Alterity, Metaphor and Formation: Around the Edges of a Paradigm

Abstract

art has lived for much of its life in some kind of productive anxiety about the uses which might be made out of it in the culture [. . .] insofar as the claim is testable by looking at the uses society actually made of abstract paintings, then we could say that indeed they have been thought to be decorative and put through their paces in that spirit. They have seemed the appropriate background to ball gown and bolero, to the black-tie do at the local musuem, to the serious business of making money. (p. 219) What has quite rapidly happened is that Modernism quickly lost its anti-bourgeois stance, and achieved comfortable integration into the new international capitalism ... The painfully acquired techniques of significant disconnection are relocated, with the help of the special insensitivity of the trained and assured technicists, as the merely technical modes of advertising and the commercial cinema. The isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss, the narrative discontinuities, have become the easy iconography of the commercials, and the lonely, bitter, sardonic and sceptical [male?] hero takes his ready-made place as star of the thriller.25 Reconstructing Modernism contains several interesting essays which contribute to the revisionist social history in two ways: Monahan's piece is an addition to our knowledge of the historical institutionalisation of Modernist art, for example. Buchloh's account of the historiography of Constructivism, within the context of the Cold War, is a valuable part of the critical re-reading of Modernist history. Beyond these essays, Crow's study of Warhol's early 1960s works and Laurie May's account of trade unionism within the Hollywood of the 1950s extend the range of objects of study within the paradigm. Both essays, however, occupy a marginal place within the volume as a whole, either cast to the periphery or short and unambitious in scope. The 'centre' to the collection is Clark's text, located virtually in the middle and (a shade) longer than de Duve's piece. It also provides the book's surface identity. My final point is perhaps obvious. This is a (relatively) absent centre, in the sense that it occupies no position fully or finally; it is unstable and it makes the volume unstable; it does not codify any paradigm or structure of protocols within research or writing. It contains elements of a different 'relation to the world', of a different set of concerns, beyond the paradigm, but not a refusal of it, as Clark says. It may lead one way or another, but the 'fact' of metaphoricity, and of what has been called a 'radical alterity',26 cannot be unlearned, only repressed. We may look forward to the development of another paradigm (I certainly do), but this must not prevent us from identifying the present conditions within which such a repression has, and will take place, and with what important con-