KANT AFTER DUCHAMP

THIERRY DE DUVE

AN O C T O B E R BOOK

T H E M I T PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

LONDON, ENCLAND
 P a r t I:

THE UNIVERSAL AND THE SINGULAR

 1

ART WAS A PROPER NAME

For us, art is that which we find under this name: something which
simply is, and which doesn't need to conform to laws in order to
exist; a complicated social product.

—Robert Musil

ACT ONE: IN W H I C H Y O U ARE C O M I N G HJOM O U T E R SPACE

AND ASK Y O U R S E L F " W H A T IS ART?"

1.1.

Imagine yourself an ethnologist—or an anthropologist—from outer space. You

descend to Earth. Knowing nothing about it, you are unprejudiced—except
perhaps that you see everything through E.T.'s eyes. You start observing hu­
mans—their customs, their rituals, and above all, their myths—in the hope of
deriving a pattern that will make Earth-thought and its underlying social order
intelligible. You quickly notice, among other things, that in most human
tongues there is a word whose meaning escapes you and whose usage varies
considerably among humans, but which, in all their societies, seems to refer to
an activity that is either integrative or compensatory, lying midway between
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

their myths and their sciences. This word is art. Having noticed that it designates
things, and goaded by your empirical curiosity as a researcher, you set out to
inventory these things.
With the help of your informants, chosen to be as numerous and diverse
as possible, at some point you will have collected a corpus, as exhaustive as
possible, empirically defined by the rubric: all that is called art by humans. 1 So
gathered, the corpus seems incredibly heterogeneous to you. It includes images,
but not all images; sounds, but only some; written or printed texts, but only
certain ones; two- and three-dimensional objects, some made in the image of
humans, but also others that are unrecognizable; gestures, cries, and speeches,
but performed or uttered only under certain, extremely variable, conditions;
and so on. You sort. You compare. You scan your corpus in all directions,
counting on discovering those features, which through their recurrence and
their opposition to other neighboring features, will little by little establish the
field of pertinence of the human word "art."
The job seems endless to you. You can tenaciously undertake it only be­
cause you are relying on a postulate that at times seems to you an intuitive
certainty, but at other times only a methodological hypothesis: the comparative
procedure is worth the expenditure; the taxonomic enterprise looks promising.
Perhaps, being a follower of the functionalist school of some Martian Malinow-
ski, you postulate that art has a social function proper to itself, independent of
the diversity of its manifestations, or that it fulfills a fundamental need of hu­
manity in general, or further, that it corresponds to a shared instinct of the
species constituting one trait of any human's "basic personality." As such, the
classification of the various domains of their activities that humans spontane­
ously construct when they distinguish between art, religion, ethics, and science,

1. "An art object, by definition, is an object recognized as such by a group." "The study of
aesthetics consists mainly of the simple collection of objects Everything will be collected,
including what is easy to collect." Marcel Mauss, Manuel d'ethnographie (Paris: Payot, 1971),
p 89. (My translation.)
 A R T W A S A P R O P E R N A MK

seems well founded to you. Or perhaps you have been nurtured by the structur­
alist school of a Martian Levi-Strauss (more prestigious on your planet), in
which case the spontaneous taxonomy of humans seems to you no less well
founded, although for other reasons. You take it to be an empirical fact, whereas
they refer to it, perhaps unwittingly, as to a set of transcendental conditions.
Thus, it is with good reason that humans give art an autonomous place, with
magic and religion on one side, and science on the other. With the certainty
that "in anthropology as in linguistics, it is not comparison that supports gener­
alization, but the other way around," 2 you postulate the existence of a universal
unconscious structure that underlies the disparate corpus constituted by every­
thing humans call art. A set of regular transformations, tedious to inventory but
limited a priori by the combinatory system, will perhaps one day explain the
profound isomorphism which you suppose underlies the variety of practices,
but which, for the time being, seems to be lacking in content the more universal
it is in form. At the intersection of magical action and scientific knowledge, artistic
making attributes a symbolic power to the things it names, at times gathering
together, at times dispersing, human communities.
And you conclude that these symbols that humans exchange in the name
of art must have—for them, who are perhaps unaware of this, it is a minimum;
for you, who know nothing but this, it is a maximum—the undeniable function
of marking one of the thresholds where humans withdraw from their natural
condition and where their universe sets itself to signifying. Likewise, you con­
clude that the name "art," whose immanent meaning still escapes you—inde­
terminate because overdetermined—perhaps has no other generality than to

2. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest
Schoepf ( N e w York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 21 W h e r e the word "art" is lacking and does
not, therefore, allow the empirical census and the structural postulate of invariance to refer
to it, another postulate of universality takes over. Thus Boas: "In one way or another, esthetic
pleasure is felt by all members of mankind." Franz Boas, Primitive Art ( N e w York: Dover,
1955), p 9
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

signify that meaning is possible. In this game of symbolic exchanges, the word
"art" would be nothing but the empty square that sets them in motion. 3

1.2.

As an extraterrestrial ethnologist, this is probably all you could say about art
viewed from the perspective of its humanness. Beyond this symbolic function,
what humans call art loses its unity and thus fractures into arts, in the plural—
into countless styles and motifs. But you will probably have noticed that these
things humans name art have different ages; that some are being preserved with
great care; that they are transmitted from generation to generation even while
new things are continuously produced, and while from time to time some
things are discarded and forgotten. Therefore, it might occur to you to consider
your corpus as a synchronic section resulting from a long diachronical sedimen­
tation, one whose history you undertake to write. Without really leaving your
watchtower, you now give your attitude as an anthropologist a twist of human­
ism, and so, you become an art historian.4

3. In so few lines, one cannot do m o r e than indicate the starting point of Levi-Strauss's
aesthetic thinking, the theory of the floating signifier (developed in his Introduction a Voeuvre de
Marcel Mauss), w h e r e he explains the emergence of the symbolic in general as the condition
of art as well as of myth and science. W i t h o u t this condition and its structuralist explanation,
the comparisons Levi-Strauss introduces (as in the chapter "Art" of Structural Anthropology)
between artistic productions that are similar but that c o m e from peoples completely separated
in time and space would not even be plausible, except through a diffusionist explanation.
O n e could thus imagine that an anthropologist landing from outer space and, inversely to
Levi-Strauss, looking for the unity of very heterogeneous artistic productions which, however,
arise globally from one and the same society, one from which he himself is separated in time
and space, would stumble on the same hypothesis, but in reverse order, so to speak The
reflexive singularity of art—that it is symbolic about the s y m b o l i c — w o u l d only strike him
all the m o r e forcibly.
4. T h e writing of art history always presupposes an anthropology, albeit a deceivingly simple
one, as is shown by H W Janson, w h o chooses this starting point to his History of Art. "We
 A R T W A S A P R O P E R N A M B

With one foot inside and one foot outside of time, you see the nature/
culture threshold repeating and renewing itself in each of the mementos hu­
mans leave on the earth, sometimes as documents, sometimes as monuments.
With the help of the necessary documentation, you climb back up the trail and
try to bring to life the monumental corpus of what humans have called art in
the course of their history and which they still preserve under this name. Your
corpus is given from the moment your point of view is established, your point
of view established from the moment your corpus is set. Art is your domain,
your speciality, your chapter in universal history. Whether or not you argue
your point of view, for you art is the autonomous raison d'etre of your corpus,
something like a substance or an essence, a noumenal invariant, the evolution
or decline of which you describe as fluctuations or variations that are only phe­
nomenal. Perhaps you reflect on the noumenon that makes art art, hoping that
historical inquiry will clarify it for you; but first you have postulated its identity,
there where history, lost in the search for its origins, confesses its own im­
potence in linking the evolution of art to the major discontinuity that must
have presided over its birth, there also where Kunstwissenschaft takes over from
Kunstgeschichte. Perhaps you dream to find this identity, essence, or origin of art
in the ideal of Greek antiquity, and your discipline only engages in time the
better to restore atemporality. Perhaps, on the contrary, you project it into the
future and the facts gathered by your discipline arrange themselves accordingly
as an eschatology Or else, it is the organic cycle of generations or the mechani­
cal swing of the pendulum that spells history for you. In any event, you hypoth­
esize about the shape of time even if you haven't done so about the being of
art. In both cases the hypothesis is unverifiable, either lost in its origins or per­
manently out of sight, beyond the horizon line where history ends.
Having the taste neither for metaphysics nor for speculation, perhaps you
prefer monographic studies: the concrete history of objects rather than the ab­
stract history of being. Your work is scientific, like that of the natural scientist.

might say that a work of art must be a tangible thing shaped by h u m a n hands" (New York:
Abrams, 1966, p. 9)
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

But you are a historian of art and not of things. You cant help but recognize
an intention in each "art-thing," nor fail to see that the intentions form certain
groupings, following lines of force that are geographical and chronological. And
if you recall having been a functionalist, you will be tempted to say that these
lines of force draw a common design, a Kunstwollen, everywhere and always
different in its manifestations, but everywhere and always constant in its aim.
According to whether your inclination pushes you toward difference or con­
stancy, you write The Life of Forms or The Voices of Silence, biomorphism in move­
ment or psychology as metamorphosis. But you never write the history of art,
since art as such is without history. Of course, you are aware that the concep­
tions humans have of art history have changed in concert with the things and
the forms called art, but if in their succession you are above all tracking
the evolution of the idea, you will see your discipline melting into Geistes-
geschichte and art, having become one of the historical figures of Spirit, losing
its concrete specificity. If, on the contrary, buttressed by the concrete, you allow
yourself to see nothing but form and its variation, and if you suppress all specu­
lative temptations, you will have reduced your discipline to Stilgeschichte, but
not without making the concept of art reappear under the name of style. It,
too, maintains itself in the singular throughout all pluralities. For if history peri-
odizes styles, style periodizes history. And if you recall having been a structural­
ist, you will be tempted to order the temporal evolution of styles with the help
of a few paired, formal criteria—the opposition of painterly and linear, of open
and closed, and so on, those truly distinctive features of style in general.
Whatever the history of art—most often indeed the history of styles—
does, it postulates (when it doesn't simply prejudge) the continuity of its sub­
stance, the invariance of its concept, the permanence of its foundations, and the
unity of its limits. You are a historian of art and this is why, even though (all
things considered) you don't know what art is, as far as you are concerned its
history must be cumulative. Despite changes, even despite revolutions, the his­
tory of styles, accumulated in the mass of things that humans have called art
over the course of time, appears to you as a cultural heritage. It belongs, you
say, to humanity, and this is why your discipline is humanist. It is made up of

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objects but also of relations between these objects, ties of filiation, hinges of
influence through which history obeys its own causality, broken influences and
new departures through which art renews itself, naked as on the first day. As an
extraterrestrial anthropologist visiting Earth, you had defined art empirically as
being constituted by everything humans call art. As a humanist historian, you
redefine this corpus historically: it is a patrimony. Its manifest heterogeneity
gives way to its cumulative continuity, which is grounded in the fact that an
essence called art maintains itself unchanged throughout its succession of
avatars.5

5. This rather cavalier summary of the biases of (mainly German) art history relies on a few
landmarks that are well k n o w n for having indeed oriented the profession and which it will
be enough to mention here: Winckelmann for founding art history on the Greek ideal; Riegl
for the n o t i o n of Kunstwollen; WolfHin for the distinguishing features of style; Riegl and M a x
Dvorak, respectively, for the history of art as Stilgeschichte and Geistesgeschichte, Panofsky for
the distinction between d o c u m e n t and m o n u m e n t and for "the history of art as a humanist
discipline." Art historians are n o t unaware of the implicit postulates of their discipline On
the contrary, there is n o great historian of art w h o has not treated this problem theoretically.
But neither is there one w h o has "resolved" it, for that would imply going beyond the limits
that the discipline has drawn r o u n d itself. Certain ones, like Germain Bazin and Lionello
Venturi, gave the problem a historical and reflexive twist or, in the instance of George Kubler,
a more radically epistemological one But that is to grasp the problem on the bias, as it were,
either redoubling art history as the "history of art history," or posing the problem of the
shape—itself ahistorical—of the history of art itself. It is rarer to see the problem approached
frontally by embarking on a theoretical and methodological work. Yet this is exactly what,
for example, Hans Sedlmayr does, as he ranks the tasks of art history along a series that begins
in the being of the work of art, postulated but unknowable, and ends, after a long detour in
historical science, in the factors or forces that must g r o u n d this being in its universality (Kunst
und Wahrheit, Zur Tlieorie und Methode der Kunstgeschichte [Mittenwald Maander, 1978], p. 11 )
If this is r a r e — a n d risky—for a theoretical work, it is, on the contrary, almost the rule in
popularizing works which, before offering the reader a grand historical panorama guided by
the red thread of an atemporal and universal notion of art, warn, but through sheer rhetorical
caution, that this notion is a fiction. E H G o m b r i c h , for example, begins his Story of Art

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1.3.

Now perhaps a slightly more philosophical curiosity urges you to wonder about
this essence. It might be that you feel the need to give the word "art" an onto-
logical status that would, once and for all, provide its definition. Thus, you
make yourself into a philosopher or even a logician—inasmuch as logic has
been, ever since Aristotle and Thomas of Aquinas, the main road into ontol­
ogy—and you return first of all to the empirical definition of your corpus: art is
everything humans call art.6 That this definition, or pseudodefinition, is circular
doesn't stop you in the least, because you can already infer from it that art is a
name, a predicate common to everything called art, a concept which it is now
a matter of defining, both in extension and in intension. If it is exhaustive, your
corpus will furnish the extension of the concept of art, allowing the analysis of
the class of artistic things into subclasses that supply as many regional concepts

with this warning: " T h e r e really is no such thing as Art." To w h i c h he immediately adds,
" T h e r e are only artists" (London: Phaidon, 1972, p . 5). But Gombrich is not Vasari, and what
he offers is not a history of artists b u t well and truly a history of "Art." Even m o r e symptomati-
cally for what concerns us here, H . W. Janson, for his part, opens his History of Art with a
reproduction of Picasso's Bull's Head which is a "semi-readymade" composed by a bicycle seat
and handlebars, and about w h i c h the first sentence of the text asks: " W h y is this supposed to
be art? H o w often have we heard this question asked . . ?" (p. 9). All pedagogy aside, it is a
question to which Janson's history of "Art" replies no m o r e than does any other.
6. Thus Richard Wollheim asks, " W h a t is art? Art is the sum or totality of works of art" (Art
and Its Objects [ N e w York: Harper & Row, 1968], p 1) It is obvious that the ontological
question concerning art can arise elsewhere and need not be posed exclusively from within
logic. Thus Heidegger's famous text, " T h e Origin of the W o r k of Art," deliberately outflanks
and subverts this conceptual frame. But it is a fact that once a theory of art tries to base itself
o n an ontology, it is often inclined to do so with the help of that distinction prevailing in
analytical philosophy between ontology and epistemology, assigning a priority to the first.
T h e question " U n d e r what conditions is something art ? " precedes de j u r e the question " U n ­
der what conditions is knowledge of art possible?"

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as the general one of art subsumes. In this way, you distinguish the subclass of
painted things and the concept of painting, that of musical things and the con­
cept of music, that of literary things and the concept of literature, and so on.
What remains is to determine, in intension, under what necessary and sufficient
conditions anything whatever can be called a painted thing or a musical thing
or a literary thing. In other words, you will have to identify the properties that
are common to all the things called painting, music, literature, and so on, then
isolate the properties common to all the arts taken together, and finally elimi­
nate those properties which are also present in things not called art at all. Ardu­
ous, interminable, it is a task that is also probably in vain. For even if you
reached the conclusion, for example, that the presence of pigment on a support
is the criterion identifying the members of the class of painted things, this still
would not separate paintings, as works of art, from all the painted things that
have no claim to the name of art. Thus, you must still discover the criterion
that all subclasses composing the class of art-things have in common and that
simultaneously discriminates art in general from non-art.
Your task becomes more and more difficult but you don't give up. You
abandon an exclusivist theory, whose criterion allows only the intersection of
the concepts under consideration, in favor of an inclusivist theory that is satisfied
with their reunion. But you are in danger of ending up with the same absurdity.
Either the ontological status of the work of art is an empty set, or it is an infinite
one; either nothing is art, or everything can be. However, since the logicians
ingenuity is unlimited, you leave the level of things for that of theories. Thus,
you look for what there is in common between Aristotle's theory, for example,
which held that art is imitation, and Collingwood's, which claimed it as expres­
sion, and Tolstoy's, which maintained that art is the communication of feelings;
and so, from comparison to comparison, you try to produce the theory of all
theories. Since the dangers at this level are identical to those at the first level,
and since there is the added one of an infinite regress into metatheones, perhaps
you now adopt the strategy of counterexamples, chosen or constructed to re­
fute, one by one, the existing theories of art, examples that you will test in all
"possible worlds."
 T ii h U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

And there, having perhaps exhausted your resources but not lacking inven­
tiveness, you probably draw one of the following conclusions: that the ontologi-
cal status of works of art is, like that of games according to Wittgenstein,
nothing but family resemblance; that all attempts to define art must end in
either a solipsism or a tautology; that the concept of art is undecidable; that the
openness and indeterminacy of the concept are pertinent to any definition of
the concept; or finally, either by recourse to a theory of performative speech
acts, or through the detour of an institutional theory, that the circularity of the
empirical definition "art is everything that is called art," far from being a soph­
ism, constitutes the ontological specificity of works of art. And you will thus,
even despite yourself, have brought your scientific grain to the ideological mill
that has for quite a long time made the discourse of art history and current
opinion go round: art is an autonomous business that is its own foundation,
names itself, and finds its justification in itself7

1.4.

Armed with all the certainties acquired over the course of this journey through
ethnology, the history of art or of styles, and logical ontology, you finally plunge
into your corpus in order to extract a model from it, the embodied proof of
your theory, its paradigm. And out of it you pull—indeed, yes—a urinal. This
particular one, rebaptized Fountain and signed R. Mutt, although everyone
knows that its real author is a famous artist called Marcel Duchamp, is reverently
kept in a museum, under the name of work-of-art and as part of the cultural
patrimony. Its import seems indeed to have reduced the work of art to being the
very symbol of this symbolic value that the word "art" confers on the objects of
an exchange, whether linguistic, economic, ritual, or sumptuary. Better than

7 Allusion is here made to many theories of art arising from analytical philosophy, some
essentialist (DeWitt Parker, Ducasse) or neoessentialist (Beardsley, Mandelbaum), others
sceptical and Wittgensteinian (Weitz, Kennick, Ziff), still others conventionalist or " a s c n p -
tive" (Danto, Binkley), or finally, institutional (Dickie)

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any other work of the cultural patrimony, Duchamp's urinal manifests the magic
power of the word "art"; testifies to an almost impertinent freedom vis-a-vis the
history of styles, which it appears to summarize and complete without owing
it anything; and above all, illustrates the undecidability, the openness, and the
indeterminacy of the concept of art, or even its entrenchment in solipsism or
its expansion into universal tautology. Further, it is just as much the emblem of
a theory of art-as-performative-institution. In fact, it welcomes all theories
of art, or disqualifies them all, inasmuch as it is the counterexample to all of
them, traversing all "possible worlds" like an absolutely sealed-off monad. This
particular urinal has nothing in common with any of the countless things car­
rying the name of art, except that it is, like them, called art. And nothing distin­
guishes it from just any ordinary urinal, from non-art, except, once again, its
name, art. In conclusion, it allows you to administer the striking proof of art's
very autonomy, taking the glorious form of a nominalist ontology.
Having arrived at this stage, you are contemplating your paradigm as if it
were a marble Aphrodite. It is supposed to sum up all works of art preserved as
such on the planet Earth, and to reduce them to their common essence: they
are called art by humans. But don't you realize that your theoretical definition
of art simply brought full circle the empirical inquiry with which you started?
Aren't you sensing the irony and the biting humor of this ready-made urinal?
Aren't you worried by the absence of freedom that is the consequence of such
an autonomy collapsed into tautology? Don't you feel disgusted or made ridicu­
lous by the idea of accepting that anything whatever be made into the para­
digmatic model of art's universality? Aren't you upset at the prospect of seeing
so vulgar an object put an end to an entire stylistic heritage? If this urinal has
not yet succeeded in instilling in you some sort of suspicion as to the validity
of your theory, then you really must be from outer space. Perhaps you affect
the detachment of the Martian observer, seeking shelter under the notion of
scientific objectivity. In fact, you are either a blind idealist or an inveterate cynic.
But if, on the contrary, you feel awkward after all the work you have done
since you first imagined yourself as an extraterrestrial ethnologist, when the
heterogeneity of your corpus led you to become, successively, a historian of art
and a philosopher obsessed with the ontology of art, then your case is different.

