Antivision

Author(s): Rosalind Krauss

Source: October, Vol. 36, Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, UnKnowing (Spring, 1986), pp. 147-154
Published by: The MIT Press
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Antivision

ROSALIND KRAUSS

One turns the pages of Georges Bataille's book on Manet with a mounting
sense of disappointment. Is it really Bataille who is telling us-once againthat Manet's achievement was the destruction of subject matter so that in its
as he
place, from among its ruins, should arise pure painting-"painting,"
a
for
"for
its
own
the
of
interwoven
forms
and
colors"?'
writes,
sake, song
eyes
Having turned subject matter into a mere pretext for this release of visual opulence, for this experience of optical autonomy, Bataille can conclude, "I would
stress the fact that what counts in Manet's canvases is not the subject, but the
vibration of light."2
So once again there is the visual model, ineluctably tied to the visual arts.
Of course, modernism's visual model had significantly transformed those of
earlier times. This is true whether we think of the Middle Ages' preaching
model, in which vision, seen as the most vivid and precise of the senses was to
be the conduit through which religious matter could most directly and most enduringly affect the soul; or whether we take an empiricist model, with painting
transcribing that mosaic of sensation through which reality announces itself to
a perceiving subject. Modernism transmutes these models according to its
own, altered sense of the task of visuality. To exclude the domain of knowledge, both moral and scientific, to rewrite the visual in the realm of a reflexive
relation to the modality of vision rather than to its contents, to savor in and for
itself qualities like immediacy, vibrancy,simultaneity, effulgenceand to experience
these as qualities without objects -the intransitive verbs of vision, as it wereall of this is to enter what in quite another mood we might describe as the modernist fetishization of sight.
1.
Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons, Geneva, Skira,
1955, p. 36.
2.
Ibid., p. 103. This had, essentially, been the position of the French art historical establishment since the major Manet exhibition of 1932. In Manet et la tradition(1932), Germain Bazain
had announced, "L'art de Manet est en effet un pur pFrobleme de couleur," asserting the artist's
indifference both to invention and to subject matter. Rene Huyghe's Manet peintre(1932) emphasized Manet's commitment to a notion of painting as a reflexive process.

148

OCTOBER

But Bataille - and here's the strange part - had begun his career precisely
by buying out of all this.
From the Documentsperiod, that is to say 1929-30, comes a series of texts
dedicated to an entirely different reading of vision's relation to art. We think of
"Rotting Sun," the essay dedicated to Picasso; we turn to the study of automutilation and the fascination with the sun in "Sacrificial Mutilation and the
Vincent Van
a Gogh"; orr we reflect on the highly critical review of
Severed Ear of Vin
PrimitiveArt, a book that sought to extend developmental psychology's theories
of the genesis of representation back to the time of the caves; or again, we find
the brief meditation on the organ of vision in the Documentsdictionary entry
called "Eye," and subtitled "Cannibal Delicacy." In all of these Bataille proposes
a scandalous relation of art to vision.

Lascaux.Bison, man, and bird.

Antivision

149

Contained in the visual metaphor-the grounding of art in the fundamental properties of vision-is the commitment to productiveness and to mastery,
to the acquisitiveness and accomplishment of sight, to its usefulness, its prowess,
its determined busy-ness. Miming this productivity was - for the psychology of
the 1920s-the very project that initiated man into the act of art, where representation is, simply, a way of appropriating things. To draw an animal on the
wall of the cave is to possess it, to have already succeeded in hunting it. The
psychologist charts a purposive movement on the part of the primitive draughtsman that is propelled by this need to create an equivalent to the purposefulness
of sight. The modern scientist sees that paleolithic, infant artist progressing,
over the course of thousands of years, from the babble of an inchoate scrawl to
the search from within that linear meander for something he will "recognize"
and, once having seen it there, man or animal, he learns to repeat this sign.
Gradually he perfects it. And his mastery of it repeats the mastery that it, as
likeness, will exercise on the world he sees.
Bataille never denies this scenario of productiveness, which he titles "appropriation." He simply points out that this account has chosen to omit
another, parallel course, charted like the first, on the wall of the cave. It is this
second course, delirious, destructive, that cannot be thought by science. From
the very same period that the walls reap their harvest of animals-delicatehooved, shaggy-backed, ferociously horned-they declare a fury towards the
person of their own creator. The Aurignacian depictions of man are caricatural,
ignoble, debased. They never seem to rise above those initial, early scrawls the
motive for which seems, despite the psychologists' scenario, dubiously productive. Rather the force propelling these formless networks of line comes across as
destructive, as a marking which dirties, defaces, disrupts the ground on which
it appears, a marking whose impulse seems purely sadistic. So art has an alternative beginning at least as far as man's self-image is concerned. It begins with
what Bataille calls "a refusal to represent" and instead projects self-depiction as
autodefacement.3
Two mythic cycles project this (self-)defacing structure of representation.
The first takes place in darkness, in the chthonic obscurity of the cave, where
no man leans over the luminous reflection of his own image, giving rise to the
beginnings of art in the rapt, self-admiring gesture of Narcissus. Instead, the
Minotaur presides in this darkness and substitutes the blindness and terror of
the labyrinth for the transparency of the mirror. The representation of man
within this site must be collected under the nonproductive terms "destruction"
or "decomposition," as opposed to the productive form that undertakes the job
of appropriation.
The second cycle leaves the caves and is performed precisely in relation to
3.
Georges Bataille, "L'art primitif," Oeuvrescompletes, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard,
247-54.

