POSTMODERNIST PURITY

by
JOHN MCGOWAN
jpm@unc.bitnet
Department of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
_Postmodern Culture_ v.4 n.1 (September, 1993)
pmc@unity.ncsu.edu
Copyright (c) 1993 by John McGowan, all rights
reserved. This text may be used and shared in
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University Press.

Review of:
Owens, Craig. _Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power,
and Culture_. Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne
Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992.

[1]

Craig Owens was a critic/theorist of contemporary art,

best known for his essays in _October_ and _Art in America_,
who died of complications stemming from AIDS in 1990. Just
about everything he ever published--plus the syllabi and
bibliographies for courses he taught on postmodern art, on
critical theory, and on visualizing AIDS--has been collected
in the volume under review. It makes for sad reading, not
just because Owens should still be among us, but also
because the shifting yet intractable aporias of a certain
postmodernist discourse haunt this work. Owens's
intellectual trajectory--from Derrida to Foucault to Lacan

as the major influence on his work--follows that of much of

his (and my) generation in this country. From an
aestheticist, textual rejection of modernist pieties
inspired by Derrida, Owens moved to a political analysis of
modernism that focused on relations of power and from there
to a cultural critique of the construction of gender
identities and of desire (sexual and social) itself. In the
process, Derrida and Foucault do not completely disappear,
but the prevalence of psychoanalysis in much feminist
thought had shaped Owens's discourse in a particularly
distinctive way by the mid-eighties.
[2]
The thread that runs through these various sub-periods
in Owens's work is the problematic of representation. An
early (1979) essay on Derrida's critique of classical
aesthetics ends with the enigmatic statement from which the
editors of this volume take its title:
If in 'The Parergon' Derrida offers us no alternative
theory of art, it is because the theoretical
investigation of works of art according to
philosophical principles is what is deconstructed.
Still, 'The Parergon" signals a necessity: not of a
renovated aesthetics, but of transforming the object,
the work of art, beyond recognition." (38)
What is the nature of the "necessity" here? Necessary for
what and to whom? And how would we know (if) something
(was) beyond recognition? A few years later (1982),
Foucault has led Owens to be more willing to name names, to
suggest why an escape from representation, from recognition,
might be desirable. He calls our attention to "the ways in
which domination and subjugation are *inscribed within* the
representational systems of the West. Representation, then,
is not--nor can it be--neutral; it is an act--indeed, the
founding act--of power in our culture" (91). The wholesale
condemnation of the West's representational systems is
retained in this shift from Derrida to Foucault, but now
Owens can at least specify particular harmful effects of
powerful representations and the groups most likely to
suffer those harms.
[3]
Three years later (1985) Owens criticizes Foucault for
only telling "half the story"; what "Foucault would excise"
is the half "that concerned desire and representation"
(204). Here we need Lacan, who teaches us to "regard all
human sexuality as masquerade" (214), as a representation of
presence/plenitude/identity over the absence/lack that is
castration. Appropriately enough, the Lacanian essay on
"Posing" brings Owens full circle. He ends with a quote
from Derrida. "If the alterity of the other is *posed*,
that is *simply* posed, doesn't it amount to the same . . .
. From this point of view I would even go so far as to say

that the alterity of the other inscribes something on the

relation which can in no way be posed" (215).
[4]
The critique of representation, then, keeps coming back
to the desire for that which exceeds representation, which
cannot be represented. I use the word "desire" deliberately
here because, while fascinated by the inscription,
formation, and constraints of conventional desire, Owens
follows his models in never thinking through his own desire
to question and disrupt the conventional. This postmodern
discourse adopts without question a certain oppositional
posture traditionally associated with the avant-garde. This
blind spot is particularly irritating because Owens
recognizes that the avant-garde was never the revolutionary
force it set itself up as and that contemporary re-runs of
avant-garde movements are the farcical versions that follow
tragedy in Marx's version of historical repetition. "Honor,
Power, and the Love of Women" offers a wonderful send-up of
neoexpressionism, while "The Problem with Puerilism" argues
convincingly that "what has been constructed in the East
Village is a simulacrum of the *social* formation from which
the modernist avant-garde first emerged" (263). But, lest
we allow this talk of simulacrum to entice us into nostalgia
for the original modernist avant-garde, Owens is quick to
sketch for us the role that avant-garde played in making
"difference . . . become an object of consumption":
The fact that avant-garde artists had only partially
withdrawn from the middle-class elite--which also
constitutes the primary, if not the only, audience for
avant-garde production--placed them in a contradictory
position; but this position also equipped them for the
economic function they would eventually be called upon
to perform--that of broker between the culture industry
and subcultures. (264)
[5]
Armed with this awareness of the modernist
avant-garde's failure, Owens offers nothing beyond calls for
a purity more stringent than the modernists could achieve.
Writing during the boom art market years of the 80s (which,
again, he wonderfully satirizes when discussing enemies like
Robert Hughes in "The Yen for Art"), Owens is reduced to
denial when asked to contemplate the relation of the artists
he champions to that market. Andars Stephanson asks: "But
isn't it true that oppositional artists themselves became
marketable, say, after 1980?"--to which Owens replies: "This
is seriously overplayed. Hans Haacke does not sell much
work, and he has not had a show in an American museum until
now. Kruger's work is also interesting because it costs far
more to produce in terms of photomechanical work, labs and
so forth, than it costs to produce a painting, yet it sells
for one-tenth of the latter's price" (307). What's

