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The "Primitive" Unconscious of Modern Art Author(s): Hal Foster Source: October, Vol. 34 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 45-70 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778488 . Accessed: 11/02/2015 13:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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The "Primitive"Unconscious of Modern Art

HAL FOSTER

At once eccentricand crucial, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is the set piece of the Museum of Modern Art: a bridge between modernistand premodernist painting, a primal scene of modern primitivism.In this paintinga step outside the traditionis said to coincide with a leap within it. Yet one wonders if this aestheticbreakthroughis not also a breakdown, psychologicallyregressive,politicallyreactionary.The paintingpresentsan encounterin which are inscribed two scenes: the depicted one of the brothel and the projected one of the heralded 1907 visit of Picasso to the collection of tribal artifactsin the Muse d'Ethnographiedu Trocadero. This double encounter is tellinglysituated: the prostitutesin the bordello, the Africanmasks in the Trocadero, both disposed forrecognition,foruse.1 Figured here, to be sure, are both fear and desire of the other,2but is it not desire formasteryand fear of its frustration? In projectingthe primitiveonto woman as other, Demoisellesless resolves than is riven by the threatto male subjectivity,displayingits own decentering along with its defense. For in some sense Picasso did intuit one apotropaic functionof tribal objects- and adopted them as such, as "weapons": They were against everything- against unknownthreateningspirits. ... I, too, I am against everything.I, too, believe thateverythingis unknown, thateverythingis an enemy! ... women, children... the 1. As is well known, an early study included two customers of the demoiselles, a medical student and a sailor, and was thus distanced as a narrative; with these surrogates removed, the painting becomes a direct address to its masculine subject. As forthe Trocadero, Western man, its source of projection, is absent fromit: "What was not displayed in the Musee de 1'Homme was the modern West, its art, institutions,and techniques. Thus the orders of the West were everywhere present in the Musee de l'Homme, except on display." (James Clifford,"On Ethnographic Studiesin Societyand History,vol. 23, no. 4 [1981], p. 561). Surrealism," Comparative See William Rubin, "Picasso," in "Primitivism" 2. in 20th Century Art.:AfinityoftheTribaland the Modern,ed. Rubin, New York, MOMA, 1984, pp. 252-254. Hilton Kramer, who celebrates the abilityof bourgeois culture to negate the primitive"assault," findsthis importantconnection between primitivismand "fear of women" "trivializing"("The 'Primitive' Conundrum," The New Criterion [December 1984], p. 5).

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whole of it! I understoodwhat the Negroes used theirsculpturesfor. S.. All fetishes... were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influenceof spiritsagain, to help them become independent. Spirits,the unconscious ... theyare all the same thing.I understood why I was a painter. All alone in thatawful museum withthe masks . . . the dusty mannikins. Les Demoisellesd'Avignon must have been born thatday, but not at all because of the forms;because it was my firstexorcism painting- yes absolutely!3 Apart froma (bombastic) avant-gardism,Picasso conveys the shock of thisencounteras well as the euphoria ofhis solution,an extraordinarypsycho-aesthetic move by which othernesswas used to ward away others (woman, death, the primitive)and by which, finally,a crisis in phallocentricculture was turned into one of its great monuments. If, in the Demoiselles,Picasso transgresses,he does so in order to mediate the primitivein the name of the West (and it is in part forthis that he remains thehero of MOMA's narrativeofthe triumphof modernart). In thisregard,the is indeed a primal scene of primitivism,one in which the structured Demoiselles relationof narcissismand aggressivityis revealed. Such confrontationalidentificationis peculiar to the Lacanian imaginary,the realm to which the subject returnswhen confrontedwiththe threatof difference.4Here, then, primitivism discourse, a recognitionand disavowal not only of primemerges as a fetishistic itive differencebut of the fact that the West - its patriarchal subjectivityand socius- is threatenedby loss, by lack, by others. was also the set piece of the recent MOMA exhiLes Demoiselles d'Avignon in 20th Century bition-cum-book "Primitivism" Art: Affnity of the Tribal and the Modern,5in which the painting was presented, along with Africanmasks often proposed as sources forthe demoiselles, in such a way as to support the curain art. (The argumentruns that Picasso torial case fora modern/tribalaffinity could not have seen these masks, thatthe paintingmanifestsan intuitiveprimitivityor "savage mind.") This presentationwas typicalof the abstractiveoperation of the show, premised as it was on the belief that "modernistprimitivism depends on the autonomous forceof objects" and that its complexitiescan be revealed "in purely visual terms, simplyby the juxtaposition of knowinglyse3. Quoted in Andre Malraux, Picasso'sMask, trans. June and Jacques Guicharnaud, New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976, pp. 10-11. 4. My discussion of primitivismas a fetishisticcolonial discourse is indebted to Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question," Screen,vol. 24, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1983), pp. 18-36. 5. The show, sponsored by Philip Morris, Inc., included some 150 modern and 200 tribal works, most oftenset in pairs or comparative ensembles. Curated by William Rubin, Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, in collaboration with Kirk Varnedoe of the Institute of Fine Arts, it claimed to be "the firstexhibition to juxtapose tribal and modern objects in the lightof informedart history."MOMA also published a two-volume catalogue with nineteen essays by sixteen scholars on diverse aspects of "primitivism."

