November 6, 2013

Particular New Forms of Realism

Draft | By AK Thompson

Dear PPW,

The following paper is something I’ve been working on for a while and that I’ve been struggling to complete. Through an analysis of two very different postmodern artists—Mark Lombardi and Cindy Sherman—the paper considers the challenges of producing transformative movement-based art in the period of late capitalism. Drawing on the insights of Walter Benjamin, my objective was to learn what could be appropriated—not so much aesthetically as epistemologically—from their respective (and contradictory) strategies. I feel like I’m fumbling toward something, but I would appreciate a little push.

Peer review responses thus far have been mixed. Many readers have indicated that they think I’m on to something but find the material too dense; others have cautioned agaisnt my inclination to end on a prescriptive note. Since I’m reluctant to abandon prescription, the challenge seems to be to make it as compelling and actionable as possible.

Ultimate objective: to work up a publishable stand-alone version of this piece (for a journal in social theory, cultural sociology, social movement studies, or elsewhere—suggestions welcome) and to include a version as the conclusion to my forthcoming monograph on Walter Benjamin, social movements, and art.

Comments and feedback most welcome.

Thanks, and see you on November14!

AK Thompson

PS: Some of you may have noticed that this is not the paper I’d promised. Rest assured, however, that I will be sure to submit “A Time for Leaders” at a later date.

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Particular New Forms of RealismDraft | By AK Thompson

According to Walter Benjamin, history decayed into images (2003:476). From this insight, he developed a means of reading images to uncover their historical significance and a strategy for producing images that might shock others into recognizing the dangers and opportunities that marked their historical moment. Gathered together in Convolute N of his uncompleted Arcades Project, Benjamin’s compelling but enigmatic notes on what he called the “dialectical image” are highly suggestive when imagining how social movements might take hold of the visual field today.

In Benjamin’s account, dialectical images arose at the point where everyday social relations crystallized around their point of greatest contradiction. In other words, the dialectical image wasn’t simply an image of struggle with which viewers could identify or an image of misery capable of stimulating outrage. For these reasons, it was not propagandistic in the traditional sense. Instead, the dialectical image condensed all the unrealized promise of the past and all the practical means that such promise might finally be realized to a single, illuminating point. “To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts,” Benjamin proposed.

Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectal image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position is naturally not an arbitrary one. It is to be found, in a word, where the tension between dialectical opposites is greatest. (2003:475)

As with Marx, who noted in an 1843 letter to his friend Arnold Ruge that “the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality,” Benjamin thought that—by exposing the wishful fantasies embodied in everyday artifacts and revealing the precise manner by which these fantasies came to be ensnared within the deadening logic of the commodity form—people could be alerted to the opportunities for revolutionary transformation that lay dormant in every situation.

Once it became clear that their identification with the existing world corresponded to its unrealized promise and not to the hard casing within which it had become trapped, Benjamin imagined that people would embrace forms of action that, in his mind, were the equivalent of “splitting the atom” (2003:463). The phrase was not intended to be metaphorical; by breaking the commodity-encrusted shell and reconnecting with the promise encased therein, Benjamin wagered that could release a tremendous amount of compressed human energy. When coupled with the profane reckoning provoked by the dialectical image (a reckoning that enjoined the viewer to consider how—this time—their dreams of happiness might finally be fulfilled), this energy becomes the motive force for revolution.

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To be sure, such an account of the revolutionary process is as enigmatic as it is compelling. To make matters worse, Benjamin himself remained elusive when it came to providing concrete examples of what a dialectical image might actually look like. But while these features of Benjamin’s writing pose challenges to social movement actors interested in operationalizing his insights, a careful reading of Benjamin’s description of the dialectical image’s production and of its anticipated effects provides a useful framework for considering particular cases. Based on this framework, I have argued elsewhere that Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads (1933) and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) can be read as coherent visual approximations of the dialectical image.

Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads (1933)

Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937)

At this point, readers familiar with Benjamin may interject by pointing out that dialectical images do not have to be “images” in the conventional sense at all. Indeed, as Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out, such “images” might be extended to include dust, fashion, expositions, and commodities (1991:221). But while considering any of these objects

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analytically reveals their potentially significant revelatory power, Buck-Morss makes clear that the dialectical image is itself composed of two discrete but interrelated moments—one mediated and analytic, and one immediate and revelatory.

