the useless image bataille, bergson, magritte-suzanne guerlac

8/9/2019 The Useless Image Bataille, Bergson, Magritte-SUZANNE GUERLAC

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The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, MagritteAuthor(s): Suzanne GuerlacSource: Representations, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Winter 2007), pp. 28-56Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2007.97.1.28 .

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SUZANNE GUERLAC

The Useless Image:Bataille, Bergson, Magritte

The Lascaux cave, known as the Sistine Chapel of prehistoricart because of its stunning wall paintings, was discovered, quite fortuitously,in 1940. Opened to the public in 1948, it became the site of serious archae-ological study only in the early 1950s, with work carried out by l’Abbé Breuil,the most celebrated French paleontologist of the time. In 1952 Breuilpublished his monumental Quatre Cent Ans d’art pariétal, in which he devel-oped his thesis concerning the magical power of prehistoric cave paintings,powers he explained in terms of primitive hunting rituals. Three years laterGeorges Bataille published Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art , in which he shiftedBreuil’s interpretation toward a notion of religious transgression.

Bataille frequented the surrealist milieu of André Breton until 1929 when he broke with Breton, violently, and became editor of Documents , acountersurrealist review devoted to questions of avant-garde art and ethno-graphy that he published from 1929 to 1931. In 1937 he helped found theCollège de Sociologie (along with Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, and others),

a project informed by Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion and theethnographic work of Marcel Mauss. Bataille remained fascinated by relations between art and the experience of the sacred, eventually theorizing

what he called the transgression of eroticism as an intimate relation betweeninterdiction and transgression in a study influenced by Caillois’s L’Homme et le sacré and, to a lesser degree, inspired by the work of Rudolf Otto.

By the 1960s, l’Abbé Breuil’s thematic treatment of cave art had beensuperceded by the structuralist approach of André Leroi-Gourhan, who readPaleolithic art in terms of binary structures of signification. With the rise of poststructuralism, however, in the course of the same decade, Bataille’s notion of

transgression became an important philosopheme in France in the context of Tel Quel ’s avant-garde theoretical program. Michel Foucault appealed to it as apost-Hegelian substitute for the dialectic; Jacques Derrida wrote an important essay on the subject; and transgression played a crucial role in Julia Kristeva’s

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A B S T R A C T This paper explores Bataille’s writings on primitive art, specifically his essay on the Lascauxcave, in order to elaborate a notion not of the informe (as contemporary art critics have done), but of the fictivefigural image. It reads this “useless image”—a term borrowed from Bataille—in the work of Magritte throughBergson’s notion of resemblance and the operation of attentive recognition. / R EPRESENTATIONS 97. Winter2007 © 2007 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X,pages 28–56. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.


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The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, Magritte 29

analysis of avant-garde language practices in The Revolution of Poetic Language andin her elaboration of the concept of the abject .1 Together with Derrida’sgrammatological term différance , transgression provided one of the majortheoretical underpinnings for the notions of text and writing central topoststructuralist theory and its challenge to representation. This is why, even inour post-poststructuralist era, it remains a bit shocking to hear Bataille speak of a“sacred moment of figuration” in Lascaux (fig. 1).2 He not only marvels at the

miraculous seductive power of the cave’s animal paintings but also attributes aspecifically transgressive force to these figurative images, contrasting them withthe grotesque depictions of human beings that he labels informe (fig. 2).3

Since the 1980s, Rosalind Krauss has transposed the theoretical terms“writing” and “text” into art-critical discourse in the American context. In1996, together with Yve-Alain Bois, she curated an important exhibit at theCentre Pompidou, L’informe: mode d’emploi , that revived (and displaced)Bataille’s notion of the informe , elaborating it as an important art-critical term.4

Whereas in their exhibition catalogue (published in English as Formless: A

FIGURE 1. Black bull, Lascaux. Reprinted from Georges Bataille, Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art (Lausanne, 1955).


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R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S30

FIGURE 2. Venus of Tursac (Dordogne). Reprinted from Grand, Paule-Marie,Prehistoric Art: Paleolithic Painting and Sculpture (Greenwich, Conn., 1967).

User’s Guide ) Krauss and Bois refer the informe back to Bataille and to hisdiscussion of primitive art, they consistently steer clear of the Lascaux cave.5

In Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art , Bataille puzzles over what he takes to be acertain lack of interest in the prehistoric cave on the part of specialists. Is it, heasks, pudeur that inhibits a return to this “place of our birth”—a fear of regression, perhaps?6 We might ask the same question in a different register

concerning the reluctance of contemporary critics to address Bataille’s text onLascaux. Might there not be some anxiety about theoretical regression, given that Bataille insists here on the magic of figural images? To the extent that theexhibit L’informe: mode d’emploi , and the lively critical discussion that surroundedit, marked a strategic critical intervention in the field of modern art criticism, wecould say that crucial issues of contemporary aesthetics—issues that concern thelimits of modernism, the status of surrealism within the modern canon and thestatus of fictive figural images—can be meaningfully staged in relation toprehistoric sites, specifically the caves of Lascaux and, as we shall see, Gargas.




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I

The “theoretical unity” of modernism, affirms Yve-Alain Bois, hasbeen “constituted through an opposition of formalism and iconology.”7 It

was ostensibly to undercut pat oppositions of this kind that Rosalind Kraussand Yve-Alain Bois elaborated the term informe. The Pompidou exhibition,and the critical term that oriented it, were part of a strategy of “redealingmodernism’s cards” (“To Introduce,” 29). Informe implied a delicate criticalintervention, one that “brushes modernism against the grain,” but without “countering modernism’s formal certainties by means of more reassuringand naive ones of meaning” (“To Introduce,” 25), that is, without fallingback into iconology or figuration. The task of the informe , then, was not only to undermine the excessive formalism of a certain modernism (the“modernist fetishization of sight” associated with Clement Greenberg) but

also to stave off a postmodern impulse that would, in Bois’s words, “bury modernism” and “conduct a manic mourning of it” (“To Introduce,” 29).8

