“Reclaiming Praxis in An Expanded Field: A Theory of Art and An Art of Theory: Notes on Theoretical Arches”
Once upon a time there was a precipitous moment in the history of the West when the debate between philosophy and politics, between theory as contemplation and political praxis, was in a state of tense equilibrium, undecided one way or the other. Such a moment was certainly after the moment of Greek tragedy; perhaps it occurred at or just after the time of the trial of Socrates. It is a moment recalled, but which may never have existed, in Aristotle’s imaging of the bios politikos, Greek ethical life, as the life of the polis. It is in Plato’s Republic that the issue between political life and the theoretical, the bios theoretikos or later on the vita contemplativa, is decided. The subsequent autonomy and independence of theory and vous is established through the institution of a distinct and authoritative domain outside the changing and fragile area of human affairs. This we have come to call the in Plato the Idea, that noetic stuff from which the demiurgos of the cosmology of the Timaeus crafts out of a mathematical mixing of the three kinds of Being, Being qua Being. Henceforth, politics and praxis was to be only the application of theory to the world. Practice lost its own sight, its own form of reasoning and activity. Practical reason became the application of theoretical understanding to practical matters rather than a form of worldly engagement in its own right. The triumph of the life of contemplation in Plato—which would be continued in Christianity, in modern philosophies of history and in the economic organization of mass societies—spelled the end of ethical life almost before it had begun…
Thus I take as axiomatic the parable concerning this fate of theory versus praxis and its relationship to art, to art as human production, an intertwining of techne and poesis in spawning a discourse or logos. It is a contestable story, one told by Jay Bernstein in The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno and which he paraphrased from Hannah Arendt, who encountered it in Heidegger. What does it mean to participate in a theoretical praxis that is not merely the hierarchical ordering of thinking-doing? What is the ontological status of philosophy, of theory, of art, of thinking and writing today? Are they all to be separated? I think not. The artist Robert Morris once used the term the “expanded field” to describe his conceptualization of sculpture in the 1960s, and the art theorist Rosalind Krauss has taken up that banner and reinscribed it with new designations, new connotations. So too shall I. “Under what conditions then, could one mark, for a philosopheme in general, a limit, a margin that it could not infinitely re-appropriate, conceive as its own, in advance engendering and interning the process of its expropriation…proceeding to its inversion by itself? How to interpret—but here interpretation can no longer be a theory or discursive practice of philosophy—the strange and unique property of a discourse that organizes the economy of its representation, the law of its proper weave…(xvi).” Our dearest Jacques asks us this in the preface to Margins of Philosophy. Margins, borders, limits…theory has purportedly exposed them, pushed them, delineated them more clearly for us so that we are able to access with critical contemplation the entire spectrum of recorded thought, of civilization, because civilization is history and history is writing. But what then, is theory? This is not another lamentation concerning the rationalization of the world; it is no cry of Entzauberung der Welt! (the startling dis-enchantment of the world and the freeing of the world from magic.) Instead, it engages through the locus of art theory and criticism an attempt to overcome this lacunae between theoretical discourse and theoretical praxis. The situation of art is significant precisely because it is a sphere of production where writing is one of the necessary pillars of proof in an arena of taste. This is where the notion of politics as theory applied to practice becomes important, because as Bernstein realized, it is not that practices is merely the administration of theory, it too itself has its own theory just as the practice of theory is not necessarily a smooth transition from idea to action.
And thus I think that it has become difficult to write good art criticism these days, and the reasons why is symptomatic of theory itself, of theory with a capital T, as this totality of paradigm of discourse and critique. By art criticism I include both the type of writing practiced in journals, magazines, newspapers and other publications concerned with the arts and culture as well as the more scholarly writing emanating from academic institutions. A certain French painter from the 1920s once remarked that the Germans could not take a piss or a shit without a theory behind it. The same can be said of writing criticism and theory today (many of those same Germans who could not piss or shit sans ideologie being the very same ones writing most prolifically about art of course). A famous philosophy professor of mine one quipped that all good philosophy is a great reworking of previous philosophy. It is not to be reductive or to categorize all new thought as old thought rewritten, but there is a sense of the emperor parading down the avenue of ivory towers, his pen stronger than sword or staff in hand, waving the magic wand from which a fountain of discourse will spew like spun gold over yesterday’s news. The long lone of history has thrown down its gauntlet across the printed page and it is difficult to conceive of the written word as anything but between those lines. The descriptive quality of writing has become so densely solidified and sedimented into the discourse of writing, acutely so in the case of art, that to achieve independence from the text becomes impossible. But hasn’t independence always been a dream, always already a state of forgetfulness as soon as it is capable of being remembered? We strive for liberation from the author, from very text itself, what do we mean? And yet these multiplicities of s meaningless meanings are still more meaningful than what we read: different time different artists different art same writing the same same same. QUOTE DIFF. CRITICS WRITING ABOUT DIFF ARTISTS AT DIFF TIMES!!