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If you sense that contemplating a urinal as if it were a marble Aphrodite is either

ridiculous or disingenuous, then you are already laughing at yourself in disbelief
If you feel swayed by this urinal's irony, if its corrosive humor has eaten away at
your Martian ethnocentrism, your patriarchal arrogance as an art historian, or
your confidence in logical rationalism, then its autonomy as art already appears
to you as nothing but an act of faith. Suspicion sets in. You realize that when a
urinal can be art, then anything can be, provided one believes it. And if your
model proves to be merely a matter of faith, then the theory it supposedly
demonstrates is bound to be just a belief system. When the ontological defini­
tion of art ends up being equated with the empirical description—art is every­
thing humans call art—that was your starting point when you were an honest
but outside observer, then the autonomy of art has become of caricature of
itself. And when all the disparate things accumulated through the history of
styles as the heritage of humanity seem to lead to an institutional definition
of art that is deliberately running in circles, then humanity itself must feel
dispossessed. And so do you. For after all, in question is our culture, not the
threshold nature/culture in the abstract, and our history, not that of an essence,
and our performative speech acts, not a self-defining institution. The detach­
ment of the observer—the ethnologist's outsideness, the historian's overview,
the logician's neutrality—are unsuitable when the meaning of art, not just its
recognition, is at stake. You will have to start all over again.

ACT TWO- IN W H I C H You S H A R E T H E P L I G H T OF HUMANKIND

AND ASK Y O U R S E L F " W H A T S H O U L D ART BE?"

2.1.

You are no longer from outer space. You are an Earthling. No longer an extra­
terrestrial ethnologist, you are a sociologist who is implicated in his or her own
field of research. In other words, you are someone fired by the desire for scien-
tificity—an observer, but an observer who is also a part of the observed phe­
nomenon (in your case, the society of your fellow humans); moreover, someone

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who knows and wants this and takes it into account at the theoretical level By
the same token, you are also someone for whom this awareness is upsetting,
someone practicing not methodical doubt but methodical suspicion. In other
words, you are modern. In abandoning those forms of outsideness that consti­
tute the confidence—or the faith—of the ethnologist, the art historian, or the
logician, you have also left all forms of extratemporality behind. And you can
no longer say, "Art is everything that is called art by humans . . . by theni!' Nor
even, "It is everything humans have called art over the course of centuries, and
which they continue to call art." You have to say, and in the present tense, "It
is everything we call art." What at first rose before you with all the neutrality of
a corpus gathered without bias now appears to you as the necessary object of a
consensus—a consensus, furthermore, that ought to be universal. In order for
art to be identified with everything we as humans call art, all of us would need
to agree about it. But this consensus is problematic from the start, if only be­
cause it is too obvious that we don't agree. To you, as a sociologist, it is even
more problematic, because it implicates and involves you while you seek to
maintain scientific objectivity. You cannot nor do you want to neglect the fact
that despite its social weight, consensus—in art as in other domains of social
life—is always somewhat blurry and unreal; that it is never anything but a statis­
tical distribution of opinions, bunching up around its mean but significant
above all in its standard deviation; that it is suspect even when it is that of the
majority, because the unequal spread of cultural capital tends to base all polls
on art on some cultural poll tax. You are highly aware that the inventory of
things constituting our cultural heritage does not equally belong to all of us.
For you, implicated sociologist, the notion of consensus remains an expedi­
ent, an opaque unsatisfactory concept, which must be demystified. The registra­
tion of social accord always requires some factor analysis to penetrate behind
appearances and show that currents of convergent opinions merge at the con­
fluence of several competing logics that govern group behaviors, carry social
agents along, and seem to strip them of any real power of decision. Because you
are a sociologist and because sociology should be a science, you cannot describe
artistic consensus in any other way than as a field of forces whose effects are

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both random in their detail and deterministic in their totality. And because you
are implicated, you cannot resign yourself to this mechanistic vision. Not only
would it reduce the feeling of your own free will to nothing, but it would also
level the meaning of your scientific practice, which in itself constitutes a social
commitment. For in seeking to understand society as it is, you want to grant it
the means to direct its changes. And while your analytical tools blow apart the
zones of agreement that keep the social fabric together, you cannot help hoping
that, in the end, they will foster a happier togetherness. As a sociologist, you
are bound to be both utterly sceptical and slightly Utopian. The uncomfortable
position you are in (which is inherent to the practice of "critical" or implicated
sociology) forbids you to consider that the relative agreement, through which
the society of Earthlings as a whole calls art what it calls art, is the result of the
miraculous coming together of the opinions of individual subjects. But it
equally forbids you to consider it as the expression of a grand collective sub­
ject—that is, we humans—acting on design, even should this design remain as
unconscious as Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Indeed, consensus is infinitely
more mysterious, paradoxical, and difficult for you to understand than is social
inertia, on the one hand, or social struggle, on the other. As a sociologist, all
you can say is that consensus is the aggregate result of a variable number of
social conducts which obey neither individual and subjective intentions nor
objective class interests. You will say that consensus comes about just where,
fleetingly or enduringly, there converge a certain number of habitus that seem
teleologically oriented, but which are, in fact, socially acquired dispositions to­
ward transindividual practices, most often unreflected upon although inten­
tional, and objectively orchestrated in a given field. Such would be, in the
aesthetic field, the consensus through which we call art what we call art."

8. Better than anyone else, Pierre Bourdieu illustrates the position of the implicated sociologist
who knows that he shares in the society he observes, and so shoulders all the methodological
and epistemological difficulties deriving from this Beginning with L'amour de I'art (Paris:
Minuit, 1966) and continuing through La distinction (Paris: Minuit, 1979), Bourdieu demon-

16
 A R T W A S A P R O P E R N A M E

Having said all this, you are about to stop being a sociologist, for sociology
has limits that it recognizes and butts up against. The field it explores is peopled
with facts to which it must adapt its tools, under the threat of not being consid­
ered as a science. Now, at one end of this field, the fact of consensus, even as
something relative, even as something uncertain and problematic, escapes soci­
ology as such. The more it is equipped to take the phenomenon of general
assent apart, to analyze it in terms of balance of power, to describe the circum­
stantial collusions of independent habitus, the more sociology is powerless to
explain consensus itself. If consensus is an empirical sociological object, it is
never a theoretical one, because to analyze it into factors and factions results in,

strated an unremitting suspicion toward aesthetic consensus. In Esquisse d'une theorie de la pra-
tique (Paris: Droz, 1972), and then in Le sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1980), h e has criticized
the objectivist presuppositions of structural anthropology, extolled a praxeological knowledge
of the social world, and introduced the concept of habitus as "systems of enduring and trans-
posable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that
is, as organizing and generative principles of both practices and representations which can be
objectively adapted to their goal w i t h o u t implying either conscious purposes or an explicit
mastery of the operations required to achieve them, objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' w i t h ­
out in the least being the produce of obedience to rules, and, being all that, collectively
orchestrated w i t h o u t being the product of the organizing action of a c o n d u c t o r " (Le sens
pratique, pp. 88—89; see also Esquisse, p . 175). M y translation Later, in Homo Academicus (Paris:
Minuit, 1984), where he closely observed the social g r o u p in which he intimately takes part,
Bourdieu went so far as to a s s u m e — n o t without pain or c o u r a g e — t h e personal consequences
of the demystification of the consensus apparently projected by academics as a class. But in
his last book, Les regies de Vart, Genese et structure du champ Htteraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992), Bourdieu
seems to want to disimplicate himself from the field he is studying by positing precisely the
concept of field—the literary or artistic field being defined as a belief system capable of pro-
ducing artists as well as works of art. It is with this rather surprising inversion of Marx's infra­
structure/superstructure relationship that Bourdieu hopes to regain an objective, scientific
status for the sociology of art, or to restore what other sociologists would call "axiological
neutrality."

17
 T H E U N I V E R S A L A N D THF SINC.ULAK

and perhaps aims at, the dissipation of its illusion. This is why the anonymous
crowd speaking with a unanimous voice remains an enigma for sociology, an
enigma that is made all the more unassailable since sociology refuses to attribute
this unanimity to a collective subject or to the sum of individual free wills, but
also refuses to make it the epiphenomenon of either a mechanistic determinism
or a Brownian motion.t}
At the other end of its field, sociology also butts up against consensus, not
as fact but rather as idea, postulate, or presupposition. Sociology doesn't merely
take stock of society's existence; it posits a concept that it calls the social and
whose unity, constancy, and necessity lie beyond empirical investigations. Soci­
ology postulates that there is an us; this is what distinguishes it from ethnology,
and also what tinges it—in spite of its striving for scientific objectivity—with
a mild but inevitable utopianism. From your previous Martian perch the fact of
human accord, when it existed, was attributed to some nature common to all
humans, some universal identity among them. And when it did not occur, you
interpreted this as a set of differences among humans, whose analysis revealed a
structure all the more universal for being more deeply hidden. But at this point,
you have descended to earth, a man or a woman among men and women, and
what you observe is no longer the human species in its ecological niche but
humankind in its social becoming. The differences that structure men and
women are in fact the conflicts that divide us, men and women, and the identity

9 Perhaps it is because consensus is by definition a nontheorizable object for sociology that,

as soon as it deals with crowd or masses, sociology seems to make way for psychology T h e
crowd's cohesion is then explained either by emotivity and suggestibility (Le Bon), or by
imitation and mass communication (Tarde), or by identification and substitution of the o b ­
ject with the "ego ideal" (Freud), or yet again by the inversion of a phobia against contact
(Canetti) All these interpretations converge on the desire for the charismatic leader and not
on a postulated c o m m o n sense. It is the merit of Serge Moscovici's book, L'age des Joules (Pans:
Fayard, 1981) that it could coolly reread a body of texts that emphasized the fundamental
irrationality of a p h e n o m e n o n that sociology, always dependent on the antipsychologism of
Durkheim, has a tendency to avoid
 Ain W A S A P R O P E R N A M F

that cements humanity is more than a biological feature; it ought to be a histori­

cal goal.

2.2.

You are once more a historian, but though art is still what interests you, you
are not, this time, a historian of art, that is, of style. You no longer draw the
progress of the forms you have inherited against the background of an essence
that supposedly maintains itself unchanged over the course of history. You are
the historian of the becoming-art, that is, of the very movement through which
art is produced and progresses in its historical unfolding. You are not dealing
with a given corpus but with a problematized consensus. Art, you say, is every­
thing we call art, but the we is not a given. You have been to the school of
suspicion and know that humans rarely say " I " in unison without having been
forced to do so. Consensus, when it exists, is always suspect of not having been
spontaneous, a cover for power and its abuses. But when it does not exist it
needs to, like a horizon line in the name of which the abuse of power may
be denounced. Consensus—whose other name is, after all, peace-on-earth—is
always a state of happiness, whether you project it as a religious ideal, a political
program or Paradise lost. In all three cases, even in the third, it lies ahead of
you. No one would dream of paradise if it didn't promise reunion. The art
historian's gaze was retrospective, yours is prospective. The art historian had
inherited an inventory of things and he or she ruled over this domain as the
distant representative of humanity as it is. You see yourself as the committed
emissary of humanity as it will be or should be. You watch over the same cul­
tural heritage, but it is not made up of things; it is made up of practices. The
art of the past interests you only insofar as it holds out promise for the future.
As a corpus, it simply doesn't exist. The word "art" exists, certainly, but when
it signals accord, it is already past. Only when it is in conflict does it make
history, when its meaning lies in its being transformed and destroyed as much
as created. Like the historian of art, you record the history of styles, but you
pay attention only to the leading edge where a style is destroyed to make way

19
 T H E U N I V E R S A L A N D THE S I N C U I A R

for another, and where the becoming-art occurs through negation and breaks
the consensus.
You are not a historian of art; you are a historian of the avant-garde. Such
is the name of the practices that alone interest you. The name of art and the
consensus that it begs are nothing but the retrospective sanction of these prac­
tices. It makes them autonomous, and in so doing alienates them; it endorses
them, and in so doing drains them of power; it affirms them, and in so doing
negates their negating impetus. If the name of art arrests your attention, it does
so only slightly. You never use it except for convenience in that larger context
you call culture and civilization, or superstructure and ideology. It is the phe­
nomenon of the avant-garde that entices you—its attitudes and practices, its
hopes and conquests, its programs and achievements, its excesses and failures.
All this mobilizes you, and this mobilization is, in the end, always political. You
are a historian of the avant-garde, and the avant-garde sets the direction where
history is to go. You want, therefore, to predict and to prescribe more than to
tell and to describe.
Notice that for all that you are not necessarily an avant-garde historian.
Rather, you are summoned either to advocate the avant-garde or to fight it.
You are facing an abrupt alternative that allows for no neutrality. Either you
make the values of the avant-garde your own and you become a militant of the
political revolution, or at least of the cultural one; or else you castigate and fight
these values and you also become a militant, a reactionary or at least a conserva­
tive one. In both cases, you place yourself in an agonistic field which is that of
the very practices whose historian you are. In both cases, art—that which, as a
convention or a concession, you call art—has a symptomatic value of reflection
or of premonition of the state of social struggle. And in both cases, these values
are essentially constituted through negation. It is the negativity of the avant-
garde that stokes the conservative historian's resentment at seeing nothing in it
but a vast enterprise of dehumanization. It is the same negativity that enthusias­
tically bloats the Utopian historian's prophecies in seeing in the avant-garde a
healthy clearing out before tomorrow's victory celebration. And it is still the
same negativity that sharpens the vision of the critical historian in seeing in

20
 A R T W A S A P R O P E R N A M E

the avant-garde a resistance to the one-dimensional flattening of ''affirmative"

culture. These are more or less the political choices open to you, but nothing
stops you from pushing them even further by denying them in their turn, as the
most recent avant-gardes do. More radical than the frightened conservative, you
could pursue antihumanism to the point of bestiality or angelism, or toward the
reawakening of the superman. More disenchanted than the former Utopian
avant-gardist, you could proclaim that alienation is a virtue and that the lack of
future is the truth of the tabula rasa. More subversive than the theorist of nega­
tive dialectics, you could go so far as to negate dialectics and play the game of
cynicism, mimetic camouflage, and passivity.
These choices and others still, unforeseen because history does not stop,
are open to you, since you, as historian of the avant-garde, are set in motion by
the very history you are writing, and since there is no theoretical methodology
that is not simultaneously a practical strategy. The only thing from which these
choices cut you off is to become what the historian of art had been: the mere
historiographer of an essence. They force you to espouse a philosophy of history
for which there is no definition of art except the historical process through
which art negates itself and comes to terms with its own negation. This process
does not have an essence for its ground; rather it has a struggle for its motor. It
never constitutes itself as a patrimony but projects the heritage of the past into
the future in order to contradict it. When you call this process art, you mean
that we, humans, don't need to agree about what art is. On the contrary, we
need to struggle for what art should be. Some fight for one conception of art,
others for another; yet we all stake a claim to what art ought to be for all of us.
When you identify art with avant-garde art and with the avant-garde exclu­
sively, you imply that conflict and contradiction are the very fabric of art. Most
contradictorily indeed, you call on the idea of a reconciled humankind to claim
that the history of art will end with art's disappearance, while you anticipate the
end of history to justify art's premature existence.
Indeed, just as the art historian reflecting upon his or her activity could not
fail, sooner or later, to encounter the question of art's origins, as a historian of
the avant-garde you cannot avoid asking yourself about the direction of history.

21
 THk U N I V E R S A I AND THE S I N G U L A R

In fact, you have asked yourself this question already, in the very act of becom­
ing this historian. And you have answered it through a wager, which is nothing
other than your own commitment. Optimist or pessimist bettor, you have put
your money either on progress or on decline, but in any case you have put your
interpretations of history on the line. Their truth or falsity awaits confirmation
by the future; logic will not settle the question. In other words, in the
becoming-art of the avant-gardes, it is the meaning of the word "art" that mat­
ters to you, not its truth value.10

10. This sketch-like portrait of the historian of the avant-garde of course summarizes a far m o r e
nuanced reality In fact, it fits art critics better than art historians, because they take sides in
the heat of the history that is being made around t h e m and to which their own writings
contribute. O n one side, we w o u l d find, in 1913 for example, w h e n the "historical avant-
gardes" came into being, Royal Cortissoz as the defender of the establishment and, on the
other, R o g e r Fry as the formalist advocate of the n e w art; or today, n o w that we hear of
various n e o - , post-, or transavant-gardes, Hilton Kramer as neoconservative critic and Benja­
min B u c h l o h as post-Adornian theorist In the meantime, the history of the avant-gardes has
been written m o r e often than not by historians of art for w h o m the avant-garde is after all a
style and m o d e r n art is a cultural heritage. Even the Marxist art historians, w h o do not always
write about modernity but w h o at least k n o w better than others that they belong to its
conflictual field, do not escape from this model of style. Such is the case with Arnold Hauser,
Frederick Antal, or Nicos Hadjinicolaou, even though for the latter the notion of style has
been replaced by that of "visual ideology." O n e must turn to philosophers—art historians,
sometimes to "straight" philosophers, always to theorists, to find this particular form of
history-writing which, espousing or castigating the avant-garde, stems from either fervent
h o p e or deep disquiet or b o t h at once, about the future of art and its possible disappearance.
A r o u n d 1930, for example, w h e n the "historical avant-gardes" had achieved their break­
through, w e would find Ortega y Gasset on the right and Herbert R e a d on the left. T h e
former redirects against the formalist, "dehumanizing" avant-garde the aestheticizing and elit­
ist prejudice that is in fact his own, while the latter imbues the avant-garde with a revolution­
ary power through which he hopes to resolve his o w n personal contradictions as a "bourgeois"
aesthetician absorbed by Trotskyist ideas. Besides, the duty to take a political stance for or
against the avant-garde, which results from the jettisoning of the concept of art as a historical

22
 A R I W A S A P R O P E R N A M L

2.3.