The task of reframing modernism has been ongoing for decades, andthe theorization of the informe was just the latest move in the service of thisproject. Tools borrowed from the French theoretical context—semiologicaland grammatological tools—had been turned successfully against modernist formalism. But now, faced with a challenge from another quarter—frompostmodernism—it became necessary to disarm the other term of theopposition, iconology, whose immanent return postmodernism threatened.To this end Krauss and Bois turned to Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject

and displaced it in the discourse of the informe . Through a structuralinterpretation of the base materialism of the early Bataille, which Kristevaarticulated with the psychoanalytic concept of primary repression, theFrench theorist had invented a category of the abject that seemed to slippast ready-made oppositions (such as between the imaginary and thesymbolic) and even to suggest a way into the difficult Lacanian territory of the real . In the notion of the informe Krauss and Bois found a way to think“the concept of the abject ‘operationally’—independently of a thematics of trauma, of mourning, of melancholy—i.e., independent of attachment to asubject, and to meaning” (“To Introduce,” 25). The informe , in other words,

would do the work of the abject in the visual field without falling intoiconology. This is what is at stake when Yve-Alain Bois insists that the informe is an operation, not a theme, and explicates this operation with reference toBataille’s discussion of alteration in an essay on primitive art published in1930, a book review of G.-H. Luquet’s L’Art primitif.9

Bataille turned to Luquet for an explanation of the puzzling contrast between the two kinds of primitive art already mentioned—the painted“well-formed images” that resemble animals, on the one hand; and the




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deformed, abstract, sculptural renderings of human beings on the other.10

What is the difference in meaning between these two distinct kinds of art, heasked? If primitive artists could paint animals so convincingly (indeedNorbert Aujoulat admires the “uncommon mastery of motion and

perspective” of Lascaux’s cave paintings, as well as their precision of detail) why did they not produce comparable images of themselves?11

In order to account for certain aberrant features of primitive art, Luquet had introduced a distinction between “visual realism” and “intellectualrealism.”12 The former is mimetic, whereas the latter presents things as weknow them to be, not as they appear to us (a profile rendering of a person

with two ears would be an example of intellectual realism). Luquet associatesintellectual realism with children’s drawings and suggests that primitivehumans, like children, pass through this phase before advancing to visualrealism. Not only does Bataille object to the comparison of primitives to

children, he finds Luquet’s theory inadequate to the question that concernshim, namely, why there would have been such a great difference in the cavesbetween the visual treatment of animals on the one hand and of humans onthe other.

Bataille proposes another approach, one he derives from observationsLuquet had made concerning the origin of figuration in the graffitilikedrawing activity of children who love to dip their fingers in mud or paint andrun them along a wall, taking a kind of instinctual pleasure in markingthings up and destroying the surfaces around them. Bataille suggests that the deformation of the human form in the abstract anthropoid figures (theones he calls informe ) could be attributed to an operation of alteration,characterized as an innate instinctual desire to deface or deform materials,surfaces, or objects. This process involves the following steps: First, randomscribbling or tears attack a given surface or support in a kind of instinctualgesture. Second, a virtual object is discerned through imaginative projectioninto these random markings. Finally, in a third dialectical moment, this

virtual figure is altered, or defaced, in turn. It is in reference to thissequence that Krauss will write: “Informe denotes what alteration produces.”13

And it is on this basis that Krauss and Bois will define the informe as an

operation that yields “the disintegration rather than the creation of form.”14

But they move too quickly when they reduce alteration to this operationand proceed to identify it with transgression. For, on Bataille’s account,alteration also includes a second moment. Speaking of alteration, Bataillecontinues,

Another outcome is possible for the figured representation from the moment that theimagination substitutes a new object for the support that has been destroyed . . . it ispossible, through repetition, to subject it to a progressive appropriation in relation tothe represented original. In this way one passes, quite rapidly, from an approximate





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(informe/conforme) corresponds with the dual operation of the sacred that requires interplay between interdiction and transgression.

Bataille does not explicitly theorize the notion of transgression untilL’Erotisme (1957), published two years after “Lascaux.” However, an earlier

version of this study, “L’Histoire de l’érotisme” (whose composition coin-cides with that of the essay on Lascaux) presents an account of the dualoperation transgression/interdiction that parallels the story Bataille tellsabout the birth of art in “Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art.”20 In “L’Histoirede l’érotisme,” we find interdiction/transgression written into a narrativethat concerns the origins and ends of history. In his famous public lectures(which Bataille attended) Alexandre Kojève had interpreted G. W. F. Hegel tosay that history is the dialectical development of the self-creation of man, adevelopment he presented as a negation of the givens of nature. “L’Histoirede l’érotisme” presents an eminently dialectical account of the relationship

between interdiction and transgression that follows the lines of Kojève’snarrative of history, which goes like this: (1) history is founded as thenegation of nature; this is the moment of interdiction that framesthe experience of culture. (2) This cultural world, which now coincides withthe horizon of the given, impinges on the autonomy of the subject. (3) Thesubject revolts against this limitation in a gesture of transgression that negates this new horizon of culture. Transgression, as a negation of interdiction, marks a dialectical return to the initial horizon of nature—only this time in a mode of desire . This is the “double movement of negation andreturn” that Bataille also calls the “reversal of alliances” in his discussion of

the sacred.21 It corresponds to the affective rhythm of the sacred presentedthrough the figure of the dance in L’Erotisme , a movement anticipated by the“drunken dance” evoked for Bataille by the animal images on the walls of Lascaux.22

When Bataille presents the origin of art as a passage from beast to manin “Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art,” the dialectical narrative of relationsbetween interdiction and transgression comes into play. The act of makingart implies a passage from nature to culture; it coincides with the moment of interdiction as theorized in “L’Histoire de l’érotisme.” Transgression occurs

through the evocation of the animal world that is left behind in this passageby means of painted figural images that seem to address us. It occurs for thespectator who experiences a return to the world of nature in a mode of desire (a transgression of interdiction), and who, upon viewing theseimages, is transported, making a correlative “passage from the world of workto the world of play.”23 The human being who views these cave imagesbecomes a religious animal when addressed by this primitive art.24 This is themoment of transgression, and it occurs thanks to the powerful way in which





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the figurative images address the viewer across an immense expanse of time(fig. 3).