At this point I would like to interject, to introduce a secondary discourse paralleling the parable of Plato and the fate of artistic theory. I want to show the forgotten interdependence of theory with art, of logos and techne, both forms of poesis. the Greek word for a “mathematical proof,” around since Pythagoras’ time is derived from the same word as the Greek word for theater. Though at first this distant etymological embrace might appear to be accidental, a false cognate so to speak, the Greeks, deliberate as they always were, did not think so. The Greek word for “proof,” evidence theaoria demonstrates the hidden meaning of what it is to prove, to prove mathematically beyond a shadow of a doubt, impossible to refute. It does this because Pythogoras was reputedly scorned for his geometric discoveries and had to prove them to the Greek public, literally demonstrate them with hand and stick in sand abstract principles in a public sphere for the consumption and acknowledgement of the Greeks. And where else would such an event take place but at the theater, the setting of all spectacles and repository of all Greek history’s past hopes and dreams. Incidentally, the Greek word for theory also resides within the root for vision. But as we must already know, this is no mere incidence. The very concept of a theoria is centered around the enactment of a performance, an explication of the matters of the world in front of an audience in which to prove or disprove a point concerning said world. Thus the linkage between theater, theory and proof, performance, demonstration and vision is triply revealed and proved. Yet we so often forget that even Plato in the Phraedrus lends credence to muthos as another possible access to truth without additional recourse to logoi or theory when he considers the creation of the world under the sway of nature and says: “QUOTE.”
The institution of drama and tragedy in particular can be seen to have begotten in Western civilization the coming into being of our eidos concerning thought and evidence, thinking and proving. Aristotle gives us a clue when he states in Part IV of the Poetics that both tragedy and comedy, at first mere improvisation, originated with the leaders of the dithyramb. The dithyramb was originally a spring ritual dedicated to Dionysus. The word itself meant a leaping, an inspired dance, and in its original form was an actual bringing-back of life, a rising-up or calling-up that took the form of dromena, actual “things done,” such as song and dance. The chorus, that group of dancing and singing men often in charge of lamenting destiny, was always at the center of the action. Its actual role is difficult to comprehend for the modern observer…The focus of the event was the circular dance platform often named after the choros itself, a chorus that originally signified a group dance and eventually took its name from orchesis, which also means dance…such events combined poetry, music, and dance within an architectural frame. This recognition of a communal audience, and of the chorus as Nietzsche points out so eloquently in the Birth of Tragedy, has been lost. It has been replaced by an assumption of the individual immediacy of personal literacy. This constitutes a retreat into the interior that has ceased to abate even today. One can write to a reading public, but it is still to each and every single person one by one is it addressed. Writing as we have learned, serves to sever. Perhaps theory can now be considered the primogenitor beginning of all beginning, just as in Plato’s Timaeus he found it necessary to introduce a third term, the chora, between being and becoming, the first time that philosophy found itself facing the necessity of contradiction between the intelligible and the sensible, so now we could attempt to write a new space, a new topos concerning the possibility of writing, with writing. Jacques says of chora’s importance: “…an apparently empty space-even though it is no doubt not emptiness? Didn’t it name a gaping opening, an abyss or chasm? ” and to name to give in language, is that not also to create? Writing and birth, language and civilization, theory and practice, ceaselessly intertwined…The ancients distinguished philosophy dialectic, rhetoric, myth, epic poetry and drama as all differing forms of communication, albeit with differing levels of veridicality or access to alethea. The destabilization and segregation of theory into disparate fields that seemingly contradict each other is not a necessary flaw so long as the value claims to truth that theory lays bare are not activated. We all implicitly recognize that thoughtful discourse is never an attempt at alethea, but I would argue that the grasping towards, the pushing and pulling at the limits of language in order to construct an interpretation that becomes a stand in for truth has reached a crucially decisive moment? Chomsky has written about the phenomena in Manufacturing Consent where with the segregation of academics, the higher the degree of education you receive, the more inculcated you are and complicit with the principles of the dominant ideology, because where else would theory, could theory, does theory exist except in us?