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lected worksof art."6Though the exhibitiondid qualifythe debased art-historical notion of causal influence(e.g., of the tribal on the modern), and did on anotherfrontdemolish the more debased racist model of an evolutionistprimitivism, it did so oftenonly to replace the firstwith "affinity" (in the formof the and the second withthe emptyuniversal,"human creativfamilyof homoartifex) ity whereverfound."7 Based on the aestheticconcerns of the modern artists,8the "Primitivism" show cannot be condemned on ethnologicalgrounds alone. Too oftenthe contextualistrebuke is facile, a compensatoryexpression of a liberal-humanistremorse forwhat cannot be restored. It is, afterall, the vocation of the modern art museum to decontextualize. (Levi-Strauss describes anthropologyas a techhow much more is thistrueof art history?)And in the case niquedu dipaysement:9 of the tribal objects on display, the museum is but one finalstage in a series of abstractions,of power-knowledgeplays that constituteprimitivism.Yet to acknowledge decontextualizationis one thing,to produce ideas with it another. For it is this absolution of (con)textual meanings and ideological problems in of formthat allowed forthe humanist presuppositionsof the the self-sufficiency show (that the finalcriterionis Form, the only contextArt, the primarysubject Man). In thisway the show confirmedthe colonial extractionof the tribalwork (in the guise of its redemptionas art) and rehearsed its artisticappropriation into tradition.10No counterdiscoursewas posed: the imperialistpreconditionof primitivismwas suppressed, and "primitivism,"a metonym of imperialism, served as its disavowal. This abstractionof the tribal is only half the story;no less essential to the was the decontextualizationof the modern work. productionof affinity-effects It, too, appeared withoutindices of its contextualmediations(i.e., the dialectic of avant-garde,kitsch,and academy by whichitis structured:it is, incidentally, the excision of thisdialectic that allows forthe formal-historicist model of modernismin the firstplace). The modern objects on view, most ofwhich are preoccupied by a primitivistformand/or"look,"alone representedthe way the primitive is thought.Which is to say that the modern/tribalencounterwas mapped - in in mostlypositivistterms(the surfacesof influence,the formsof affinity) termsof morphologicalcoincidence, not conceptual displacement. (The "trans6. Kirk Varnedoe, "Preface," in "Primitivism," p. x. 7. Ibid. 8. On the one hand, this is a legitimaterestriction:to focus on the "appreciation"of tribal art by modern artists,who "generally did not know its sources or purposes" (exhibition pamphlet). On the other hand, it is a curatorial alibi that obscures the ideology of primitivism. 9. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Archaism in Anthropology,"in Structural Anthropology (Vol. 1), trans. Claire Jacobson, New York, Basic Books, 1963, p. 117. 10. "We owe to the voyagers, colonials, and ethnologiststhe arrival of these objects in the West. But we owe primarilyto the convictionsof the pioneer modern artiststheirpromotionfrom the rank of curiositiesand artifactsto that of major art, indeed to the status of art at all" (Rubin, "Modernist Primitivism:An Introduction,"in "Primitivism," p. 7).

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gressivity"of the encounterwas largelydisregarded,perhaps because it cannot be so readilyseen.)In thisway, the show abstractedand separated the modern and the tribal into two sets of objects that could then only be "affined."Thus reduced to form,it is no wonder theycame to reflectone anotherin the glass of the vitrines,and one is temptedto ask, cynicallyenough, aftersuch a double abstraction,such a double tropismtoward modern (en)light(enment),what is was discovery(of What part of this hypothesis-turned-show leftbut "affinity"? and what and the innate transculturalforms, structures, part (modernist) like) invention? or ElectiveAffinities, Impressions (et d'Oceanie) d'Afrique For William Rubin, directorof the "Primitivism"show, the idea of "elecbetween the tribal and the modern arises fromtwo oracular protive affinity" nouncementsof Picasso: one to the effectthatthisrelationshipis similarto that between the Renaissance and antiquity; the other that his own tribal objects were "morewitnessesthan models"11of his art. Innocuous enough, these state11.

Quoted by Rubin, "Introduction,"p. 17.