You are not far from being, once again, the philosopher-logician you were
earlier. Like him or her, you say: art is everything that is called art. Like him or
her, you infer from this that the word "art" is the name common to everything
called art. Like him or her, you deduce in turn that "art" is a common noun.
But unlike him or her, you do not treat this noun as a concept. For the sentence
"art is everything that is called art" is no longer a logical proposition the minute
you add to it the mark of a "subject-of-utterance" that is presumed but neces­
sary: ". . . called art by us." Since we are fighting over the meaning of art, the
word "art" cannot avoid taking on plural and contradictory meanings. More­
over, since the very fight over the meaning of the word "art" is its most salient
meaning when art is equated with the avant-garde, its features can no longer
be reduced to logical predicates. So, the question that the logician asked

invariant and from the acknowledgment of the fact that the historian is carried along by
history, does not necessarily lead to splits between conservatives and progressives. O n e of the
most interesting and fruitful of these splits, the debate between Lukacs and Adorno, took
place within the Left and even within Hegelo-Marxism. It was the attempt to account for
the alienation of modern art that led Lukacs to opt for realism and Adorno for the avant-garde.
Finally, today's cultural situation, after the failure of the "historical avant-gardes" to make the
concept of art fade into a revolutionary society or to profoundly change its meaning, leads
one to ask w h e t h e r the position of a historian of the avant-garde is still tenable w i t h o u t provoking
in those w h o claim to hold it either painful conflicts or powerful denials of their o w n value
judgments. H o w could it be otherwise, now that the avant-gardes have b e c o m e a historical
object classed as art, while the concept of "avant-garde" still clinches to a sense of history that
makes art the dialectical process of its own declassification? These conflicts and denials are
very visible, as m u c h in the work of an author like T. J Clark, w h o , a careful historian himself,
tries to reconstitute the p h e n o m e n o n of the avant-garde in all its social density before he lets
theory intervene, as in the w o r k of an author like Peter Burger, w h o , a thorough theorist
himself, tries to resolve the problem of correct theorization of the avant-garde before he
inscribes historical facts in this framework

23
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

him- or herself undergoes a considerable rephrasing. He or she wondered what

all the things humans call art might have in common, and you wonder what we
might have in common that predisposes us to agree to call art the same things,
whether because the agreement is in effect, or whether, in order for such a
desire to grip us, in order for such a dream even to be thinkable, it might be in
effect some day The germ of an answer soon arises: we all have an aptitude for
language, for communication—in short, for signs in general Moreover, this
common faculty is also our common fatality. We dwell in language as we do in
society or history; it preexists us and constitutes us down to our very uncon­
scious. What works of art have in common is what we have invested in them,
driven by our common necessity to produce signs that in turn produce us.
Having said this, you are a semiologist, or better, a semiotician.11 The word
"art" is not the predicate of all the things we call art. It is not a concept; it is a
sign. Because it is merely a sign, it takes the place of consensus; that is, it substi­
tutes (itself) for it and signifies it, being the metaphor—and one of the most
exalted that humankind has produced—for the accord between humans. Each
of the things named by this sign is in turn made up of signs, of so many met-
onyms of this metaphor begging approval. But because the works of art are
condemned to being made of signs and the word "art" to being itself a sign,
the universal agreement that art claims as its signified is equally condemned to
remain a signifier, ceaselessly running down the chain of signifiers, like an object
desired but out of reach, forever pushed under the "bar" of metaphor. 12 For

11. T h e nuance between semiology and semiotics used to set a telling dividing line a m o n g
French intellectuals in the seventies. Whereas the "semiologists" strove for objectivity and
sought to give their discipline a truly scientific status, they were deemed conservative by the
m o r e progressive "semioticians," some Marxists but not all, w h o thought of their discipline
as a linguistic—not metalinguistic—practice transforming its object rather than reflecting it.
T h e way your involvement with and in the history of the avant-garde has led you to raise the
issue of the meaning of art naturally turns you into a semiotician m o r e than into a semiologist
12. T h e allusion here is to Lacan's theory of metaphor, certainly an adequate intellectual
framework for the role of (French) semiotician that you are playing n o w

24
 ART W A S A P R O P L H N A M E

you, as semiotician, signs—and art-signs to a greater extent than those of ordi­

nary exchange—have their own existence; they form a system among them­
selves, but this system is limitless and overwhelms humans who, thinking to
serve themselves by working this system, in fact are worked by it. Once senders
and receivers exchange a chain of signs, they cannot prevent them from saying
either too much or too little, or from causing their acoustical or graphic sub­
stance to generate incongruous resonances that call to mind other signs, or from
attesting to the disappearance of the reality they evoke. Consensus, which for
your part you call successful communication, is no longer the enigma it was for
the sociologist. It is simply the exception, a special case that exists when the
message is exceptionally primitive, or the coding exceptionally strict, or the
channel exceptionally pure. The rule is polysemy, equivocation, noise, dissemi­
nation. The rule is art, poetic language, the text without author, because each
of its readers is counted among its producers. Art, all that by this common—
and convenient—name we call art, is this infinite "rustle of language" (Roland
Barthes) accompanied, assumed to the point of its madness, analyzed for its
explosive pulverization, then catalyzed in the name of the impossible consensus
it signifies and substitutes for.
Thus, for you there are two types of art since there are two types of consen­
sus. The first, which you deem to be beneath your concern, gathers together
the canonical masterpieces of the past and the art made for easy consumption.
This consensus is indeed nothing but a habitus, or a habit. It is the one that the
historian of art exaggeratedly respects because he or she understands it as tradi­
tion, that is, as continuity, and of which the historian of the avant-garde is
systematically suspicious because he or she sees in it nothing but tradition, that
is, nothing but established power. In your eyes, only the contested works de­
serve the name of art, and these might very well include masterpieces from the
past, once they are reread for their power to reactivate dissension. But in this
case, you will call even the masterpieces avant-garde works. So for you, as a
semiotician, the name of art is the metaphor for the same contradictory and
conflictual becoming-art on whose meaning the historian of the avant-garde,
which you yourself were just a while ago, was betting. But whereas he or she

25
 T H L U N I V F R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

was making a wager, your job is to make an interpretation. Where consensus

about an avant-garde work exists, there is agreement about the fact that dis­
agreement is necessary in order for the name "art" to be invoked and provoked;
and where consensus does not exist, it exists negatively, since disagreement is
necessary in order to signify that consensus is desired and desirable only when
it is impossible. Thus, you have to interpret the identity of contraries that makes
of art and non-art an indivisible couple. This is something you will have diffi­
culty doing scientifically, since science dislikes contradiction and its reduc-
tionism is too reductive, to your taste, to encompass the proliferation of signs.
Rather, you will write, and you will conceive of your own textual practice as
something as polymorphous as the art you are interpreting, and from which
you expect, on a theoretical level, an effect of isomorphism. The calculated,
strategic confusion of practice and theory thus inevitably leads you to some
art doctrine.
Because you are a semiotician, artistic signs are likely to present themselves
to you, by turns, under the three aspects of signified, signifier, and referent. If
you favor the signified, yours is a symbolist doctrine. Since the meaning of art
is nothing but the impossible consensus about its name, you make yourself the
witness and defender of art-for-art's-sake. And since consensus is impossible and
should be so, you call on art against art. With the melancholy of the Decadents
or the enthusiasm of the dadaists, you take it upon yourself to give the ruin or
destruction of art its meaning of anti-art. If you favor the signifier, yours is a
formalist doctrine. In encoding and decoding, in construction and deconstruc-
tion, in the abandoning of established conventions and the invention of new
ones, you look for the principle of "significant form." And you find it, never
better assuming its critical and self-critical power than in formlessness and anti-
form, just where the lack of semantic meaning opens the way to syntactical
significance. Finally, if you favor the referent, yours is a realist doctrine. Yet,
this realism must deal with the aura of unreality with which signs, being signs,
color their referents. Art's "real" having been put in abeyance, what remains is
surrealistic fantasy or superrealistic decoy; it is the assassination of art through
quotation and parody. But toward whatever side your doctrine leans, you find

26
 AIM WAS A PROPER NAME

yourself defending an ideal of autonomy which can all the less be taken for
granted as it realizes itself through its negation. If you lean toward the symbol­
ism of the signified, you will need to submit to derision the self-exaltation of
art's meaning; if you lean towards the formalism of the signifier, you will need
to somehow dismantle the self-institution of art's formal conventions; and if you
lean toward the realism of the referent, you will need to betray the self-
reference of art's discourse. Once the autonomy of art is no longer a given but
rather allows heteronomy into its own condition, its accomplishment can only
be postponed by a practice that breaks with common sense and alienates itself
from the majority The consensus around the avant-garde is always a minority
one; otherwise it is not about the avant-garde. It is always forced, since it is a
result of force. It is always both alienated and alienating. And it is always antici­
pated when it is desired and premature when it happens. That is to say, when
the other name of art is avant-garde, this sign is always caught in the grip of a
double necessity—to be the symbol of an impossible consensus and to be the
symptom of an inevitable dissension. Thus, in order for humans to someday
come to understand each other, we must daily recall the nature of the constitu­
tive slip-of-the-tongue on which the misunderstanding is based.13

13. U n d e r the terms "semiologist" or "semiotician" (see above, n 11), each will recognize
his or her own. F r o m the two Saussures (the one of the Cours and the one of the Anagrammes)
to Gerard Genette, from the Russian Formalists to Tel Quel, it is in the necessary complicity
of a theory wanting to be scientific and a literary practice wanting to be avant-garde that the
quest for artistic essence has been displaced from art as a given domain to art as generative
process, but for all this w i t h o u t ceasing to be an ontological quest, however denied or negated
This is betrayed by notions such as ecriture, text, textuality or picturality, w h e n they come to
replace those of literature or painting. O n e might say that negation itself has become the
essence, for the shift from logic to semiotics implied a switch of philosophies: whereas the
logician's roots are in Aristotle and, beyond Aristotle, in Plato—that is, in a philosophy of
being, of p e r m a n e n c e — t h e semiotician will tend to rely on some philosophy of becoming—of
c h a n g e — b e it that of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger. Thus, it is an ontological neces­
sity for the being of ecriture or "the text" to include its fading, its negation unfolding in time.

27
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

2.4.

Made more than sceptical by this journey through implicated sociology, the
committed history of the avant-garde, and disseminative semiotics, you are not
going to rely on any expected consensus to find a model to support your theo­
ries. You appeal instead to an impossible consensus; you look for provocation;
you instigate conflict. And you set before all of us—we who call art everything
we call art—a fait accompli by producing the very same urinal that you were
contemplating as if it were a marble Aphrodite at the end of your journey
through ethnology, art history, and philosophy. It is the incarnated proof of the
contradictory identity of art and non-art. When it was submitted, pseudony-
mously, at the 1917 Independents' Show in New York, it completely sundered
the a priori consensus of the show's organizers. It revealed in these organizers,
of whom Duchamp was one, the various competing aesthetic habitus their judg­
ment followed. It projected into an anticipated future the retrospective sanction
that would admit it into the cultural heritage, and in so doing, it was a coup
making the avant-garde's dialectical law explicit.14 For this urinal is in our heri­
tage, now, but it is there as a permanent scandal. More radically than any other
avant-garde work, it makes clear that the absolute signified and the true dignity
of art-for-art's sake is anti-art; that the brutal abandonment of all formal conven­
tions of art has pushed purism to the absolute "significant form"; that reality is

T h e Barthesian theme of para-dox, the Kristevian theme of signifiance, the Derridean theme
of differance, all are in some respect tied to history's lack of self-presence, which is just as
formative for t h e m as the suspicion these authors direct toward the consensus over signs, or
the fixity of signifieds, or the finiteness of signifiers, or the reality of referents. This is w h y —
even m o r e than for some political alignments that, j u d g e d from a distance, look more than
embarrassing—French semiotics (or "semanalysis," Kristeva's expression), w h i c h started out
with scientific goals as semiology, quickly landed on grounds that were either frankly literary
or openly ideological (in a sense, after all, m o r e Hegelian than Marxist or Althusserian)
14. M o r e about this in chapter 2

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excrement, exactly what the absolute self-referentiality of art-about-art leaves

behind. Paradigmatic manifesto of art as anti-art, Duchamp's urinal makes all
this manifest. It is in vain that it rests in a museum and gets added to the cultural
heritage. For some, it has not stopped being the harbinger of the happy day
when art will finally fall from its pedestal and belong to everyone; for others, it
remains the source of resentment and fear of the day when, everything having
become art, nothing will be art any longer; and for all of us—in our society
where consensus is either incomprehensible or impossible—it is still an object
of dissent revealing our common plight. In conclusion, Duchamp's urinal
wields the disquieting proof of art's alienation, an alienation that seems defini­
tive to those who read it as evidence of decadence, provisional to those who
see it as the premise of renewal, and necessary to those for whom the faculty
of negating is what, in the end, promises emancipation.
Having arrived at this stage, you are contemplating your paradigm no
longer. You are brandishing it like a banner, and possibly you are throwing it
in your opponents' faces, whoever they are. Whether you took sides with or
against the avant-garde, Duchamp's Fountain is for you the most significant
sign—symbol, symptom—of a culture that you deem to be ours and in which
negation, dialectical contradiction, counterinstitutional struggle, ideological de-
construction and textual experimentation fill the word "art" with ambiguous
and opposite meanings. As such, Fountain has the most general value, either as
promise or as warning. It proves your theory and upholds your practice; in
short, it embodies your doctrine. But aren't you distressed by the reified nega­
tivity of this ready-made urinal, now that it is piously preserved like an icon?
Aren't you concerned that the dialectical equation of art and anti-art might have
congealed into a perverse tautology, now that even the middle class collects its
products? Aren't you bored by the phoniness of a good part of Duchamp's leg­
acy? Don't you feel the powerlessness of avant-garde art to elicit indignation
from a society that is too liberal but still not free enough, too eager to mask
conflict behind pluralism and too anxious to clothe its consent for cultural illit­
eracy in the rags of dissidence? If you have not yet started to despair about the

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practical value of your theories, you must really have fled to another planet.
Either you are already there, with the philosophers of resentment and the histo­
rians of decline who like to watch Rome burn from a distance, or you are in
the takeoff lounge with the modern utopianists and no longer within range of
the noise coming from the burning metropolis. Or else, perhaps, you persist in
not seeing that the main body of the army has never followed the avant-garde;
that the motor of contradiction is exhausted; that the step from creative nega­
tion to nihilism has been taken; that around anti-art, the impossible consensus
has nonetheless been reached out of indifference, and that it is inevitable that
suspicion, once you let it start, gnaws down to your very last bit of hope. But
if, on the other hand, you despair enough about art, if the feeling of the vanity
of anti-art brings you to the point of remembering that the irony of the urinal
was baptized by Duchamp "ironism of affirmation," then perhaps you will go
all the way beyond suspicion and realize that, in your engagement with the
avant-garde, you were not mistaken about practice but rather only about theory.
Perhaps then negativity will seem to you like an unfair concept, because it
always reduces affirmation to double negation and therefore never allows it to
exist in its own right. And perhaps the concept of alienation, whose social real­
ity is undeniable, -will seem equally unjust to you, for being proved precisely by
its denial. After all, it is your own social responsibility from which you run the
risk of alienating yourself when, as an implicated sociologist, you demystify the
illusion of consensus; you run the risk of bankrupting your own duty to free­
dom 'when, as a historian of the avant-garde, you prescribe a course of history
that you describe as unavoidable; you run the risk of depriving yourself of your
own obligation to speak truly when, as artist-semiotician, you knowingly con­
fuse signifying practices with theories of signification. The sceptical disen-
chantments that led you to abandon the illusions of outsideness, metalanguage,
and disinterestedness certainly offer great intellectual benefits, but they do us a
wrong. Your commitment, your attention to that common accord and above
all that common discord, through which we call art what we call art, has led
you, like it or not, to speak in our name for all of us. This us is an abuse and an
alibi. You will have to start all over again.
 A m W A S A P R O P E R N A M E

ACT THREE: IN WHICH YOU HAVE BECOME JUST YOURSELT

AND KNOW WHAT ART You LIKE AND DISLIKE

3.1.

You are no longer anyone, anyone special that is. You are not a specialist any
more. You are just yourself, without particular qualifications, simply an ama­
teur, which means that you are no longer a professional, but also, in the etymo­
logical sense of "amateur," that your dealings with art have the nature of a love
relationship. You are Mr. or Ms. Everyone, since everyone is an art lover to
some extent. So, you are in love. And just as you need no theory of woman to
love a woman, or of man to love a man, you need no theory of art to love art.
Just as no one falls in love with Woman (or Man) in general, no one falls in
love with Art in general. Even Don Juan, who is looking for the woman, loves
women individually, one by one. You are in love with this or that work, and
certainly with more than one at a time, but not with all works. Like your
choices in love affairs, your choices in art are free and at the same time compul­
sive. Something irresistible attracts you. You don't always know what, but you
know that you are attracted because you feel it. All you have for knowledge is
your own certitude and all you have for certitude is your own feeling. To you
it is indisputable; it is its own proof Your friends, your psychoanalyst if you
have one, and you yourself might be endlessly suspicious of this feeling; your
social milieu might disapprove of it; the establishment might repress it or forbid
its expression. All this would make it more exalted or painful, but would take
nothing away from its authenticity. In love affairs, with works of art as with
people, your feelings are of course determined by past experience, channeled
through the story of your family, conditioned by your belonging to this or that
social class, by your sex and your gender, by your education, by your heredity.
Obviously, you can only love within the limits of your social determination and
of the cultural opportunities that are objectively available to you, but that
doesn't stop you from loving. Your taste is indeed an aesthetic habitus, but it is
yours; moreover, if you didn't feel it to be yours, it wouldn't be a habitus but

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rather the interplay of forces external to you. You have introjected the socially
acquired dispositions that produce the love of art; you have let them lie fallow,
or you have cultivated them to a greater or lesser extent; regardless, they shape
you just as intimately as anything else in your personality.
If at this point someone asks you to define art, it is with your taste and
your personal feelings that you will answer. You will say, pointing a finger at
your favorite works: art is this, and this, and that. You have been asked for a
definition, but since you only have your feelings as a guide, you don't feel en­
titled to generalize, so in place of a theory you give examples. Each of them
you baptize with the name of art, one by one. The phrase "this is art" is the
expression of your judgment, arising case by case. And so is the phrase "art is
this." In spite of the fact that it sounds like a definition, it is merely a quasi-
definition, an empirical one if you like, since it is based on sense experience,
but more precisely an aesthetic one, inasmuch as the word "aesthetic" precisely
means: that which has to do with a sentimental, not with a cognitive, experi­
ence. In baptizing the examples of your taste with the name art, you are thus
making an aesthetic judgment. Most often of course, as in the case of established
masterpieces, you are simply repeating a christening that has long since been
performed. Your personal habitus confirms a more or less general consensus.
But from time to time, you call art something unexpected, or your refuse to
call art something too expected. Perhaps you make it a point of showing how
origmal and audacious you are; perhaps you want to mock taste, whether good
or bad, and prefer to display eclecticism, mannerism or avant-gardism; perhaps
in trying to distinguish yourself from the ruling habitus what you really do is
entrench yourself more surely in the habitus of the ruling class; perhaps you are
doing all this because you are a snob. But if you are a snob, you are a fraud.
You are cheating with your feelings and are not using the word "art" to christen
the works you genuinely like; you are merely using it as a social password.
Perhaps, on the contrary, you make it a point of suspecting the general consen­
sus, which seems to you to be manipulated; perhaps you distrust taste, not so
much your own but the very concept of taste, which you read as ideology;
perhaps you have developed a hatred for the "man of taste" whose distinction

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simply marks him off from general opinion, and you retaliate by valuing only
the most opinionated works that mark you off as well; perhaps you justify this
with theory and hide your hatred. But if you do so, you are an ideologue. You
can't help but have feelings, yet you won't allow them to speak out. You deny
them and you use the word "art" as a social weapon. You are a snob in reverse,
and if you are, your social weapon will turn out to be another (anti-) social
password. But if, contrary to both the snob and the ideologue, you are sincere
when you call art something unexpected or refuse to call art something too
expected, then you are yielding to those complex and contradictory feelings
that, akin, indeed identical, to those of love, compel you to go beyond your
taste and to surrender. Then the word "art" is dictated to you by the objectified
force of these feelings forcing you and about which, by a sort of immediate
reflexiveness, you precisely feel that they put your taste, your aesthetic habitus
and habits, in jeopardy. Then, in attributing this name, art, to the object that
occasioned this uneasy feeling in you, you are obeying the contradictory in­
junction of your feeling. In this case, the unexpectedness of the things that you
call art is indeed unexpected by general opinion—not insofar as it is the opinion
of others (the mass of humans from which you distinguish yourself), nor insofar
as it is ours (the class of distinguished people who impose their class consensus),
but insofar as it is yours, personally; insofar as, whatever your class, you have
incorporated into your taste or anti-taste that classification which classes you.
Such a judgment, which is born out of dissent—that is, literally (dissent
meaning dissentiment) born out of the conflict within your own personal feel­
ings—is perhaps no longer a judgment of taste, even though it is an aesthetic
judgment. Just as the feeling of love alternates between lightness and gravity,
carries one away with joy or plunges one into worry, encompasses passion as
well as tenderness, irrepressible sexual attraction as well as attentive companion­
ship, absolute veneration as well as faithful friendship, a blind fixation on the
seductive object as well as empathy and compassion, just as it can exhaust itself
in possession or forget itself in charity, just as it often harbors savage jealousy or
abruptly slides into hatred, just as it is made up of as much suffering as ecstasy,
so too the love of art is sustained by an array of heterogeneous feelings and not

33
 TilF U N I V E R S A I AND I HE S l N G U I A R

based, as the notion of taste would have it, on the rather oversimplified oppo­
sition of pleasure and pain. The mixture of pleasure and pain, or the oscilla­
tion between terror and delight—indeterminate feelings, or rather, emotions,
in which Kant and Burke saw the sign of the sublime—are themselves inade­
quate to supply a word general enough to cover the embattled diversity of the
feelings entering the love of art and coinciding, as they doubtless do, with the
whole range of human feelings. The sublime emotion is part of them, to be
sure, as is the feeling of beauty that is called taste. But the sudden turn of taste
into disgust is also part of them, as is the tiny step that carries the sublime into
the ridiculous. Love may not seem to be the appropriate name for the assembly
of such incompatible feelings, yet it is. It is even the most realistic one for a love
so contrary to propriety. And if one must find an apt word to designate the
cause, or rather, the occasion for the summons of those incompatible feelings,
it is the word "art" that suits the case. It suits it precisely because it is not
suitable, being, in that sense, the least idealistic name for things arousing so
unsentimental a sentiment.
The semiotician wasn't wrong in reading the word "art" as the negative
sign of successful communication, or of a communication that succeeds only
when it fails; the historian of the avant-garde wasn't wrong in hearing the word
"art" only in the provocation of anti-art or in the distress calls of non-art; the
sociologist wasn't wrong in attributing the word "art" only to the practice that
dissolves consensus or reveals it as dissolved, already And you yourself, mere art
lover, when you utter the word "art" to refer to that unexpected something
that upsets your feelings beyond all appropriateness, you acquiesce to this up­
heaval, you lay claim to the opposing feelings that shake you, and it is the object
that thwarts your love of art and that occasions the sentiment of dis-sentiment
in you that you decide to call, reflexively, by the name of art.
Even though your feelings are your own, proven by the fact of being expe­
rienced, they are never your property. They are acquired cultural values in re­
lation to which the probability that you experience them—and that you
experience them apropos of "this" rather than "that"—obviously depends on
your culture. The breadth of your culture is what allows you to recognize the

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conflict of values competing within and for the cultural field, whether they are
closely linked to or far removed from the spontaneous values of the group you
belong to. This conflict is what the sociologist called the competition of con­
current habitus, the historian of the avant-garde the inherent contradiction be­
tween art and anti-art, and the semiotician the dissemination of signs. But it is
one thing to recognize values in conflict, and it is another to experience them.
Being cultivated and being sensitive are not equivalent. To be sensitive to art is
to feel the conflict of values as a conflict of feelings. This sensitivity is something
which, far from putting you out of the fray, plunges you directly into it; it is
something completely at odds with aesthetic disinterestedness or distancing, and
also very different from the flair of the dandy or the snob who samples the
conflicting values in order to choose by reflex the one that will shock and mark
him or her off from the crowd. The reflexivity of your contrary feelings is not
a reflex; it is what condenses their contradictoriness into the feeling of dissen­
sion, the sentiment of dis-sentiment. In calling art something conflictual and
unexpected, you give your assent to the reflexive feeling of dissent, that is, to
the quarreling rather than peaceful coexistence of the cultural values you are
able to experience. You give your consent to the felt absence of consensus about
this thing, which is only unexpected by others insofar as it is overwhelming for
you, and which is only overwhelming for you insofar as it is controversial for
everyone; and for this thing you demand the agreement of all others.

