The Political Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Art

Abstract

The session on the Political Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Art at the 1986 Annual Meeting of the College Art Association,which served as the basis of this issue of Art Journal, owed its genesis to two rather different sources. First, the notion of an unconscious as opposed to a conscious inscription of the political in the work of art or in artistic institutions or within the processes of art making seemed to me to provide a necessary antithesis to those consciously formulated political programs or commissions which had been considered in the volume Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, edited by Henry Millon and myself in 1978 (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T Press). Second, I had been inspired by a reading of Fredric Jameson's magisterial text, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1981). It was not my intention to attempt a wholesale translation of Jameson's complex work into the realm of the visual arts-a project that would have been impossible in any case-but rather to see what would happen if one made the attempt to articulate such a problematic venture for the field of art history. In the case of art consciously designed to serve a political cause-for example, Repin's They Didn't Expect Him, representing the return of a Siberian exile, or Rude's heroic statue of Napoleon-the politics in question were often made manifest in the terms of iconographic, rather than formal analysis. It seemed to me that in the case of the presence of unconscious political presuppositions a different sort of methodology would be necessary, one that avoided displacing the political onto the realm of subject matter and, indeed, one that avoided the stereotypical opposition between iconographic and formal analysis entirely. The original call for papers for the session on the Political Unconscious stipulated proposals dealing in novel or innovative ways with the intersection of art and politics, particularly cases in which concrete historical relations of class, sex, nationality, or race were veiled, transformed, or even erased, thus functioning as an unconscious grounding for the production under consideration. By I meant to imply the discourses of art, modes of art production, and art institutions such as museums and academies, as well as works of art per se. Investigations of photography, print-making, and anonymous visual production, as well as the more conventional painting and sculpture, were invited. More than fifty proposals were submitted for consideration, many of them excellent and provocative. For purposes of consistency, papers dealing with French art were given priority, with the exception of Douglas Crimp's piece on the Altes Museum, which seemed to set the stage-both theoretical and material-for the whole undertaking, despite the fact that the museum in question was a German rather than a French one. An additional piece, by Michael Orwicz, which seemed entirely appropriate to the generally French tenor of the issue, was added to the papers presented by Douglas Crimp, Leila W. Kinney, Stephen F. Eisenman, Christopher J. Robinson, Jane Kromm, and Jeffrey J. Rosen at the 1986 session. I see now that my conception of the political unconscious was in fact rather nafve and too all-embracing. Yet it seemed to me to serve a real purpose in generating the methodologically various and often provocative texts that it did.