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ments neverthelesssuggest the way primitivismis conceived as absorbing the primitive,in part via the concept of affinity.The renaissance of antiquityis an intra-Westernevent, the verydiscoveryof a Westernness: to pose it as an analto inscribethe tribalas modern-primitivist, to deny itsdifogy is almost ipsofacto ference.Moreover, the analogy implies thatthe modern and the tribal,like the Renaissance and antiquity,are affinedin the search for"fundaments."Argued particularlyby codirectorKirk Varnedoe,12thispositiontends to cast the primitiveas primaland to elide the different ways in whichthefundamentalis thought. The second Picasso testimonial,thatthe tribalobjects were witnessesonly, sets Yet, ifnot directsources, up in the disavowal of influencethe notion of affinity. "the Negro pieces" were not, on account of this, mere secretsharers: theywere use. seen, as Picasso remarkedto Malraux, as "mediators,"13thatis, asformsfor If the Renaissance analogy poses the tribal as falselyfamilial,here recognition is contingentupon instrumentality.In this way, throughaffinity and use, the is sent into the service of the Western tradition primitive up (which is then seen to have partlyproduced it). The exhibition commenced with displays of certain modernist involvements with tribal art: interest,resemblance, influence,and affinityproper-usually of a roughlyanalogous structureand/or conception.'4 In the inspired pairing of the Picasso constructionGuitar(1912) and a Grebo mask owned by him, Rubin argues thatthe projectiveeyes of the mask allowed Picasso to think the hole ofthe guitaras a cylinder,and thus to use space as form,a surrogateas sign (a discoveryprolepticof syntheticcubism). Such affinity, "conceptual ideographic,"" not merelyformal,is argued in thejuxtaposition of a Picasso painting (Head, 1928) of superimposed profiles(?) and a Yam mask with the same element foreyes, nose, and mouth. In both works the "features"appear more arbitrarythan naturallymotivated. The two do share an ideographic relation to the object, and it is true that different signifiedsmay be informedby similar signifiers.But the worksare affinedmostlyby virtueof the factthat theydiffer fromanother (Western "realist") paradigm,16 and the arbitrarinessof the sign (at least in the case of the tribal object) is largely due to its abstractionfrom its code. Otherwise, the affinitiesproposed in the show were mostlymorphological - or were treatedas such even when theyappeared metaphoricalor semiological (as in certain surrealisttransformationswrung by Picasso). These formally

See in particular his essay on Gauguin in "Primitivism," 12. pp. 179-209. 13. Quoted in Malraux, p. 10. 14. To claim affinity,the curators must disprove influence or direct contact- an "argument from silence," which, as others have pointed out, is difficultto make. 15. Rubin, "Introduction,"p. 25. 16. See James Clifford,"Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," Artin America(April 1985), p. 166.

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coincidentalaffinitiesseemed to be derived in equal part fromthe formalistreception of the primitiveread back into the tribalworkand fromthe radical abstractionperformedon both sets of objects. This productionof affinity through projectionand abstractionwas exposed most dramaticallyin thejuxtaposition of a painted Oceanic wood figureand a Kenneth Noland targetpainting(Tondo, 1961), a workwhich,in its criticalcontextat least, is preciselynot about the anthropomorphicand asks not to be read iconographically.What does this pairis ing tell us about "universals"?- that the circle is such a form,or thataffinity the effectof an erasure of difference.Here, universalityis indeed circular,the specular image of the modern seen in the mask of the tribal. the show dismissedthe primitivist misreadingpar excellence: Significantly, thattribalart is intrinsicallyexpressionisticor even psychologicallyexpressive, when it is in factritualistic,apotropaic, decorative, therapeutic,and so forth. But it failed to question other extrapolationsfromone set of objects, one cultural context,to the other: to question what is at stake ideologicallywhen the "magical" characterof tribal work is read (especially by Picasso) into modern art, or when modern values of intentionality,originality,and aestheticfeeling

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Max Ernst.Bird Head. 1934-35.

are bestowed upon tribalobjects." In both instancesdifferent ordersof the socius and the subject, of the economy of the object, and of the place of the artist are transposedwithviolence; and the resultthreatensto turnthe primitiveinto a specular Western code wherebydifferent ordersof tribalcultureare made to conformto one Westerntypology.(That themodernworkcan reveal properties in the tribal is not necessarilyevolutionist,but it does tend to pose the two as different stages and thusto encompass thetribalwithinour privilegedhistorical consciousness.)'8 17. The "tribal artists" are also called "problem-solving"(Rubin, "Introduction," p. 25). Though this term imputes an almost formalistorientation,it also suggests a possible "affinity"of art and artifactas an imaginaryresolutionof social contradiction.This definitionleads one to wonder what contradictionmodernist"primitivism"resolves. 18. "Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historicorganization of production. The categorieswhich express its relation, the comprehensionof its structure,thereby allow insightsinto the structureand relation of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itselfup, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along with it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significancewith it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimationsof higherdevelopment among the subordinate species, however, can be understood only afterthe higherdevelopment is trans. M. Nicolaus, London, Pelican, 1973, p. 105). already known" (Karl Marx, Grundrisse,