Figuration produces an experience of the sacred here because ourencounter with it is “catastrophic.” Catastrophe is above all a temporalstructure for Bataille, one that interrupts linear time.25 In the Lascaux cave,the figural image addresses us from the depths of time, performing its“endless survival” until it reaches us. It is through this address that the

primitive “beast” becomes an artist, entering into history and culture. Thenegation of the order of nature (of prehistoric man as beast) occursthrough this address by the figural image. At the same time, figurationmarks a return: “They returned to this world of the savagery [sauvagerie ] of the night . . . they figured it with fervor, in anxiety,” Bataille writes of thesefirst artists.26 The images that we recognize let us feel the transgressive joy of the primitive man/beast that Bataille associates with play and opposes to theutilitarian cultural economy established through interdiction.


FIGURE 3. Third Chinese horse, Lascaux. Reprinted from Georges Bataille,Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art (Lausanne, 1955).




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For Bataille, the informe anthropoid objects found in the cave are part of this story. They signify a refusal by the artists of Lascaux to depict thehuman form that Bataille interprets as a negation of the passage fromnature to culture (or from beast to man); they signify the negation of

interdiction associated with transgression. Considered in light of theprestige of the animal paintings, they communicate a desire for(dialectical) return to the savage night of nature. To this extent they participate in the narrative of transgression that implies a return to naturein a mode of transgressive desire according to the (pseudo-) dialecticallogic presented in “L’Histoire de l’érotisme.”

If the Lascaux paintings are stupefying because of what they show usand the desire they evoke in us, they are equally important to Bataille for

what they do not show. In this cave, Bataille writes, we are overwhelmed by the “useless figuration of these signs that seduce.” These extraordinary

images, then, are useless figures. First (departing from the theory of Breuil), Bataille claims they are useless because they were created fromdesire, not for some instrumental (or ritual) purpose; this is what makesthem art. In the second place these images are useless because they do not tell us what we want to know. We want to see a portrait of the artist as aremote reflection of ourselves at the point of our own origin, to know what the primitive human looked like when, making art, s/he became like us.Instead, Bataille writes, we are given masks, masks that evoke the animal

world primitive man is on the point of leaving through the act of making art (fig. 4).

Last but not least, there is a theoretical sense in which it is meaningfulto speak of useless images here. For, according to Bataille’s theory of alteration, the figures that emerge to be either deformed or brought intoform—rendered informe or de plus en plus conforme— are, as we have seen,

virtual figures—images of pure invention. They are images fortuites , asBataille put it in “L’Art primitif,” images that arrive as if by accident.27

Alteration involves the projection of spontaneously generated mentalimages, which, when actualized or given form, offer no certainty, noknowledge, and no truth.

II

Bataille’s enthusiasm for the “sacred moment of figuration” inLascaux is scandalous for modernist critics committed to the “disintegrationrather than the creation of form.”28 But the notion of the useless image,

which we borrow from Bataille’s essay on the cave, suggests a way to theorizefigural art outside the celebrated opposition between formalism and





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iconography. In particular, it provides a way of thinking about surrealist images, fictive figures that are not representational.

We might take as a point of departure a painter generally excluded fromthe modernist canon: René Magritte. Magritte was an abstract painter until1925, by which time he had discovered the early work of Giorgio De Chiricoand come to feel that “abstract paintings reveal only abstract painting, andabsolutely nothing else.”29 He had also come to believe that the full

potential of abstraction had already been realized in the early work of Piet Mondrian. Abstraction, from his point of view, was over. Having abandonedit, however, Magritte became marginalized within the history of modern art.Labeled realist, his work was accused of being retrograde, banal, and, worse

yet, unpainterly.Rosalind Krauss, for example, contrasts the “dry realism” of Magritte with

the “abstract liquefaction” of Joan Miró, an artist she claims for the informe ina brilliant analysis in another context.30 This opposition is telling, in that it


FIGURE 4. Fourth bull, Lascaux. Reprinted from Georges Bataille, Lascaux; or, The

Birth of Art (Lausanne, 1955).




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demonstrates how easily the informe itself can be recuperated by one term of the fundamental opposition that it was meant to displace, one we can now rephrase as an opposition between formalist abstraction and realism.

In his celebrated early-1970s essay Ceci n’est pas une Pipe Foucault

attempted to clear Magritte’s name of the charge of realism. He succeeded,provisionally, but only at the price of significant misunderstanding and in an argu-ment that leaves the opposition formalism/iconography (or abstraction/figuration) intact. Indeed, he took a version of that opposition—reading

versus looking—as his point of departure.Foucault argued that Magritte’s paintings were fundamentally con-

cerned with operations of signification, not visual representation. Magritte was not interested in visual resemblance, but rather in similitude, a termFoucault defined according to a textual paradigm. Whereas resemblance“serves representation,” Foucault wrote, similitude “develops in series that

have no beginning and no end, that one can run through [ parcourir ] in onedirection or the other, that obey no hierarchy, but propagate themselves fromsmall differences to small differences.”31 Foucault affirms that similitude(conceived on the grammatological model of différance or the Barthesianmodel of texte scriptible ) is privileged over resemblance in Magritte’s work.32

Similitude, he insists, introduces a reading function (a differential movement)that triumphs over resemblance, defined as a looking function and identified

with representation—or, as Krauss put it more bluntly, dry realism. In effect,Foucault’s analysis brings Magritte over to the side of writing, which, as weknow, contests representation. (Krauss will make a comparable gesture for

surrealist photography, as we shall see, a decade later.)33The Fata Morgana edition of Ceci n’est pas une Pipe includes two short

letters from Magritte to the already celebrated French philosopher in whichthe painter attempts to clarify his use of the terms “resemblance” and“similitude.” Not only do these letters call attention to erroneous assump-tions made by Foucault, they alert us to the importance of the term“resemblance” for Magritte, and to the fact that the painter used this term ina radically unconventional way. Six years after Foucault’s essay, Flammarionpublished a hefty volume of the collected writings of Magritte that reveals

how absolutely central the notion of resemblance was to his conception of painting, and how radically Magritte’s understanding of the term differs fromthe one Foucault attributed to him. “The art of painting,” Magritte writes