As an immediate, quasi-mystical apprehension, the dialectical image was intuitive. As a philosophical “construction,” it was not. Benjamin’s laborious and detailed study of past texts, his careful inventory of the fragmentary parts he gleaned from them, and the planned use of these in deliberately constructed “constellations” were all sober, self-reflective procedures, which, he believed, were necessary in order to make visible a picture of truth that the fictions of conventional history writing covered over. (1991:220)

For this reason, and especially in the context of social movement struggles to develop effective visual strategies, it’s appropriate to delimit the scope of our investigation in this case to the realm of deliberately constructed images. And though neither Rivera nor Picasso produced the “cessation of happening” that Benjamin had hoped for (1968:263), their analytic proximity to the dialectical image make them important reference points for those concerned with making effective visual interventions today.

Nevertheless, attempts to mimic these images without taking the significant social, historical, and epistemological transformations that have taken place since the 1930s into account are bound to fall short. In order to proceed, it’s therefore necessary to transpose the dialectical image’s epistemic premises into our own contemporary register. Specifically, we must consider how our own endless present has transformed people’s relationship to both images and to history.

In his pioneering analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism, Frederic Jameson acknowledged that—despite the evident connections between postmodern sensibilities and those that occasionally found expression in the high modernist (and even the Romantic) period—we are now divided from these prior moments by a kind of epochal break. For Jameson, this break arises from the dramatic transformations that multinational capitalism produced in the relationship between culture and economy starting in the early 1960s (1991:5). If, in the past, culture—and, in particular, visual culture—was at least formally distinguishable from the market (and if this position allowed it to formulate critical responses to dynamics within the economic base), the same cannot be easily said today.

Coinciding with the integration of culture into the commodity cycle has been a transposition of history into the register of style.i As Jameson recounts, the relation to the past fostered by postmodernism becomes increasingly concerned with the “imitation of dead styles” (1991:18). Here, the past is approached “through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’” (1991:19). Consequently, “the past is … itself modified” and “the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future” is reduced to a “multitudinous photographic simulacrum” (1991:18). Written more than twenty years ago, contemporary developments suggest that (even as postmodernism falls

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into decline as a self-conscious cultural and intellectual project) Jameson’s assessment has become more—and not less—relevant.

Although culture’s subsumption within the economy did not automatically make every postmodernist a willing participant in the new order, Jameson cautions that—even at its most defiant—postmodern culture could not escape the fact that its excesses were now actively sought by a market desperate to revitalize the waning magic of the commodity form. Acknowledging the spirit of refusal that sometimes found expression in postmodern art, Jameson nevertheless concludes that postmodernism’s

own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society. (1991:4)

Corroborating this perspective, art critic Hal Foster has suggested that today’s critical artists are best understood as being “as much a subcontractor” to late capitalism as they are “an antagonist” (1996:60). Social movement actors and radical cultural producers will recognize this dynamic. In a brave new world partitioned into niche markets, defiance has become a hot commodity. The music of rebellion becomes top-40 bubblegum, and renegade street artists like Shepard Fairey help clear a path to the White House.

Although Benjamin had anticipated the subsumption of culture to the commodity form, he only witnessed the process in its germinal—high modernist—phase.ii Now that the process is complete (or nearly complete), it’s evident that one of the central premises upon which the dialectical image relies has become less stable. If, in The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s goal was to read images to uncover “the expression of the economy in its culture” (2003:460), the challenge today is reading the “expression” of one sphere in another when the distinction between them has become—at best—purely formal.

It’s in the context of this transformation that we can understand Jameson’s contention that “Benjamin’s account” is today “both singularly relevant and singularly antiquated” (1991:45). In order to address this challenge, Jameson advances some provisional claims about what would be required to produce a “cognitive map” suitable to the new terrain. Similar to the dialectical image, the cognitive map’s purpose is to “enable a situational representation [of] that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is … society’s structures as a whole” (1991:51).