3.2.

Along with the number of overwhelming things you love, the incompatibilities
among your feelings multiply Can you possibly love both Wagner and Mozart
without recanting? Can you accommodate both Rubens and Mondrian simul­
taneously? Would you dare name the feeling that might reconcile John Heart-
field and Leni Riefenstahl? How would you justify putting Manzoni's cans of
Artist's Shit in the same museum as Bonnard's Nude in a Tub? The question of
the unity, of the identity of art, that the logician raised in terms of the common
properties of objects and the semiotician in terms of a common inherence in
 r ii L U N I V E R S A L AND THL S I N t; U I A R

languages, is raised now not in terms of community or even of compatibility

but in terms of the passage from one feeling to another. Aesthetic judgment,
which unifies nothing, nevertheless administers these passages. Your personal
pantheon is more or less crowded, your ideal library more or less vast, your
imaginary museum more or less rich, but they exist as a battleground, a babel
of tongues, a Borgesian shambles where you ceaselessly pass from one camp,
one language, one form to another. Each of the things to be found there is no
more than an example of what art is for you; none amounts to a definition, a
concept, a theory. When asked for one, all you can say is: "Look, here is some
art." Clearly, such gestures are only quasi-defmitions, not generalizable. But
they claim generality, they execute a passage, they are the index that shifts the
general name, art, from one particular work to another among your choices. In
order to generalize, you would have to add up example after example and end
up with a formula that may look circular, like those of the ethnologist and the
sociologist, but that is in fact reflexive. You no longer say, "art is everything
humans call art," nor, "it's everything we call art." You do say, you claim to say,
"it's everything I call art." You are not basing yourself on a corpus you invento­
ried but in whose establishment you have had no role; you don't assume a con­
sensus that you really suspect is impossible or illusory; you simply exhibit your
own personal collection, real or imaginary.
But in showing, under the name of art, what you have collected, you are
no longer a mere art lover. You advertise your tastes, you claim and profess
them, you try to get them shared. And if you go so far as to make public your
doubts, your uncertainties, your errors of taste, your distastes and even your
disgusts by exhibiting—always under the name of art—those things among the
cultural products that aroused so many mixed feelings that you judged them
to be overwhelming, then you have all the qualifications to be, so to speak,
a professional art lover, which is to say, an art critic. Art critics, in the broad
sense—chroniclers, specialized journalists, teachers, but also museum curators,
art collectors, even art dealers—in other words, all those people who make
their aesthetic judgments public, are people who exercise a critical vigilance,
not over a corpus of objects or a consensus of receivers, but over the collection

36
 A«r W A S A P R O P E R N A M E

of things having aroused in them the feeling that they were confronting art. It
is with and about this that they judge and over this that they will be judged.
Whatever other things art critics do, whatever criteria come into play when
they write, collect, organize shows, buy and sell art, when all is said and done,
art critics are public and professional art lovers. The rest is, while not irrelevant,
at least accessory. Of course, with this professional status comes power, a plat­
form, an academic authority exerted through teaching or in the media, a real
or supposed expertise, a potential charisma, and the possibility of influencing
the public and manipulating the market. But power doesn't make a critic (it
shouldn't, and in the long run, it doesn't); reputation does. And reputation im­
poses itself only in exposing itself. Art critics, in publishing their judgments, ask
to be judged on their judgments' quality and, whether they like it or not, con­
sign themselves to the verdict of the future.

3.3.

This expression may sound high-flown, but it is the right one: the tribunal of
history is what constitutes culture as value. Because history is a court, constantly
in session, cultural values are created even while others are destroyed. The his­
torian of the avant-garde wasn't wrong when he or she defined the agonistic
value called art as a process. But "process" would have to be read as "trial"
rather than as "transformation." And it is because history is a court that cultural
values are preserved across a succession of societies that no longer live according
to these values. So, the historian of art wasn't wrong either when he or she
defined the sedimented value called art as a cultural heritage. But the emphasis
should be put on the jurisprudential aspect of the transmission rather than on
the cumulative aspect of the legacy. Jurisprudence is the legal memory in which
society stores the judgments issued in the past over cases similar to those cur­
rently submitted, but which the written law could not have foreseen in their
singularity. Judges are invited to consult jurisprudence for inspiration but they
remain free to contradict it. The closer a legal system comes to common law
and the less it depends on the written code, the more important jurisprudence

37
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

becomes. The history of art—and even more, the history of the avant-garde,
namely the history of modern art—resembles such a judicial system. Artistic
culture transmits art just as jurisprudence passes along judgment: by rejudging.
None of the rejudged judgments making up the jurisprudential record is en­
tirely determinant for those that will follow, and none has been entirely deter­
mined by those that preceded it. There is no more a Last Judgment than there
is a first; there is no more a historical determination "in the last instance" (Marx)
than there is a court of first instance. The tribunal of history is a permanent
court of appeal. The first reader of a book, the first listener to a concerto, the
first viewer of a picture already judges the artist's judgment, while the artist
had, through provocation, already lodged an appeal against the prejudices of
the times.
You have just been an art critic and now, in the act of rejudging, you have
become a historian. Let's say you are a somewhat sluggish critic, slow on the
uptake, or one arriving too late and judging an event that is already receding in
time, or one enjoying the full historical distance granted by those artworks
coming to us from the distant past. Perhaps you are simply less sure of your
judgments than the talent scout operating in the heat of the moment; perhaps
you need a slightly thicker jurisprudence to pass judgment; perhaps you prefer
to sustain your own verdict with that of so many past generations. But between
your practice as a historian and that of the day-to-day critic, there is neither
difference in kind nor any break. You write history in practicing belated art
criticism. Like the historian of art, you inherit the cultural patrimony, or rather,
the jurisprudential record. Like the historian of the avant-garde, you take sides in
a struggle, or rather, in a trial. As for the historian of art, art for you is a given
domain of facts. As for the historian of the avant-garde, art for you is a conflict
whose outcome is at stake. But more clearly than most historians of art, you
state and take on your responsibilities as judge. Quite possibly this will mean
no more than a slight inflection of style, with which you avoid creating the
belief that history itself is speaking through your mouth or writing itself through
your pen; yet such an inflection of style will be more than the simple scruple
or the regret shown by certain art historians—the most honest ones—who

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admit to the subjectivity of their choices and accountings. It will be both a

working method and a moral principle resulting from your knowing that once
you admit a recognized work of art into your discourse, it is accompanied by
an invisible tag saying "this is art," and that, though the tag is a given, what it
says is not a fact. When, as a historian, you write about something that has
already been called art by others—historians who preceded you or critics faster
than you—you are taking stock of a judgment registered somewhere on the
jurisprudential record, but which nothing forbids you to reverse as long as you
are not unaware, nor keep your readers unaware, that a judgment had been
passed. Jurisprudence doesn't have the force of law, but it carries some weight.
Yet no matter how heavy it weighs on your judgments, it is never a criterion
that exempts you from having to judge again; it is merely a guideline that you
may or may not follow, a record of prudence that helps you decide whether you
should let the experience of your predecessors nourish your own, but which,
in any case, you ought to confront with your actual feelings.
In judging again you take a stand. You write history both in respecting the
events as they took place and in choosing the significant events. The history of
art is not a discourse torn between the objectivity of science and the subjectivity
of evaluation and interpretation. It is false to claim that it records the past as if
the events had organized themselves spontaneously, but it is equally false to say
that in reading the events as signs it is free to prescribe their meaning and to
orient them according to an end. What the historian of art describes as the
spontaneous evolution of style actually occurred under the pressure of aesthetic
jurisprudence; and what the historian of the avant-garde prescribes as a trend,
which he or she claims is that of history itself, is actually visible only in hind­
sight. Now, what you do is similar to what the historian of art was doing, only
with this proviso: that the style of your writing makes it clear that history as
heritage is no more than jurisprudence. With this proviso, your attitude is closer
to that of the historian of the avant-garde. Like him or her, you know that you
are on board the history train and responsible for intervening in it. But unlike
him or her, you don't confuse writing and praxis. Yes, you are at war but you
are not a soldier; you are more like a war reporter. Yes, you have a stake in the

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 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U I A R

conflicts of history but you are not a militant; you are more like a moralist. You
are in fact at once the judge and the court clerk. The conflicts of the avant-
garde and the arriere-garde have been entrusted to you through the jurispru-
dential record, registered in the form of "differends" and litigations.15 At times,
your job is one of rewriting a "differend" in the language of the litigation it has
become over time; at others, it is one of reopening a litigation to show that it
still hides a "differend." Both tasks require judgment and interpretation. You
intervene in history, but you are not rewriting the events that happened so as
to make them anticipate what would happen later; you are not extrapolating
trends so as to fill them with historical meaning; you are adding to the jurispru­
dence. This is also translated by an inflection of style. For if you no longer claim
that your writing is dictated by facts, neither do you want to suggest that it is
done in the name of a cause. You only write to set a precedent, here and now.
The least one can ask from an art-historical text is that it carry the date of its
composition as explicitly as possible.
Thus, you are a historian, a critic-historian or a historian-critic, and what
you do is akin to, with these inflections of style taken into account, what the
historian of art and the historian of the avant-garde were doing. However, you
are neither the one nor the other. Rather, you are a historian of tradition. Even
though, on the one hand, like the historian of art, you inherit the word "art"
along with the jurisprudential record, you never take it for granted and you
never let it delimit a priori the field of your research. You know too well that
the word "art" was at issue in each judgment stored in jurisprudence and that
it is still at issue when you decide on whom you are going to write, which

15. "As distinguished from a litigation, a differend [differend] would be a case of conflict,
between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment
applicable to both arguments. One side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legiti­
macy. However, applying a single rule of judgment to both in order to settle their differend
as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them
if neither side admits this rule)." Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend Phrases in Dispute (Min­
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. xi.
 A R T W A S A P R O P E R N A M E

works you are going to mention, how many pages you are going to grant them,
whether you are going to praise or criticize them—all the decisions art histori­
ans make when they write history. You neither believe nor postulate that art is
an essence that remains permanent throughout the changes in style, form, taste,
ideology, and their underlying socio-historical conditions; but you are aware
that the name "art" continues to be transmitted through the sequence of re-
judged judgments making up the jurisprudence. Well, this transmission is called
tradition. And even though, on the other hand, like the historian of the avant-
garde, you have a sharpened awareness of the struggles through which art comes
into its historical existence, even though you know how much these struggles
necessitate the destruction and the negation of traditional art, you never take
the negativity of the avant-garde for granted and you never let it structure your
own thinking about art. You know too well that all courts pit the prosecution
against an accused or a plaintiff, that without a dispute there would be nothing
on which to pass judgment, and that the sentence must decide between "this is
art" and "this is not." You do not defend the doctrine that art, or avant-garde
art, is the dialectical movement that goes from art to non-art, and from non-art
to a transformed notion of art, since you are aware that jurisprudence, not dia­
lectics, has settled the identity of the contraries. For sixty years now dadaism
has been in the museum and the "tradition of the new" has been in place. You
may judge that tradition has been betrayed or that the betrayal has been trans­
mitted, but you cannot ignore the fact, laid down in the trial record of the
avant-garde, that "transmission" is now translated into "betrayal." You will not
rejudge without knowing that henceforth "betrayal," "translation," and "trans­
mission" comprise the three inseparable meanings of the word "tradition."

3.4.

As a historian of tradition, in this sense, you are no better equipped than the
mere art lover when it comes to defining art. You may be infinitely more so­
phisticated and knowledgeable than the mere art lover, but you are not a theo­
rist, you are a critic, a slow critic perhaps but a critic nonetheless. Thus, you
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U I A R

are an art lover yourself, but one who accepts the duty to go public with his or
her preferences. By way of theory, all you have is your collection, which you
may or may not want to wrap in explanations; the reasons adduced for a judg­
ment never totally account for the sentence pronounced, and certainly, they
don't replace it. You have a notion of what art is and what it means to you, and
you have standards about what you expect art should be. But to sustain both
your notion of art and your expectations from art, you rely on your judgment
alone. Pleas and testimonies are of little help in the cultural court; what matters
are the exhibits, and whether they pass the test of time. As a historian, you know
this for a fact of jurisprudence; as an art lover, you know this from experience.
So, if someone were to ask you whether you could come up with a model
exemplifying your theory of art, your answer would be "No," since you have
no theory. Still, could you dig out of your collection a work exemplary enough
to stand for a paradigm of the whole? Your answer would be: "Let me consult
with my feelings." Examples would be summoned, and most probably the first
ones to come to your mind would be your favorites. Undisputed masterpieces
would be among them, some of which were highly controversial in their own
time—Giorgione's Tempest for example, or Manet's Olympia. Being as familiar
with the jurisprudence as you are, you are also aware that the reversals of verdict
these works underwent must have influenced your own feelings about them.
And it is not so much now your taste that you consult, or the jurisprudential
consensus precisely called taste, as your own reversals of taste, the jurisprudence
of your betrayals. You look back on your youthful love affairs with Albers and
Vasarely and Kinetic Art with embarrassment, yet you would want to save Alb­
ers, and Morellet, and certainly early Soto, from oblivion. You remember viv­
idly how the encounter with pop art on your first trip to America violently
disrupted the confidence you had in the supremacy of European, abstract art.
The Bauhaus had been betrayed, and it took years until you had digested all the
consequences. Whenever you hesitate about post-1968 Warhol today, you feel
the need to recall the shock his blunt images had been to you in 1964 and to
check whether his later work withstands comparison. For a very long time,
Warhol and Cezanne were, in your truncated vision of art history, the two poles
 A R T W A S A P R O P E R N A M E

around which all your favorite art works had to revolve, like two armies facing
each other on the battlefield. During all this time, the past of art was there, in
the look of the cities you lived in or in the prestigious names you had learned
to respect from childhood on, but the past was not available. Having been edu- |
cated to the idea that architecture started with the Crystal Palace, painting with
Cezanne, music with Schonberg, you would remember the silly guilt you felt
simply for liking the ruins on the Forum the first time you visited Rome. The
discovery of Palladio, of Masaccio, of Monteverdi came later, and there is no
way for you to reach into your imaginary collection of art works without ac­
knowledging the helter-skelter order in which they entered it. "Is this legiti­
mate?" you would ask yourself. "Am I not supposed to come up with a model,
something that could stand for art at large and be objectively valid, or at least
historically relevant?" More grappling with your feelings is called for. Since
Rome came to mind, you would think of Florence, and then Venice, and the
fondest memories of museum visits would soon overwhelm you with joy. Siena
would not be forgotten, and how, in the wake of your discovering Duccio's
Maesta, all the Sienese petits maitres found their way into your collection. But
joy is not enough, and the hard time you had with Tintoretto, the sort of
condescension with which you regarded Mannerism (with the exception, per­
haps, of Pontormo and that one painting by Beccafumi), should make you think
twice. You would still be facing the fact that there is not one single modern
Italian artist whom you would want to put in the foreground of your collection,
in other words, whom you could make stand for tradition as a whole (and
where would tradition come from, if not from Italy?). Not De Chirico, not
even Fontana. As to the contemporaries, the Arte Povera and the transavant-
garde people, why is it that none of them seems exemplary enough? Clemente
has charm, Merz is powerful, Kounellis is intelligent, Anselmo is subtle, Fabro
is both distasteful and superbly clever (which might be something), but they are
all too elegant and too subdued by the awesome ruins strewn over the Italian
landscape. The legacy of Italy is not in Italian art. It was transferred to France
long ago, and your acquaintance with the jurisprudence as recorded in art his­
tory books tells you that you know this all too well. But your own jurisprudence

43
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tells a different story, which by now is also on the record. Why is it that Hartung
and Soulages could not durably sustain the enthusiasm of your adolescent years,
and that Fautrier had to wait until Schnabel had succeeded in making something
out of the exhaustion of American painting a la Pollock to be a plausible candi­
date for rediscovery? It is an undisputable fact, to you, that tradition crossed the
Atlantic at the outbreak of World War II. Pollock is the true inheritor of Ce­
zanne. This conviction took twenty years to affirm itself. You first valued him
because he had made such a radical gesture with the invention of drip painting;
the result didn't matter as much as the gesture. Then you valued him because
the gesture meant so much, in terms of the relationship between the painter's
body and the canvas, the decentering of the self, the final abandonment of the
Albertian window, and what not? Now you value him simply because he was
the best painter of his generation. This is not to say that your previous readings
of his work did not contribute to your present conviction, but they would have
been thrown overboard as peches dejeunesse if renewed acquaintance with the
works themselves had not confirmed your personal jurisprudence.
At this point in your introspection, you are reminded of the moment when
you began to feel very strongly that your personal jurisprudence was sustained
by that of others, and that you were part of a tradition, no matter how vehe­
mently you still wanted to deny this. Other critics, with other agendas, had
reached similar convictions, and in turn, this is what made them convincing.
Do you know the extent to which those critics' comments made you look at
art through their eyes? N o , but does it matter? They are now part of yourself,
an ingrained element in your own judgments, if not in your own commentary.
You were not around when Pollock became Pollock, but Clement Greenberg
was, and his astonishment, his resistance, his coping, his progressive surrender
to Pollock's breakthrough are on the record. Born too late even to have had a
stake in the violent rejection of Greenberg by the younger generation of artists
and art critics, you simply know what you owe him: his tradition is yours. Your
alle giance, however, includes further betrayals, as it should. There is no way
you can accept that Olitski or Noland are Pollock's heirs, and if Caro's star is
rising again and pushes many a Minimalist sculptor into the shadows, it is not