—that really should be called the art of resemblance—makes it possible todescribe, through painting, a thought capable of becoming visible. This thought in-cludes only figures that the world offers: people, curtains, weapons, stars, solids, in-scriptions, etc. Resemblance spontaneously reunites these figures in an order that directly evokes mystery.34





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For Magritte, then, painting is fundamentally an art of resemblance. But resemblance does not imply a mimetic relation between an image and a model.It is an act of visual thought. “The images I paint,” he writes, “show nothingexcept what I have thought” ( Ecrits , 689).35 Painting does not give us an image

that resembles the world; it materializes, or embodies in paint, a visual mentalact—an act of resemblance. It renders this act visible as if by “photographicrecording [enregistrement photographique ].” Here Magritte meets up with Breton

who defined surrealist automatism as a “photography of thought.”36

Resemblance, for Magritte, involves the visual thought of an affinity between two images that do not look alike. The painter recounts, forexample, the night he slept in a room where someone had placed a bird in acage. “A magnificent error,” he writes, “made me see the bird absent [disparu ]from the cage and replaced by an egg. I had discovered an astonishing new poetic secret” ( Ecrits , 110).37 What has happened? Magritte sees something

that is not there (the egg) in a particularly revealing relation to what is thereto be seen (the cage). The bird, really there, has disappeared from view,hidden by the image of the egg. The visual shock Magritte enjoyed, he

writes, was caused “by the affinity of two objects” (110), in this instance thecage and the egg (fig. 5).

Henceforth Magritte would seek out such visual experiences of affinity.He would set himself thought problems to be solved visually, either throughan automatic drawing practice, or, exceptionally, by direct visual inspiration(fig. 6).38 Each problem, he writes, involves three terms: “the object, thething attached to it in the shadows of my mind, and the light in which this

thing should appear [devait parvenir ]” ( Ecrits , 111). This elusive third termis crucial to the articulation of the other two. It is precisely this act of synthesis that Magritte calls “resemblance” and characterizes as an activity of inspired thought.

“An unknown image from the shadows is called forth by an image knownin the light [une image connue de la lumière ],” Magritte writes ( Ecrits , 335) (fig. 7).The phrase sounds like a nod to Marcel Proust, and it may well be, but it alsoevokes Henri Bergson’s discussion of relations between memory andperception in Matière et mémoire . Here we come across a notion of

resemblance that informs Magritte’s theory of painting, as well as the moregeneral notion of the useless image I am attempting to elaborate here.Bergson argues that since perception occurs in time it requires the

support, or relay, of memory in order to function at all.

Your perception, as instantaneous as it may be, consists therefore in an incalculablemultitude of memory fragments [éléments remémorés ] and, in truth, all perception isalready memory. Actually, we perceive nothing but the past, the pure present beingthe elusive [insaissable ] progress of the past gnawing away at the future.39





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Perception, according to Bergson, involves a “perceptual shock [ébranlement perceptif ]” that functions to “imprint on the body a certain attitude in which memories will insert themselves . . . the present percep-tion willalways seek, in the depths of memory, the image [souvenir ] of the anteriorperception that it resembles” (Matière , 112).40 This is the phrase that

returns, only slightly altered, in Magritte’s sentence: “An unknown imagefrom the shadows is called forth by an image known in the light”( Ecrits , 335).

Bergson calls the operation that articulates the incoming sense data of perception with memory images “attentive recognition” (Matière , 107). Hesays that the incoming sense experience, imprinted on the body, calls tomemory, which then spontaneously generates memory images to match (oranswer) the rough contours of perceptual experience. On Bergson’s theory

various mental planes are available to furnish memory images. There are,

FIGURE 5. René Magritte, “Les Affinités Electives [Elective Affinities],” 1930.Copyright © 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York.




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for example, the “memories that follow immediately upon . . . perception, of which they are but the echo” (Matière , 112). These provide useful memory images that contribute directly to the act of perception and to the cognitiveconstruction of the object at hand.41 These shallow memory images appear

similar to the incoming sense data of perception. They are as if “photographed from the object itself” (Matière , 112). But more disparatememory images come into play as well, images associated with various fea-tures of the specific context into which past experiences are embedded inour memory through relations of similarity and contiguity. “Behind theseimages identical to the object,” writes Bergson, “there are others, stored inmemory, and that simply have resemblance to the object” (Matière , 112–13).There are still others, he adds, “that only have a more or less distant kinship[ parenté ]” (Matière , 112) with the incoming sense data. In other words, the


FIGURE 6. René Magritte, “La Main Heureuse [The Happy Hand],” 1953.

Copyright © 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.




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shallowest memories, and those that will directly participate in the percep-tion of the object at hand, yield images similar to the object of perception.But others—deeper memories that carry more contextual detail, morespecific features of the concrete singularity of the past experience—may linkto the sense data in a mode of resemblance that does not imply visual

similarity at all, but merely some sort of generic affinity.

42

Bergson defines perception in terms of action, not representation.43

This point is fundamental. Perception does not match, or represent,external objects; it filters from the complexity of the real only those featurespertinent to its pragmatic interests. Perception, for Bergson, is always lessthan the real. Poised for action, memory contracts; the mind tenses up andsharpens its focus, as if to cut through the real like a knife blade at the point of incipient action.44 Bergson provides a schematic drawing of an invertedcone to show us what he calls the “two extreme planes of mental life . . . the

FIGURE 7. René Magritte, “Les Vacances de Hegel [Hegel’s Vacation],” 1958.Copyright © 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York.