1970, pp.

150

OCTOBER

the sun, that embodiment of the zenith and of light which for most of mankind
functions to symbolize elevation of both mind and spirit. The sun functions as
the most abstract of objects, Bataille explains, "since it is impossible to look at it
fixedly." But if, he argues, "one obstinately focuses on it, a certain madness is
implied, and the notion changes meaning because it is no longer production
that appears in light, but refuse or combustion. ... In practice the scrutinized
sun can be identified with a mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epileptic crisis.4 It is just such a crisis that tied Van Gogh to the sun, the constant
deity of his painting from the time of Arles and Saint-Remy, the deity to which
he made the sacrifice of his ear.
To stare at the sun is to go mad, to go blind, and thus to perform what
Bataille calls automutilation. But this automutilation by which the body is defiled is the very act of mimesis through which one attempts to identify with an
ideal-the sun, the gods-by imitating it. Ancient sacrificial ritual-Bataille
speaks of Mithraic cults in "Rotting Sun," or Aztec ones in "Extinct America"
- as well as modern pathological behavior, fix precisely on that aspect of the
sun or the sun god that embodies waste and destruction: "It is nothing but
radiation, gigantesque loss of heat and light, flame, explosion,"Bataille writes,
calling the sun "this great cataclysm."5 And it is this ideal which in the eyes of
an idealist culture would only be an anti-ideal, this ideal of a nonrecuperable
expenditure, of a supreme power through loss that forms the basis of imitation
when identification with "a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs"
issues, inevitably, in automutilation.6
Within this automutilative act, an identification with the sun that defines
itself as a self-blinding, the circle is squared and the darkness of the cave fuses
with the blaze of noon. The two mythic cycles are the same cycle and have the
same story to tell of representation, of art's depiction of man himself. From the
1937 essay "Van Gogh as Prometheus" comes another image of this fusion of
dark and light. Bataille imagines Van Gogh trying to look directly into the sun
by holding his hand before his face as a screen, or blinder. In such a moment of
both seeing and not-seeing, "Death appeared in a sort of transparency, like the
sun through the blood of a living hand, in the interstices of the bones outlined
in the darkness."7
Representation is born, then, at the limit: where light turns to darkness,
where life surrenders an image of death, where sight is extinguished in a revelatory moment which is the same as blindness. And it is this other, nonappropri-

4.
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis,
nesota Press, 1985, p. 57.
5.
Bataille, OC, vol. I, p. 498.
6.
Bataille, Visions of Excess, p. 66.
7.
Bataille, OC, vol. I, p. 499.

University of Min-

Vincentvan Gogh.The Sower. 1888.

ative, nonproductive form of representation that Bataille resurrects once again

in a strangely subversive image within the very pages of his book on Manet.
Manet, he had written, is the beginning of modern art, an art that
celebrates the silent autonomy of vision. But behind this beginning is another,
wholly alternate beginning, which opens up to us in the following passage:
In that vision of a man about to die, flinging up his arms with a
shriek, which we call The Shootingsof the Third of May, we have the
very image of death, such as man can hardly ever know it, since the
event itself wipes out all consciousness of it. In this picture Goya
caught the blinding, instantaneous flash of death, a thunderbolt of
sight-destroying intensity, brighter than any known light. The eloquence, the rhetoric of painting has never been carried further, but
here its effect is that of definitive silence, an outcry smothered before
it can rise.8
8.

Bataille, Manet,p. 51.

FranciscoGoya.The Third of May, 1808. 1814-15.

Goya, then, offers a quite different beginning for the history of modernism. Bataille characterizes it as an art of excess,an art that recalls the violence of
the sacred, as opposed to Manet's and dominant modernism's art of absence.We
thus end up with two beginnings that are opposed in character. "He was the
first of the moderns," Bataille insists of Goya, before adding in the very same
sentence, "though Manet alone explicitly inaugurated modern painting."9
The ambivalence that arises in this moment within the description of the
founding moment of modernism is a struggle precisely between the values of
opticality and those of an intensity that is "blinding," "sight-destroying," and in
which representation dares to be neither appropriative nor productive. One
feels in the span of two or three pages the flicker of excitement generated by this
myth of blindness so familiar to Bataille, which breaks through the placid surface of his modernist narrative in a display of regressive, irrational power.
Indeed, the Goya appearance is more than just an account of a false start.
It is the momentary disruption of the official paradigm of centuries of Western

9.

