Saturday, September 30, 2006

Because happiness is a warm gun, momma


She's not a girl who misses much
Do do do do do do- oh yeah
She's well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand
Like a lizard on a window pane

The man in the crowd with the multicoloured mirrors
On his hobnail boots
Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy
Working overtime
A soap impression of his wife which he ate
And donated to the National Trust

I need a fix 'cause I'm going down
Down to the bits that I left uptown
I need a fix cause I'm going down
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun

Happiness is a warm gun
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Happiness is a warm gun, momma
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
When I hold you in my arms
(Ooooooooohhh, oh yeah!)
And when I feel my finger on your trigger
I know nobody can do me no harm
Because happiness is a warm gun, momma
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Happiness is a warm gun
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
-Yes it is, it's a warm gun!
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Happiness is a warm, yes it is...
GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Well don't ya know that happiness is a warm gun, momma?
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Yeeeaahhh!

beatles

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Author


what is an author?

Michel Foucault

The coming into being of the notion of "author" constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today, when we reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories seem relatively weak, secondary, and super imposed scansions in comparison with the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work.

I shall not offer here a sociohistorical analysis of the author's persona. Certainly, it would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of "the-man-and-his-work criticism" began. For the moment, however, I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance; is outside it and antecedes it.

Beckett nicely formulates the theme with which I would like to begin: "What does it matter who is speaking;' someone said; 'what does it matter who is speaking.'" In this indifference appears one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing [écriture].

I say "ethical" because this indifference is really not a trait characterizing the manner in which one speaks and writes but, rather, a kind of immanent rule, taken up over and over again, never fully applied, not designating writing as something completed, but dominating it as a practice. Since it is too familiar to require a lengthy analysis, this immanent rule can be adequately illustrated here by tracing two of its major themes.

First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

The second theme, writing's relationship with death, is even more familiar. This link subverts an old tradition exemplified by the Greek epic, which was intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero: if he was willing to die young, it was so that his life, consecrated and magnified by death, might pass into immortality; the narrative then redeemed this accepted death. In another way, the motivation, as well as the theme and the pretext of Arabian narratives – such as The Thousand and One Nights – was also the eluding of death: one spoke, telling stories into the early morning, in order to forestall death, to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator. Scheherazade's narrative is an effort, renewed each night, to keep death outside the circle of life.

Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward off death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement that does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author's murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka. That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.

None of this is recent; criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance – or death - of the author some time ago. But the consequences of their discovery of it have not been sufficiently examined, nor has its import been accurately measured. A certain number of notions that are intended to replace the privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance. I shall examine two of these notions, both of great importance today.

The first is the idea of the work [oeuvre]. It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work's relationships with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. At this point, however, a problem arises: What is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed? Is it not what an author has written? Difficulties appear immediately. If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a "work"? When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during his imprisonment.

Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is "everything"? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory.

We could go even further. Does The Thousand and One Nights constitute a work? What about Clement of Alexandria's Miscellanies or Diogenes Laërtes' Lives? A multitude of questions arises with regard to this notion of the work. Consequently, it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself. The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality.
Another notion which has hindered us from taking full measure of the author's disappearance, blurring and concealing the moment of this effacement and subtly preserving the author's existence, is the notion of writing [écriture]. When rigorously applied, this notion should allow us not only to circumvent references to the author, but also to situate his recent absence. The notion of writing, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indication – be it symptom or sign – of a meaning that someone might have wanted to express. We try, with great effort, to imagine the general condition of each text, the condition of both the space in which it is dispersed and the time in which it unfolds.

In current usage, however, the notion of writing seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity. We are content to efface the more visible marks of the author's empiricity by playing off, one against the other, two ways of characterizing writing, namely, the critical and the religious approaches. Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of its sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character. To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit signification, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which give rise to commentary). To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work's survival, its perpetuation beyond the author's death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him.

This usage of the notion of writing runs the risk of maintaining the author's privileges under the protection of the a priori: it keeps alive, in the gray light of neutralization, the interplay of those representations that formed a particular image of the author. The author's disappearance, which, since Mallarmé, has been a constantly recurring event, is subject to a series of transcendental barriers. There seems to be an important dividing line between those who believe that they can still locate today's discontinuities [ruptures] in the historico-transcendental tradition of the nineteenth century and those who try to free themselves once and for all from that tradition.

§

It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers.

First, we need to clarify briefly the problems arising from the use of the author's name. What is an author's name? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I shall only indicate some of the difficulties that it presents.

The author's name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names. (Here I refer to Searle's analyses, among others.') Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description. When one says "Aristotle," one employs a word that is the equivalent of one, or a series, of definite descriptions, such as "the author of the Analytics," "the founder of ontology," and so forth. One cannot stop there, however, because a proper name does not have just one signification. When we discover that Arthur Rimbaud did not write La Chasse spirituelle, we cannot pretend that the meaning of this proper name, or that of the author, has been altered. The proper name and the author's name are situated between the two poles of description and designation: they must have a certain link with what they name, but one that is neither entirely in the mode of designation nor in that of description; it must be a specific link. However - and it is here that the particular difficulties of the author's name arise - the links between the proper name and the individual named and between the author's name and what it names are not isomorphic and do not function in the same way. There are several differences.

If for example, Pierre Dupont does not have blue eyes, or was not born in Paris, or is not a doctor, the name Pierre Dupont will still always refer to the same person, such things do not modify the link of designation. The problems raised by the author's name are much more complex, however. If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house we visit today, this is a modification that, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions. If we proved that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's Organon by showing that the same author wrote both the works of Bacon and those of Shakespeare, that would be a third type of change that would entirely modify the functioning of the author's name. The author's name is not, therefore, just a proper name like the rest.

Many other facts point out the paradoxical singularity of the author's name. To say that Pierre Dupont does not exist is not at all the same as saying that Homer or Hermes Trismegistus did not exist. In the first case, it means that no one has the name Pierre Dupont; in the second, it means that several people were mixed together under one name, or that the true author had none of the traits traditionally ascribed to the personae of Homer or Hermes. To say that X's real name is actually Jacques Durand instead of Pierre Dupont is not the same as saying that Stendhal's name was Henri Beyle. One could also question the meaning and functioning of propositions like "Bourbaki is so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-forth," and "Victor Eremite, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Prater Taciturnus, Constantine Constantius, all of these are Kierkegaard."

