006. By reinterpreting media as a medium and absorbing it into the disciplinary logic of the museum, Lowry didn’t so much embrace the post-medium condition at MoMA; he quarantined it. Not until 2019, after a full museum redesign, did the antiformalist logic of media reach his museum; not until then did medium release its hold on the presentation of modern and postmodern art. Indeed, the “New MoMA,” as that overhaul was billed, promised that “contemporary art will join early masterpieces, and we’ll mix mediums—from painting to performance—and ideas.” It’s a new MoMA, finally facing up to a condition that has defined the art world since the advent of mixed, multi- and intermedia art—since, in other words, the consolidation of the media concept itself.

The most ambitious account of that concept’s emergence is John Guillory’s 201“The Genesis of the Media Concept,” which sketches the two-thousand-year “latency of the media concept” from Aristotle to advertising. The concept’s latency, Guillory writes, was “superseded by the era of its ubiquity,” the age of media, or the mid-twentieth century to the present. Vast as it is, however, Guillory’s project does not probe this peculiar historical movement—this supersession—from latency to ubiquity. Instead, his essay takes as a central conceit the preoccupation of art and literary criticism by the concept of representation over and above the concept of media and its theoretical cognates mediation and communication. Like Krauss, Guillory devises a media concept that primarily describes processes and technologies of communication as distinct from “fine art.” (This is what allows him to suggest that literature has a “less conspicuously medial identity” than film.) Unlike Krauss, though, he doesn’t oppose the concept of media to that of artistic mediums; nor does he give the historical distinction hermeneutic value: the media concept’s relation to the fine arts, he suggests, has been unduly “repressed.” This “repression,” he writes, has “tacitly supported the disciplinary division between literary and media studies”—to which we could add the division between art history and media studies too.

But Guillory’s psychological metaphors (latency, repression) elide the material processes by which the media concept was consolidated in the vernacular in the twentieth century, shaping the discursive field in which fine arts were produced and received. Indeed, the “repression” of the “medial identity” of the fine arts is a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, not unrelated to the sudden “ubiquity” of the media concept in that very period. In the same decades that the media concept entered the vernacular, the “medium concept” began to shape art criticism, art history, and museum studies. This was no coincidence: mediums emerged as a category for the organization and appreciation of art as the dialectical counterpart to media and in response to the cultural imperialism of its mass-produced forms. As art became increasingly “public”—available to popular audiences through the technical innovations of film and photography and the generic innovations of midcult, masscult, and kitsch—mediums became the public face of art. Continue reading …

ANNA SHECHTMAN is a PhD Candidate in English Literature and Film and Media Studies at Yale University and a Senior Humanities Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.