44
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thanks to Greenberg or Michael Fried; rather it may be thanks to Richard Dea­

con—whose achievement, in your eyes, is to allow you to take in Henry Moore
and Reinhard Mucha in the same breath. There is a limit, your feelings tell you,
and one that is very quickly reached, to the degree that you can let other critics
feed you with aesthetic experience by proxy. Though you were not hanging
around with them at the time, you grew up with the generation of conceptual
artists, and their intellectualism, their sense of strategy, their awareness of the
institutional framing of art were things that you shared and from which you
learned. In many cases, their works claimed that they could stand for a critical
definition of art in general, and so you need to consult with the feelings they
elicited then and they elicit now, in order to decide whether it is not indeed
one of their breed that you should extract from your personal collection to be
the example standing for the whole. But your feelings are quick to answer: it is
not the works with the clearest pedagogical value—such as those of Huebler
or even of Weiner—that were able to withstand the passage of time, but those
of the most idiosyncratic artists—such as Broodthaers or On Kawara. And the
fact remains—because for you it is a fact, although you know that it is merely
a fact of your own making—that throughout the entire period when concep­
tual art was productive, the best artists were painters: Ryman and Stella in the
States, Richter, Palermo, Polke in Europe. You care for painting, that much is
sure. It is more threatened than other arts. Is that why only those painters who
distrust painting attract you? Is that why only those paintings that display the
extreme vulnerability of painting are able to move you beyond mere enjoyment,
and thus withstand the peril? Perhaps. You can't help but feel that they hang
in front of a background constituted by the innumerable discourses that have
proclaimed the end of painting ever since photography was invented. Yet you
can't help but feel also that this background is justified; and you soon decide
that no single painting could speak for all the art that is in your collection. No
piece of sculpture, either. Boundaries have fallen apart, you know this both
from the record and from the ups and downs of your own enthusiasms. And
yet, the collapse of boundaries is a background too; it could never be a criterion.
Wouldn't you trade the whole of Sol LeWitt's production for a single piece by
Eva Hesse?
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

Thus you would scan your collection; with such a self-examination, you
would check with the multitude of sentiments that are attached to the things
stored mentally in the memory of your experiences and called, by you but most
probably not by you alone, works of art. And you would be at a loss. Still, your
interlocutor would press you: "Stop beating about the bush. Tell me of a single
work of art that you think eminently deserves that name, and that would be
representative of all the art you love." "It's impossible," you would reply "Each
work of art is unique, works of art don't obey the parliamentary logic of repre­
sentation." And you would add that feelings don't either, that no one image of
love could be made to stand for the infinite variety of all its manifestations, as
if Tristan and Isolde could be substituted for, say, Othello. With this example, you
would also show your interlocutor how the love of art and the depiction of love
in art are inextricably entwined, a problem, in fact, highly symbolic of your
ordeal. Choosing a thing from the world of culture on the basis of what your
personal acquaintance with culture tells you is like choosing a spouse: it is more
a commitment to the future than a result of past experience. There you are.
You might find a way out by exclaiming: "Picasso!" Arent you a historian of
tradition, and don't most historians—those of modern art but also those of other
periods—agree about Picasso's looming presence in the art tradition as a whole?
He might even reconcile the historians of art with the historians of the avant-garde.
He did it all: he initiated more than one of the significant ruptures with the
past this century has experienced; he broke with himself many times; he could
express a wide range of feelings in a variety of media—painting and sculpture,
but also collage works, constructions, objects that are neither painting nor
sculpture; and, not to be neglected, he was able to recycle the whole of world
art history, from Velazquez to African masks, in such a way that after him, the
most outrageous breaks with tradition had not only reintegrated tradition but
also rewritten it. But choosing Picasso is too easy a way out, precisely for those
reasons. His presence in tradition is too well established, too secure. The juris­
prudence about him already fills libraries. Historians, critics and art lovers in
general may quibble about individual pieces, disagree in their interpretations,
rank Picasso's periods differently, but no one would be foolish enough to want
to kick him out of the museum; furthermore, no one is afraid that some day

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humankind might turn about and decide that the twentieth century was crazy
to call Picasso an artist at all. And that is the point. Picasso exempts you from
judging. Or rather, he allows you to judge by simply letting the prejudices of
your time judge in your stead.
The feeling of having it easy with Picasso prompts other feelings, and other
examples. Will Malevich s Black Square still be regarded as a great painting two
centuries from now? You feel that you have to assume responsibility for the
tradition that constitutes your personal collection, and that the only measure of
this responsibility is the amount of danger to which your collection would be
exposed by the choice you are asked to make in selecting a work exemplary of
the whole. Such a feeling is quixotic, no doubt. True, as a critic who goes
public with his or her preferences, you will be judged on your judgments. You
expose yourself, but all you are risking, if the future doesn't judge as you do, is
being forgotten. Yet this is not at all what your feelings tell you; though you
may be ambitious, to be remembered by posterity is not something that you
could decently call a duty. Vis-a-vis your collection, however, your feeling is
one of moral duty. You fear, and rightly so, that if your judgments on art were
forgotten, so would be the art itself. What matters is not that these judgments
be attributed to you, but that they be passed along. But unless you claimed them
as your own, they wouldn't be judgments at all. So, you feel that a preposterous
investiture is bestowed upon you: the right and duty to claim all the works in
your collection as though you, not the artists, were their author. You must burst
into laughter at this point: a feeling like this one catches the sublime at exactly
the point where it topples into the ridiculous. And at this point, your choice
is ripe.
You dig into your collection and bring back Duchamp's urinal. To make
sure, you check the feelings it arouses in you against those aroused by the works
that enjoy a prominent position in your collection, and especially by those
which might have been plausible candidates for the title of exemplary examples
of art at large, such as Picasso's, for instance. And you decide to stick with this
urinal. It has everything Picasso's Head of a Bull has in terms of ready-made
qualities and surprise effect; it may even have evolved out of Picasso's Absinth
 T H F U N I V E R S A L A N D THE S I N G U L A R

Glasses or cardboard and sheet metal Guitars. It has formal qualities that evoke
Brancusi and Hans Arp, plus a sense of provocation that Arp never conveys. It
expresses its time as well as Manet's Olympia, and it reaches far into its own
future to connect with the works ofJohns and Warhol and many others. Indeed,
like the joker in a card deck, it is the ever-present signifier in the cross-
referenced index of your favorite works of art since Manet. Without it, how
would you account for Manzoni's cans of Artist's Shit being in the same collec­
tion as Bonnard's Nude in a Tub? You don't account for that, yet it is a fact of
your experience that they are, and that you can pass from a notion of art where
Bonnard is a master, and not just one of good taste, to another, where Manzoni
is a priest, and not just one of derision. Perhaps it is thanks to Duchamp, who
was a champion of passages. For all those reasons, you love this urinal, and
though some of these reasons cancel each other out, it doesn't matter. Feelings
are illogical: sometimes you are in the mood for Wagner, sometimes for Mozart.
Why couldn't this urinal be a beautiful object at times, while at others, it thumbs
its nose at the very idea of beauty?
Yet you find as many reasons, and perhaps less illogical ones, to hate the
bloody thing. To admit that Bonnard and Manzoni should stand side by side
in one and the same collection yields a very unsettling feeling. Even more un­
settling is the idea that Duchamp's urinal might have reconciled them. Hasnt it
become an object of taste, and a very bland one at that, ushering in banality? If
sarcasm should account for art, it would be easier to throw Bonnard out than
to keep Jeff Koons at bay. But can you cope with the ensuing schizophrenia?
Can you hold on to those works in your collection that have the erosive power
of the avant-garde, without simultaneously blotting out all the art of the past
that gives you so much pleasure and surrendering to art as kitsch? Can you
decendy, honestly, claim that Duchamp's urinal is exemplary of all the art that
is in your collection, from prehistory to the present day? Check with your
feelings again. They tell you that there are far too many reasons why Duchamp's
urinal should be in your art collection, and that there are just as many reasons
why it should stay out. It is neither a painting nor a sculpture, nor, for that
matter, a poem or a piece of music. It doesn't belong to any of the arts. It is

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either art at large or nothing. It is on the threshold of your collection, undecid-

able, but if it enters it—so your feeling tells you—then it is exemplary of every­
thing that is in it. All the while, it compels you to call it art, as if you were its
author. The teasing is unbearable, and that's what clinches your decision. For if
you decided not to call it art, you would still act as if you were its author. You
would merely call it non-art. The thing is in every museum, and for you to
expel it from your little personal museum would be a very Duchampian gesture:
that of proclaiming a "reciprocal readymade." 16 You laugh at the ridiculousness
of your entrapment, but then you remember that this was precisely your duty
vis-a-vis the whole of your collection: to take responsibility for it as if you were
its author. And suddenly, you feel authorized to do so. Your duty has become
your right, for in front of this ready-made urinal nothing distinguishes you from
Duchamp. You didn't make it but neither did he. He didn't even call it art
himself; he let posterity call it art, and though it is now a fact of jurisprudence
that posterity did so, jurisprudence doesn't dispense you from judging on your
own. So you judge and, pointing at Duchamp's urinal, you say: "This is art; this
is the thing I choose to be an exemplary example of everything I call art."
Having arrived at this stage, you are neither contemplating your exemplary
example nor brandishing it like a banner; you are pondering it. You can't help
but feel that this very ordinary sample extracted from a virtually endless line of
mass-produced goods and made to stand for something for which it was abso­
lutely not prepared is a paradigm, a model of sorts. Isn't this what "paradigma­
tic" means: exemplary? You have the unjustified feeling that this urinal contains
a theory of art, of art at large, of art in general. Yet you can't prove it. You can't
prove anything by dint of feeling. And with this generalization, you leave your
feelings behind; with this reflection, you break with the realm of sentiments
and enter that of concepts. Unlike the mere art lover you were earlier who,

16 "Reciprocal Readymade = Use a R e m b r a n d t as an ironing b o a r d " Marcel D u c h a m p ,

The Green Box, in Salt Seller. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer
Peterson ( N e w York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p . 32; hereafter abbreviated as 5 5 .
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THL S I N G U L A R

when asked "what is art?" could only point to examples so heterogeneous that
they could never be samples of one and the same concept, you are now on your
way to a theory of art. You will not forget the art lover you were and still are,
yet you will have to leap into the cool domain of conceptualization and, in a
way, start all over again.

ACT FOUR. IN W H I C H Y O U L A N D UPON A T H E O R Y OF A R T

AND G E T R E A D Y TO L E A V E THE P L A N E T MODERNITY

4.1.

In fact, you had already leapt when your reflection led you to realize that the
feeling you had about Duchamp's urinal containing a theory of art was unjusti­
fiable. For, as far as you are concerned, the urinal became art only with your
aesthetic judgment. How could it have "contained" a theory of art prior to
your calling it art? It's just a urinal after all. Your judgment was based on your
complex, unstable, oscillating love-hate relationship with this thing, on the in­
extricable ball of twine of the feelings it elicited in you, including, this is true,
the feeling that it contained a theory. There is no proof that it does, however,
and you are not foolish enough to believe that your judgment provided it with
one. There is no theoretical foundation to aesthetic judgment; in other words,
there is no basis in theory for the sentimental sentence by way of which you
call art what you call art. Having so pondered and reflected, you are now a
theoretician of art, otherwise called an aesthetician. For it is by reflecting on
the hiatus between feeling and knowledge that you have just come to the con­
clusion that feelings are never grounded in knowledge and that, conversely,
knowledge cannot be grounded in feelings. And this is already a theoretical
proposition, albeit a liminal one. It does not say that there is no theory of art,
but rather that there is none that could be deduced from the criticism of art,
and conversely, that there is no art criticism that is justified by theory. Criticism
has no other justification than feeling, which justifies nothing. Or again, it has
no ultimate justification, since it is the exercise of judgment, and to justify a

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judgment another one is required. As for theory, it could not be based on criti­
cism. If St. Christopher carries Christ and Christ carries the world, where does
St. Christopher stand?
Here is a second liminal theoretical proposition, then: the theory of art is
not based on art. In other words, art is not autonomous. Consequently, art
theory must be based elsewhere, on a theory external to the field of art, and on
whose truth or falseness it would depend. Conversely, art does not find its basis
in theory, since theory is external to art, and to this extent—but only to this
extent—art is not heteronomous. From the theory of art to its criticism, the
reverse path is no better grounded. The seal between the two registers remains
unbroken, so that in this direction also a jump is required. This is a very strange
theory, one implying a knowledge that claims to be verifiable, and therefore
scientific, but for which truth statements have no predictive value. With regard
to a theory of art based elsewhere than on art, it is in fact impossible to produce
the case that would verify the theory, and it is even more impossible to antici­
pate what the next case would be. The sentence "here is some art" produces a
case of art, but it is not a case of theory; it is a case of feeling. The experience
is not repeatable, which is to say, experimental; it is singular, which is to say,
aesthetic.
You have been an art critic or a historian of tradition and you have pro­
duced numerous cases of your feelings, positive, negative, and mixed. You have
granted particular attention to those things that were able to bewilder and over­
whelm you, and you have come to value especially the feeling of dissension,
the sentiment of dis-sentiment, that they elicited. You have added them to the
collection of things that you have learned to like either because they were easy
and pleasurable, or because, being on the record, they were transmitted to you
and solicited your approval You have gathered all these things together with
the sentence, "Art is everything I call art." This sentence is reflexive and not
tautological, since the generic art only adds up the singular cases that you have
so named in judging them. From the sum of these cases, the generic is consti­
tuted; but from the generic, the singular cannot be deduced. Reflecting as a
theoretician on this collecting sentence, you draw something from it that is very
 T H E U N I V E R S A L A N D THE S I N G U L A R

close to what the logician deduced from his or her corpus and the semiotician
from his or her consensus: that art is the name of everything you call art. Art is
a name, and this is its only theoretical status. This name, common to all works
of art, was a concept for the logician, a sign for the semiotician. For you, prop­
erly speaking it is neither the one nor the other. For it is no longer a common
name, or noun; it is a proper name. Why? In assembling your collection in the
first person, you no longer have the distance of the extraterrestrial ethnologist
nor the alibi of the implicated sociologist. In claiming that art is everything you
call art, you take on the responsibility of a quasi-definition that is neither theo­
retical nor empirical but, instead, critical. In so doing, you ask to be judged on
your judgments and you expect to be asked in turn: "What are you talking
about? Go on and display your feelings by telling us which are the things that
have triggered them. Show us the cases, the instances." The logician would
interpret this injunction as an invitation to establish the extension of the con­
cept of art, and the semiotician as a request to tell the denotation of artistic signs.
But for you, a critic who will be judged on your judgments, the injunction is
a command to produce the referents, not of a supposed general concept of art
nor of an unlimited set of artistic signs, but of the sentence as you pronounce
it case by case: "this is art." The word "art" is a linguistic sign, no one would
deny it. But it is not a logical concept. It is thus not a common noun, even
though it is common to all the things you call art. This communality results
from the namings you have brought about through your judgments; it is not
prior to them in the manner of a linguistic denotation or a conceptual exten­
sion. It is of the same order as that which assembles all the Peters, Pauls, or
Harrys: they have their name in common, but their name is not a common
noun; it is their proper name. They owe the communality of their respective
names to the act of baptism through which they were named and not to any
mysterious property or meaning they supposedly share.
Just as with Peter, Paul, or Harry, or Catherine, Fanny, or Valerie, the name
of art is a proper name. This is a theoretical definition, the only one that can
be given to the word "art." Here, then, is a theory at once extremely simple
and terribly meager. It rests on a single proposition, a single theorem. You must

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not forget that you have arrived at it, not through a deduction or an induction,
but via the reflection you have made on your own feelings as an art lover, in
other words, on the conviction or the certitude (and what is certitude, if not
the feeling of knowing?) that you are dealing with art when you express your
judgment with the phrase, "this is art." Among certitudes of this sort, the partic­
ularly fragile and totally unjustifiable feeling that Duchamp's urinal "contained"
a theory of art was the one on which you reflected the most, for this object is
the most exemplary, the most paradigmatic of all works of art, inasmuch as it
begs you to call it art and does nothing else. With regard to all the other things
that convince you that you are dealing with art, of course you could have
chosen to express yourself with other formulas, which are apparently not nom­
inative, like "this is beautiful, sublime, extraordinary, sensational, fantastic, tre­
mendous, great, super," with "as art" being implicit. (You could do this with
regard to the urinal too, but only after having christened it.) Such formulas
reveal their purport as expressive of feelings more clearly than the naked for­
mula, "this is art." The latter, on the other hand, reveals more explicitly than
the former ones the antinomy that results when a personal feeling is cast into
the form of a predicative proposition with a claim to conceptual objectivity.17
It is this antinomy that requires the theory you make your own, as being the
only one compatible with your experience, a theory made of a single theorem,
which says: the word "art" is a proper name. Now, your theory will be a true
one, a scientific one, only if it is proved, that is, based on a theoretical ground­
ing itself verifiable, or, as Popper would say, falsifiable. Clearly the theory that
will validate or invalidate your theory will not itself be a theory of art, but
rather, a theory of proper names.
Since you are a theoretician of art and not a specialist in proper names, you
have to turn to an existing theory of proper names and take the chance that if
some day the theory you accept is shown to be false, your theory of art will
collapse. This is a handicap, perhaps, but it is the rule in scientific work. Just as

17. M o r e about this antinomy in chapter 5

 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

biochemistry, resting on the achievements of organic chemistry, which in turn

relies on inorganic chemistry, runs the risk—at least in principle—of someday
being invalidated if its bases are, so it is completely normal and epistemologi-
cally healthy that the theory of art should rest on a discipline that can be opened
to question from within itself It's rather the opposite that would be worrisome.
Unlike what often happens in the human sciences, where lnterdisciplinarity is
deemed a virtue, it is the declared dependence of the theory of art vis-a-vis the
theory of proper names that can assure its chance for objectivity. Moreover,
since there is an airtight seal between the theoretical register and the critical
one, the theory of art as proper name might even be proven wrong without
making it necessary to repudiate critical and aesthetic choices, which in any
case are nonjustifiable, being based on feeling. You thus embark on the search
for a theory of proper names. There are several, and they all occasion controver­
sies among specialists in the philosophy of language. The situation is thus less
comfortable than it was for the biochemist in relation to chemistry, but after all,
among the various theories of proper names, there is nothing to prevent you
from choosing the one that lends a certain weight to the intuitive conception
at which you have already arrived: Peter, Paul, or Harry, even though common
to all the Peters, Pauls, or Harrys, are labels that designate this Peter, this Paul, or
this Harry, one by one, without presupposing shared qualities for them, without
lending them a common sense. Now, this is exactly what was stated by the first
explicitly articulated theory of proper names, that of John Stuart Mill.18
Mill said that in contrast to general names (or common nouns), proper (or
singular) names—meant to single out an individual—have no connotation but
only denotation. In Frege's terms, they have no Sinn but only Bedeutung; or in
contemporary terms, they have no sense but only reference. Mill compared
proper names to the signs chalked on the houses to be robbed by the thieves in
the story of Ali-Baba. Like these signs, proper names designate without describ-

18. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843; reprint, London: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1961), pp 14-29