These differences may result from the fact that an author's name is not simply an element in a discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being replaced by a pronoun, and the like); it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts. Hermes Trismegistus did not exist, nor did Hippocrates - in the sense that Balzac existed - but the fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentication of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilization. The author's name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author's name, that one can say "this was written by so-and-so" or "so-and-so is its author," shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status.

It would seem that the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there area certain number of discourses endowed with the "author function" while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer – it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor – it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has an editor – but not an author. The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.

§

Let us analyze this "author function" as we have just described it. In our culture, how does one characterize a discourse containing the author function? In what way is this discourse different from other discourses? If we limit our remarks to the author of a book or a text, we can isolate four different characteristics.

First of all, discourses are objects of appropriation. The form of ownership from which they spring is of a rather particular type, one that has been codified for many years. We should note that, historically, this type of ownership has always been subsequent to what one might call penal appropriation. Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, sacralized and sacralizing figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act - an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership.

Once a system of ownership for texts came into being, once strict rules concerning author's rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted - at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century - the possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing took on, more and more, the form of an imperative peculiar to literature. It is as if the author, beginning with the moment at which he was placed in the system of property that characterizes our society, compensated for the status that he thus acquired by rediscovering the old bipolar field of discourse, systematically practicing transgression and thereby restoring danger to a writing that was now guaranteed the benefits of ownership.

The author function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way, however. In our civilization, it has not always been the same types of texts that have required attribution to an author. There was a time when the texts we today call "literary" (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author, their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status. On the other hand, those texts we now would call scientific - those dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine and illnesses, natural sciences and geography - were accepted in the Middle Ages, and accepted as "true," only when marked with the name of their author. "Hippocrates said," "Pliny recounts," were not really formulas of an argument based on authority; they were the markers inserted in discourses that were supposed to be received as statements of demonstrated truth.

A switch takes place in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Scientific discourses began to be received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or always redemonstrable truth; their membership in a systematic ensemble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as their guarantee. The author function faded away, and the inventor's name served only to christen a theorem, proposition, particular effect, property, body, group of elements, or pathological syndrome. By the same token, literary discourses came to be accepted only when endowed with the author function. We now ask of each poetic or fictional text: From where does it come, who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, or beginning with what design? The meaning ascribed to it and the status or value accorded it depend on the manner in which we answer these questions. And if a text should be discovered in a state of anonymity – whether as a consequence of an accident or the author's explicit wish – the game becomes one of rediscovering the author. Since literary anonymity is not tolerable, we can accept it only in the guise of an enigma. As a result, the author function today plays an important role in our view of literary works. (These are obviously generalizations that would have to be refined insofar as recent critical practice is concerned. Criticism began some time ago to treat works according to their genre and type, following the recurrent elements that are enfigured in them, as proper variations around an invariant that is no longer the individual creator. Even so, if in mathematics reference to the author is barely anything any longer but a manner of naming theorems or sets of propositions, in biology and medicine the indication of the author and the date of his work playa rather different role. It is not simply a manner of indicating the source, but of providing a certain index of "reality" in relation to the techniques and objects of experience made use of in a particular period and in such-and-such a laboratory.)

The third characteristic of this author function is that it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual. It is, rather, the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain being of reason that we call "author." Critics doubtless try to give this being of reason a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a "deep" motive, a "creative" power, or a "design," the milieu in which writing originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations we force texts to undergo, the connections we make, the traits we establish as pertinent, the continuities we recognize, or the exclusions we practice. All these operations vary according to periods and types of discourse. We do not-construct a "philosophical author" as we do a "poet," just as in the eighteenth century one did not construct a novelist as we do today. StilI, we can find through the ages certain constants in the rules of author construction.

It seems, for example that the manner in which literary criticism once defined the author – or, rather, constructed the figure of the author beginning with existing texts and discourses – is directly derived from the manner in which Christian tradition authenticated (or rejected) the texts at its disposal. In order to "rediscover" an author in a work, modern criticism uses methods similar to those that Christian exegesis employed when trying to prove the value of a text by its author's saintliness. In De Viris Mustribus, Saint Jerome explains that homonymy is not sufficient to identify legitimately authors of more than one work: different individuals could have had the same name, or one man could have, illegitimately, borrowed another's patronymic. The name as an individual trademark is not enough when one works within a textual tradition.

How, then, can one attribute several discourses to one and the same author? How can one use the author function to determine if one is dealing with one or several individuals? Saint Jerome proposes four criteria: (i) if among several books attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be withdrawn from the list of the author's works (the author is therefore defined as a constant level of value); (2) the same should be done if certain texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the author's other works (the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence); (3) one must also exclude works that are written in a different style, containing words and expressions not ordinarily found in the writer's production (the author is here conceived as a stylistic unity); (4) finally, passages quoting statements made or mentioning events that occurred after the author's death must be regarded as interpolated texts (the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events).

Modern literary criticism, even when – as is now customary – it is not concerned with questions of authentication, still defines the author in much the same way: the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications (through his biography, the determination of his individual perspective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation of his basic design). The author is also the principle of a certain unity of writing - all differences having to be resolved, at least in part, by the principles of evolution, maturation, or influence. The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts: there must be - at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or unconscious - a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized around a fundamental or originating contradiction. Finally, the author is a particular source of expression that, in more or less completed forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in works, sketches, letters, fragments, and so on. Clearly, Saint Jerome's four criteria of authenticity (criteria that seem totally insufficient for today's exegetes) do define the four modalities according to which modern criticism brings the author function into play.

But the author function is not a pure and simple reconstruction made secondhand from a text given as inert material. The text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author. These signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such elements do not play the same role in discourses provided with the author function as in those lacking it. In the latter, such "shifters" refer to the real speaker and to the spatio-temporal coordinates of his discourse (although certain modifications can occur, as in the operation of relating discourses in the first person). In the former, however, their role is more complex and variable. Everyone knows that, in a novel offered as a narrator's account, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance.