Confronted with this challenge, Jameson notes that postmodern cultural products—though often clearly apologias for global exploitation—can also be read as “particular new forms of realism” (1991:49). From this vantage, grasping the depth of an apparently depthless situation means “becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in

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which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (1991:25). In other words, while that which is signified can no longer be accessed directly, its dimensions—its spatial and temporal coordinates—can still be read off of its signifying trace. In this way, the phenomenal experience of social depthlessness can be impelled to reveal its own “deep” conditions of possibility.

Practically speaking, the collapse of the distinction between culture and economy requires that we elaborate epistemic habits and visual strategies that do not rely—as all previous aesthetic avant-gardes have done—on the critical distance afforded by their prior separation. In other words, since it’s impossible to “return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours” (Jameson, 1991:50), we must find ways of updating—and thus “completing”—our high-modernist strategies of visual critique by tempering them in the crucible of the endless present.

Jameson does not get much further than calling for such a project. Instead of concrete propositions, we are given useful but overly-general guidelines: “the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital.” But while Jameson is short on specifics, he does not fail to convey the extent to which such a project is needed. Since an art capable of holding to the truth of multinational capital would allow us to “begin to grasp our positioning … and regain a capacity to act and struggle” in a context that continues to be marked by “confusion” (1991:54), the stakes are very, very high.

How, then, might the dialectical image be transformed to address the cultural logic of late capitalism? How can Benjamin’s concept—which emphasized “shock” as though it had self-evident revelatory power—be reconfigured to work at a moment in which shock is no longer shocking? In what follows, I propose that the dialectical image might be salvaged by supplementing shock with an aesthetic-epistemological seduction capable of reconnecting viewers to the now-lost referent. In order to do so, I consider the work of two contemporary artists—Mark Lombardi and Cindy Sherman—who, in struggling with the epistemic coordinates of the postmodern scene, produced images that seem to connect aspects of Benjamin’s conception to novel forms of seduction capable of addressing the historical lacunae we now confront.

Like Benjamin, New York-based neo-conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was preoccupied with collecting and organizing information. Between 1994 and his death by suicide in 2000, he developed a novel representational strategy that stands as an intriguing visual approximation of Jameson’s aesthetic of cognitive mapping. After a career that saw him shuffle between stints as a reference librarian, a curator, and a researcher (Hertney, 2006:85), Lombardi began producing works in which data collection and the analysis of social relations congeal into flow charts, maps, or “narrative structures.” Taking financial scandals, business deals, and shady connections between corporate and political interests

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as his starting point, he produced “delicate filigree drawings that map … the flow of global capital” (Hertney, 2006:83).

Mark Lombardi, Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra Operation, ca. 1984-86 (4th Version) (1999)

In an artist statement released in 1997, Lombardi described how he assembled his “narrative structures” by using “a network of lines and notations which are meant to convey a story, typically about a recent event … like the collapse of a large international bank, trading company, or investment house.” Motivated by the desire to “explore the interaction of political, social and economic forces in contemporary affairs,” Lombardi adopted an approach strongly reminiscent of Benjamin’s own method:

Working from syndicated news items and other published accounts, I begin each drawing by compiling large amounts of information about a specific bank, financial group or set of individuals. After a careful review of the literature I then condense the essential points into an assortment of notations and other brief statements of fact, out of which an image begins to emerge.

My purpose throughout is to interpret the material by juxtaposing and assembling the notations into a unified, coherent whole… Hierarchical relationships, the flow of money and other key details are then indicated by a system of radiating arrows, broken lines and so forth… Every statement of fact and connection depicted in the work is true and based on information culled entirely from the public record. (1997)

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Like Benjamin, Lombardi strove to make the scattered fragments of daily life intelligible through the process of assemblage. After his death, his holdings were found to include “14,500 index cards with information on the subjects of his investigations, all drawn from publicly available sources” (Heartney 2006:85). This compulsive collecting echoed Benjamin’s own habits while struggling to illuminate the Paris arcades.

