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Critical Reflections
deep rift within the discourse of contemporary criticism. And one can read
today’s critical discourse as an attempt to bridge, or at least conceal,
this divide. For example, there is the critic’s demand that art thematize existing
social differences and position itself against the illusion of cultural homogeneity.
That certainly sounds very avant-garde, but what one forgets is that
the avant-garde didn’t thematize already existing differences but introduced
previously nonexistent ones. The public was equally bewildered in the face
of Malevich’s Suprematism and Duchamp’s Dadaism, and it is this generalized
nonunderstanding—bewilderment regardless of class, race, or gender—
that is actually the democratic moment of the various avant-garde projects.
These projects were not in a position to suspend existing social differ -
ences and thereby create cultural unity, but they were able to introduce
distinctions so radical and new that they could overdetermine differences as
they stood.
There’s nothing wrong in itself with the demand that art give up its
modernist “autonomy” and become medium of social critique, but what goes
unmentioned is that the critical stance is blunted, banalized, and finally made
impossible by this requirement. When art relinquishes its autonomous ability
to artificially produce its own differences, it also loses the ability to subject
society, as it is, to a radical critique. All that remains for art is to illustrate a
critique that society has already leveled at or manufactured for itself. To
demand that art be practiced in the name of existing social differences is
actually to demand the affirmation of the existing structure of society in the
guise of social critique.
In our time art is generally understood as a form of social communication;
it is taken as self-evident that all people want to communicate and strive
for communicative recognition. Even if the contemporary discourse of art
criticism understands the famous “other” not in the sense of particular cultural
identities, but as desire, power, libido, the unconscious, the real—art is
still interpreted as an attempt to communicate this other, to give it voice and
shape. Even if communication is not achieved, the desire for it suffices to
secure acceptance. Also the work of the classical avant-garde is accepted when
it is understood as subordinate to the earnest intention of bringing the unconscious
and the otherness into expression: the incomprehensibility to the
average observer of the resulting art is excused by virtue of the impossibility
of any communicative mediation of the “radical other.”
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