One might object that this is a characteristic peculiar to novelistic or poetic discourse, a game in which only "quasi discourses" participate. In fact, however, all discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self. The self that speaks in the preface to a treatise on mathematics - and that indicates the circumstances ofthe treatise's composition identical neither in its position nor in its functioning to self speaks in the course of a demonstration, and that appears the form of "I conclude" or "I suppose." In the first case, the "I" refers to an individual without an equivalent who, in a determined place and time, completed a certain task; in the second, the "I" indicates an instance and a level of demonstration which any individual could perform provided that he accepted the same system of symbols, play of axioms and set of previous demonstrations. We could also, in the same treatise locate a third self; one that speaks to tell the work's meaning, the obstacles encountered, the results obtained, and the remaining problems; this self is situated in the field of already existing or yet-to-appear mathematical discourses. The author function is not assumed by the first of these selves at the expense of the other two, which would then be nothing more than a fictitious splitting in two of the first one. On the contrary, in these discourses the author function operates so as to effect the dispersion of these three simultaneous selves.

No doubt, analysis could discover still more characteristic traits of the author function. I will limit myself to these four, however, because they seem both the most visible and the most important. They can be summarized as follows:(1) the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; (3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer but, rather, by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects - positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals.

Up to this point I have unjustifiably limited my subject. Certainly the author function in painting, music, and other arts should have been discussed; but even supposing that we remain within the world of discourse, as I want to do, I seem to have given the term "author" much too narrow a meaning. I have discussed the author only in the limited sense of a person to whom the production of a text, a book, or a work can be legitimately attributed. It is easy to see that in the sphere of discourse one can be the author of much more than a book - one can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will in their turn find a place. These authors are in a position that I will call "transdiscursive." This is a recurring phenomenon – certainly as old as our civilization. Homer, Aristotle, and the Church Fathers, as well as the first mathematicians and the originators of the Hippocratic tradition, all played this role. Furthermore, in the course of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Europe another, more uncommon, kind of author, whom one should confuse with neither the "great" literary authors, nor the authors of religious texts, nor the founders of science. In a somewhat arbitrary way we shall call those who belong in this last group "founders of discursivity."

They are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts. In this sense they are very different, for example, from a novelist, who is, in fact, nothing more than the author of his own text. Freud is not just the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Marx is not just the author of the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital: they both have established an endless possibility of discourse. Obviously, it is easy to object. One might say that it is not true that the author of a novel is only the author of his own text; in a sense, he also, provided that he acquires some "importance," governs and commands more than that. To take a very simple example, one could say that Ann Radcliffe not only wrote The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and several other novels but also made possible the appearance of the Gothic horror novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century; in that respect, her author function exceeds her own work. But I think there is an answer to this objection. These founders of discursivity (I use Marx and Freud as examples, because I believe them to be both the first and the most important cases) make possible something altogether different from what a novelist makes possible. Ann Radcliffe's texts opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or principle in her work. The latter contains characteristic signs, figures, relationships, and structures that could be reused by others. In other words, to say that Ann Radcliffe founded the Gothic horror novel means that in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel one will find, as in Ann Radcliffe's works, the theme of the heroine caught in the trap of her own innocence, the hidden castle, the character of the black, cursed hero devoted to making the world expiate the evil done to him, and all the rest of it. On the other hand, when I speak of Marx or Freud as founders of discursivity, I mean that they made possible not only a certain number of analogies but also (and equally important) a certain number of differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded. To say that Freud founded psychoanalysis does not (simply) mean that we find the concept of the libido or the technique of dream analysis in the works of Karl Abraham, or Melanie Klein; it means that Freud made possible a certain number of divergences – with respect to his own texts, concepts and hypotheses – that all arise from the psychoanalytic discourse itself.

This would seem to present a new difficulty, however, or at least a new problem: is the above not true, after all, of any founder of a science, or of any author who has introduced some transformation into a science that might be called fecund? After all, Galileo made possible not only those discourses which repeated the laws he had formulated, but also statements very different from what he himself had said. If Georges Cuvier is the founder of biology, or Ferdinand de Saussure the founder of linguistics, it is not because they were imitated, nor because people have since taken up again the concept of organism or sign; it is because Cuvier made possible, to a certain extent, a theory of evolution diametrically opposed to his own fixism; it is because Saussure made possible a generative grammar radically different from his structural analyses. Superficially, then, the initiation of discursive practices appears similar to the founding of any scientific endeavor.

Still, there is a difference, and a notable one. In the case of a science, the act that founds it is on an equal footing with its future transformations; this act becomes in some respects part of the set of modifications that I makes possible. Of course, this belonging can take several forms. In the future development of a science, the founding act may appear as little more than a particular instance of a more general phenomenon that unveils itself in the process. It can also turn out to be marred by intuition and empirical bias; one must then reformulate it, making it the object of a certain number of supplementary theoretical operations that establish it more rigorously, and so on. Finally, it can seem to be a hasty generalization that must be retraced. In other words, the founding act of a science can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those transformations which derive from it.

In contrast, the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations. To expand a type of discursivity such as psychoanalysis as founded by Freud, is not to give it a form generality it would not have permitted at the outset but, rather, open it up to a certain number of possible applications. To limit psy choanalysis as a type of discursivity is, in reality, to try to isolate in the founding act an eventually restricted number of propositions or statements to which, alone, one grants a founding value, and in relation to which certain concepts or theories accepted by Freud might be considered as derived, secondary, and accessory. In addition, one does not declare certain propositions in the work of these founders to be false: instead, when trying to seize the act of founding, one sets aside those statements that are not pertinent, either because they are deemed inessential, or because they are considered "prehistoric" and derived from another type of discursivity. In other words, unlike the founding of a science, the initiation of a discursive practice does not participate in its later transformations. As a result, one defines a proposition's theoretical validity in relation to the work of the founders - while, in the case of Galileo and Newton, it is in relation to what physics or cosmology is in its intrinsic structure and normativity that one affirms the validity of any proposition those men may have put forth. To phrase it very schematically: the work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordinates.

In this way we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields of discursivity, for a "return to the origin." This return which is part of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The return is not a historical supplement that would be added to the discursivity, or merely an ornament; on the contrary, it constitutes a effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself. Reexamination of Galileo's text may well change our understanding of the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, reexamining Freud's texts modifies psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx's would modify Marxism.