But while there are many intriguing biographical connections between Lombardi and Benjamin (connections that culminate in their respective deaths by suicide), their methodological connection is still more significant. To give but one example: in his unpublished manuscript about the history of panoramic painting (a Benjamin favorite), Lombardi recounts how, in struggling to give an account of the world, “the historian is reduced to random glimmerings obtained via shards, scraps and bits of ephemera to begin the reconstruction” (Bigge, 2005:133). Although Lombardi does not cite Benjamin directly in this context, his sentiment clearly echoes Benjamin’s note in The Arcades Project in which he proposed to allow the “rags, the refuse” of everyday life “to come into their own … by making use of them” (2003:460)

Lombardi curator Robert Hobbs was also prone to describing the artist’s work in Benjaminian terms. According to Hertney, Hobbs was “immediately impressed” with the “sheer beauty” of Lombardi’s work, which used “the delicacy of the curving lines” to delineate “abstract force fields created by the global movement of money.” Hobbs described these works “variously as webs, rhizomes, and constellations” But alongside these revealing characterizations, he also declared Lombardi’s creations to be nothing short of a “mental and visual seduction” (2006:84).

For his part, cultural journalist Ryan Bigge also became intrigued by the simultaneity of analytic clarity and seduction in Lombardi’s work. For Bigge, the artist’s curved lines recalled “the simple yet seductive contours of latitude and longitude” even as they revealed the “self-described vicious circles” of global capitalism (2005:128). In these formulations, it’s possible to see how seduction might pave the way for the shock of recognition.

For Bigge, Lombardi’s genius owed to his ability to “make abstract movements of capital concrete and comprehensible” (2005:128). However, because of the manner in which they are assembled, the narrative structures ensure that comprehensibility does not arise all at once. Instead, it must be pieced together by oscillating between critical distance and engaged proximity. Seduced, the viewer thus sways back and forth. As Bigge recounts, “the density of text” in Lombardi’s images “necessitates the viewer take a number of steps backward, since the facts can easily overwhelm the piece’s beauty.” Indeed, “only from a distance can the work be seen, rather than read” (2005:128-129). But this textual density is also seductive; and as soon as the viewer has retreated to the point from which it’s possible to perceive the whole, she is confronted with the urge to dive back in.

Because its particular content can only be dimly grasped when contemplated from a distance that allows the viewer to consider the beauty of the image as a whole, Lombardi’s creations encourage a process of analytic engagement that compels the

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viewer—now seduced by the whole—to once again fixate upon individual, constellated components. Like falling from heaven and breaking the cloud cover, the viewer is thus drawn through aesthetics before confronting the shocking implications of the depicted scene; however, even here, the beauty and conceptual coherence of the totality is not eclipsed. To reactivate it, the viewer is simply required to step back in order to begin the process anew. By prompting alternation between these two vantage points, Lombardi does for epistemology what stereoscopy does for vision.

Along with holding true “to the world space of multinational capital,” Lombardi’s stereoscopy also corresponds to Benjamin’s efforts to crystallize historical fragments into illuminating three-dimensional constellations. However, with Benjamin’s dialectical image, stereoscopy is achieved through the montage of historical citations themselves and not through modulations in the epistemic position of the viewer; however, this doesn’t mean that montage plays no role in Lombardi’s oeuvre (though his works are certainly not montage in the conventional sense). Drawn in pencil on one surface, they stand in sharp contrast to those works of the early twentieth century that were assembled from multiple sources in the interest of yielding generative discord.

Nevertheless, when considered from an epistemological and not a purely formal perspective, it’s evident that Lombardi does bring discrete fragments into combination in new and illuminating ways. The constellating line of his narrative structures gives shape to fragmented and otherwise imperceptible social relationships and—in the process—forges a new socio-spatial proximity (a new cognitive map) that amplifies the viewer’s apprehension of the “world space of multinational capital.” If, in the past, montage enabled artists to materialize meaning by assembling objects in new and illuminating ways, Lombardi effectively revitalizes this strategy by conceptually distilling it to its most basic premise.

