Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.
http://www.jstor.org
Antivision
ROSALIND KRAUSS
One turns the pages of Georges Bataille's book on Manet with a mounting
sense of disappointment. Is it really Bataille who is telling us-once again-
that Manet's achievement was the destruction of subject matter so that in its
place, from among its ruins, should arise pure painting-"painting," as he
writes, "for its own a
sake, song for the eyes of interwoven forms and colors"?'
Having turned subject matter into a mere pretext for this release of visual opu-
lence, for this experience of optical autonomy, Bataille can conclude, "I would
stress the fact that what counts in Manet's canvases is not the subject, but the
vibration of light."2
So once again there is the visual model, ineluctably tied to the visual arts.
Of course, modernism's visual model had significantly transformed those of
earlier times. This is true whether we think of the Middle Ages' preaching
model, in which vision, seen as the most vivid and precise of the senses was to
be the conduit through which religious matter could most directly and most en-
duringly affect the soul; or whether we take an empiricist model, with painting
transcribing that mosaic of sensation through which reality announces itself to
a perceiving subject. Modernism transmutes these models according to its
own, altered sense of the task of visuality. To exclude the domain of knowl-
edge, both moral and scientific, to rewrite the visual in the realm of a reflexive
relation to the modality of vision rather than to its contents, to savor in and for
itself qualities like immediacy, vibrancy,simultaneity, effulgenceand to experience
these as qualities without objects -the intransitive verbs of vision, as it were-
all of this is to enter what in quite another mood we might describe as the mod-
ernist fetishization of sight.
1. Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons, Geneva, Skira,
1955, p. 36.
2. Ibid., p. 103. This had, essentially, been the position of the French art historical establish-
ment since the major Manet exhibition of 1932. In Manet et la tradition(1932), Germain Bazain
had announced, "L'art de Manet est en effet un pur pFrobleme de couleur," asserting the artist's
indifference both to invention and to subject matter. Rene Huyghe's Manet peintre(1932) empha-
sized Manet's commitment to a notion of painting as a reflexive process.
148 OCTOBER
But Bataille - and here's the strange part - had begun his career precisely
by buying out of all this.
From the Documentsperiod, that is to say 1929-30, comes a series of texts
dedicated to an entirely different reading of vision's relation to art. We think of
"Rotting Sun," the essay dedicated to Picasso; we turn to the study of auto-
mutilation and the fascination with the sun in "Sacrificial Mutilation and the
Vincent Van
Severed Ear of Vin a Gogh"; orr we reflect on the highly critical review of
PrimitiveArt, a book that sought to extend developmental psychology's theories
of the genesis of representation back to the time of the caves; or again, we find
the brief meditation on the organ of vision in the Documentsdictionary entry
called "Eye," and subtitled "Cannibal Delicacy." In all of these Bataille proposes
a scandalous relation of art to vision.
3. Georges Bataille, "L'art primitif," Oeuvrescompletes, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, pp.
247-54.
150 OCTOBER
the sun, that embodiment of the zenith and of light which for most of mankind
functions to symbolize elevation of both mind and spirit. The sun functions as
the most abstract of objects, Bataille explains, "since it is impossible to look at it
fixedly." But if, he argues, "one obstinately focuses on it, a certain madness is
implied, and the notion changes meaning because it is no longer production
that appears in light, but refuse or combustion. ... In practice the scrutinized
sun can be identified with a mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epilep-
tic crisis.4 It is just such a crisis that tied Van Gogh to the sun, the constant
deity of his painting from the time of Arles and Saint-Remy, the deity to which
he made the sacrifice of his ear.
To stare at the sun is to go mad, to go blind, and thus to perform what
Bataille calls automutilation. But this automutilation by which the body is de-
filed is the very act of mimesis through which one attempts to identify with an
ideal-the sun, the gods-by imitating it. Ancient sacrificial ritual-Bataille
speaks of Mithraic cults in "Rotting Sun," or Aztec ones in "Extinct America"
- as well as modern pathological behavior, fix precisely on that aspect of the
sun or the sun god that embodies waste and destruction: "It is nothing but
radiation, gigantesque loss of heat and light, flame, explosion,"Bataille writes,
calling the sun "this great cataclysm."5 And it is this ideal which in the eyes of
an idealist culture would only be an anti-ideal, this ideal of a nonrecuperable
expenditure, of a supreme power through loss that forms the basis of imitation
when identification with "a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs"
issues, inevitably, in automutilation.6
Within this automutilative act, an identification with the sun that defines
itself as a self-blinding, the circle is squared and the darkness of the cave fuses
with the blaze of noon. The two mythic cycles are the same cycle and have the
same story to tell of representation, of art's depiction of man himself. From the
1937 essay "Van Gogh as Prometheus" comes another image of this fusion of
dark and light. Bataille imagines Van Gogh trying to look directly into the sun
by holding his hand before his face as a screen, or blinder. In such a moment of
both seeing and not-seeing, "Death appeared in a sort of transparency, like the
sun through the blood of a living hand, in the interstices of the bones outlined
in the darkness."7
Representation is born, then, at the limit: where light turns to darkness,
where life surrenders an image of death, where sight is extinguished in a revela-
tory moment which is the same as blindness. And it is this other, nonappropri-
4. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis, University of Min-
nesota Press, 1985, p. 57.