What I have just outlined regarding these "discursive instaurations" is, of course, very schematic; this is true, in particular, of the opposition I have tried to draw between discursive initiation and scientific founding. It is not always easy to distinguish between the two; moreover, nothing proves that they are two mutually exclusive procedures. I have attempted the distinction for only one reason: to show that the author function, which is complex enough when one tries to situate it at the level of a book or a series of texts that carry a given signature, involves still more determining factors when one tries to analyze it in larger units; such as groups of works or entire disciplines.

§

To conclude, I would like to review the reasons why I attach a certain importance to what l have said.

On the one hand, an analysis in the direction that I have outlined might provide for an approach to a typology of discourse. It seems to me, at least at first glance, that such a typology cannot be constructed solely from the grammatical features, formal structures, and objects of discourse: more likely, there exist properties or relationships peculiar to discourse (not reducible to the rules of grammar and logic), and one must use these to distinguish the major categories of discourse. The relationship (or non-relationship) with an author, and the different forms this relationship takes, constitute – in a quite visible manner – one of these discursive properties.

On the other hand, I believe that one could find here an introduction to the historical analysis of discourse. Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal transformations but according to their modes of existence. The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The manner in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more readily understood, I believe, in the activity of the author function and in its modifications than in the themes or concepts that discourses set in motion.

It would seem that one could also, beginning with analyses of this type, reexamine the privileges of the subject. I realize that in undertaking the internal and architectonic analysis of a work (be it a literary text, philosophical system, or scientific work), in setting aside biographical and psychological references, one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject. Still, perhaps one must return to this question, not in order to reestablish the theme of an originating subject but to grasp the subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies. Doing so means overturning the traditional problem, no longer raising the questions: How can a free subject penetrate the density of things and give it meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs that are properly its own? Instead, these questions will be raised: How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.

Second, there are reasons dealing with the "ideological" status of the author. The question then becomes: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one's resources and riches but also with one's discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely.

The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inserts it, one has an ideological production. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. Although, since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive; a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property, still, given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence. I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint – one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced [expérimenter].

All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest sell did he express in his discourse? Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?

§

NOTES
i John Searle, Essay in the philosophy of language (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1969) pp. 162-74

*This essay is the text of a lecture presented to the Societé Francais de philosophie on 22 February 1969 (Foucault gave a modified form of the lecture in the United States in 1970). This translation by Josué V. Harari has been slightly modified.
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Utterance


Bakhtin's theory of the utterance 
Maurizio Lazzarato

Bakhtin's theory of enunciation is a 'carnevalesque' integration of all the elements that Hannah Arendt's theory of action and the word had emptied out or subordinated to the totalising power of language. The recognition of the multiplicity of the semiotic, the polyphony of matters of expression (both verbal and non-verbal), the heterogeneity of linguistic and non-linguistic elements, becomes on the one hand, the basis of a 'strategic' theory of action between speakers whereby it is possible to define meaning as an 'action on possible actions' (to use Foucault's expression) [1], and on the other hand, it is the basis of a theory of creativity and production of subjectivity.

Bakhtin's theory has no room for the concept of the performative beause 'all speech acts' are 'social acts, not just performative ones. All utterances are 'speech acts' that engage a 'social obligation'. Despite an homology of terms, there are remarkable differences between Austin's and Bakhtin's theories of speech acts. To begin with, the latter affirms a difference of nature between language and the utterance. In order for words, propositions, and grammar rules to become complete utterances and linguistic acts, there needs to be a 'supplementary element' that remains 'inaccessible to all categorisations and linguistic determinations, one that linguistics cannot grasp'.

The word, the grammatical form, propositions, and statements separated from the utterance (from the speech act) are 'technical signs' at the service of a signification that is only potential. The individuation, singularisation, and actualisation of this potential of language operated by the utterance (this 'achievement') allows us to enter an other 'sphere of being': the 'dialogical sphere'. What makes us turn words and linguistic propositions into complete utterances, into a 'totality', are pre-individual affective forces and social and ethico-political forces that whilst being external to language are actually inside the utterance.

'The enunciated, Bakhtin says, is completely traversed by these extra-linguistic (dialogic) elements.'

In the theory of the speech act, speakers are not first and foremost linguistic or psychological subjects, but 'possible worlds' - (singularities or existential cristallisations - in the language of Guattari). They occupy 'chronotopes' (blocs of space-time, 'existential territories', in the language of Guattari), and these are absolutely irreducible. The dialogic relationship between possible worlds and processes of existential singularisation is constituted by affective, ethical and political forces. Through the utterance, these express friendships and enmities, agreements and disagreements, sympathies and antipathies. They organise the relation of cooperation that opens to the creation of possibilities or, on the contrary, establish relations of domination that fix the same possibilities.

The origin of all of these forces is not linguistic, even though they express themselves through language and signs. Rather, they are variables internal to the creation and transformation of the utterance.

Affective and ethico-political forces are firstly expressed by the voice. In an important article, Guattari notes that in the utterance one finds both the 'pre-individual voice' that expresses a will based on emotional evaluations (in his words, sensible affects) and 'social voices', ethico-political voices that express 'universes of references and values' (the beautiful, the just and the true), which are problematic affects in Guattari's words.

Wherever linguistics wills structural and differential relations between signs, Bakhtin, like the enlightened, the idiots and the mad, 'extends the voices, their dialogic relation' and the existential territories that support them.

This voice is deployed on this side of articulated language. According to Bakhtin, the voice or intonation, not yet captured in the 'phonetic abstraction' of language, is always produced 'on the threshold of the verbal and the non-verbal, the said and the non-said' and it is through it that it addresses itself to the other. This address is affective and ethico-political rather than linguistic. It 'appropriates, travels, avails itself of linguistic and semiotic elements, confirms and drifts away, critiques and legitimates meanings and established intonations'.

Voices operate a singularisation of language that we might call strategic because they distribute and 'name' speakers according to a proto-political model that structures the space of the word along the lines of power relations between speakers. The voice already engages a specific mode of action of discourse that with Foucault we can call 'the action on possible actions', because it expresses evaluation, differences and values.