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 A R T W A S A P R O P E R N A M E

ing. In this way, the art lover who is asked for a definition of art and who
answers, "art is this," acts like the thief; he or she designates but does not de­
scribe. Yet however simple and seductive Mill's theory might be when it is so
annexed to art, it raises two problems, and in addition it contains a defect of
form. First, the word "art," contrary to Mill's singular names, does indeed pos­
sess meaning. It can, for example, signify the excellence of execution or the fact
of belonging to one of the fine arts. In fact, the word "art" has at least as many
meanings as there are theories of art, perhaps as many as there are private usages
of it, even as many as there are circumstances under which it is pronounced.
Moreover, it is the quantity of all possible contradictory meanings of the word
"art" that has led the logician to abandon attempts to establish its intension,
and the semiotician to constitute its significance out of its very swarm of mean­
ings and non-meanings alike. Second, the word "art" is nonetheless a common
noun, or what Mill called a general name. It is perhaps analogous to Peter, Paul,
or Harry, but these are also general names; they are first names that on their
own are not enough to single out an individual. The addition of a family name
will not necessarily suffice either. To be sure of knowing exactly of whom one
is speaking, it would perhaps be necessary to say something like: "the Peter
Johnson born in New York on May 14, 1934, son of Gerald Johnson and Mary
Moore." But isn't such a formula already a description? Doesn't it give the
meaning, or an elementary meaning, for the name Peter Johnson? In other
words, is it really true that proper names have only denotation and no connota­
tion? And finally, there is the defect of form. In the phrase "art is this," and
more obviously still in "this is art," it is the deictic this that designates without
describing, and singles out an individual. To take Mill literally, the only proper
names strictly speaking would be pronouns and demonstratives. In the phrase
in question, it is not the word "art" but the shifter "this" that would be a proper
name, playing the role of the chalk mark in the Ali-Baba story.
This is what Frege and Russell thought, when they proposed another the­
ory of proper names, in contradiction to Mill's. They claimed that proper or
singular names have sense, or in Mill's language, connotation; they are really
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

abbreviated or disguised definite descriptions.19 Thus the meaning of "Aris­

totle," for example, would be contained in the following descriptions: the
Greek philosopher born in Stagira, the student of Plato, the tutor of Alexander,
the author of the Nicomachean Ethics, etc. Faced with the difficulty of knowing
how many of these descriptions the man about whom one is speaking must
satisfy, so as to be sure that one is really speaking about Aristotle, Searle, and
later, Strawson and others, have amended the theory of Frege and Russell, mak­
ing it more flexible by introducing the notion of the cluster concept in place of
the definite description.20 To be Aristotle, it would be necessary and sufficient
that the man of whom one is speaking respond to a certain (never specified)
number of the above descriptions. A single one would not be enough (there
might be more than one philosopher born in Stagira), but the conjunction of
all of them would not be necessary (some day one might discover that Aristotle
didn't write the Nicomachean Ethics as we now know he didn't write the Prob-
lems). One could thus be satisfied with their inclusive disjunction. In the main,
Frege and Russell, as amended by Searle, find Mill correct about general names
and incorrect about proper or singular names.
More recently, Saul Kripke, and through a different route, Hilary Putnam,
have criticized this critique in their own turn. 21 Kripke in particular returned to
Mill's theory by inverting the argument Frege and Russell made against it. Mill
was right, he said, about proper names, but wrong about certain general names

19. Gottlob Frege, "On Sense and Reference," in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of
Gottlob Frege, ed. P. Geach and M. Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960); Bertrand Russell,
"Descriptions" in Readings in the Philosophy of Language, ed. J. Rosenberg and C. Travis (Engle-
wood Cliffs, N.J.- Prentice-Hall, 1971).
20. John Searle, "Proper Names," Mind 67, no. 266 (April 1958): 166-173; and "Proper
Names and Descriptions," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Mac-
millan, 1967), 6: 487; P F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), chap. 6.
21 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972);
Hilary Putnam, "It Ain't Necessarily So," TheJournal of Philosophy, 59, no. 22 (1962): 658-671;
and Mind, Language and Reality, vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­
sity Press, 1975)

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 ART WAS A PROPER NAME

like those of measures, substances, natural species, or colors. According to

Kripke, just as with proper names in the strict sense, these are rigid designators,
that is, labels always relating to the same referent, whatever might be the
"counterfactual situations" or "possible worlds" in which one could imagine
them. Even though rigid designators might have a meaning, and this meaning
might consist of a list or cluster of properties, essential or not, what makes them
proper names is their use: they serve to fix the reference and not to pronounce
a meaning. According to Frege and Russell, the name "Aristotle" and the ex­
pression "Alexander's tutor" are synonyms. Kripke doesn't deny this, but he
points out that if one uses this synonymy in order to determine of whom one
is speaking when one says "Aristotle," and if for example one imagines a possible
world where Aristotle had not been Alexanders tutor, a contradiction appears
which amounts to saying that the tutor of Alexander was not the tutor of Alex­
ander. Either Aristotle never existed, or one is speaking of someone else. To
this, Kripke objects that even though "Alexander's tutor" is one of the meanings
of "Aristotle," nevertheless it will still be the same Aristotle one is speaking
about—the one who in the real world was Alexander's tutor—when one imag­
ines a possible world where Aristotle would never involve himself in teaching.
Once the reference is fixed, it is rigidly maintained across all imagined count­
erfactual situations. And this led Kripke to turn his attention toward the event
that establishes reference, which for most proper names is a baptism, whether
performed by means of a description or not, and to become interested in the
chain of speakers through which proper names are transmitted to people who
"know" of whom they are speaking even when they really could neither de­
scribe, or define, the individual so named nor trace the chain of transmission
back to the initial baptism.
Without going further into Kripke's theoretical views, this can form the
basis for a theory of art, understood as a rigid designator, or rather, as a proper
name. 22 The phrase "this is art," as it is uttered by art lovers who use it to judge

22. In spite of grammars and dictionaries, it is preferable to speak of art as a proper name in
the narrow sense rather than as a rigid designator (the Kripkean category that encompasses

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by dint of their feelings and of the conflict among their feelings, is a baptism.
Art lovers may believe themselves to be justified in their judgment; they may
have many motivations, some cultural and learned, others emotional and sen­
sual, still others intellectual and even moral; but it is with the affective sum total
of all these motivations that they judge, with the feeling they may or may not
have that "everything falls into place" in conformity with their expectations or,
to the contrary, in spite of them. In baptizing a given thing with the name of
art, they express the feeling that it deserves to be so called. The fact that in the

both "real" proper names and names of substances, natural species, colors, etc.), because of
the essentialism to which Kripke's category ultimately leads, an essentialism for which your
art theory has absolutely no need. In two very confused articles ("Defining Art," The British
Journal of Aesthetics 15, n o . 3 (1975): 191—206; and "A Kripkean Approach to Aesthetic T h e o ­
ries," The British Journal of Aesthetics 22, no. 2 (1982). 150-157), James D . Carney tentatively
tried to make a case for the "rigid designator m o d e l " (or the Kripke-Putnam model, as he
first called it). In Carney's model, the word "art" is akin to the w o r d "gold" for Kripke
Whereas it is true that a putative piece of gold (like a putative w o r k of art) is identified with
reference to a paradigm sample transmitted over time through the linguistic community, it
remains possible to call on an intensional definition of gold (atomic n u m b e r 79) to verify its
true nature. N o t so with art. Carney, w h o has an inkling of this but does not see it clearly, is led
to oscillate b e t w e e n various theories that are no improvement whatsoever on the essentialist or
Wittgensteinian models he set out to criticize (those very models with w h i c h you yourself
experimented a while ago w h e n you were assuming the position of the logician; see n. 7).
His theory alternately requires (1) that all works of art share a "universal property," or if it
can't be found, at least a "hypothesized" one or the belief in one; (2) that the "artworld"
(George Dickie's concept) knows about art's "universal properties," or if it doesn't, at least
agrees on a "favored theory," or if it doesn't, hopes to arrive at one; (3) that some theory, true
or false, "serve as the final court of appeal as to w h e t h e r x is art." H o w one can arrive at such
absurdities is explicable, alas, w h e n it is realized that "aesthetics" practiced in this way is a
discipline that has currency only on the planet Mars, That's where Carney and his like (see
n. 7) obviously live, with the exception of Arthur D a n t o , whose theory, though false, is witty,
and w h o has at least a foot in the real world and goes out to look at art m o r e often than not.
Let Carney have the last word: "I suggest that the reason the rigid designator model can b e
fruitful to aesthetic theory is that it saves appearances" Indeed

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enormous majority of cases it had been called art already, by others, simply
makes judgment easier; it doesn't deprive art lovers of their right, and their duty,
to perform the baptism once again. All art lovers are like artists, in this respect,
who when they consider the thing they were working on finished decide to
call it a work, or like the discoverers of art naifor of art brut, when they decide
to acknowledge aesthetic qualities hitherto unrecognized as artistic. What mat­
ters is that the word "art" expresses a feeling, or a set of feelings, but that it
does not mean what it expresses. In fact, it means nothing, or too many things
all at once, which amounts to the same thing. Unlike the.words "sad" or "en­
thralling," it doesn't even hint at the "content" or the "quality" of the feelings
it expresses. And unlike the words "colorful" or "rhythmic," it says nothing
about the objective features of the thing pointed at. Being a proper name, the
word "art" is a blank. The question to ask about proper names, Kripke says, is
that of their reference, not that of their meaning. To what are you referring, as
art lover, as critic, or as historian of tradition, when you show your appreciation
of anything whatever in saying: "this is art"? That is the question. Certainly not
to this, the designated thing, for then the phrase would be tautological. You are
referring to all the other things equally designated by you, in other circum­
stances, by use of the same phrase; with the word "art," you are pointing a
finger at all the things that make up your critical collection, your personal,
imaginary museum. In calling this thing art, you are not giving out its meaning;
you are relating it to everything else you call art. You don't subsume it under a
concept; you don't justify it by means of a definition; you refer it to all the other
things you have judged through a like procedure, in other times and other
places.
This is why aesthetic judgments are always comparative, even though it
would be useless to try to say precisely what they compare. 23 Not only does

23. Aesthetic j u d g m e n t s are comparative, at least, in the anthropological register in w h i c h this

chapter is deliberately located. T h e question of w h e t h e r an absolute aesthetic j u d g m e n t is
possible opens another register, which could be called transcendental. M o r e about this in
chapters 5 and 6

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your interlocutor not know that collection to which you refer when you say
"this is art," since you are not showing it to him or her, but neither do you
know precisely the extent of your comparisons. You might have two or several
paintings in front of you, but you cannot listen to two concerts at once; in any
event, it is impossible that, in the hie et nunc of experience, you could have access
to the totality of what you call art. Moreover, what the word "art" expresses to
you, what it has expressed each time you baptized something with it, is not
accessible to your full consciousness either. Particular feelings once attached to
the perception of particular works of art may subsequently have been detached
from them, replaced by others or attached to other works. They are buried
somewhere in your experience. Thus, the feeling that comes to you in the
presence of this thing, here, which beckons you to call it art, is measured by
the memory of past feelings. But feelings are rarely something you could say
you simply store in your memory They can prompt or repress remembrance;
they are as much the guardians of memory as guarded by it; they are sometimes
the affects of forgetting, sometimes the impulse to anamnesis, sometimes a
compulsion signaling repressed memories. Nothing is more deformed, be­
trayed, at times embellished, at times darkened by time, than the memory of a
feeling. But it remains that aesthetic judgment compares comparable things
when it confronts a present feeling to the re actualization of past sentiments. For
the remembrance of a feeling is always a feeling, while the memory of a piece
of knowledge is not necessarily a piece of knowledge (one can remember once
having known trigonometry but have forgotten it; one can remember having
loved and perhaps have forgotten how it felt, but not without at least feeling
the melancholy of oblivion and indifference).
But aesthetic judgment does not simply compare feelings with each other.
Human experience in general does that too. Moreover, there is plenty of room
in human experience for aesthetic judgments unrelated to art. So, if you choose
to express your feelings with the sentence "this is art," does this then mean that
you are comparing "art feelings" with one another, feelings that have a special
"art quality" to them or that only art can elicit? Certainly not. Your experience
has taught you that the feelings to be had from art can be had from life as well,

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and that, conversely, the love of art possibly encompasses the whole range of
human feelings. Yet you know an "art feeling" when you feel one, and what
you are attaching to this, precisely by calling it art, is certainly an "art feeling."
This means that your feeling is such that it prompts you to refer the this about
which you judge at present to all the thats of your personal collection, as though
comparison were possible. Now, for all that, you do not succeed in comparing
things, objects, perceptions, images, or even recollections. You can, if this brings
to mind that, if similarities in medium, form, style, or subject matter, or what­
ever other intuitive associations, force specific comparisons. You can't, if your
"art feeling" is too vague to prompt specific associations. And in any case, there
is no way you could bring to mind all the works in your collection, all
the occasions that triggered in you an "art feeling" in the past. Yet when you
choose to express your aesthetic judgment with "this is art," you claim such
a comparison.
Between the inaccessible referents of the word "art" and the referent of
the demonstrative "this," that is, between all the past occurrences of your "art
feeling" and this one, there are paths, some opened for free association, others
blocked by censorship, through which affects are triggered, evoked, amplified,
or silenced, and through which comparisons are compelled. You may or may
not be able to call the resulting "art feeling" by its name—beauty, for example,
or ugliness, or awkwardness if you hesitate—but such names are proper names,
too, a shorthand for the level of intensity that you expect from art on the basis
of your past experience, and also on the basis of your willingness to let a new
and unexpected thing overwhelm you, at the very moment when it proposes
itself as a candidate for your aesthetic appreciation. Your "art feeling" may give
rise to interpretations, just as your interpretations (or somebody else's) may elicit
further feelings. The outcome of this is a complex layering of meanings and
feelings, which alternate tentative interpretations about what has been felt and
feelings experienced about what has been signified. The referents of the sen­
tence "this is art" can thus recede in memory and get buried under stratified
sedimentations of thoughts and affects which are very hard to discern, and for
that reason, "unconscious." However, these very referents—alienated from one
 T H E U N I V E R S A L A N D THE S I N G U L A R

another by being severed from the affective experience that produced them—
are grouped together and made autonomous in the name of a call for compari­
son, which is sometimes seen as a proof of their common property or as a sign
of their common meaning, but which in fact is nothing but the shared reference
to this name, art, which is their common proper name. It is misleading to say,
as the logician does, that this shared reference represents the open-endedness
and the indeterminacy of the concept of art, and it is insufficient to speak of
intertextuality in relation to it, as does the semiotician. For it is not with regard
to definitions of art—which are rationalizations of something irretrievably irra­
tional—that reference is made to the name of art, or at least not directly: open-
endedness and indeterminacy are themselves feelings that only someone with a
bias toward logic is prone to attribute to a concept. And though texts and signs
inevitably call to mind their context and intertext, on its own the interpretive
process that runs through them does not account for their gathering under the
banner of art, a term that only someone with a bias towards semiotics is prone
to understand both as an elusive signified and as the signifier of this very elusive-
ness. The shared reference that unites, sunders, reassembles, and opposes all the
things that you, personally, call art, is not accessible, even to you; yet it is the
stuff of your experience of art. It is the accumulated outcome of a quasi-
automatic process of comparison that purports to compare things not necessarily
comparable in terms of medium, form, style, or subject matter, as though they
were comparable, and which feels justified in so doing because the feelings
these things elicit precisely offer a basis for comparison, however treacherous.
In fact, aesthetic comparison is not direct: it neither simply matches an "art
feeling" with another "art feeling," nor simply pits a work of art against another.
It is a comparison by analogy, an "as if-comparison." When you decide to enter
a work of art into your collection—especially if it is a work backed up by little
jurisprudence or even none at all, a thing unprepared to be art on the basis of
medium, form, style, or subject matter, but which nonetheless compels you to
refer it to all the art that is in your collection, a thing so unsettling that calling
it art, art at large, is the issue, a thing that is likely to bring about a "non-art
feeling ,, —you will not do so on the basis of past experience alone. Compari­
sons fail. Yet it is as though you went through a comparative reasoning, saying:

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"This thing, here, which makes me compare it with all the things I value as art,
stands for those things from my present collection, as the overwhelming 'non-
art feeling' it is the occasion for stands for the feelings my past experience has
taught me to expect from art."
There are alternate readings to such "algebra": "This thing, here, which to
me is not art yet, stands in relation to the unsettling 'non-art feeling' it yields,
as the whole of my art collection stands in relation to my expectations from
art." Still another: "The feeling that so upsets my expectations compares with
those very expectations as this unexpected thing compares with everything I
call art" And still another: "My experience of art is to the things this experience
led me to collect what my inexperience in dealing with this new thing is to the
thing in question." And so on. 24 If you surrender to your feeling, the outcome
is inevitable. You will conclude, although you need not say it explicitly or even
consciously: ". . . so that I call this thing art" Your "conclusion" is not a con­
clusion in the logical sense, however, and the "rationale" through which you
reached it is not a rationale. It is literally irrational, since it equates ratios that
are not measurable. This "as if^rationale," this comparison by analogy, is what
Kant called a reflexive judgment and what Duchamp, quite pointedly, called an
algebraic comparison.25 The theoretician you are may find confirmation in this for
your theory of art as proper name. But the theoretician in you has not forgotten

24. Let's call the thing that is a candidate to the name "art" X, and the set of things constituting
your personal art collection C; further, let's call the unexpected feeling that X elicits fX, and
the vague and unspecifiable feeling you have learned to associate with your collection and
which "sums up" your expectations from art/C. The four readings you just gave of the "as
if^companson" making up your aesthetic judgment would then translate into the following
"algebraic" formulas:
1. X / C = / X / / C
2. X/fX = C/fC
2>.fX/fC = X/C
A.fC/C =fX/X
25. More about Kant's reflexive judgment in chapter 5, and more about Duchamp's algebraic
comparison in chapter 2.

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the art lover you were, and still are. And as an art lover, you dont need to
name or analyze the process that regulates your aesthetic judgments. It is simply
confirmed by experience. Time and again, from childhood on, when you
began to acquire a personal imaginary collection of works of art, you went
through an "as if-comparison" of this kind each time you entered a new work
into your collection, gradually increasing the number of referents you gave to
the name of art. In this way, you broadened your taste, built a notion of what
art is and means to you, and heightened your expectations as to what art should
be. As they say, you gave yourself criteria for art. But "criterion" is the wrong
word. It suggests that given objective features or given subjective feelings act as
grounds for comparisons having the form of logical inference—"if. . . then."
Whereas the comparisons by analogy with which you judge aesthetically have
a reflexive form—"it is as if. . . so that." What the accumulated experience of
art slowly increases and specifies is not a set of criteria but the plausibility of such
"as if^comparisons." As your acquaintance with art builds up, this plausibility at
once increases and narrows. It increases because the broader your collection,
the greater the probability that you will accept into it things that could not
possibly have been art to you previously. And it narrows because as your expo­
sure to art augments, so does the intensity level of the feelings, the quantity of
surprise, the richness and density of experience, that you expect to be conveyed
by works of art. That you would grow to love a work whose medium, form,
style, or subject matter seem unrelated to art becomes more and more plausible,
while it becomes less and less plausible that you would be satisfied with it if it
did not match the quality of the feelings art usually gives you. This plausibility,
more or less rationalized, interpreted in various degrees, constitutes your idea
of art.
This idea is not a concept, for at least three reasons: it is personal to you
and is not generalizable; you are in no position to formalize it, to prove its
pertinence, or to argue the "logic" of it in all its details; and most often, you
don't know how it came to you nor from whom you got it. Because, of course
it is not a question of claiming that, however personal it may be, the idea of art
is original with each individual, purely private or sovereignly subjective. This

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would be falling into solipsism and idealism. Indeed, to the contrary, it is so­
cially, historically, and culturally conditioned. You did not start your personal
art collection from scratch. Before you uttered the sentence "this is art," you
had heard it spoken. Things of all kinds, perhaps starting with your first teddy
bear, were shown to you and given as examples of things to be cherished. Some
of those things were indicated as being art, and you learned to associate feelings
with objects already collected and valued by others—your parents, your teach­
ers, the museum, the art community, society at large. Your feelings, whether
about art or in life, are receptive to influence, and the memory of your feelings
is not impervious to the injunctions of society either. Moreover, the feelings
society allows or encourages in regard to art are, to a large extent, stored in the
jurisprudential record along with the works and their interpretations. Your idea
of art is, for the most part, made of aesthetic habitus, of incorporated cultural
values, of ingrained prejudices, and of received ideas. Still, it is your idea of art,
not someone else's, that you acknowledge whenever you publicize your "art-
feeling" by designating the things that you call art yourself. If, for this or that
social reason, you cheat with your feelings, dress up your true taste in borrowed
clothes, appropriate a collection you cannot honestly claim, or uncritically ac­
cept as art what the experts call art, you will still not have made their idea of
art your own. It is one thing to pay lip service to a social attitude; it is another
to judge on one's own. And since you can't help but judge, because you can't
help but feel what you feel, it is your idea of art—the plausibility of your own
"as if-comparisons"—that is the regulative idea of your judgment.
Everyone and anyone has an idea of art, and even several ideas, simple or
complex, unlearned or cultivated, conventional or audacious. Some people,
either underprivileged or not very sensitive, cling to the ideas of art they share
with their social group or vie with each other to adopt those imposed by the
ruling class. These are the conformists. If they are among the rulers, they never
doubt the consensus and never question their own right to say "we" when they
judge. They do not see the conflict of cultural values, or if they do, they judge
it out of place, as if it were itself an error of taste. If they are among the domi­
nated, they suffer oppression, punishing themselves for their "bad taste" and

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 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U I A R

striving to identify with what they take to be the general consensus. Others,
whether they are objectively dominated or whether they have taken sides with
those who are, revolt. They see hegemony in the apparent consensus and feel
the cultural conflicts strongly because their sense of value is struck by them.
These are the rebels, sometimes the revolutionaries, often the partisans of the
avant-garde. It matters more to them to destroy their opponents' idea of art
than to maintain one themselves, unless as a reaction. Finally, there are those
very privileged, and conscious of being so, who want to raise themselves above
their own sensibility and that of their group, readily publicizing a universal idea
of art that they believe to be beyond judgment and taste. These are the civil
servants of humankind, the variety of whose cultures they observe detachedly,
rarely involving themselves in the conflicts of the moment. As for you, who are
aware of the diversity of cultural values and sensitive to their conflicts, you also
have ideas of art, several which you feel are socially at war with each other and
historically relative, ideas that are made as much of received conceptions and
conventions as of the idiosyncrasies of your taste, and above all, ideas that are
ready to fall apart and coalesce again differently in the face of a feeling of dissent
so strong that its unsettling is precisely the sign by which you recognize the
regulative idea of your judgment. You are, above all, an art lover whose idea of
art shifts under the pressure of an unexpected feeling that introduces into the
tangled memory of your past experiences the reflexive feeling of dissent, the
sentiment of dis-sentiment.