But rather than generating the kind of shock that such constructions yielded in the early twentieth century, the slow seduction enacted by Lombardi’s narrative structures revitalizes shock’s epistemological promise by subverting its contemporary aestheticization. By making the abstract concrete, and by showing how the trans-local organization of capitalist social relations is made possible through concrete and localized points of relay, Lombardi helps us to think in terms that take history itself to be the object of a collective, transformative labor process. For these reasons, and as a prefiguration of Jameson’s new “political art,” Lombardi should be considered an important reference point for anyone working to develop a dialectical image today. However, when measured against the epistemological demands that Benjamin associated with the concept, his work ultimately falls short.

In order to understand why, it’s necessary to consider how Lombardi’s narrative structures depict an objectified world of relations in which the viewer is never directly implicated. In other words, if they provoke forms of analytic reckoning consistent with the requirements of the dialectical image, they do not yet lead to the forms of decisive action that such images also require. And, because the composition’s constellated

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references do not pass through the viewer in any clear sense, there is little for the viewer to do but engage in passive contemplation.

According to Hobbs, “Lombardi wanted … to pry people loose from habitual ways of thinking, so that they would look anew at their world and find far-ranging connections where none were thought to exist” (2003:41). And there’s no doubt that this happens. But while Lombardi’s viewer can look on with amazement or gnawing disgust as the trans-local relations of capitalist exploitation take on a concrete form, the images themselves organize no space from which to engage in anything beyond interpretation. Since the narrative recounted by Lombardi’s structures is already whole (since there is, in fact, no contradiction to address), “completing” the scene through decisive action is superfluous.

At best, Lombardi’s representational strategy fosters outrage at capitalist impunity. At worst, it becomes a machine yielding smug satisfaction. For while Lombardi’s formal-conceptual objectifications make the world visible in its trans-local, constellated totality, the price of that objectification is that—like a weather pattern—the world itself ends up appearing in a pre-social, natural, or reified form. Standing outside the depicted scene, the viewer is thus implicitly exonerated. Worse still, because the viewer is not inducted into the depicted drama, the drama itself remains a fundamentally distorted representation of the social. For this reason—and along with Brecht, who made the same observation in a different but parallel context—we must consider why “the present-day world can only be described to present-day people if it’s described as capable of transformation” (1992:274).

How might the political-epistemological lacunae at the heart of Lombardi’s oeuvre be addressed? Although there are likely many ways to answer this question, I would like here to reconsider the work of Cindy Sherman, an artist whose images are probably the perfect antithesis to Lombardi’s neo-conceptualist experiments. Creating self-portraits since the 1970s, Sherman’s work has been heralded for its uncanny ability to illuminate the precise means by which narrative fictions come to organize perception. In so doing, it also illuminates important aspects of the social overlooked in Lombardi’s narrative structures. Because Sherman was among those artists who—from the 1970s onward—began to actively explore embodiment and site-specificity, this corrective function should be considered deliberate. As art historian Hannah Westley attests, the “move to reground art” during the period in which Sherman’s work first appeared was considered “urgent” by many artists working in a context overrun by “the serial objects of minimalism, simulacral images of Pop and demonstrations of conceptual work” (2008:179).

In contrast to the conceptual artists that had been Lombardi’s genealogical precursors, Sherman produced works that highlighted how the postmodern subject came to be marked by a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between representation as an all-consuming social-indexical system on the one hand and those nebulous aspects of Being that refused encapsulation on the other. For this reason, Sherman’s work became inseparable from the “return to the body and the social, to the abject and the site-specific” that marked the art of that era (Westley, 2008:179).

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In her Untitled Film Stills shot between 1977 and 1980, Sherman produced self-portraits that—through changes in composition, costume, lighting, and tone—effectively demonstrated that “subjectivity” seemed increasingly to be a representational accomplishment. By mining the archive of established film genres and personae while maintaining a consistent presence at the center of each image, she helped to reveal the degree to which the cultural logic of late capitalism had subordinated the ontological question of Being to the more malleable register of stylistic signifiers. From this standpoint, Sherman’s works should seem whimsical; however, viewers and critics alike have agreed that their actual effect has been far more unsettling. Why is this so?