'Intonation seems to indicate that the world that surrounds the speakers is full of animated forces: it is menacig, indignant, loves or flatters objects and phenomena'. In the voice, we find again the 'animism' rivendicated by Guattari, that is to say, the taking sides in an ethico-political way in relation to others and the world.

The voice expresses itself, vibrates in a dialogical space that is a sui generis 'public space'. The voice can produce itself on the basis of 'different fundamental tones' (Bakhtin) that depend on the power relations in the 'public space' where it evolves. These are power relations (of domination or of cooperation) that modulate and influence its modes of expression. The voice can be deployed and differenciate between an 'athmosphere of sympathy', of 'complicity' or of 'defiance' and 'embarassment'.

In each voice there is a double address. the voice addresses not only the addressee but also the 'object of the utterance' in so far as the object is called into being both as 'judge and witness' and therefore, as its 'ally or enemy'.

According to Bakhtin, one must radically distinguish between the 'evaluative expression', which can be affective and axiological, and 'semantic expression', because - contrary to what Wittgenstein claims - the latter can never replace or substitute the former. There will always be a iatus, an irreducible disjunction between desire and affective expressions, on the one hand, and language (its words and statements) on the other. Linguistic exclamations that we learn can never replace or substitute the cry of pain of the body.

Here lies the difference between linguistics and the philosophy of language: pre-signifying corporeal semiotics (gestures, postures, moves, attitudes), the 'universe of values' and existential territories, are part and parcel of the components of the utterance. They are, notably in Guattari, an autonomous power of the production of speech.

'Intonation and gesture are linked by a close relation that finds its origin in bodies - the 'primary and ancient matter of evaluative expression'. In each gesture, as in each intonation, always lingers and sleeps in waiting an embryo of attack and defence, menace and tenderness. For this reason every utterance always puts the speaker in a position of 'ally or witness', friend or enemy.

Even the poet, says Bakhtin, 'always works with the sympathy or antipathy, consensus or dissent' of the listener.

It is only when the voice penetrates and appropriates words and statements that the latter loose their linguistic potentiality and turn into actualised expression. It is only at that moment that words and statements are encumbered with the a unique and non reproducible role in verbal exchange.

2. The active and creative dimension of dialogic relations, their character as strategic games of 'possible worlds', and the existential singularities and spaces that support them, is evident when one compares them with the linguistic elements of the statement. Whilst the latter are 'reproducible' components, dialogic relations represent the 'non reproducible', always renewed elements of the utterance, whereby singularity arises from the evenemential nature of the utterance. These two dimensions (reproducible and non reproducible) are clearly distinguishable both in the address and in the response that the utterance calls for.

All speech acts are addressed to someone or something, respond to someone or something and through this addressing or this response they express values, points of view, emotions, affects, sympathy and antipathy, agreement and disagreement in relation to the situation, in relation to the other and to one's own utterance, in relation to other utterances and also in relation to the utterances that circulate in the public space (notably those that refer to 'the true, the just and the beautiful', as Bakhtin remarks). All these speech acts aim to an agreement or a disagreement, refer back to an enemy or a friend.

All speech acts are questions that interrogate others, oneself and the world. Bakthin's theory of enunciation implicates the world as a problem, as an event and as something that is never accomplished, unlike Austin's theory of performativity and speakers, which entails the world as convention, institution, and something to reproduce.

In his last years Guattari refers to a 1924 text by Bakhtin that talks about poetic creation, from which he draws lessons for a theory of the utterance and of the production of subjectivity in general.

Even in the case of poetry, it works not only on the signifier, but always refers back to the existential point of view. Bakthin underlines how if one wanted to account for the address it would be insufficient to stay at the level of the mere material of language. One needs to refer to material languages that are non discursive.

In the speech acts (here poetic speech acts), it is affect, the existential function, that uses and appropriates different semiotic elements to compose them and keep them together, to accomplish them and achieve them.

The existential function that Guattari calls the refrain relies on certain 'discursive chains', on certain linguistic elements, and it detaches them from their meaning and normal signification and denotation to confer to them their own movement, ultimately another meaning. In this way it plays the role of an ontological existential affirmation.

Bakhtin distinguishes between five elements of enunciation:

1) the sound side of the word, its musical aspect;

2) the material meanings of all its nuances and its variants;

3) its aspect of verbal relations and interrelations;

4) the intonation aspect that expresses its emotional and volitional orientation at the psychological level and its direction in relation to ethico-political and more specifically social values (pre-individual and social voices);

5) the sentiment of verbal activity, of the active engendering of its meaning (the feeling or affect in which one needs to include all moving elements of articulation, gesture, mimicry and others, all the inner drive of the person) - Affect expresses the existential apprehension of the world and the self that presides over the dispositions of elements of enunciation, their selection and modes of composition.

The first three components of the utterance that constitute the linguistic and semiotic elements of the utterance represent their 'reproducible' parts that can be reiterated, whereas the last two elements cannot be reproduced, they are absolutely singular, and created for the first time and in the speech act.

The fourth element is specifically dialogic and expresses both affective (emotional and volitional) evaluations and social (axiological) ones.

The last element, that represents the sentiment of activity in the creation of the word, expresses the existential and ontological force of affect. It constitutes the non-discursive element that generates not only the psychic reality of the word, but also 'meaning and appreciation'. By means of the utterance, the speaker inhabits an 'active position' (she operates in an existential self-positing as Guattari will say) in relation to the world and others: 'in other words, the sentiment and feeling of taking up a role that concerns man as a whole, of a movement that involves both the organism and semantic activity, because what it generates is the soul of the word in its concrete unity'.

Guattari draws general conclusions. With Bakhtin, he says, 'we can learn to read the utterance, its multiple voices and its multiple centres' (p. 40). The utterance and the process of production of subjectivity are 'a composition of heterogeneous modes of semiotisation (production of meaning)'. An always partial (non totalising) composition of a multiplicity of elements (both linguistic and non-linguistic) and an heterogeneity of semiotics (signifying and corporeal, iconic, pre-signifying and machinic). But it is this affect, the refrain that operates the 'enunciative crystallisation', that produces at the same time a 'relative feeling of unity' and of singularity, specific each time, to the disparate multiplicity of these linguistic elements, corporeal and axiological, that traverse the speaker. The affect is a process of existential appropriation which, on the one hand, selects the semiotic components by detaching them from their meanings and ordinary denotations, and on the other hand operates as a 'catalyst', as an attractor that keeps them together as in a musical 'motif', as in the refrain by giving coherence to these heterogeneous elements through repetition.