significant here is not the fact of the matter, but the form
that the defense of oppositional artists takes. Owens has
not gotten past the association of purity and integrity with
poverty, with producing the art work which does not become a
commodity. He is setting himself up to reach the same dead
end that avant-garde art has been reaching for seventy-five
years: the dead end of silence as the only pure act and the
dead end of isolation from every audience because to appeal
to anyone outside the self (or, in some cases, outside a
small coterie) is to become implicated in social forms of
exchange that are repudiated.
[6]
In this context, the poststructuralist critique of
representation comes across as a new variant on this
long-standing modernist obsession with purity. To even
engage in debate with the culture, it seems, would be to
succumb to its terms.
It is not the ideological content of representation of
these Others that is at issue. Nor do contemporary
artists oppose their own representations to existing
ones; they do not subscribe to the phallacy of the
positive image. (To do so would be to oppose some
'true' representivity to a 'false' one.) Rather, these
artists challenge the activity of representation itself
which, by denying them speech, consciousness, the
ability to represent themselves, stands indicted as the
primary agent of their domination." (262)
What would it mean to "indict" the "activity of
representation itself" in the name of "the ability to
represent themselves"? By rejecting a conflict within the
social over different representations with the assertion
that every positive image is a phallacy, Owens places the
artist on the path of pure negation that has been a
modernist treadmill since at least Flaubert's desire to
write a novel about nothing.
[7]
The critic is left in even a worse position than the
artist.
"What you are saying, then, is that to represent is to
subjugate?" "Precisely. There is a remarkable
statement by Gilles Deleuze . . . that encapsulates the
political ramifications of the contemporary critique of
representation: 'you [Deleuze says to Foucault] were
the first . . . to teach us something absolutely
fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others.'"
(261-2)
Owens as critic does nothing else but speak for others. He
wrote only one essay--"Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism"--that
is even remotely self-referential, and he is still speaking
for gay men, not of this particular gay man. Everything he
writes performs the traditional critical task of mediating

between audience and work (of art, of theory). A sometime

academic who wrote academic prose to introduce academic
theory to a nonacademic audience (the New York art world),
Owens was primarily a translator, re-representing
representations to facilitate their entry into different
contexts. His success is attested to by the fact that his
work was widely read and highly influential. Through his
efforts and those of some collaborators, _Art in America_
became a conduit point between the academy and the art
world. Owens was a mediator whose work keeps circling
around his distrust of the means of mediation. By adopting
a simple-minded and wholesale condemnation of
representation, Owens boxed himself into a corner where he
had to suspect anything he would write of bad faith. He
wrote only three essays the last four years of his life; he
did not write about AIDS. I know nothing about Owens
personally; his health as well as other commitments could
easily explain this relative silence. But his own
theoretical views had, by that time, left him very little
space to work in.
[8]
No doubt Owens would have struck out in new directions.
What is fascinating and rewarding about these collected
essays is the combination of Owens's sharp eye (this is
someone whose representations of others' art I came to
trust) with his continued fascination with and ability to
learn from theoretical arguments. If I focus on the
theoretical impasse at which his work ends, it is because I
find it sad that one version of postmodernism is currently
stuck right there, unable (apparently) to apply its own
strictures against universals to this universal condemnation
of representation, unable to think its own retrograde
(modernist) desire for purity within its critique of
discourses that aim for homogeneity. Not surprisingly, the
specifics of Owen's wonderful essays on William Wegman,
Barbara Kruger, and Lothar Baumgarten already suggest some
ways to move beyond a vague and unsatisfiable desire for
absolute alterity. The conclusion to the essay on Wegman
talks of "necessity" again, but this time it is the
necessity of recognition, not of getting beyond it:
When we laugh at Man Ray's foiling of Wegman's designs,
we are also acknowledging the possibility, indeed the
necessity, of another, nonnarcissistic mode of relating
to the Other--one based not on the denial of
difference, but upon its recognition. Thus, inscribed
within the *social* space in which both Bakhtin and
Freud situate laughter, Wegman's refusal of mastery is
ultimately political in its implications. (163-4)
Postmodern thought needs to turn to the question of the
social space which would enable this recognition of

difference; it is the absence of the social and its myriad

forms of interaction between self and other that constitutes
both the purity and the peculiar emptiness of so much
postmodernist cultural critique. For what could be more
narcissistic than a total repudiation of all the forms of
representation by which the other might try to make contact?