4.2.

You have not stopped being this art lover, but you are one after having been,
in turn, an art critic and a historian of tradition, and then, through a leap and a
reflection, an aesthetician. It is a new reflection, but one that does not imply
any leap "backwards," that now leads you back from theory to history, this time
under the banner of a theory of history. For you cannot avoid constructing a
conception of the historicity of art. In this, you are both close to and very
different from the historian of art, for whom historicity was given with the con-

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cept of style: linearity of evolution, cycles of civilization, discontinuity of peri-

odization, all contingent. Historicity is also given to you, but as jurisprudence:
if styles are maintained, it is because the judgments of the past weigh on those
of the present, and if they are broken, it is because a judgment contrary to
custom has been passed. You inherit all that. You are equally close to and very
different from the historian of the avant-garde, for whom the dialectical meaning
of art, never given in advance, never inherited but prescribed as novelty, was its
very historicity. But you do not confuse practice with theory. The practical, or
"praxical," dimension of art is something you once again call jurisprudence, but
this time in the sense that you make it by setting precedents. Jurisprudence is
the historicity immanent in your practice as historian. It has transmitted to you
the records in which your predecessors' judgments are stored, and it will trans­
mit the record of your judgments to your successors. But it does not give the
theoretical form of historicity as such. Now, the other name of jurisprudence—
the one that corrects all at once the notions of style and of the avant-garde—is
tradition. Tradition means transmission, translation, and betrayal. What tradi­
tion transmits, translates, and betrays are first of all the things called art. In
preserving them in museums, it makes those things available to successive gen­
erations of viewers; it translates them in whatever art ideology current museol-
ogy fosters; and in so doing, it inevitably betrays them. In placing these things
in museums of art, in gathering them together in the name of art, what tradition
also transmits, translates, and inevitably betrays, is the name "art," that very
name which, on the theoretical level, you have defined as a proper name. So,
reverting to this theoretical level, where it is a matter of conceiving the historic­
ity of tradition, you ask yourself just how proper names are transmitted, trans­
lated, and betrayed.
By and large, proper names are transmitted in three ways. First, through
direct filiation, from father to son if the lineage is patrilinear. A widely accepted
notion, which is not on the whole false but which is much too simple, con­
ceives of the name of art as transmitted this way, along with that of artist: from
spiritual father to spiritual son, from legitimate master to innovative disciple.
Hardly examined, the procedure of transmission is called influence (and

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rupture); theorized, as by Freud for instance, it is called (resolved) Oedipal con­

flict. In any case, it is the name-of-the-father that is transmitted along with the
title of artist, eventually to be translated and betrayed by the son who takes it
on as tradition. Secondly, proper names are transmitted by hearsay, in the same
way information in general is propagated. We hear art spoken about as we hear
So and So spoken about. One speaks of art as one spreads rumors, without
necessarily verifying them, without knowing from whence they originate,
without remembering from whom one got them, and without bothering about
where they will go. A large part of culture, understood as acquired knowledge,
as familiarity, as habitus, even as savoir-vivre, is woven of such rumors. Proper
names posit themselves in this culture in order to maintain systems of refer­
ences; this is their only function, as Kripke has shown. One knows of whom or
what one speaks, even when one wouldn't know exactly what is understood or
what is being said. Among proper names in general, cultural rumor circulates
names of artists and names of works, to which it attaches the name of art. But
rumor is not enough to make a tradition. Not that it lacks a sufficient amount
of translations and betrayals, since, to the contrary, noise is the most probable
state of all transmission. Rather, de jure if not de facto, the chains of transmis­
sion woven by cultural rumor imply no judgment other than the initial baptism.
With tradition, which certainly feeds on culture as well as feeding it in return,
but which, above all, is nourished by sensitivity and nourishes it reciprocally,
things work entirely differently The name of art rebounds from judgment to
judgment, that is, from baptism to baptism, and although none are primal, all
are initial. When the phrase "this is art" is an aesthetic judgment and not just a
rumor relayed by hearsay, it is never an origin yet always an initiative. Even and
especially when it silently accompanies the first word of the novelist, or the first
touch of the painter, it is already the fruit of an initiation, but one that creates
an event and, if the case arises, produces a new referent for the name: this, here,
now. The here and now shift with time, and one can very easily not be in
agreement about the "this." Aesthetic experience does not get transmitted, it is
not intersubjective. Only the name is transmitted, and it in no way guarantees
the identity of the experience. It remains that, in art, there is no judgment by
 ART WAS A PROPER NAME

default and no baptism in absentia, and that the deictics of experience (this,
here, now) bear witness to a feeling for which the occasion is unique, unrepro-
ducible, and nontransferable. The name is transmitted and repeated, but the
baptism is renewed each time the named thing comes up for trial before a new
occurrence of the feeling.
Now, it is the idea of art that summons the thing to appear. Indeed, it
"measures" how plausible it is that this thing, here, be called into court to see
its claim to be art checked against the testimonies of all things already called
art, and be compared to them by dint of feeling. Your idea of art has been to a
large extent transmitted to you along with the name, partially as unchecked
rumor, that is, a prejudice, partially as unchallenged social value, that is, as ideol­
ogy, and partially as rejudged jurisprudence, and this is what matters. It is simul­
taneously a diffuse idea allowing comparisons among the things you have called
art through habitus or out of cultural loyalty, and a regulative idea that is formed
and enriched by each of the judgments that have set a precedent in the jurispru­
dence, at least for you. However, it is not certain that the idea is transmitted
along with the name. If criteria allow it to be communicated, and if it forms a
conception that is received and preserved by you without further trial, then it
is. But if, in that case opened by the summoned thing, it is the idea as well that
you are judging, then it is not. Each time the sentiment of your dis-sentiment
makes you add a new, unexpected, and overwhelming thing to your critical
collection, you shake up the set of references to which you have been referring
this or that work up until then. You make certain expectations more plausible
and others less. And you betray tradition, since what you transmit is not what
you have received. But you also translate it, since it is in the same unchanged
name of art that you claim the assent of others to an increased dissension. Your
idea of art has changed along the way, but it is not the meaning or explanation
of this change that you pass along. You are in the debt of interpretation. This
may explain why the idea of art has so often taken the form of a question and
why inquiry about the meaning of art is so often undertaken out of a sense of
obligation, particularly by semioticians, who sense in the dissemination of artis­
tic signs a powerful call for interpretation at the same time that they are loath

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to meet it. In hunting out the work's intertext, they refuse to cancel the text's
debt. Quite to the contrary, the debt is what they transmit to "posterity" as the
obligatorily interrogative meaning of the idea of art. This may also explain why
critics, who seem to seal off questions of interpretation through the peremptory
assertion of their judgments, when they claim to define art by saying "It's every­
thing I call art," pay for this claim, and always to "posterity," with the obligation
of having in the final accounting to produce the totality of their aesthetic
choices. This claim is arrogance only if there is confusion about—or if they
themselves confuse—this responsibility with the right of decree that the public
nature of their judgments confers on them. It is an error only if there is confu­
sion about—or if they themselves confuse—the exhibition of their examples
of art or the more or less justificatory comments that accompany them with the
establishment of a proof. Finally, it wrongs the readers, the artists, or the public,
only if it is believed to be authorized—or if they think it is authorized—to
violate the rule of separateness that seals off the critical realm from the theoreti­
cal, and to slide from the one into the other without taking any leap and reflec­
tion. In fact, critics, all critics—even those who abuse their authority in the
name of their expertise—from the moment they make their judgments public
and even more if they stir up controversy, all critics see themselves called upon
by history, sooner or later, to summon the totality of things they call art. They
are not so much in the debt of an interpretation as they are held on account for
a showing of cases.
As critic or as historian of tradition, you have declared that art was every­
thing you called art, referring all the occurrences of the name to each other.
Your culture has the breadth of your collection, your sensitivity the richness of
your feelings, and your probity as critic or historian the publicity of your judg­
ments. Thus, you want to be judged on the totality of your choices—each of
them, singly—including those, the majority, through which you relay a previ­
ous instance of the art-naming procedure and take charge of it. You then appeal
to a judgment which, across your personal choices, will judge, if not tradition
as a whole, at least a tradition, the chain of transmission of the name of art of
which your judgments are a link. Like all chains, this one is only as strong as its

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weakest link. Tradition is never as sensitive as at that very point where it is in

danger of breaking, jurisprudence never as important as where the dispute is
not sealed, judgment never as decisive as where it makes a decision in the un-
decidable, sentiment never as pertinent as where it has the fragility of dis-
sentiment. And so, the tradition you belong to is no different from what others
called the avant-garde.
This tradition is yours, but it would not be a tradition if it were yours alone.
You share it with everyone responsible for having weakened a link in the chain
of tradition. You are in dangerous company and you know it, for not every
attack on what the traditionalists call tradition comes down, in the end, as a
link in a tradition. Vulgarity is always just this side of kitsch, "bad taste" is often
license for a lowering of expectations, and breaking with tradition sometimes
results in just that, a break with tradition. Your feelings and your feelings alone
can tell you whether the sense of rupture conveyed by a given work stems from
resentment, impotence, and disavowed hatred of art, or whether it proceeds
from a deep and understanding love for the fragility of the tradition's weakest
links. Consulting your feelings is a way of probing the plausibility that similar
feelings presided over the making of the work you are judging—although with
no guarantees whatsoever, which is, of course, true for all art, since the commu­
nication of feelings is indirect, being mediated by an object. But it is particularly
true of the avant-garde, because to weaken a link in the chain of tradition means
to attach less importance to the successful communication of feelings than to
the lack of guarantee for this communication's possible success. Thus, what
those artists and art lovers who share your tradition have in common with you
is not a given set of feelings, a temperament, or a taste; it is a willingness to let
the works they make or collect run against their temperament, an aptitude to
let their betrayals of taste rule over their taste, a readiness to surrender to those
feelings that promise solitude rather than community. More than anything else,
the stuff of the tradition you belong to is the paradoxical sharing of the sense
of being alone. What this shared solitude stands for is both the right to judge
by yourself and the duty to judge as if you were not alone; and the ability, the
"talent" that this calls for is a capacity to read your feelings as if they were

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objects projected outside of yourself, forces traversing you, social facts. The
more a work forbids you to call it art in peaceful agreement with yourself, the
more it invites you to increase the plausibility that it be compared with the
works that other times, other people, nations, races, social classes, and the other
gender might call art. And the more it upsets your idea of art and arouses in
you the feeling that the unexpected has arrived, the more you will sense that it
has precisely expected you to broaden your expectations. With this reflexive
twist, whose signal is the sentiment of dis-sentiment, you are being pulled out
of yourself, and your judgment is made so much more anonymous that you
find yourself unable to assign to the various social values, whose conflicts you
feel, nameable social instances. It is, then, as if you said: "This thing, here,
which I personally can't endorse without inner conflict, compares with my per­
sonal collection as my personal collection, once enlarged to include the thing
in question, would with a radically impersonal one."
So, your tradition is not yours alone; it is the avant-garde but it is not
only the avant-garde. A radically impersonal collection would be composed of
everything anyone and everyone might call art—not just avant-garde art—in
agreement with you. Of course, it is an abstraction, an ideal, a mere idea whose
name is "art in general." Even if every man and woman on earth were con­
sulted, such a collection could not be gathered, if only because the most thor­
ough survey would still leave out the dead and the unborn. And if every man
and woman on earth could be consulted, it would be even more a mere idea,
for disagreement is the rule: conflict, dissent, that is, dis-sentiment. And yet, as
an ideal, art in general ought to be the collective possession of humankind; the
radically impersonal collection it represents ought to be ours, universally. You
know this for sure (although this "knowledge" is merely a certitude or a convic­
tion), in spite of the fact that you also know that not all men and women agree
on art, far from it, and that the we to which you claim to belong doesn't speak
unanimously. Your conviction is well founded and legitimate; for it does not
rely on any opinion poll, it stems from the reflexive feeling of dissension (yours,
not ours) in which you now read the sign that all ideas of art, the most open,
the most contradictory and conflicting, the most uncertain, must be admissible

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within this tradition held together by its weakest links. What is this tradition if
not the genealogy through which the name "art" was transmitted and shifted
from the works of the past onto those of the avant-garde, when it passed from
an era where it meant beauty, perhaps, or perfection in sensitivity, or excellence
in skill, to an era where it was at once believed, wished, and feared that it meant
the most absolute indeterminacy of sense and its polymorphous opening onto
nonsense? It is the avant-garde as tradition betrayed and betrayal transmitted; it
is consensus as impossible; it is art as non-art and non-art as art. And thus, there
is no better name for it than art, art in general. This paradoxical jurisprudence
leads you to recognize, and to judge, that the avant-garde is not only a tradition,
but the continuation of tradition tout court.

4.3.

Now you look back on this tradition. You take it all in with the necessarily
retrospective gaze of the historian who knows that it constitutes simultaneously
the history he or she belongs to and the historicity of this history. You were its
genealogist; now you also become its archaeologist.26 Asking yourself how proper
names are transmitted, you noted that the name of art, which is also transmitted
by filiation and rumor, only sets a precedent in jurisprudence when it is relayed
by aesthetic judgment, and that the more a precedent is fragile, the more it is
crucial. Reflecting on your own jurisprudence, you have sketched the "family
tree" along which the proper name, art, was transmitted, emphasizing these

26. Genealogy, here, is to be understood in all senses of the word: as the discipline that
concerns itself with the establishment of filiation (in this case, with artistic filiations, which is
what most art historians do); as the discipline (actually, the same one) that examines h o w
proper names are transmitted (in this case, the name "art"); and in the Nietzschean sense,
especially as interpreted by Michel Foucault. As to archaeology, it should also, of course, be
understood in the sense given to it by Foucault, although its traditional connection to art
history should be kept in mind.

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judgments based on sentiment and dis-sentiment, and whose regulative idea is

itself an idea, or a counteridea, of art, or of anti-art, but always an idea, whatever
it may be, that has something to do with art. One last reflection makes you
realize that once it is regulated by an idea of art, whatever it might be, and not
ruled by such and such a criterion of art, this genealogy in its totality must have
as its regulative idea nothing but the idea itself of art as proper name.
What does this mean? One should guard carefully against any confusion
between the idea of art as proper name and the concept of "art-as-proper-name."
The latter operates on the level of theory. It expresses the conceptual knowledge
acquired through the theorem that defines the word "art" by the (Kripkean)
concept of the proper name or rigid designator.27 But the idea of art as proper
name, on the contrary, operates on the level of practice, that is, of judgment,
of the aesthetic usage of the word "art." The concept is either true or false, the
idea is either just or unjust. Through a leap and a reflection, you arrived at the
concept that the word "art" was a proper name. Reflecting on your personal
experience as an art lover, but leaving your feelings behind, you realized that
whenever you issued an aesthetic judgment formulated as "this is art," you were
baptizing an object that struck you as art with reference to a collection of
samples which, to you, were art already. The word "art," in this sentence, was
used in the same way that proper names, according to Kripke, are used: to fix
the reference and not to convey meaning. The truth or falsity of Kripke's theory
of proper names will determine that of your concept of art as proper name. It
will neither affect your experience of art, nor threaten your conviction that this
concept is the only one compatible with your experience. The idea of art as
proper name came about differently, when you reflected on the fact that your
judgments on art had to be part of a tradition and this tradition could only have
been that of the avant-garde. The idea that the word "art" could have been
used, and has in fact been used, in the manner of a proper name is the only one

27. From w h i c h it clearly does not follow that the w o r d "art" is a concept, any m o r e than
the word "Peter," since proper names are not concepts.