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It is in this sense, then, that Bergson could be said to provide thephilosophical ground for Magritte’s conception of painting, and for what I amcalling, after Bataille, the useless image. This broader play of affinity betweenimages, which Bergson characterizes through the word “resemblance”—one

that moves beyond mere similarity of appearance and does not depend on theratio of any analogy—is what I take Magritte to have in mind when he definespainting as an art of resemblance. Magritte’s “visual thought [la pensée qui voit ]” ( Ecrits , 377) can be glossed in relation to Bergson’s “vision of memory”(Matière , 173). It is through a richer contact with memory that the uselessimage comes into play, and with it what Magritte calls “the beauty of what isneither meaning [sens ] nor nonsense [nonsens ]” ( Ecrits , 549). This is thebeauty of art that escapes the grip of either formalism or iconology—thebeauty, we could say, of the useless image (fig. 9).


FIGURE 8. René Magritte, “Dieu n’est pas un Saint [God Is Not a Saint],” 1935.Copyright © 2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York.




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III

If there is one position on which Rosalind Krauss and Clement Greenberg could be said to agree, it is the rejection of surrealist painting.

When, in a move against Greenberg, Krauss champions surrealism, shedoes so in the domain of photography, in a reading that performs what

Krauss calls a “relocation of photography from its eccentric position relativeto surrealism to one that is absolutely central—definitive one might say.”46

We could say that Krauss has done the same for surrealism, shifting it froman eccentric position relative to modern art to a central one.47

The Optical Unconscious (1993), which contests Greenbergian mod-ernism, and traces an alternative path through modern art that is orientedby the informe , starts in the surrealist context with the photo collages of Max Ernst and proceeds to engage with Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso,

FIGURE 9. René Magritte, “Les Fanatiques [The Fanatics],” 1945. Copyright ©2006 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.




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and Jackson Pollock. This gesture cuts two ways. On the one hand it counters Greenberg, for whom surrealism was anathema. On the other, it radically rereads surrealism, skirting the issue of surrealist painting almost entirely, and drawing surrealism back toward the practices of Dada.48

Through the perspective opened up by the informe , the analysis in theOptical Unconscious pursues the critic’s earlier reading of surrealist photogra-phy, where a semiological analysis enables her to circumvent issues of iconol-ogy almost entirely.

“Photography,” she has written,

belongs to that group of signs set off semiologically by the name index. It is the char-acter of the index, indeed, to mark the spot, since it is the one type of sign that is theresult of a physical cause, unlike the icon, a sign that relates to its referent throughthe axis of resemblance . . . the index has an existential connection to meaning, withthe result that it can only take place on the spot.49

The photograph does not engage with representational meaning, since it isproduced by a trace of the object that imprints itself directly by chemicalmeans. It functions not as an icon but as an index (terms borrowed fromthe semiology of Charles Sanders Peirce).

In The Optical Unconscious , Krauss implicitly inscribes her analysis of theindex in an art-historical narrative through reference to the readymade. Not only does she move from Max Ernst to Duchamp (in a displacement fromsurrealism to Dada) she reads Ernst through the Duchampian term“readymade,” thereby capturing surrealism for the trajectory of the informe that, in the end (with Jackson Pollock), meets up with the conventional story of modernism.

Max Ernst composed his photo collages from a stock of preexistingimages (photographic or print material), often taken from commercialcatalogues. Krauss not only associates this practice with the Duchampianreadymade but also attributes this association to André Breton. “The termBreton had originally used for this element,” she writes, “is the far moresuggestive word ‘readymade,’ as, in his text for the 1921 exhibition at AuSans Pareil, he notes that the collages are built on grounds constituted by ‘the readymade images of objects,’ adding parenthetically ‘(as in catalogue

figures).’”50

Krauss then extends this analysis to affirm surrealism’sengagement with “a model based . . . on the conditions of the readymade,conditions that produce an altogether different kind of scene from that of modernism’s,” one that implies a “structure of vision and its ceaseless returnto the already-known.”51 This is the horizon of the optical unconscious that Krauss will analyze with reference to Freud and Jacques Lacan, challengingthe sublimating opticality of Clement Greenberg, through an appeal to theLacanian notion of the real.




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Two comments are in order. First, in the passage from Breton just cited,Breton is not describing Ernst’s collages.52 He is critiquing art that tries tosignify in new ways (like cubism and the symbolist poetry of StéphaneMallarmé) instead of working with what is given and rearranging it, as Ernst

does (and as Lautréamont had done before him, in the literary field, inPoésies ).53 What is essential, from Breton’s point of view, is not the readymade(in Duchamp’s sense) but the act of redistributing given terms (words orimages) “in whatever order we please.”54 For Breton, this is how thesurrealist practice of automatism yields the image. When Rosalind Krausstranslates Breton’s images toutes faites (which I have translated elsewhere as“given images”) as “readymade,” what is evacuated is precisely the wordimage and, beyond that, the image itself —the light of the image , as Bretonmight say.55 What is at stake in the substitution of the readymade for thesurrealist image is precisely the allusion to Duchamp, who not only

abandoned abstract painting (like Magritte) but abandoned paintingaltogether, and for whom, in his own words, “the choice of the readymade[was] always based on visual indifference.”56

“Surrealist photographers,” Krauss has written, “were masters of theinforme.”57 Both photography and the readymade enjoy a privilegedconnection with the real associated with the structure of the index.58 Thanksto this structure, both are “independent of any imaginative manipulation,”

which is to say, free of meaning or iconography; “as paradoxical as it might seem,” Krauss writes, “photography has been an operative model forabstraction.”59 The gesture of “brush[ing] modernism against the grain,”

oriented by the critical construct of the informe , ends with abstraction,having successfully evicted the image from surrealism and displacedsurrealism toward Dada. Krauss ends her story with Jackson Pollock (andEva Hesse’s sculptural allusions to his work), arriving, when all is said anddone, not so far from Greenberg’s modernism after all.