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No less than the formalabstractionof the tribal, this specular code of the For what do we behold here: a universality primitiveproduces affinity-effects.'9 of formor an otherrenderedin our own image, an affinity withour own imagiof the terms nary primitive?Though properly wary primitiveand tribal,the firstbecause of its Darwinist associations, the second because of itshypothetical nature, the curatorsused both as "conventionalcounters"20- but it is precisely this conventionalitythat is in question. Rubin distinguishedprimitivestyle fromarchaic (e.g., Iberian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican) diacritically in relationto the West. The primitiveis said to pertain to a "tribal"socius with communal formsand the archaic to a "court"civilizationwithstatic,hieratic,monumental art. This definition,which excludes as much as it includes, seems to specifythe but in factsuspends it. Neither"dead" like the archaic nor "hisprimitive/tribal torical,"the primitiveis cast into a nebulous past and/orinto an idealist realm of"primitive"essences. (Thus the tribalobjects, not dated in the show, are still not entirelyfreeof the old evolutionistassociation with primal or ancient artifacts,a confusionentertainedby the moderns.) In thisway, the primitive/tribal is set adriftfromspecificreferentsand coordinates- which thus allows it to be definedin whollyWestern terms.And one begins to see thatone of the preconditions, if not of primitivism,then certainlyof the "Primitivism"show, is the mummificationof the tribal and the museumificationof its objects (which vital cultures like the Zuni have specificallyprotestedagainst). The foundingact of thisrecodingis the repositioningofthe tribalobject as art. Posed against its use firstas evolutionisttrophyand then as ethnographic evidence, this aestheticizationallows the work to be both decontextualizedand of the primitiveamong the moderns- its curcommodified. It is this currency circulation as as its commodity- that allows forthe modern/tribal rency sign, in The the first "Primitivism"show exhibitedthiscurrency place. affinity-effect but did not theorize it. Moreover, it no more "corrected"this primitivistcode than it did the officialformalistmodel of modernism. This code was already partlyin place by the time of the MOMA "AfricanNegro Art" show in 1935, when James Johnson Sweeney wrote against its undue "historicaland ethnographic" reception: "It is as sculpture we should approach it."21 Apart from anti-Darwinistmotives,the imperativehere was to confirmthe formalistreading and newfoundvalue of the Africanobjects. With the Africancast as a specifibestowed cally plastic art, the counterterm- a pictorialart- was institutionally 1946 of the South the MOMA exhibition "Arts work Oceanic Seas," by upon 19. "Affinity" seems at once a cultural concept and a natural (or at least transcultural)property - a logical scandal, as LUvi-Strausssaid of the incest prohibition.But just as Derrida argued that Levi-Strauss's "scandal" was an effect of his own structuralistsystem, so mightthe modern/tribal be an effectof its formalistpresentationat MOMA. "affinity" 20. See Rubin, "Introduction,"p. 74. 21. James Johnson Sweeney, AfricanNegroArt, New York, MOMA, 1935, p. 21.

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directedby Rene d'Harnoncourt. Althoughthis exhibitiondid not mentionthe in the art with the "dreamworldand surrealistsdirectly,it noted an "affinity" subconscious."22It then remained forAlfredBarr (in a 1950 letterto the College ArtJournal) to historicizethis purely diacritical, purely Western systemas a "discovery": It is worthnoting,briefly,the two great waves of discovery:the first mightbe called cubist-expressionist.This was concerned primarily with formal,plastic and emotional values of a directkind. The second wave, quasi-surrealist,was more preoccupied with the fantastic and imaginative values of primitiveart.23 The "Primitivism"show only extended this code, structuredas it was around a "Wolffliniangeneralization""24 of Africantactility(sculptural, iconic, monochromatic,geometric)versus Oceanic visuality(pictorial, narrative,colorful, curvilinear), the firstrelated to ritual, the second to myth,with ritual, Rubin writes,"more inherently'abstract' than myth. Thus, the more ritually orientedAfricanworkwould again appeal to the Cubist, while the more mythic content of the Oceanic/American work would engage the Surrealist."25This aestheticcode is only part of a cultural systemof paired terms,both withinthe primitive(e.g., maleficAfrica versus paradisal Oceania) and withinprimitivism (e.g., noble or savage or vital primitiveversus corruptor civilized or ennervated Westerner), to which we will return. Sufficeit to say here that the tribal/modernaffinity is largelythe effectof a decoding of the tribal(a "deterriin the Deleuzian torializing" sense) and a recoding in specular modern terms. As with most formalor even structuralapproaches, the referent(the tribal socius) tends to be bracketed, if not banished, and the historical(the imperialist condition of possibility)disavowed.26 Essentially, the OED distinguishesthreekinds of "affinity": resemblance, kinship, and spiritualor chemical attraction("elective affinity").As suggested, in the show, mostlyof the firstorder,were used to connoteaffinities the affinities of the second order: an optical illusion induced the mirage of the (modernist) Family of Art. However progressivethis may once have been, this election to ourhumanity can now be seen as thoroughlyideological, for if evolutionism subordinatedthe primitiveto Westernhistory,affinity-ism recoups it under the sign of Western universality.("Humanity," Levi-Strauss suggests,is a modern 22. Rene d'Harnoncourt, preface to Artsof theSouthSeas, New York, MOMA, 1946. 23. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., letter in CollegeArtJournal,vol. 10, no. 1 (1950), p. 59. 24. Rubin, "Introduction,"p. 47. 25. Ibid., p. 55. The process is strangelyreminiscentof Impressions 26. ofAfricain which, by a code of his own, Raymond Roussel produces an "Africa"which totallyoccludes Africa- but neverthelessmakes us aware of Western mythsof Africa as he does so.