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21 (1978)

Considered as a series so that both the range of Sherman’s deliberate filmic citations at her constant presence at the center of each image become explicit, the Untitled Film Stills begin to appear dialectical. By mobilizing representational norms unmoored by concrete referents while—at the same time—maintaining a consistent presence in each image, Sherman intensifies the tension between the simulacrum and the self-portrait. In her images, two discrete ontological premises (one “new,” one “old”) come into direct conflict. Occupying each image in a way that suggested a “more,” a beneath or beyond that exceeds representational capture, Sherman discovered that she could make representation confront Being itself.

According to art critic Peter Schjeldahl, by taking “the movie fiction of a character observed in vulnerable solitude as the departure point for an exploration, in depth, of vulnerability itself,” Sherman seduces her viewers into confronting the “shock of deep

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recognition”—an experience that is “not altogether agreeable.” On this basis, Schjeldahl locates “the drama” in Sherman’s work “in the abyss between matter and mind, object and subject” (2003:35). Imperceptible in the first instance, this point—this “abyss”—is brought into focus through the staged antagonism of antithetical ontological premises. Initially, representation subsumes (or seems even to constitute) Being. But if this is true, then what is this indescribable and unsettling Thing, this remainder that refuses symbolization?

On first blush, the Untitled Film Stills seem inseparable from the feminist desire to interrogate the representational norms that organize and maintain feminine status. By citing works of low-culture and transposing them into the realm of fine art (as Duchamp and Warhol had done before her), Sherman exposes them to a scrutiny they may not otherwise have received. But alongside these citations, Sherman herself remains the clear object of her work. By downplaying her status as creator,iii Sherman found a means by which to make her images speak for, and thus condemn, themselves. In this way—and like Benjamin before her—Sherman reaffirmed that effective social criticism “needn’t say anything. Merely show.” (2003:460).

But while Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills proved to be exceptionally compelling as a critique of representational norms, they did not yet constitute an explicit critique of representation as such. If, as art critic Norman Bryson has argued, the postmodern moment is characterized by “the absorption of reality within representation,” then the challenge for those aiming to change the world is to first highlight the means by which representation has come to seem like an “apparently enclosed order” with “no fire escape” (1993:222). Only after this knowledge is secured does a jailbreak from the prison house of signs even become conceivable. The Untitled Film Stills point to this challenge; however, they do not resolve it.

It’s in this context that we can understand Sherman’s gradual move toward producing images explicitly concerned with the point at which representation itself begins to fail—the very point at which the “fire escape” becomes evident. In her centerfold images of the 1980s, this search led her (still the subject-object of her work) to depict women posed in accordance with the representational norms of the pornographic pinup. But while these works—like the Untitled Film Stills before them—engaged representational norms by actively objectifying them, Sherman also heightened her mastery of “the look” of distracted focus to suggest either an enormous inside or an enormous outside that stubbornly refused subordination to the symbolic register invoked by the image. Significantly, what Sherman “sees” in these images also remains inaccessible to the viewer who is thus forced to confront her own scopophilic prying (now fully activated through the works’ citation of pornographic representational norms).

From the mid-‘80s onward, and as a logical elaboration of her engagement with representation’s limit, Sherman began to explore the threshold of death and engage themes similar to those considered by Julia Kristeva in her analysis of abjection in Powers of Horror. In Kristeva’s account, the abject “draws me toward that space were

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meaning collapses” (1982:2). Moreover, “the time of abjection is double” since it’s marked by a “veiled infinity” even as it pushes those who contemplate it toward “the moment when revelation bursts forth” (1982:9).

Coinciding with Lacan’s account of the Real (that thing which escapes symbolization and produces profoundly unsettling effects), Kristeva’s description of the abject also suggests a structural homology with Benjamin’s dialectical image. Indeed, reading through Convolute N, it’s difficult to not be struck by Benjamin’s fascination with the moment when revelation “bursts forth.” As in Kristeva, this moment of revelation obtains when the “veiled infinity” of empty, homogenous time (the time of mythological histories told from the standpoint of “progress”)iv is sundered. Consequently, for Benjamin, “the dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash” (2003:473).