IV

In many of the caves, but particularly those at Gargas, the paleolithic paintings in-clude palm prints that were made, twenty millennia ago, by placing an outstretchedhand against the wall and blowing pigment onto the exposed surface to create theimage in negative. The image is a residue of its maker. No matter how simply, Ileave my trace. . . .

Displaced from a Golden Age Greece to the dawn of humanity, the birth of art never seemed, therefore, to require a break with the myth of Narcissus. If themimetic urge led to the depiction of mammoth and horse and bison, it even moresurely required the reflection of the artist himself.60




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Given the theoretical authority of Bataille for the critical project of the informe , and the importance, in this context, of Bataille’s discussion of primitive art, Krauss had to return to the question of cave art in The Optical Unconscious . She also had to avoid Lascaux, with its proliferation of powerfully affecting figurative images, at all costs. Her solution is to change caves.Instead of entering Lascaux, a site renowned for its proliferation of dazzlingfigural images, she brings us to Gargas, a cave celebrated (as the Gargas Website attests) for its hundreds of mysterious handprints (fig. 10).61 These areimages Krauss characterizes as having been quite literally “stenciled off the

world itself,” as she has written of the photograph.62 The palm prints of Gargas place the index at the very origin of art. The substitution of Gargasfor Lascaux parallels the displacement already noted from Breton toDuchamp. It is consistent with a story that takes us from the indexical markof the palm print, to the indexical structure of surrealist photography,through the readymade, to modernist abstraction. The move from Lascaux


FIGURE 10. Gargas, hand prints. Reprinted from André Leroi-Gourhan, The Dawn of European Art (New York, 1982).




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to Gargas enables contemporary theorists of the informe to evacuate the issueof fictive figuration, which is central to the art practices of Breton, MaxErnst, and Magritte and to new media art today. The issue played out at theprehistoric scene therefore, is the fate of what I have called, after Bataille,

the useless image.Modernism, Krauss writes, “imagines two orders of the figure”:

The first is that of empirical vision, the object as it is “seen,” . . . the object modernismspurns. The second is that of the formal conditions of the possibility for vision itself,the level at which “pure” form operates as a principle of coordination, unity, structure: visible but unseen. That is the level modernism wants to chart, to capture, to master.But there is a third order of the figure . . . an order that works entirely underground,out of sight.63

On this account, the first order of the figure implies realism, the second

implies Greenbergian formalism, and the third the order of the informe asdestruction of form and return to the real. I am proposing yet anotherorder of the figure: the useless image. It is neither iconic (the object seen)nor abstract; it is not even informe . Magritte elaborates it through a notionof resemblance that refers us not to Peirce, but to Bergson.

If the index marks the spot, as Krauss has so aptly put it, the questionremains: where is the spot in a photography of thought ?64 Where, in other

words, is thought? This is a question that prompted Bergson to write Matière et mémoire and to displace entirely the question of the relation between body and mind through memory that traverses them both.65 Photography was a

central preoccupation of surrealism, but it preoccupied the surrealists, moreoften than not, as a problem . When Max Ernst took already given photo-graphic or engraved images as the point of departure for his photo collages,gluing them together in improbable juxtapositions, he then photographedhis collages to hide the seams of his cuts and designated the photographiccopy as the original work. In so doing he was certainly not using photogra-phy in view of its indexical value, its status as imprint or “footprint.”66 He wasusing it, quite precisely, to cover his tracks, imagina-tively manipulatingphotography to yield the appearance of a seamless fiction, one “with nosystem of reference,” as Breton observed with delight, capable of “estrangingus back into our memory.”67 Magritte, who was fasci-nated with bothphotography and film, speaks of the need to overcome the objectivity of photography, something he undertakes to do precisely by extending thecitational practices of Ernst’s photo collages into a field of pure invention:painting. He produces what Ernst referred to as “collages painted entirely by hand.”68 Surrealism problematizes the index, then, specifically at the point

where Magritte’s art of resemblance meets Breton’s definition of surrealist automatism as a photography of thought .69 From Breton through Ernst and





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Magritte this metaphor deepens and develops its specificity. Magritte extendsErnst’s metaphotographical maneuvers, completely breaking the indexicalrelation of the photograph, while miming it.

Krauss and Bois ostensibly intended the informe to undercut [déclasser ]

oppositions between modernism and postmodernism, thereby disabling thepostmodern attempt to “bury” modernism. As soon as one takes intoaccount figures such as Magritte, however, we see that the informe serves toshore up modernism through a series of repositionings that shield what emerges as the first principle of modernism: the refusal of iconology. Thedefense against the figural image, so vehemently waged by Greenberg,prevails.

If alternative modernisms are in order today, it is not so much because of an aesthetic challenge posed by postmodernism as it is a result of thechallenge new technologies pose. Digital images have already displaced

photography from the ground of “photochemical form[s] of causality.”70

One could argue that what Breton saw in the photo collages of Ernst was astep in this direction. Magritte, who paints his collages entirely by hand,reveals that the index has no ground to stand on. This is what Magritteunderstood by the dépassement [overcoming] of the objectivity of photog-raphy by painting, which, as an art of resemblance, not only invokes memory but also embodies virtual images in paint.

The notion of the useless image (and the constellation of figures it designates—Breton, Magritte, de Chirico, Ernst) strikes me as especially pertinent today, when structures of representation are being called into

question technologically in ways that suggest a dépassement of the problem of abstraction altogether. In the information age the image per se may be on its

way to becoming useless. As Mark Hansen has convincingly argued, today the image is not given, it is actualized. New media works emphasize theactualization, or embodiment, of images through interaction with thespectator in an information field.71 As Friedrich Kittler put it, digital dataexist “unencumbered by a need to adapt to the constraints of humanperceptual ratios.”72 Today, on a model much more similar to Bergson’soperation of attentive recognition than to structures of either abstraction or

representation (either formalism or iconography), it is a question of therealization or embodiment of virtual images.This is precisely the path we have opened up through Bataille’s

discussion of the “sacred moment of figuration” in Lascaux (fig. 11) and of the “useless figuration” of these seductive images, which we have consideredin light of the moment of alteration that has been repressed by contemporary critics—the gesture of bringing into form. We have followedit to Magritte, where painting, as an art of resemblance, is an embodiment of

virtual images, images of visual thought. What links the two is Bergson,




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whose theory of attentive recognition proposes that even perceptualinformation needs the supplement of a memory image in order to comeinto being, just as the memory image needs the solicitation of perceptualdata (its life or chaleur ) to prompt the spontaneous actualization of thememory image from the virtual storehouse of pure memory.