5. Bataille, OC, vol. I, p. 498.
6. Bataille, Visions of Excess, p. 66.
7. Bataille, OC, vol. I, p. 499.
Vincentvan Gogh.The Sower. 1888.
Goya, then, offers a quite different beginning for the history of modern-
ism. Bataille characterizes it as an art of excess,an art that recalls the violence of
the sacred, as opposed to Manet's and dominant modernism's art of absence.We
thus end up with two beginnings that are opposed in character. "He was the
first of the moderns," Bataille insists of Goya, before adding in the very same
sentence, "though Manet alone explicitly inaugurated modern painting."9
The ambivalence that arises in this moment within the description of the
founding moment of modernism is a struggle precisely between the values of
opticality and those of an intensity that is "blinding," "sight-destroying," and in
which representation dares to be neither appropriative nor productive. One
feels in the span of two or three pages the flicker of excitement generated by this
myth of blindness so familiar to Bataille, which breaks through the placid sur-
face of his modernist narrative in a display of regressive, irrational power.
Indeed, the Goya appearance is more than just an account of a false start.
It is the momentary disruption of the official paradigm of centuries of Western
9. Ibid.,p. 56.
Antivision 153
art to which Bataille subscribes throughout the rest of the book. For the whole
of Manet is an exercise in the aesthetic paradigm we associate with the Enlight-
enment and the name of Lessing: the paradigm that differentiates the artistic
genres by means of the modalities of consciousness of reality proper to each,
disassociating an art of time from one of space and thereby grounding each of
the arts in the perceptual field proper to its own experience: speech linked to
temporality and sectioned off by definition from sight, linked to space.
Wholly within this framework, Bataille then repeatedly defines Manet's
contribution as a breaking of rhetoric's grip on painting, as a silencing of
speech in order to discover the preeminence of vision as such.
The interest of the Goya episode as an alternative, in fact contradictory,
beginning is precisely that it challenges the aesthetic paradigm- vision/lan-
guage - through which painting is understood to define itself, by offering a
third term /blindness/ which can be seen as undoing or foiling that paradigm.
Outside the structural law that organizes the arts in relation to the positive con-
tents of sense, blindness-which in its sensory malfunction is precisely the
refusal to appropriate - is an irregular third term, not deducible from the other
two. Following Barthes's description of the operations of Bataille's heterology
we could say, "It is a term that is independent, full, eccentric, irreducible: the
term of a (structurally) lawless seduction."10 Instead, blindness becomes a term
that forms its own pairing with the pole of opticality by constructing another
paradigm - vision/blindness - on the very body of the perceiver, in all of his or
her physical, material existence.
In so doing, the work of the heterological becomes obvious, because it
forces one to see that it was always on, in, and through the body of the
perceiver that the aesthetic paradigm operated; that these operations were
merely sublimated by an idealist subterfuge that wants to describe the work of
art as a function of the disembodied modalities of sense. But Bataille invites the
body to reassert itself into the structural law by which modernism masquerades
painting as the experience for itself of the contentless contents of vision. The
paradigm vision/blindness returns sight to its seat in the affective, erotic ground
of the body, the body convulsed in either autoappropriation or automutilation.
It is only lately that one has learned, in this country, to attend to this
alternative mythological practice, to this construction of a wholly disorienting
and disruptive third term that unravels the neat categories of a too formulaic
modernism. Looking around the edges of Bataille's own circle in the days of
Documentsone finds a group of practices that are as extraordinary as they are
disregarded within the official histories of modernist art. On the one hand there
is the disruptive practice of the early Giacometti as he began to think the body
10. Roland Barthes, "Les sorties du texte," in, Bataille, ed. Philippe Sollers, Paris, 10/18, 1973,
p. 58.
154 OCTOBER
11. See my treatment of this in "No More Play," collected in my, The Originality of the Avant-
Gardeand OtherModernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1985.
12. See my "Corpus Delicti," October,no. 33 (Summer 1985), pp. 31-72.