It is always affect that has the ability to 'transversalise' this heterogeneity of elements, to give them colour, a tone that makes them converge, in time, towards the singularity of the utterance.

Affect represents an opening of non discursivity that is at the heart of discursivity and makes it crystallise and works on it, organises it and valorises it.

Like in Bakhtin, in Guattari too, the affects that provide the utterance with the character of an existential singularity are both 'affects of sensibility' (pre-individual, volitional and emotional) and 'affects of problematics' that activate references that are 'sentimental, mythical, historical and social', universes of values and references.

This active power of the affect, despite being non discursive, is no less complex, and Guattari defines it as 'hyper complex to mark the fact that it is an example of the engendering of the complex, a processuality that is in a nascient state, a place of proliferation of becomings'.

The human sciences and in particular psychoanalysis have for too long been used to think of affect in terms of the elementary entity of pulsion and instinct. But, according to Guattari, there are also 'complex affects', highly differentiated, that inaugurate irreversible diachronic ruptures and should be called 'christic, debussyst, leninist (and as will happen, Sarkosyst). It is thus that throughout the decades a whole constellaton of existential refrains, of enunciative ruptures, has given access to a 'Lenin-language' that engages specific procedures belonging to the order of rhetorics and lexicons belonging to the order of phonology, prose and images'.

One should go back more specifically to the novelty introduced by the theory of Guattari and Deleuze, that is to say, to the role played by the existential function of affects in speech and the production of subjectivity. For the time being I just want to underline the creative elements, the forces of affirmation and transformation of the relationship to the self, others and the world, that are non-linguistic forces, because they are affective, social and political. They are exterior to language, but inside the utterance.

We find the same fundamental distinctions in the act of response to the address ('comprehension'). All speech acts are a 'question' that requires a response, but the response that the utterance awaits is an 'active responsive attitude', an 'active responsive comprehension' of the other, unlike the performative, where the other is neither autonomous nor free. For the utterance 'nothing is more terrible than lack of response'. But the 'response-act' that operates in the word is not primarily linguistic.

If, as Bakhtin suggests, rather than the 'polyphony' and heterogeneity of the semiotic linguistic and non linguistic elements of the address, we consider those of 'comprehension', we find the same multiplicity of linguistic (reproducible) and non linguistic (non-reproducible) elements. In comprehension, there is an active response-reaction that we can distinguish.

1) the psychophysiological perception of the physical sign (word, colour, spatial form).

2) the recognition of the sign (as known or unknown), the comprehension of the reproducible (general) signification of language

3) the comprehension of its meaning withint the given context (close and distant)

4) the 'active dialogic comprehension (agreement and disagreement), the insertion in a dialogic context, the value judgement, are degrees of depth and universality.

This last element, the properly dialogical element is the most important because it is what singularises and gives existential coherence to the response-reaction. It is what selects, orders and achieves the multiplicity of the different matters of expression. Linguistic comprehension is not the same thing as dialogic comprehension. The first is made up of reproductible elements (the first two elements of Bakthin's citation), the second, of non-reproducible components, singular and created by the same act of comprehension.

Comprehension is always a taking up a position, a judgement, a response - an action inside dialogical relations.

The responses-reactions express a sympathy, an antipathy', an 'agreement, a disagreement, an adherence, an objection, an execution, a stimulus to action, etc'. All responses-reactions 'refute, confirm, complete and stand upon the questions to which they are addressed.'

Unlike the recipient of the utterance in Virno, who only contemplates, is witness to and judge of the elocution ('I speak'), who, as in the classical performative, is only subjected to an institutional effect, in Bakthin the interlocutor fully participates to the accompishment of the action. Also as in the later theory of Foucault of power relations the interlocutor is active and 'free'. In the event of enunciation, one determines the dynamics and orients the actualisation. The utterance is a co-production of a polemical or cooperative co-actualisation of linguistic virtualities and worlds of values or existential territories that support them.

Similarly to Foucault's power relations, the relations of power of the speech open up an active field of comprehension, responses-reactions, and a field of possibilities that cannot be determined or actualised outside the 'making' of the utterance.

If we follow the 'making' of the utterance, we can easily see that the nature of the utterance is not performative but dialogical, strategic and evenemential. The speech act is an action on the possible action of others that starts from the ethico-political dimension and the affective dimension of the relation with the other. Bakhtin has an 'agonistic' notion of the utterance that functions as a struggle between speakers, or rather, as a form of government of others that is expressed through a whole series of techniques and tactics of which linguistic and semiotic techniques and tactics are part and parcel.

'When I elaborate my speech, I tend to, on the one hand, determine this response in an active fashion, on the other hand I tend to presume that response and this presumed response acts itself on my utterance (I mark restrictions). When I speak, I take into account the a-perceptive foundation on which my word will be received by the recepient: the degree of information that he has of the situation, his specialised knowledge in the domain of the cultural exchange, his prejudices (of my point of view) and sympathies and antipathies. Because this will condition his responsive comprehesion of my utterance'.

The choice of kinds of utterance, the choice of compositional processes and linguistic means will start from the power relation with the other, because unlike Saussure's linguistics the utterance is not simply an individual process. These choices can be determined only inside the utterance in the process of their making where the other is integrated as a living, dynamic and free element.

Translation by Arianna Bove

[1] ' To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of actions of others' ( Foucault , 'The subject and power' in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 221)

Paper presented at http://imaginaryproperty.com/intervention3

Sunday, January 15, 2006

reversal of form


by Robert C. Morgan


Installation view at
Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum channels with pink and aluminum color, 120 pieces measuring 87 x 7 x 2.5 in.

It is refreshing to know that there are artists working today who are not seduced by the allure of popular culture and who are willing to step back from the banalities of everyday life and see art in its own terms through its own visual syntax and within the terms of its own space. I am not referring to what the French Nabis called "art for art's sake" nearly a century ago. Nor am I advocating an approach equivalent to the formalist movement in American painting during the peak of high Modernism in the 60s. What is indeed unique about Tadaaki Kuwayama's art is a certain boldness in coming to terms with a new paradigm that exists outside the domain of popular culture. While the American Minimalists provide a clear antecedent in his work, there is a question as to whether this is the proper or even the most appropriate term to describe the work of Kuwayama. While one cannot deny that Minimalism has had an effect on changing the direction of art in recent years, or disregard the fact that Kuwayama's reductive position is obliquely tied to that history, it should be clear that not all art that carries a reductive posture is Minimal art.