We began, then, with the useless image in its proximity to the informe, infull support of the gesture of “redealing the cards” of modernism. But to

redeal effectively, we must start with a full deck. We cannot limit the processof alteration only to the informe (in the limited sense invoked by Krauss andBois) or we will be locked within the modernist opposition formalism/iconography (or abstraction/figuration), unable to fully appreciate thecritical and aesthetic force of surrealism. We must also include the operationthat brings into form , that actualizes or embodies images, associated with what I am calling, after Bataille, the useless image. This is the fictive figural imagethat occurs outside the framework of representation, yielding, as Magritteput it, “the beauty of what is neither sense nor nonsense” ( Ecrits , 549).


FIGURE 11. Rotunda bull, Lascaux. Reprinted from Leroi-Gourhan, Dawn of European Art.




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Notes

I would like to thank the editorial board of Representations for their careful

reading of my work and helpful editorial suggestions.1. Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” Critique 195–96 (1963); JacquesDerrida, “De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale, Un hegelianismesans reserve,” in L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris, 1967), trans. as Writing and Dif-

ference by Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978); Julia Kristeva, The Revolution of Poetic Lan- guage , trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984), and Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection , trans. Léon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982).

2. Georges Bataille, “Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art,” in Oeuvres complètes , 12 vols.(Paris, 1970), 9:63. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

3. These consist of “inhuman” depictions of human figures or statues of mostly feminine figures that Bataille describes as “hidden from human appearance[dérobées à l’apparence humaine ]” (ibid., 72). He refers to them as “informe ” (65).

4. That same year, in a pendulum swing away from André Leroi-Gourhan’s struc-turalist paleontology, a new version of l’Abbé Breuil’s shamanistic interpreta-tion of cave art was affirmed by two anthropologists working in collaboration,David Lewis-Williams, an expert in southern African shamanistic art, and JeanClottes, an expert in European Paleolithic cave art. See Jean Clottes and DavidLewis-Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves ,trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York, 1996). One can only imagine how this workmight have fascinated Bataille.

5. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York,1997).

6. Bataille, “Lascaux,” 43.

7. Yve-Alain Bois, “To Introduce a User’s Guide,” October 78 (Fall 1996): 29. Subse-quent references to this work will be given in the text in parenthesis. On thequestion of the informe see also Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris, 1995).

8. Greenberg’s “modernist fetishization of sight” is cited in Rosalind Krauss, “An-tivision,” October 36 (Spring 1986): 147.

9. This operation also implies a specific set of gestures such as horizontality,pulse, entropy, and base materialism. Georges Bataille’s “L’Art primitif,” inOeuvres complètes (Paris, 1970), vol. 1, was first published in Documents 7, deux-ième année (1930): 389–97. In a preceding issue, Documents had published adictionary entry for the word “informe ,” defining it as “a term used to declassify”

(cited in ibid., 217).10. Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” 253.11. Norbert Aujoulat, Lascaux: Movement, Space, and Time (New York, 2005), 221.12. This was a distinction introduced by Heinrich Schaeffer in 1919 in Principles of

Egyptian Art (recently reprinted; Oxford, 1986).13. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

(Cambridge, 1985), 64.14. Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” October 33 (Summer 1985): 43.15. Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” 253. G.-H. Luquet’s account of figuration in primitive

art, and Bataille’s theorization of the figural moment of alteration, meet up in





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the surrealist practice of automatism. See Breton’s essay on Max Ernst (AndréBreton, “Max Ernst,” in Oeuvres complètes [Paris, 1988], and Max Ernst’s Beyond Painting (New York, 1948). Ernst writes of “reproducing only that which saw it-self in me” in his photo collages, and of obtaining “a faithful image of my hal-lucination”; cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics (Palo Alto, 1997), 130.

He also refers to the celebrated “lesson of Leonardo,” the pedagogical exerciseLeonardo reputedly required of his students, namely, that they stare at a blank wall until they began to discern figures there that they must then go on to ren-der (130 n. 15), and which resembles the figural operation of alteration.

16. Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” 249.17. In The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), Rosalind Krauss acknowl-

edges that “it is because of its wonderful ambivalence that Bataille likes the word alteration ” and that it leads “simultaneously downward and upward”(152), but she says nothing about the fact that figuration belongs to the struc-ture of alteration in Bataille.

18. Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” 251. A note refers to Rudolf Otto’s Le Sacré , publishedin English as The Idea of the Holy (Oxford, 1923). Otto’s study, which emphasizesambivalent subjective response in the experience of the sacred (attraction andrepulsion), anticipates important features of Bataille’s account of transgressionin L’Erotisme (Paris, 1957).

19. “We will limit ourselves for the moment to affirming that such a change hastaken place from the time of the Aurignacian with respect to the representa-tion of animals and with respect to the representation of human beings”(Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” 253).

20. Cf. Georges Bataille, “L’Histoire de l’érotisme,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris,1970), 8:9–165. Some versions of these essays go back as early as 1939. Most were written during 1950–51. Likewise, two versions of the Lascaux study werepublished before 1955 in Critique (see Bataille, Oeuvres complètes , 9:420).

21. Bataille, Oeuvres complètes , 8:66. Bataille calls this study an “erotic phenomenology”(524) and situates it in relation to Alexandre Kojève. He also writes: “Eroticismis essentially, from the first step, the scandal of the ‘reversal of alliances’”(Oeuvres complètes , 7:81).