As with Benjamin, who imagined that the desire for redemption was stimulated by recollections of an existence prior to the fall that has left its traces on all manner of social ephemera (1978:148), Kristeva proposed that the experience of abjection was akin to that of a subject to whom “it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations for its own being” (1982:5). This is politically significant, since the experience of lack points to that which is lacking. At its logical conclusion, it can become the basis for a redemptive act capable of surmounting the inaugural loss that—through abjection—can now be concretely understood.

Although they should not be overstated, these connections between Benjamin and Kristeva allow us to more fully appreciate the Benjaminian attributes of Sherman’s work. For instance, while Benjamin highlighted the political significance of the corpse in the German “mourning plays” of the seventeenth century, Sherman’s images from the mid-‘80s revealed how the corpse could be used to illuminate dynamics particular to late capitalism. Like Charles Baudelaire, Sherman’s work from this period managed to truly see the corpse, not only from the outside, but also—as Benjamin would say—“from within” (2006:163).

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #153 (1985)

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Although these images are shocking, they are also profoundly ambivalent. To understand why, it’s necessary to consider how the viewer contemplating Sherman’s abjection is confronted with the shock of recognition (I, too, will be the corpse!) only after passing through the scopophilic seduction of the abject itself. Which would be fine—or even politically desirable, as it was in the case of Lombardi’s work—if it weren’t for the fact that this seduction is itself ambivalent.

On the one hand, it seems to prepare the viewer for a shock from which it’s impossible to distance one’s self (and here, as with Lombardi, seduction becomes an important factor in the elaboration of a contemporary dialectical image). On the other hand, Sherman’s approach seems to turn abjection into an aesthetic experience wholly commensurate with the cultural logic of late capitalism. Here, in the face of experience’s endless dissimulation, the promise of one Real thing becomes the ultimate—and ultimately commodifiable—seduction.

The forms of aestheticization to which Sherman’s works have remained susceptible are incompatible with the dialectical image. For this very reason, commentators like curator Magrit Brehm have been able to blithely declare that, in her “Disgust” series, Sherman’s subject “is not the moldy food but the designed surface” (2002:9). Here, disgust itself becomes indistinguishable from “an artistic experience” (2002:8). Though seemingly undone by its encounter with the Real, postmodern epistemology thus reveals itself to be capable of representationally subsuming abjection itself. And as irreducible Being gets reduced to the stylistic conceits of the image surface, the ontological stereoscopy that gave Sherman’s work its depth and dialectical force becomes flat.

Perhaps it was inevitable. After all, Kristeva herself noted that—with the publication of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (a Benjamin favorite)—abjection itself became “fashionable” (1982:20). Channeled into the symbolic register at a moment when capitalism has robbed experience of all gravity, the abject has become a powerful means of re-infusing our wasted lives with an affective weight we are no longer able to muster ourselves.

Harnessed to the logic of the commodity form, abjection marks a beguiling outer limit. At a moment when many commodities have been deprived of all but the representation of their use value,v the Real becomes a hot commodity. And the more the encounter with the Real comes to mark the last reliable verification of Being (and here we need only to think of those pornographic genres promising “real” tears or successful businesses specializing in slum tourism), the more likely it is that abject art will degenerate into a provocation whose ultimate effect is the reaffirmation of the status quo.

If Lombardi’s narrative structures fall short of becoming dialectical images by over-objectifying the social, Sherman’s images fail by allowing abjection to be turned into a source of narcissistic (and commodifiable) pleasure. Nevertheless, when considered together, Lombardi and Sherman provide useful reference points for those interested in

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producing a dialectical image capable of locating the fire escape to our own endless present.

How, then, might we envision a synthesis? To begin, it’s useful to reiterate how, both Lombardi and Sherman effectively marshal seduction to stage shocking analytic confrontations. We can therefore imagine that today’s dialectical image must refuse to become visible all at once. If, as Buck-Morss proposed, the dialectical image is comprised of two discrete modes of apprehension (where one is related to its production and the other to its recognition), the contemporary context demands that the process of production becomes an aspect of what is finally recognizable. Today, the dialectical image is processual. It is marked by duration.