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Western concept.)27 In this recognitiondifferenceis discovered only to be fetishisticallydisavowed, and in the celebrationof"human creativity"the dissolution of specificculturesis carried out: the Museum of Modern Art played host to the Musee de l'Homme indeed. MOMAism MOMA has long served as an American metonymof modern art, with the historyof the one oftenchartedin termsof the space of the other. This mapreading ofmodernism ping has in turnsupporteda "historical-transcendental"28 as a "dialectic" or deductive line of formal innovations within the tradition. Now in the decay of thismodel the museum has become open to charges that it repressespolitical and/ortransgressiveart (e.g., productivism,dada), that it is indifferent to contemporarywork(or able to engage it only when, as in the "InternationalSurvey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,"it conformsto its traditional categories), that it is a period piece, and so on. In this situation, the "Primitivism"show could not but be overdetermined,especially when billed as a "significantcorrectionof the received historyof modern art."29What history was correctedhere, and in the name of what present?What would be the stake, forexample, if MOMA had presented a show of the modern encounter with mass-culturalproductsratherthan tribalobjects? Could it map such a toposand not violate its formal-historicist premises? Could the museum absorb art that modernist official paradigms as well as institutionalmedia apparachallenges tuses as it incorporatedprimitivistart? More important,did MOMA in fact pose a new model of modernismhere, one based not on transformationwithin but on transgressionwithout- an engagementwithan outside (tribaltraditions, popular cultures) that mightdisrupt the order of Western art and thought? The conflictedrelationof"Primitivism"to the modern and the presentwas evident in its contradictorypoint of view. At once immanentand transcendent, the show both rehearsed the modern recepand demystificatory, mystificatory between the two "from tion of the tribal"fromthe inside"and posited an affinity above." It reproduced some modern (mis)readings (e.g., the formal,oneiric, "magical"), exposed others(e.g., the expressionist),only to impose ones of its See Levi-Strauss, "Race and History," in Structural 27. Anthropology (Vol. 2), trans. Monique Layton, Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press, 1976, p. 329. "The historical-transcendentalrecourse: an attemptto find,beyond all historicalmanifes28. tation and historical origin, a primary foundation, the opening of an inexhaustible horizon, a plan which would move backward in time in relation to every event, and which would maintain throughouthistorythe constantlyunwinding plan of an unending unity"(Michel Foucault, "History, Discourse, and Discontinuity,"Salmagundi20 [Summer/Fall 1972], p. 227). 29. Rubin, "Introduction,"p. 71. The exclusion of neo-expressionismfromthe contemporary section of the show appears almost as a disavowal of one of its subtexts. The work in this section, though not traditionalin medium, is so in the way it fashions"theprimitive"as an ahistoricalprocess or as a primitivisticlook.

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own (the intentional,original, "aesthetic,"problem-solving).The status of its objects was also ambiguous. Though presented as art, the tribal objects are manifestlythe ruins of(mostly) dead culturesnow exposed to our archeological probes- and so tooare themodern objects,despite the agenda to "correct"the institutionalreading of the modern (to keep it alive via some essential, eternal "primitivism"?).Against its own intentions,the show signaled a potentially postmodern, post-tribalpresent; indeed, in the technological vacuum of the museum space, this present seemed all but posthistorical. But the exhibitiondid more than mark our distance fromthe modern and tribalobjects; it also revealed the epistemologicallimitsofthe museum. How to representthe modern/tribalencounteradequately? How to map the intertextuality of this event? Rather than abstractlyaffineobjects point by point, how to trace the mediationsthatdivide and conjoin each term?If primitivismis in part an aestheticconstruct,how to display its historicalconditions?In its verylack, the show suggested the need of a Foucauldian archeologyof primitivism,one which, ratherthan speak froman academic "postcolonial"place, mighttake its own colonialist condition of possibilityas its object. Such an enterprise,however, is beyond the museum, the business ofwhich is patronage- theformation of a paternal traditionagainst the transgressiveoutside, a documentation of civilization,not the barbarism underneath. In neitherits epistemologicalspace nor its ideological historycan MOMA in particular engage these disruptive terms. Instead it recoups the outside dialectically- as a momentin itsown history--and transformsthetransgressiveintocontinuity.With thisshow MOMA may have moved to revise its formal(ist)model of the modern now adjudged (even by it?) to be inadequate, but it did so only to incorporatethe outside in its originary(modern) moment as primitivism.Meanwhile, except forthe token, misconstruedpresence of Robert Smithson (and perhaps Joseph Beuys), the transgressivein its transfigured(contemporary)moment- in all its disruptions of aesthetic,logocentriccategories- was not acknowledged, let alone thought. This recuperation of the primitivehas its own history,which Varnedoe in various essays narrates: from"formalquotation" (e.g., the appropriations of most fauves and cubists) to "syntheticmetaphor"(the universal languages of several abstractexpressionists)to "assimilatedideal" (the primitivismof most of the artistsin the contemporarysection), the primitivehas become primitivist.30 Reduced to a ghostlyaffinity outside the tradition,the primitivenow becomes an "invisibleman"'31withinit. This absorption allows the primitiveto be read 30. See in particular his "Abstract Expressionism," in "Primitivism," pp. 614-659. In his "Preface" Rubin termsprimitiveart the "invisible man" of modern art 31. scholarship, a trope that exceeds his suggestionthat its minor status in the MOMA historyof art is correctedby this show. For not only does it call to mind another repressed figure,the invisiblewoman artist,it also suggests that the "correction"of primitiveart occurred long ago, when via "cultural production" and artisticincorporationit was firstrendered a ghostlypresence, an invisible man, within the modernist tradition.