Installation at 
Stiftung for Konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany
, 1995. Metallic blue and aluminum color on bakelite with aluminum angles, 96 ft. long.

Although Kuwayama began his career as a painteron fact, a reductive painteron the late 50s in New York (where he eventually exhibited at the famous Green Gallery), it is important to examine the development of his work for what it is. The artist's relationship to the frontal surface, for example, is distinct from what defined many of the ideas inherent in Minimalism. The inappropriate term Minimal painting has been persistently used, in both gallery and museum exhibitions, as a means of identifying a kind of painting that might better be called reductive. From this perspective, one might consider the non-relationa paintings of Barnett Newman as having had an influence on the early paintings of Frank Stella and Brice Marden, not to mention on the early work of Kuwayama, whereas the late black painting of Ad Reinhardt seem less conducive to painterly influences than to works by early Minimal and Conceptual artists, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, and Joseph Kosuth.

Installation views at Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum with yellow, blue, and aluminum color, 8 x 24 x 2.5 in.

Even so, there are those who will insist that their obsession with the frontal surface is primarily about the object or the transformation of surface into object. This evolution toward objecthood through the frontal surface of painting finds antecedents in works by the Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko and later in the monochromes of the Nouveau Realiste Yves Klein. Although their efforts were made nearly 40 years apart, there is a clear direction toward reductive painting that has little to do with the Minimalist object. Engaging in a reductive posture, whether on the frontal surface or in object form, may proceed from very different and diverse intentions. For an artist to work reductively does not automatically imply Minimalist art any more than an artist with a good idea should imply Conceptual Art. I would argue that Kuwayama is an artist who evolved from a reductivist position, yet whose work has often, though mistakenly, been called Minimalist.


Installation views at Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum with yellow, blue, and aluminum color, 8 x 24 x 2.5 in.

In 1967, Kuwayama painted a series of monochrome panels, placed vertically in frames and tangential to one another, with titles such as Red, Mustard Yellow, and Pale Blue. The important feature of this work was that the color was directly painted on canvas and therefore was still contained within the fictionalized space of the painterly field. Their subject matter is as reduced as that of Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimus or the Untitled white panels of Rauschenbergs' both of which were painted in 1951 and therefore could be cited as antecedents of the vertical monochromes of Kuwayama, painted six years later.

Installation at
Ingolstadt Museum, Germany, 1997. Anodized aluminum channels with yellow and aluminum color, 20 pieces measuring 8 x 84 in. long.

Whereas painting retains the space of fiction, no matter how constructive or reductive, Minimalism is essentially about the objective point established by Donald Judd. Once art leaves the fictional space of the surface without necessarily becoming sculpture (in the relational sense of diverse parts in search of a formal resolution), and if it retains a position of reductive neutrality in object form, usually fabricated, then we can talk about Minimal art. While the method that supports this position may be a type of linguistic formalism (unrelated to Greenberg's aesthetic formalism), the result is perpetually directly related to form more specifically, the form of the object within a given context.1 What distinguishes the more recent modular work of Kuwayama is that his forms (panels or linear elements) are designed not so much to intercede within a given space as to create a new space through modular equivalence and repetition. In doing so, a reversal begins to happen whereby the emphasis is no longer given to the forms themselves but to the total space they inhabit. It is here that the viewer may begin to embark on another approach. Instead of focusing attention on the formal elements in order to create some sort of dialectical encounter with the space, the forms (as in the artist's recurrent use of color-tinted Bakelite panels) visually recede into the space. Having been altered through the placement of the panels, the recession of the forms into the space reaches a point that the artist calls infinity space without beginning or end, a pure space. In essence, the form(s) disappear and create space.


Installation at
Satani Gallery, Japan, 1996. Mixed media, glass, mylar, graphite, and aluminum.

As a theoretical comparison, this is different from the large-scale steel sculpture of Richard Serra. Whereas Serra (whom the critic Robert Pincus-Witten once termed a Postminimalist) is concerned with site specificity, his weathering steel plates are still within the context of sculpture. Serra's work is pragmatic in its confrontational value. It offers itself as an intervention into everyday time and space. Kuwayama's approach goes in another direction. Instead of insisting on his work as sculpture, Kuwayama transforms the space through the repetition of modular elements and thereby offers a completely new syntax to the way a space is normally perceived, both physically and conceptually. This was made evident in his recent site-specific installations at the Chiba City and Kawamura Memorial Museums in Japan in 1996. Although different elements were employed in each case, using different sizes and modular shapes, fabricated in synthetic Bakelite or constructed in mylar, glass, and aluminum, the emphasis was not on the sculpture but on the transformation of the space through the use of modular elements and the concept of disappearance in relation to the repetition and placement of the elements. In a Kuwayama installation, the space becomes the object through this process of reversal. The materials are simply the vehicles to make a passage into the reality of a new kind of space, to bring space into being which is close to the practice of the great 15th-century Japanese landscape painter Sesshu.

Installation at 
Chiba City Museum, Japan, 1996. Aluminum color on bakelite, 15 pieces measuring 4 x .75 ft.

Kuwayama likes to refer to this kind of space as absolute, as if there were no beginning or no end, as if the transference into time were an entry into the moment, and the moment would be absolute, unequivocal, unremitting in its perceptual sense of wholeness, its gestalt. There is a purity here that again recalls the unwavering commitment often attributed to Ad Reinhardt. One of the most lucid articulations of this concept in relation to Kuwayama has been written by the Japanese critic Koji Taki:

Pure space may seem very different from the actual space in which we live, but this purity stimulates our imagination. Purity means more than mere simplification. And we are made to leap into this pure space, carrying our load of complexity, moving beyond the real world with the freedom of the imagination. We do not see a world which is breaking down, a world going to ruin, a world full of amorphous human passion, or a world of simple beauty. Rather we see a world which appears beyond human perceptions, beyond settled and familiar meanings, a world which horrifies and thrills our spirit. We experience simultaneous terror and ecstasy transcending reality.2


Installation at 
Chiba City Museum, Japan, 1996. Three corners with three colors, metallic pink, yellow, and blue on bakelite.