But it is not enough to be seduced. Lombardi and Sherman operate on different—and nearly antithetical—aesthetic and epistemic terrains. How can we constellate them so as to overcome the shortcomings they confront as stand-alone oeuvres? And more: how might we use such a constellation to illuminate the moment of danger in which we now find ourselves? If Lombardi’s narrative structures need to be subjectivized in order to induct the viewer, how might this be accomplished? And, if Sherman’s corpse needs to be socialized so that the world to which it is a symptom becomes visible as its profane condition of possibility, what does this mean, visually-speaking?

Although the answer to these questions is by no means clear, it’s hopeful to note that—in their artistic productions and pedagogical practices—activists have begun experimenting with possible reolutions. For instance, at the outset of war in Iraq in 2003, demonstrators in Toronto could be heard chanting “Bay Street’s covered in Baghdad’s blood!” Although it was not yet clear what connections existed between Canadian finance capital and America’s new strategy of accumulation by dispossession, the chant enjoined those who shouted it (and maybe those who heard it, too) to radically truncate the distance between cause and effect so that “there” could be made visible “here.” The mock military checkpoints set up on university campuses by Palestine solidarity activists abide by a similar logic. By making aspects of Israel’s spatial organization concrete on campuses where administrators have been complicit with Israeli apartheid, these checkpoints prefigure a materialist pedagogy of concretion.

But what’s missing from practices such as these is an attempt to forge a coherent epistemological link between the objective demands of analytic montage and the post-empathic subjectivity required to truly learn from abjection. Only here will a contemporary dialectical image emerge.

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Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter (2003). The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

——. (2006). “Central Park” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

——. (1978). “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Reflections. New York: Schocken

——. (1968). “Theses On the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. New York: Schocken

Bigge, Ryan (2005). “Making the Invisible Visible: The Neo-Conceptual Tentacles of Mark Lombardi.” Left History 10.2, Fall, 2005

Brecht, Bertolt (1992). “Can the Present-Day World be Reproduced by Means of Theatre?” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang

Brehm, Magrit (2002). Ahead of the 21st Century: The Pisces Collection. Hatie Cantz Bryson, Norman (1993). “House of Wax,” in Cindy Sherman: 1975-1993. New York:

Rizzoli International Publishers

Buck-Morss, Susan (1992). The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Foster, Hal (1996). The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Hertney, Eleanor (2006). “The Sinister Beauty of Global Conspiracies,” in Defending Complexity: Art, Politics, and the New World Order. Lennox, MA: Hard Press Editions

Hobbs, Robert (2003). Mark Lombardi: Global Networks. New York: Independent Curators International

Jameson, Frederic (1991). Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press

Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press

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Lombardi, Mark (1997). “Artist Statement.” www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/mlavailable3.html

Sanbonmatsu, John (2004). The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject. New York: Monthly Review Press

Schjeldahl, Peter (2003). Cindy Sherman: Centerfolds. New York: Skanstedt Fine Art

Westley, Hannah (2008). The Body as Medium and Metaphor. New York: Rodopi

Žižek, Slavoj (2008). The Fragile Absolute: or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso

i It is significant to note that—in The Arcades Project—Benjamin actively distinguished the study of images, which he took to be the substance of historical knowledge, from the study of style (2003:462).

ii Considering newspapers that included feuilletons on their front page alongside the news of the day, Buck-Morss highlights Benjamin’s engagement with the fact that, in the nineteenth century, “the line” between “political fact and literary fiction” became incredibly thin. But while he anticipated how the “oppositions in which we have been accustomed to think may lose their relevance” and sought to develop an appropriate corresponding pedagogical strategy (1991:140), even Benjamin would have been hard pressed to divine the extent of culture’s current economic subsumption.

iii Sherman has deliberately refused to even inscribe her works with particular titles, which is the artist’s due.

iv Throughout Convolute N, Benjamin makes several attempts to distinguish his conception of history from the one pervasive among bourgeois historians seduced by the myth of progress. In one such entry, Benjamin states: “the concept of progress had to run counter to the critical theory of history from the moment it ceased to be applied as a criterion to specific historical developments and instead was required to measure the span between a legendary inception and a legendary end of history. In other words: as soon as it becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress bespeaks an uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation” (2003:478).

v Slavoj Zizek has explored this theme extensively (e.g. 2008:28).

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