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retroactivelyalmost as an effectof the modern tradition.Cultural preparation - that "the primitive"was also achieved fromwithinmodern art- is claimed. This is the basic argumentof the classic Primitivism in ModernArt(1938, 1966) its first sentences read: artistic Robert "The interestof the twenGoldwater; by tiethcenturyin the productionsof primitivepeoples was neitheras unexpected nor as sudden as is generallysupposed. Its preparation goes well back into the nineteenthcentury..... ."32This, too, was essentiallythe argumentof the"Primitivism"show: that modern art was "becoming other"prior to the 1907 Picasso visitto the Trocaddro. Thus the heroes of the show were artistswho "prepared" the primitive(Gauguin) and/or incorporated it (Picasso)--artists who turned the "trauma" of the other into an "epiphany"of the same.33 That the primitivewas recognized only afterinnovationswithinthe tradition is well documented: but what is the effectivity here, the ratio between invention and recognition,innovation and assimilation? Is the primitiveto be of a constitutiveconstituentdialectic"34withinWestthoughtof as a "robinsonnade ern tradition,or as a transgressiveevent visitedupon it, at once embraced and defended against? For surelyprimitivismwas generated as much to "manage" the shock of the primitiveas to celebrate its art or to use it "counterculturally" and "preparation";yet here, be(Rubin). As noted, the show argued "affinity" yond the abstractionof the firstand the recuperationof the second, the primi"the role of the objects Picasso saw on this firstvisit to the tive is superceded: was Trocadero obviouslyless thatof providingplastic ideas than of sanctioning radical more his even progress along a path he was already breaking.'"" This the primitive"role" tends not only to assimilate the of retrospectivereading tradition but to recuperate the modernistbreak withtradiother to primitive of in the interests all tion, progressivehistory.(As the verycrux of MOMAism, in cubism particular must be protectedfromoutside influence; thus analytic tribal art is assigned "but a residual role"36in it.) What, apart fromthe institutional need to secure an officialhistory,is the motivebehind thisdesired supercession? What but the formationof a cultural identity,incumbentas this is on the simultaneous need and disavowal of the other? Generally perceived as primal and exotic, the primitiveposed a double threatto the logocentricWest, the threatof othernessand relativism. It also in ModernArt, New York, Vintage Books, 1966, p. 3. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism 32. 33. See Rubin, "Picasso," in "Primitivism," pp. 240-343. "The changes in modern art at issue were already underway when vanguard artistsfirstbecame aware of tribal art" (Rubin, "Introduction," p. 11). 34. Levi-Strauss, "History and Dialectic," in TheSavageMind, Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press, 1966, p. 264. 35. Rubin, "Picasso," p. 265. 36. Ibid., p. 309. A residual role but perhaps a real "affinity":for it could be argued that cubism, like some tribal art, is a process of "splitrepresentation."See Levi-Strauss, "Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America," in Structural (Vol. 1), pp. 245-268. Anthropology

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artifact,more "immediate,"more "magical." We know posed a doubly different how the early moderns reclaimed this artifactas art, abstracted it into form; how, also, the "Primitivism"show mitigatedits otherness,projected it as affinity. Here we may see how this othernesswas furtherrecouped by a reading of the tribal artistthat served to recenterthe modern artist,rendered somewhat marginal or academic by mass culture, as a "shamanistic"figure.Meanwhile, the tribal object with its ritual/symbolicexchange value was put on display, reinscribedin terms of exhibition/signexchange value. (Could it be that the "magic" perceived in the object was in part its differencefromthe commodity form,which modern art resistedbut to which it was partlyreduced?) In this way, the potentialdisruptionposed by the tribalwork- that art mightreclaim a ritual function,that it might retain an ambivalence of the sacred object or giftand not be reduced to the equivalence of the commodity-was blocked. social exchangejust as the And the Africanfetish,which representsa different modern works aspire to one, became another kind of fetish: the "magical" commodity.