22. Bataille, “Lascaux,” 81, and L’Erotisme , 68–69.23. Bataille, “Lascaux,” 28.24. Bataille, “L’Histoire de l’érotisme,” 39–41.25. See Georges Bataille, “Sacrifices,” in Oeuvres complètes , 1:94–96. Bataille speaks

here of “the catastrophe of time” and of “the problem, of the being of time”(95). In “Lascaux” he writes: “Could we miss the fact, that, entering thegrotto . . . we are, deep in the ground, in some way lost [égarés ] ‘à la recherche du temps perdu ’?” (43).

26. Bataille, “Lascaux,” 63.27. Bataille, “L’Art primitif,” 249.28. Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” 43. In another essay Krauss identifies informe with

deconstruction (“No More Play,” in Originality of the Avant-Garde, 99). See my discussion of relations between art criticism and French theory in “La trans-gression et le rêve de la théorie,” in De “Tel Quel” à “l’Infini,” l’avant-garde et après ? ed. Philippe Forest (Paris, 1999), 79–95.

29. René Magritte to André Bosmans, August 1959, published in Harry Torczyner’sMagritte, Ideas and Images , trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1977), 65.




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30. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde , 91; “Michel, Bataille, et Moi,” October 68(Spring 1994).

31. Michel Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une Pipe (Paris, 1973), 61. The title refers to aseries of paintings by Magritte that includes “La Trahison des Images,” where we read the words “ceci n’est pas une pipe” painted beneath the painted image

of a pipe (which justifies his opposition between reading and looking).32. Foucault speaks of the “privilege of similitude over resemblance” (ibid., 65),and again of “breaking down the fortress in which similitude was held prisonerto the affirmation of resemblance” (71).

33. See Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in Originality of the Avant-Garde . The chapter concludes with this statement: “But it is my thesisthat . . . [with surrealist photography] reality was both extended and replacedor supplemented by that master supplement which is writing: the paradoxical writing of the photograph” (118).

34. René Magritte, Ecrits complets (Paris, 1979), 518.35. I would like to stress the distinction between what Magritte calls visual thought

and something like opticality. “Vision is not just physical,” writes Magritte, “it isreasoned [raisonnée ].” Magritte calls this a “vision to the second degree”(ibid., 182).

36. Breton, “Max Ernst,” 245.37. The anecdote pertains to the painting “Elective Affinities.”38. The problem of the glass, for example, finds its réponse exacte in an umbrella in

the painting “Les Vacances de Hegel”; the problem of the cloud yields “LaCorde Sensible”; the problem of the piano, “La Main Heureuse”; and the prob-lem of the train, the celebrated painting “La Durée Poignardée.” Concerningthe painting “La Main Heureuse” Magritte has written: “The problem I havebeen dealing with is the problem of the piano. The answer apprized me that the secret object designed to be joined with the piano was an engagement

ring. . . . The size of the ring is like an emanation of some happiness, particu-larly that of a hand playing the piano. In addition the outline the ring makes,partly concealed by the piano that traverses it, evokes the form of a musicalsign” (Torczyner, Magritte, Ideas and Images, 144). Of “La Durée Poignardée” he writes: “I decided to paint the image of a locomotive . . . I thought of joiningthe locomotive image with the image of a dining room fireplace in a moment of ‘presence of mind.’ By that I mean the moment of lucidity that no methodcan bring forth. Only the power of thought manifests itself at this time . . . wedo not count for anything, but are limited to witnessing the manifestation of thought” (81).

39. Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire (Paris, 1939). Bergson also writes: “Every per-ception occupies a certain thickness of duration, prolongs the past in the pres-ent, and in this way participates in memory” (274).

40. Bergson uses the words “mémoire ” and “souvenir .” To distinguish the two, andbecause souvenir implies images, I have translated the latter as “image.”

41. On Bergson’s account, sense data come into the body; this structures an appealto memory, which produces an image. This image then feeds back into the act of perception itself, helping to constitute the object perceived.

42. If one keeps in mind Breton’s correction of Pierre Reverdy’s conception of theimage in the Manifeste du surréalisme , which Reverdy had characterized in termsof metaphor, it is important not to identify Magritte’s use of the term “affinity” with metaphor or analogy. See Breton, Oeuvres complètes, 1:325. Magritte’s term





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57. Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” 34.58. By “real” she means not the reality of realism but the Lacanian structure

of the real that cannot be situated in the terms of either the symbolic or theimaginary.

59. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde , 210.

60. Krauss, Optical Unconscious , 151.61. These are mysterious not only because they are so numerous in this cave but also because of what has been described as mutilated fingers in these palmprints. André Leroi-Gourhan, however, reads these as coded signs for animals(not narcissistic marks). See his 1967 essay “The Hands of Gargas: Toward aGeneral Study,” trans. Annette Michelson, October 37 (Summer 1986): 19–34.

62. Krauss, “Michel, Bataille, et Moi,” 13.63. Krauss, Optical Unconscious , 217.64. See Krauss, “Michel, Bataille, et Moi,” 13, and Optical Unconscious , 151, 192, and

259–60.65. Since the time of Bataille (and for the critics of Tel Quel in particular), the ques-

tion of surrealism has pitted “materialists” against “idealists,” Bergson’s dis-placement of this opposition through the term “memory” becomes all themore pertinent in this context.

66. Krauss writes: “Photography exploits the special connection to reality with which all photography is endowed. For photography is an imprint or a transferoff the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprintsor footprints” (Originality of the Avant-Garde , 110).

67. Breton, “Max Ernst,” 246.68. Ernst, Beyond Painting , 14. Max Ernst stated in 1936 that Magritte’s pictures

were “collages painted entirely by hand.” Cited by David Sylvester in Magritte: The Silence of the World (New York, 1992), 110.

69. The definition is given in “Max Ernst,” written for the catalogue of the 1921exhibit at the Librairie Sans Pareil, republished in Les Pas perdus (Breton, “MaxErnst,” 245).

70. Krauss, “Michel, Bataille, et Moi,” 13. See William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, 1994).

71. See Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, 2004).72. Cited in ibid., 2.