This pure space is the space of the imagination made real without interference, without temporal intrusions. One could argue that Taki's description of pure space is close to Minimal art specifically the light installations of Dan Flavin, the stacks of Donald Judd, the elevated grid structures of Sol LeWitt, the alloy planes of Carl Andre. It might even apply to the 努hite�paintings of Robert Ryman (although given his concern for the framing edge, Ryman could not be considered a Minimalist). But there are other factors (previously described) that distinguish Kuwayama痴 recent installation from the work of these artists, both formally and conceptually. The concern here is how to deal with the isolation of a pure space that is somehow exempt from the flow of history, that is entirely within the realm of the imagination, a space somewhere between phenomenological Neo-Platonism and Sesshu's marvelous void.


Installation at
Kawamura Memorial Museum, Japan, 1996. Metallic pink and yellow on bakelite, 136 pieces, 8 ft. high.

The theologian Paul Tillich once spoke of the space of tragedy as a condition in which the historical sense of time is lost. In his book Theology of Culture, he refers to the Greek tragedies as events conceived in a space that is removed from diurnal processes:

Human existence under the predominance of space is tragic. Greek tragedy and philosophy knew about this. They knew that the Olympic gods were gods of space, one beside the other, one struggling with the other. Even Zeus was only the first of many equals, and hence subject, together with man and other gods, to the tragic law of genesis and decay. Greek tragedy, philosophy, and art were wrestling with the tragic law of our spatial existence. They were seeking for an immovable being beyond the circle of genesis and decay, greatness and self-destruction, something beyond tragedy.3


Installation at
Kawamura Memorial Museum, Japan, 1996. Metallic pink and yellow on bakelite, 136 pieces, 8 ft. high.



Somehow Tillich's concept of spatial dominance seems too overtly Western in its interpretation, too laden with the cultural weight of the past, and therefore exempt from the possibility that space exists as a reversal of form in relation to time. As a visual antidote to Tillich's theology, Kuwayama offers a reversal of form through the abstraction of the measured interval, a rhythmic punctuation that lightens the effect of the physical space. The premise of spatial dominance is suddenly transformed into a recession of form, thereby permitting a meditative pure space to evolve into the viewer's consciousness as an intentional act. We see it, for example, in the artist's recent anodized aluminum panels (what he calls channels in which two channels, measuring 19 centimeters are jointed and alternate according to two chosen colors. We see it again in the Kozo paper works in which three layers of paper are laminated through the artist's wax-pressing technique. Using modular elements in a repeatable format, Kuwayama places a single horizontal pencil line in each of six units, alternating three times between blue and red.

Installation view at 
Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich

1998. Metallic blue and aluminum color on bakelite with aluminum angles, 8 ft. long.

Given Moholy-Nagy's cultural synthesis of space and time into a single space/time based on his own research and experimentation in visual perception and relative motion, it would appear that Tillich's view of culture is more related to a single linear view of time that is essentially pre-relativistic. This is not to dismiss Tillich's understanding of spatial predominance as a cultural force capable of usurping history in favor of mythology. An abundance of spectacles supports Tillich's view, based on the current fascination for visual art that echoes the vapid premises of pop culture. Ironically, it is within the realm of globalized pop culture that the mythological references to the mass media are strongest, not in the reductive art of Kuwayama. Simply stated, the tragic sense of space in Western history which is slowly becoming a history of media should not be confused with the concept of pure space in Eastern culture which tends toward a deeper spiritual understanding of reality. It is this latter reality that concerns Kuwayama. It is a reality removed from the everyday media and all the material consequences that it entails.


Installation view at
Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich, 1998. 
Metallic blue and yellow on bakelite with aluminum angle, 4 x 4 ft.

One could make the claim that the kind of pure space advocated by Kuwayama is not so much a tragic space as it is an evocation, an opening or a threshold, that allows for a moment or moments of elevation beyond the banalities that pull us down into the gravity of our existential reality or even the denial of that reality. Kuwayama has described the desired effect of his art as being something not of this world, in other words, transcending what we already know through the mass media and through the tragic events that surround us. He is not concerned with making an expression or with signifying a social truth or with offering a new global paradigm for art. Fundamentally, Kuwayama is interested in the kind of rarefied experience that can be obtained through his form of total art. What he describes as something not of this world is indeed a perception of infinity, a rare glimpse of something to which human beings have not yet been acculturated. One might call it science fiction, but this is too facile. It is not science fiction.


Installation view at 
Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich
, 1998. Repetition of two colors, aluminum and yellow, anodized aluminum channels, 8 x 12 x 2 in.

I like the concept of the Noh actor described by Nobuyuki Hiromoto, riken no ken.4 As I understand Hiromoto, who cites the work of Zeami, one of the great practitioners of Noh theater, riken no ken is the method by which the actor looks at himself by using his internalized outer image. This concept may seem close to the Western gestalt yet is beyond the Western analysis of perception. Kuwayama's art is fundamentally concerned with the act of perception indeed, the viewer's experience through the reversal of form into space, whereby the material focus is transformed into an arena of pure space. This is far removed from the pragmatic objecthood of Minimal art. Yet, at the same time, Kuwayama does not deny the essential materiality of his work. Rather, he is concerned with how the act of perceiving this materiality as a modular sequence of forms gives us the exacting quietude of a spiritual experience.

Robert C. Morgan is a critic and artist whose books include Between Modernism and Conceptual Art.

Notes
1. The distinction between aesthetic and linguistic formalism is analyzed and discussed in my essay Formalism as a Transgressive Device in Arts, December 1989. 
2. Koji Taki, Tadaaki Kuwayama's New Project in Tadaaki Kuwayama Project '96, co-published in conjunction with the two exhibitions at the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art (June 1 - July 21, 1996) and the Chiba City Museum of Art (June 15 - August 18, 1996), p. 54. 
3. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 33. 
4. Nobuyuki Hiromoto, Objective Space: Looking Forward to Project '96, in Tadaaki Kuwayama Project '96, op. cit., p. 61.