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In the "Primitivism"show, a transgressive model of modernism was glimpsed,one which, repressedby the formalistaccount, mighthave displaced the MOMA model- its "Hegelian" history,its "Bauhausian" ideals, its formalhistoricistoperation (e.g., of abstractionachieved by analyticreductionwithin the patriarchalline: Manet . . . Cezanne ... Picasso: of the Westerntradition). This displacement,however, was only a feint:this"new" model- that the very condition of the so-called modern break with traditionis a break outside itwas suggested, occluded, recouped. With transgressionwithout rendered as dialectic within,the officialmodel of modern art- a multiplicityof breaks reininto a syntheticline of formalinnovations- is prescribed (by the artist/critic) is causal time of history,the narrative space of the museum. as the served, Seen as a genuine agenda, the show presents this conflictedscenario: MOMA moves to repositionthe modern as transgressivebut is blocked by its own premises, and the contradictionis "resolved"by a formalistapproach that reduces what was to be pronounced. Seen as a false agenda, this cynical scenario emerges: the show pretendsto revise the MOMA storyof art, to disrupt its formaland narrativeunity,but only so as to reestablishit: the transgressive is acknowledgedonly to be again repressed. As suggested,thatthis"correction" is presentednow is extremelyoverdetermined.How better,in the unconscious ofthe museum, to "resolve"these contradictionsthan witha show suggestiveon the one hand of a transgressivemodernism and on the other of a still active primitivism?Not only can MOMA then recoup the modern-transgressive,it can do so as ifit had rejected its own formalistpast. This maneuver also allows it at once to contain the returnof its repressedand to connect witha neoprimitivistmomentin contemporaryart: MOMAism is not past afterall! In all these ways, the critique posed by the primitiveis contravened, absorbed withinthe body of modern art: "As ifwe were afraidto conceive of the Other in the time of our own thought."37 Primitivism Historically,theprimitiveis articulatedby the West in deprivativeor supplemental terms: as a spectacle of savagery or as a state of grace, as a socius withoutwritingor the Word, withouthistoryor culturalcomplexity;or as a site of originaryunity, symbolic plenitude, natural vitality.There is nothingodd about this Eurocentricconstruction:the primitivehas served as a coded other at least since the Enlightenment,usually as a subordinatetermin its imaginary set of oppositions (light/dark,rational/irrational,civilized/savage). This domesticatedprimitiveis thus constructive,not disruptive,of the binary ratioof the West; fixedas a structuralopposite or a dialectical otherto be incorporated,

37.

Michel Foucault, TheArchaeology ofKnowledge,New York, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 12.

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it assists in the establishmentof a Western identity,center, norm, and name. In its modernistversion the primitivemay appear transgressive,it is true, but it stillserves as a limit: projected withinand without,the primitivebecomes a figureof our unconscious and outside (a figureconstructedin modern art as well as in psychoanalysisand anthropologyin the privilegedtriad of the primitive, the child, and the insane). If Rubin presented the art-historicalcode of the primitive,Varnedoe offereda philosophical reading of primitivism.In doing so, he reproducedwithin it the very Enlightenmentlogic by which the primitivewas firstseized, then (re)constructed.There are two primitivisms,Varnedoe argues, a good, rational one and a dark, sinisterone.38 In the first,the primitiveis reconciled with the scientificin a search forfundamentallaws and universal language (the putative cases are Gauguin and certain abstractexpressionists).This progressiveprimitivismseeks enlightenment,not regressiveescape into unreason, and thinksthe primitiveas a "spiritualregeneration"(in which"thePrimitiveis held to be spirituallyakin to that of the new man"),39 not as a social transgression.Thus recouped philosophically,the primitivebecomes part of the internalreformation of the West, a moment within its reason: and the West, culturallyprepared, escapes the radical interrogationwhich it otherwiseposes. But more is at stake here, forthe reason thatis at issue is none otherthan the Enlightenment,which to the humanist Varnedoe remains knightlike;indeed, he cites the sanguine Gauguin on the "luminous spread of science, which today fromWest to East lightsup all the modern world."40Yet in the dialectic of the Enlightenment,as Adorno and Horkheimerargued, the liberationof the other can issue in its liquidation; the enlightenmentof "affinity" may indeed eradicate difference.41 (And if this seems extreme, thinkof those who draw a directline fromthe Enlightenmentto the Gulag.) Western man and his primitive other are no more equal partners in the march of reason than they were in the spread of the word, than they are in the marketingof capitalism. The Enlightenmentcannot be protectedfromits other legacy, the "bad-irrational" primitivism(Varnedoe's dramatic example is Nazi Blood and Soil, the swastika ur-sign), any more than the "good-rational"primitivism(e.g., the ideographic explorationsof Picasso) can be redeemed fromcolonial exploitation. Dialectically, the progressivityof the one is the regressionof the other. Varnedoe argues, via Gauguin, that "modern artisticprimitivism"is not "antitheticalto scientificknowledge."42One can only agree, but not as he in38. See Varnedoe, "Gauguin," pp. 201-203, and "Contemporary Explorations," pp. 652-653. 39. Ibid., p. 202. 40. Ibid. 41. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialecticof Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York, Seabury Press, 1972. 42. Varnedoe, "Gauguin," p. 203.