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capable of accounting for the facts of jurisprudence that have constituted the
avant-garde as a tradition. The idea that it should be so used, moreover, is the
only one to do justice to the avant-garde, for it is the only one allowing you to
see it as the continuation of tradition tout court. This idea cannot be proven even
if it finds strong support in the historical record. It presupposes something that
experience confirms but that no theory demonstrates: the use of the phrase
"this is art" expresses an aesthetic judgment, and this judgment, born out of a
feeling, neither states nor communicates the quality or "content" of this feeling.
Further, it supposes that everyone is capable of having feelings about what he
or she calls art and includes in his or her collection. This was what you supposed
and had to suppose to be an art lover. And it is what you still suppose and must
suppose in order to say that the regulative idea that summons before whatever
feeling, felt by whomever, anything whatever that is a candidate for art, could
only be the very idea of art as proper name. This idea constitutes the gist of the
tradition to which you must still belong—that is, from within which you judge
without theory—in order to be able (but this time theoretically and without
judging) to describe it as if you no longer took part in it. You translate it and
you betray it; therefore, you transmit it such as it happened in attempting to
describe it.
The first statement of this description will be, "Art was a proper name." It
is a historical statement that conjugates in the past tense the theoretical state­
ment, "Art is a proper name." It does not invalidate it, it does not refute a theory
which, true yesterday, would be false or outmoded today The definition of art
based on the Kripkean theory is not historically contingent so far as its truth is
concerned, even though it has a historical correlate so far as its relevance is
concerned. "Art is a proper name" is a conceptual or theoretical definition of
art. "Art was a proper name," on the other hand, is not a definition of art at all,
but rather the beginning of an archaeological description of the tradition regu­
lated by the idea of art as proper name. This tradition, congruent with the
history of the avant-garde, is modernity.
Describing it as a historian, or more precisely, as an archaeologist, is above
all to periodize it. This you will attempt to do, getting your bearings from this

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elementary definition: modernity is that period of Western history for which

art was a proper name, that period during which aesthetic practice—of artists
as well as of art lovers and critics—was regulated by the idea of art as proper
name. It began, obviously, when the idea emerged that art was autonomous,
and when the practice of art indeed entrenched itself in its autonomy and alien­
ated itself from society at large. It began when the word "art" became the
name of an ineffable quality that did not obey preestablished rules, that did not
necessarily coincide with the beautiful or the sublime yet was often substituted
for them, and that wrenched from the sphere of myth and religion a space of
secular spirituality that became the object of a particular intellection institution­
alized by the Museum. Provisionally and very roughly periodized, the moment
when modernity began was the eighteenth century. In the writings of Roger
de Piles and of Abbe Dubos, the notion of taste and the claim of mere art lovers
to have the right to judge on the basis of feeling emerged. In the first reviews
of the Salons, by Florent Le Comte in 1699, by La Font de Saint Yenne in
1747, by Diderot beginning in 1759, art criticism was constituted as a new
literary genre and a polemical mediation between the works of art and their
new audience of art lovers, the "public." With Mengs and Winckelmann, the
history of art appeared as a new discipline, one that sought to interpret the past
chronologically but also surreptitiously set norms for the present. From Vico
and Shaftesbury to Baumgarten and Kant, aesthetics was born, first as an appen­
dix to moral philosophy and a reflection on taste, then as a theorization of the
kind of perfection that is accessible to the senses, finally as a critique of judg­
ment. In short, the eighteenth century gave birth to each of the modern posi­
tions that you yourself have just occupied in turn, positions that you now look
back onto in order to construct their archaeology, fully aware that they are
neither facts of nature, nor facts of theory, but facts of history.
While the beginnings of modernity are easily spotted, its end, if one there
is, is highly problematic. To periodize requires, however, that one be able to
mark off a "block" of history at its beginning and end. If the end seems unde-
cidable, it is not just due to a lack of distance. It is also because the end of
modernity is almost as old as modernity itself. The period of history that had

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invented History could not fail to conceive of itself as moved forward by the
project of its own accomplishment and self-negation. The negativity of the
avant-garde, for which tradition had to mean betrayal, is explained by the antic­
ipated retrospection of the verdict thanks to which avant-garde art would, in
the end, be incorporated into tradition precisely for having first betrayed it
Similarly, the avant-garde's pursuit of novelty, its dynamic of constant sur­
passing, is explained by its aiming at a horizon beyond the modern, which the
modern then overtakes in turn. So, modernity seems to be constituted by a
forever unending process of ending. That this can be said, however, is an indica­
tion that a point in history has been reached where an after-modernity is at
least in sight. From within modernity, this could be said only as a prediction,
and such a prediction would fail to cancel itself out only if it thought of itself
as a driving contradiction. If, since Mallarme, the ideology of the avant-garde
has been massively Hegelian, this is because the end of modernity, the end of
the idea of art as proper name, its completion through incompletion, has been
the program ever since Hegel's Vorlesungen uber die Aesthetik. With Hegel, the
object of aesthetics is no longer the beautiful or taste; it is art in its autonomy.
It is also art in its historical destiny, the necessary alienation that accom­
panies its "progress," and the project of its disappearance. A century and a half
after Hegel, now that the autonomy of art appears as the autonymy—or self-
nomination—it has really been, it becomes possible to see that the Hegelian
dialectic has maintained a systematic confusion of the positions of art lover,
critic, historian, and aesthetician. For even the art lover and the critic are forced
by Hegel to project themselves, just like the historian and the philosopher, into
the speculative position from which they view an already accomplished history
of art. Now that it is not art, but rather the period that made art as a proper
name into a regulative idea, that seems to reach its end, it becomes possible,
and urgent, to turn round on this period's beginnings and to undo the confusion
wrought by Hegel.
The roles of art lover (sections 3.1. and 3.4.), critic (3.2.), historian of tradi­
tion (3.3.), aesthetician or theoretician of art (4.1.), genealogist or theoretician
of historicity (4.2.), and finally, archaeologist (4.3.), can only be played one by

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one and in that order of entrance. This order represents the historical debt of
each of these characters vis-a-vis modernity: they can't play one role without
playing or having played the previous ones. And since you yourself played all
these roles in turn, this applies to you. You are allowed to be a mere art lover,
of course, but it would be absurd and preposterous to call yourself an art critic
without being an art lover. It is perfectly honorable for you to do art cnticism
as a reviewer, without claiming to write history in the heat of the moment, but
it would be unthinkable to write the history of an art tradition without judging
as a critic and from within this tradition. You can practice art criticism without
theoretical ambitions, but conversely, if you sought to produce an art theory
without reflecting on the actual activity of the critic, you would be caught in a
formal and sterile exercise. Finally, it is entirely legitimate for you to want to
add to the jurisprudence by relying on the jurisprudential record, whether im­
mediately or belatedly, but you would fail to grasp the historicity of tradition if
you did not reflect as a theoretician on the jurisprudence in which the critic
and the historian are, in other respects, immersed. (And how could you so
reflect, if you hadn't had the experience of a critic?) Only then, when you have
played these five roles in this order, and in full awareness, will you be able to
reinscribe them into the period that gave them birth. Only then, looking back
to this period called modernity, will you gain an overview of this culture that
sustained itself on the idea that art was autonomous and on everything which,
of necessity, contradicted that idea. Only then will modernity begin to reveal
the fruitful mistake on which it fed: whereas it proceded from a regulative usage
of the idea of art as proper name, it believed or wanted to proceed from a
conceptual or speculative usage of the name of art as idea. And this—belief or
desire—probably authorized that—regulation and production. Once fruitful,
this mistake is so no longer, unless it is recognized as a mistake. It allowed
philosophy and art to walk hand in hand for about two centuries, to the point
where most modern philosophers have conceived that the search for truth re­
mains incomplete without looping into the domain of art, and where most
modern artists have believed that art lacks dignity without philosophical ambi­
tion. But the philosophical drive of modern art has lived itself out. Today, it

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makes way for the obligation to write the archaeology of modernity. The mis­
take thanks to which modern art, imagining itself as enacted philosophy, came
into being is no more than a historical fact to be reinterpreted as such. This is
a task for the archaeologist, and probably no longer one for the artist or the
critic. With this task, modernity is brought to a close and yields a new injunc­
tion: that of the postmodern.
The possible meaning of the word "postmodern" for artists is beyond your
grasp as an archaeologist. Even what it might mean for critics is no concern of
yours. Noticing that it is on everyone's lips, you just take stock of the fact that
it has appeared in recent years. To you, it sounds like a symptom, the symptom
that a large part of our culture doesn't want to call itself modern any more.
Throughout the era called modernity, modern was a value judgment synony­
mous with the word art, to the point where for the jurisprudence that exhumed
long-forgotten artists like Bach or Vermeer, or whole cultures long ignored like
African art, it was always their "modernity" that was pushed to the fore, as if it
contained the ultimate criterion justifying their status as art. But now that grow­
ing numbers of people, disappointed with modernism or dispirited by its pos­
sible impasses, no longer value the word "modern" and proclaim the advent of
the "postmodern" as if it were a magical absolution for the supposed sins of
modernity, obviously a periodization of history has been performed, albeit
through wishful thinking. To you, as archaeologist, this indicates that these
people, whether artists or critics, want to change names. The word "postmod­
ern" is nothing but a proper name, just as both the word "art" and the word
"modern" were for the moderns. As John Stuart Mill would have said, it has
no connotation but only denotation. People who use it in praise ot certain
artworks of today simply point to the things they like or value with reference
to a collection made of the works they call modern, and which they reject or
push into the past. And people who use it disparagingly simply resign them­
selves to accepting the periodization performed by the former. Both groups
denote a body of works, not necessarily the same, with one and the same proper
name. And yet to you they also connote something: for the "postmodernists,"
the wish to leave modernity behind; for the "antipostmodernists," on the
 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

contrary, the nostalgia for a set of values which they feel are no longer shared.
The "postmodernists" gladly betray modernity, the "antipostmodernists" sadly
register the betrayal and possibly fight back. As an archaeologist, you do neither.
You simply take stock of the symptom and interpret its connotation: if the word
"postmodern" is but a proper name with which to point to certain works of art
in negative reference to those called modern, then the word "modern," which
was a proper name when modernity was alive and well, is perhaps one no
longer. It is in the process of becoming a common name, that is, a concept that
can be circumscribed insofar as the period of history so called is ended. Whether
modernity has "really" ended or not is irrelevant to you as an archaeologist.
The flow of time does not spontaneously cut itself in slices; its periodization is
performative and it is performed by words, such as "pre-" and "post-," which
people use to deHmit a period. The word "postmodern" has appeared, and this
is all you need to know to sense that it carries a strong injunction. But to you,
as archaeologist of modernity, this injunction is radically different from the one
the artist and the critic might also feel. They are likely to confuse the "postmod­
ern" with "postmodernism," which to you appears as nothing more than an­
other "ism" confined within "modernism," that is, within the very ideology
that mistook the regulative usage of the idea of art as proper name for the
speculative usage of the name of art as idea. To you, "postmodern" is a neutral
and literal term, unladen with values; it is a periodizing instrument that says
what it does and does what it says and nothing else. If you feel its injunction,
it is simply because it posits you in time in a way that makes modernity the
terrain of your archaeological investigation and commands you to look at it
from a vantage point that no longer takes the modern, or "modernist," interpre­
tation of the modern era for granted. In other words, the injunction you feel
so strongly is that of defining, interpreting, conceptualizing the common name
that modernity has become. Or still, it is the injunction to rewrite the history
of the modern era in such a way that it will be read as a postmodern reinterpre-
tation of modernity. This you already began to do when you defined modernity,
neither as the era in which art was autonomous (which would be a modernist
interpretation), nor as the era that entertained the illusion or the ideology that

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art was autonomous (which would be a postmodernist, in the sense of antimod-

ernist, interpretation), but as the era whose practice and criticism of art was
regulated by the idea of art as proper name.
In order to write the archaeology of this era, you surely don't need to
subscribe to the idea of art as proper name any longer, nor to believe in it, nor
to desire it. But you won't deny that it has been a powerful regulative idea. You
will certainly have to renounce the modernist reading of modern art, which
interpreted its purism as a progressive reduction to art's necessary and sufficient
conditions. But you won't forget the works that the striving for purism gener­
ated. You will probably need to accuse the project of emancipation carried by
the avant-gardes. But you won't relinquish emancipation as a maxim. 28 You will
simply translate both the idea of art's autonomy and its inevitable negative, the
idea of art's alienation, into that of art as a proper name. For in the ruleless
game, or the ruthless struggle, that modern art has been, what was at stake was
the name of art. N o matter what modern artists did, no matter what rules they
followed or abandoned, no matter what conception of art they fought for or
against, no matter what style they invented or destroyed, those who won—the
game or the struggle—were those who managed to see their work be baptized
by the name of art. This became clear with the late modern art, when the
"historical" avant-gardes had achieved their conquest and been fully legitimized
and the neo-avant-gardes replayed their struggle as petty artworld games. When
the idea of art's autonomy came full circle as tautology, formalism, or self-
reference, it also began to lose itself body and soul in the heteronomy of the
market, as Adorno had feared. Isn't this a sign that, perhaps, the name of art is
no longer at stake? If this were the case, wouldn't you be seeing modernity
come full circle before your very eyes?
Here, thus, is a set of new tasks, for which the name of art is no longer at
stake. An archaeological site has opened up before you. To sift through it doesn't
require any loyalty to its programs, any adherence to its values, any feeling. You

28. M o r e about this in chapter 8.

 T H E U N I V E R S A L AND THE S I N G U L A R

are allowed to look on coldly as the name of art is erased from the surface of
culture, in exactly the way that Michel Foucault saw the figure of Man being
washed away "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."29 Yet as we now
know, Foucault the archaeologist was a committed humanist, his enterprise was
political, he took sides. And you yourself, for whom the emergence of the word
"postmodern" is merely a symptom, you don't lose sight of the fact that in
obeying the injunction to reinterpret modernity with clinical coolness, you also
have to rejudge it in the fire of criticism. You don't forget how you arrived at a
theory of art and a theory of its historicity: through a leap, yes, aloof from
judgment and feelings, but also through a reflection. It is in reflecting on the
critical quasi-definition you had given to all the art you loved—art is everything
I call art—that the concept of art as proper name forced itself on you. Before
being a theoretician, you were an art critic. Similarly, before being a genealogist,
you were a historian, which is to say, a slow critic, again. And so, it is in re­
flecting on your own activity as a critic working from a distance or in the tur­
moil of the present, that you were able to understand that the idea of art as
proper name had been the regulative idea of a tradition that is called the modern
tradition, or the tradition of the avant-garde. Although you can now describe
it as if you no longer took part in it—that is, as if you came from outer space
or were ready to take off to another planet and said, 'Art was everything mod­
ern humans called art," or, 'Art was everything we called art when we were
modern"—you know from experience that this tradition was yours, that it was
the jurisprudence within which you sought to set precedents.
Well, you are still that critic and your tradition is still with you. In order to
reflect you had to judge, and if you have judged, if you still do, you won't avoid
transmitting your judgments to those who will follow you and who will not
fail to situate you in the tradition you transmit and, in so doing, betray. You are
modern, without fail. Even if you write on the Middle Ages, your writings bear
a date and what you will transmit will be the "modernity" of the Middle Ages.
And even if you write on the hottest current events and invoke the postmodern

29. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 387
 A R T W A S A P R O P E R N A M E

in order to describe and evaluate them, as good or bad, it will still be "moder­
nity" that you will betray and thus translate and thus transmit. When modernity
comes full circle in the symptomatic desire to be done with it, it is fated to trap
the critic in a double bind. As a critic, there is nothing you can do for the time
being but accept this. For if the postmodern was first of all a symptom for you
as an archaeologist, a symptom which you then had to interpret and judge as
such, for you as a critic it carries an immediate injunction to judge and interpret.
Now, this injunction is contradictory, it is a double bind. When works of art
appeal to a new name before the tribunal of history, they give the critic notice
to grant it to them or not, and to say why If you grant them the name "post­
modern," you will emphasize rupture and betrayal, since to be postmodern a
work must break with the modern. And if the break itself has a say in your
evaluation of the work, then, ironically, your explanation of it is bound to be
modern. If, on the contrary, you refuse the new name and claim the modern
tradition for the work, you will still have to say why this value judgment is
more modern than the postmodern. As long as the choice you have at your
disposal in order to evaluate a work is one between two proper names, "mod­
ern" and "postmodern," you will be drawn to attempt a rereading of the whole
of modernity when faced with any single work that seems to question its limits.
Today's epidemic of historicism is positively a sign of this; it is also a symptom
that such rereadings, modernist through denial, do not yet amount to a ^inter­
pretation. Only when you are wearing your aesthetician's hat—when you de­
fine art as a proper name—or your archaeologist's hat—when you define
modernity as this period during which aesthetic practice was regulated by the
idea of art as proper name—are you free to savor all the irony of the nominalist
alternative between the modern and the postmodern. When you are wearing
your critic's hat—and even though you are the aesthetician and the archaeolo­
gist too—you remain prisoner of this alternative, which will probably last as
long as the historical transition through which our culture is passing, in the
process of leaving modernity for something unknown that is postmodern in
name only. And so, as a critic, you are left with nothing other than your feelings
to rest your judgments on: the feeling that makes you call a given work mod­
ern or postmodern, the feeling of the conflicts between the modern and its

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wish-fulfilling aftermath, and the feeling, stronger than ever, of dissent and
double bind.

4.4.

With this uncertain and painful feeling, you judge. Caught in the double bind,
you are forever a late modern, an old romantic at once stubbornly loyal to the
avant-garde and dangerously seduced by the wish not to be modern any longer.
You look at your love affairs with art with a wry smile, unwilling to atone for
sins you have not committed. You are modernity's rejected lover, melancholic
perhaps, but peaceful in the end; for you understand that when the time comes
to look straight into the black hole of the future, the true sign of love is aban­
donment. The simplistic alternative of pleasure and pain has long been broken,
so you know that to sustain your love of art you need to draw on disgust as
much as on taste, just as you know that a sense of the ridiculous is the best
antidote to those forsaken emotions of the sublime. Irony is the one feeling left
to you, yet you have grown to value it only as ironism of affirmation. Soon it will
make way for humor, that youth of old people. Freedom of indifference should
now rule over your choices and lead you out of this double bind that has put a
mortgage on the future. You remain free to call art whatever you want, and
"art" is, after all, a name indifferent to both the modern and the postmodern.
There might be some wisdom in not jettisoning it prematurely, and wisdom is
not delivered through doctrines and theories; it is displayed by example. What
work could you choose as an example to lift the mortgage? What exemplary
thing are you going to draw from your collection and make into a paradigm of
the historical transition which is our own?
One last time, you produce Duchamp's urinal, this Fountain of youth yel­
lowed by its ironic abandonment in modernity's museum-without-walls, this
piece of porcelain prominently displayed in the warehouse of contemporary art
and yet covered with the dust of indifference. It is forsaken but still new, ready
to serve and to splatter its oculist witnesses with humor. Without the illuminating
gas, the waterfall remains invisible. Its status as art has not been granted once and
for all, in spite of the more established reputation of the rest of Duchamp's

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oeuvre. Unlike the Large Glass, which Duchamp called a delay in glass . . . as you
would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver, this urinal in porcelain promises no
reconciliation between the Bride and her bachelors. Instead, inscribed as a ready-
made, it reminds you that one only has: for female the pissoir, and one lives by it.3{)
Though in her own day she has been called the Madonna of the Bathroom,
you can't make her into a marble Aphrodite, can you? Perhaps it doesn't even
matter whether this unlikely goddess of love is beautiful, ugly, or simply inter­
esting, or whether her features triggered a violent, contradictory feeling, com­
posed of disgust and ridicule, but also of mad love, despair, vengeance, and
jealousy She was carved as the figuration of a possible, which is only a physical
"caustic" (vitriol type) burning up all aesthetics or callistics.31 Hers is the beauty of in-
difference, which reminds you that the one question bequeathed by the avant-
garde must remain unanswered: can one make works which are not works of "art"?*2
Perhaps it doesn't even matter whether the pissoir is an "objet d'art," or an
object of non-art, or whether its ambiguous status of objet-dard will keep the
question open. Too many answers have been given already. Fountain is hard to
dislodge from the patrimony of avant-garde art, while it has not yet found its
legitimate place among the practices of art tout court. It remains the weakest link
in the chain of the tradition it betrayed and to which it is nonetheless referred.
It is up to you to set a precedent in this uncertain jurisprudence. For the day of
reckoning is in sight: postmodernity is knocking at the door, and the avant-
gardes of tomorrow will have to look to their past for exemplary references.
What art should be no longer lies ahead of us, like a promise, which is why
Fountain is no more postmodern than it is modern. Unlike Picasso's work, it
has not become classic either. But an exemplary reference it is, a paradigm. And
you judge it as such.
Of what is Fountain a paradigm, if not of this transition we are living
through, starting from a period when art was a proper name and moving to a

30. The 1914 Box, in 55, p. 23 (translation slightly modified)

31. 55, p. 73.
32. The White Box, in 55, p 74.

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period for which the regulative idea of art as proper name has become a given?
Given, first, the waterfall, second, the illuminating gas, no art worthy of the name
will be made that ignores or bypasses the weakest link welding the modern
avant-gardes to their premodern past. Duchamp's urinal is this link. A number
of today's artists, painters mostly, revert to the premodern as if Duchamp's urinal
never existed, as if the readymades, the "historical avant-gardes," modernism
even, had not threatened to break the chain of tradition for good. Others—
contextualists, appropriationists, or simulationists—are under the urinal's spell,
but they fail to look further into the past for references against which to check
the quality of their work. They often back their work with theory, and claim
to have found it in the readymades. You too felt that Fountain contained a
theory, but this was merely a feeling. Reflection taught you better. Neither does
Fountain close the definition of art on itself, tautologically or self-referentially,
nor does it open it to the essential incompleteness of some "anything goes."
When you say, "Art is whatever I call art," you are not, like these artists-
theorists, appropriating the readymade. Appropriation is theft, and tradition is
nobody's private property. Rather, you are claiming responsibility for the ready-
made, as though you were its author, and you are guarding your personal collec­
tion as though it were everyone's treasure. For you know that the regulative
idea that made you choose Duchamp's urinal as the paradigm of our transition,
which, in the long run, concerns all of us humans, was an idea about art regulat­
ing the baptism of anything whatever in such a way that the reflection is drawn
therefrom that any idea about art whatever was precisely what baptized it. The
readymade, Duchamp said, is a kind of rendezvous, like a speech delivered on no matter
what occasion but at such and such an hour.33 The hour has arrived for its allegorical
appearance to elicit, here and now, a hitherto unknown feeling: the jubilation
that turns the program of modernity inside out like a glove, the paradoxical
sense of the future that a deliberately retrospective gaze opens up.

33. The Green Box, in 55, p. 32.

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