Ibid.,p. 56.

Antivision

153

art to which Bataille subscribes throughout the rest of the book. For the whole
of Manet is an exercise in the aesthetic paradigm we associate with the Enlightenment and the name of Lessing: the paradigm that differentiates the artistic
genres by means of the modalities of consciousness of reality proper to each,
disassociating an art of time from one of space and thereby grounding each of
the arts in the perceptual field proper to its own experience: speech linked to
temporality and sectioned off by definition from sight, linked to space.
Wholly within this framework, Bataille then repeatedly defines Manet's
contribution as a breaking of rhetoric's grip on painting, as a silencing of
speech in order to discover the preeminence of vision as such.
The interest of the Goya episode as an alternative, in fact contradictory,
beginning is precisely that it challenges the aesthetic paradigm- vision/language - through which painting is understood to define itself, by offering a
third term /blindness/ which can be seen as undoing or foiling that paradigm.
Outside the structural law that organizes the arts in relation to the positive conin its sensory malfunction is precisely the
tents of sense, blindness-which
refusal to appropriate - is an irregular third term, not deducible from the other
two. Following Barthes's description of the operations of Bataille's heterology
we could say, "It is a term that is independent, full, eccentric, irreducible: the
term of a (structurally) lawless seduction."10 Instead, blindness becomes a term
that forms its own pairing with the pole of opticality by constructing another
paradigm - vision/blindness - on the very body of the perceiver, in all of his or
her physical, material existence.
In so doing, the work of the heterological becomes obvious, because it
forces one to see that it was always on, in, and through the body of the
perceiver that the aesthetic paradigm operated; that these operations were
merely sublimated by an idealist subterfuge that wants to describe the work of
art as a function of the disembodied modalities of sense. But Bataille invites the
body to reassert itself into the structural law by which modernism masquerades
painting as the experience for itself of the contentless contents of vision. The
paradigm vision/blindness returns sight to its seat in the affective, erotic ground
of the body, the body convulsed in either autoappropriation or automutilation.
It is only lately that one has learned, in this country, to attend to this
alternative mythological practice, to this construction of a wholly disorienting
and disruptive third term that unravels the neat categories of a too formulaic
modernism. Looking around the edges of Bataille's own circle in the days of
Documentsone finds a group of practices that are as extraordinary as they are
disregarded within the official histories of modernist art. On the one hand there
is the disruptive practice of the early Giacometti as he began to think the body

10.
Roland Barthes, "Les sorties du texte," in, Bataille, ed. Philippe Sollers, Paris, 10/18, 1973,
p. 58.

154

OCTOBER

of sculpture through the Bataillian categories of labyrinth, necropolis, and the

vertiginous fall from the vertical axis of the monument to the horizontal axis of
the base. " On the other hand there is the production of a kind of photography
associated with both Bataille's magazine Documentsand with Minotaure, the one
to whom he gave its name.
As this photography develops what are undoubtedly the surrealist movement's most inventive and searing images, it does so less under the sign of
Breton's convulsive beauty than under the sign of Bataille's automutilation.
There we find the body inscribed in a mimetic response to external forces; the
body bursting its bounds as it is assaulted from without; the body assuming
both the signs of castration and the forms of the fetish.12
The terms that Bataille invented to shake the certainty of various norlike informe, acephale,
mative paradigms in all their logical symmetry-terms
terms work to release the affect
basesse, automutilation, and blindness-these
that has been available all along in a whole body of work which, for many
decades, has been unassimilable by us.
They are terms that might be expected as well to organize and restructure
our understanding of more recent practices, beginning in the 1940s with Dubuffet's early materiological explorations, or jumping forward to watch the extinction of light in late Rothko, or to witness the alignment of the body with the
earth in the sculpture of the last two decades and understanding it in terms of
the labyrinth's complication of forms and of horizontality's endless multiplying
of point of view. It is not clear what an alternative view of the history of recent
art -one operated through Bataille's disruption of the prerogatives of a visual
system-would yield. It is my assumption that in gesturing toward another set
of data, in suggesting another group of reasons, another description of the goals
of representation, another ground for the very activity of art, its yields will be
tremendous.

11.
See my treatment of this in "No More Play," collected in my, The Originality of the AvantGardeand OtherModernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1985.
See my "Corpus Delicti," October,no. 33 (Summer 1985), pp. 31-72.
12.