Thus now that fiction is written WITH footnotes, I propose that criticism and theory be written WITHOUT footnotes. This theory is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are purely the products of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to real people places and events is purely coincidental. Yet I make no claim for originality. This is only an mis-appropriation, cobbled together from the rusticated remnants of once fluid vessels of meaning. This is a theoretical performance in the theater of our academic town hall, a site of contestation and production of meanings in discourse, through discourse and about discourse. The bricoleur has already commited grave errors in the traditional idea economy by not citing the numerous authors whose mental copyright I have infringed upon in order to pose the problem of art criticism. But I say let art criticism fully become that which it already is: rhetoric without signification. Let the pages and pages of this holy mountain of artistic discourse tenuously supporting a still viable impulse towards art-making look down and stick its nose in its own dirt, smell and breathe deep. Let the rhetoric revel in its artificiality, mix and mingle at the cocktail parties of pomo and get drunk off each others’ JOUISSANCE. Life lived at maximal libidinal intensity. Art simulated at maximum libidinal intensity. Ecriture binds both, and in re-appropriating itself traverses synchronic boundaries to re-become that which it always already was: violence. Speech is a thereness, presence. Writing is a bridge over a gap, absence, the word remembered and then forgotten. There was art before there was any writing about art. LASCAUX. Before there was any writing at all. But there can never be art again if there is no writing, if writing vanishes, is destroyed first. Seize the discourse of art criticism and the weight of theory and throw its words around. Feel in your own hand on your own tongue the weight of jouissance at maximal libidinal intensity. It is not, again, that theory is unclear, its prose dense and misleading, it is rather that why must we argue for this clarification and transparency? Because we assume that theory offers truths, truths that must and should be explicated in the Cartesian fashion of “clear and distinct” ideas in order to prove self-evident. But theory is not truth. It is theory. Yet just because it is theory does not make it untrue. Its meaningfulness lies in language, language as rhetorical truth, as the interplay of truth and untruth to produce a chora of This is writing between the lines of history’s gauntlet by slashing through the page with history’s own big stick. This is not hedonism or nihilism. This is, perhaps, democracy? If you insist on retaining the category at all, this could be the avant-garde of theory, a looking-forward that will one day be a past, a past in writing. The simulacrum / performance is the writing, the simulant the stick, and you dear readers are all the writers of history.
This has been a performance of theory inspired by the lecture style of Professor Claudia Baracchi, the language of Attic Greek, the theoretical works of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida and the theoretical practices of Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler, Sherri Levine and all female artists inspired by possibilities of appropriation and performativity. Thank you.


Distinguish between different types of writing:
Ones that need footnotes: scientific studies requiring analysis of empirical data
Ones that do not need footnotes: criticism, philosophy, rhetoric
What kind of writing is in between those two? Fictionature? Theory about theory
The idea of plagerism and intellectual idea property in writing as an art
NOTES: is the advent of philosophy also the beginning of theory?
"Owning It: Theory/ Anti-Theory/ After Theory" is an all day conference organized and sponsored by the English Student Association at CUNY Graduate Center. This conference seeks to bring together graduate students from different methodological perspectives to reassess and reassert the scope, style, and usability of the literary theoretical enterprise. "Owning it" is a call to "own" ourselves as practitioners of theory, and to understand theory not as an external, static edifice but rather as a shifting ground constituted by our collective, everyday theoretical practices. This conference invites papers that explore those practices; that examine the role of graduate students as producers and consumers of theory; that initiate dialogue between different orientations toward theory; that imagine new directions for literary theory, and that ask what it means to practice theory in what has been labeled a "post-theoretical" academic landscape. It is also a chance to investigate the political ramifications of theoretical work, including inviting speculations on the causes and consequences of the ongoing backlash to theory. We encourage submissions that take strong positions on these issues, as well as papers that comment on methodological practice in a more reflective mode.