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tends it, for primitivismis indeed instrumentalto such power-knowledge,to the "luminous spread" ofWesterndomination. On the one hand, the primitivist incorporationof the other is another formof conquest (if a more subtle one than the imperialistextractionoflabor and materials); on the other,it serves as its displacement, its disguise, even its excuse. Thus, to pose the relationof the primitive and the scientificas a benign dialogue is cruelly euphemistic: it obscures the real affiliationsbetween science and conquest, enlightenmentand eradication, primitivistart and imperialistpower. (This can be pardoned of a romanticartistat the end of the last centurywho, immersedin the ideology of of these ideas, but not a scientisticavant-garde, could not know the effectivity of an art historianat the end of this century.) Apart fromthe violence done to the otherin the occlusion of the imperialof the Enlightenmentas a ist connectionof primitivismand in the mystification universal good, this good/bad typologytends to mistake the disruptionposed by the primitiveand to cast any embrace of this disruption- any resistance to an instrumental,reificatoryreason, any reclamation of cognitivemodes repressed in its regime- as "nihilistic,"regressive,"pessimistic."43(It is thus that the transgressiveprimitivismof such artistsas Smithson is dismissed.) We are leftwhere we began, locked in our old specular code of ethical oppositions. But thenwe weretold all along thattheissue was "human creativitywhereverfound": This is the extremeof liberal thoughtand the most beautifulway of preservingthe initiativeand priorityofWesternthoughtwithin"dialogue" and under the sign of the universalityof the human mind (as always forEnlightenmentanthropology).Here is the beautifulsoul! Is it possible to be more impartial in the sensitive and intellectual knowledgeof the other?This harmonious vision of two thoughtprocesses renderstheirconfrontation perfectlyinoffensive,by denyingthe differenceof the primitivesas an element of rupturewith and subversion of (our) "objectifiedthoughtand its mechanisms.""44 There is a counterreading of the primitiveprecisely as subversive, to which we must return,but it is importantto consider here what cultural function primitivismgenerallyperforms.As a fetishisticrecognition-and-disavowal of difference,primitivisminvolves a (mis)constructionof the other. That much is clear. But it also involves a (mis)recognitionof the same. "If the West has 43. See, forexample,Varnedoe,"Contemporary pp. 665, 679. Exploration," 44. Jean Baudrillard,TheMirrorofProduction, trans.Mark Poster,St. Louis, Telos Press, is to Levi-Strauss's claim,in TheRaw andtheCooked 1975,p. 90. The reference (trans.J. and D. Weightman,New York,Harperand Row, 1969,pp. 13-14),that"itis in thelastresortimmatein thisbookthethought rialwhether processesoftheSouthAmericanIndianstakeplacethrough or whetherminetakeplace throughthemediumof theirs.What themediumof mythoughts, oftheidentity ofthosewhohappentobe givingitexmattersis thatthehumanmind,regardless structure... ." intelligible pression,shoulddisplayan increasingly

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"itis because produced anthropologists,"Levi-Strauss writesin TristesTropiques, it was tormentedby remorse."45Certainly primitivismis touched by this remorse, too; as the "elevation"of the artifactto art, of the tribalto humanity,it is a compensatoryform.It is not simplythatthiscompensation is false,thatthe artifactis evacuated even as it is elevated (the ritualworkbecome an exhibition form,the ambivalent object reduced to commodityequivalence), thatfinallyno white skin fond of black masks can ever recompense the colonialist subjection detailed in Fanon's BlackSkin WhiteMasks. To value as art what is now a ruin; to locate what one lacks in what one has destroyed:more is at work here than compensation. Like fetishism,primitivismis a systemof multiple beliefs; an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction:46 a repression of the fact that a breakthroughin our art, indeed a regenerationof our culture, is based in part on the breakup and decay of othersocieties,thatthe modernistdiscoveryof the primitiveis not only in part itsoblivionbut itsdeath. And the finalcontradiction or aporia is this: no anthropologicalremorse,aestheticelevation, or redemptive exhibitioncan corrector compensate this loss becausetheyareall implicated in it. Primitivism,then, not only absorbs the potential disruptionof the tribal objects into Western forms,ideas, and commodities, it also symptomatically manages the ideological nightmareof a great art inspired by spoils. More, as an artisticcoup founded on militaryconquest, primitivismcamouflages this historicalevent, disguises the problem of imperialismin termsof art, affinity, dialogue, to the point (the point of the MOMA show) where the problem appears "resolved." A counterdiscourseto primitivismis posed differently at different moments: the destructionof racial or evolutionist myths, the critique of functionalist models of the primitivesocius, the questioning of constructsof the tribal, and so forth.Levi-Strauss has argued most publiclyagainst these models and myths in a culturalistreading that the "savage mind" is equally complex as the Western, that primitivesociety is indeed based on a nature/cultureoppositionjust as our own is. Other ethnologistslike Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres have also countered the negative conception of the primitiveas a people without god, law, or language. Where Levi-Strauss argues thatthe primitivesocius is not withouthistorybut thinksit as form,Sahlins writesthatpaleolithichunters and gatherers,far froma subsistence society,constitutethe "firstaffluent" one, and Clastres (a studentof Levi-Strauss) contended that the lack of a state in the primitivesocius is a sign not of a prehistoricalstatus,as it may be thought

45. Livi-Strauss, TristesTropiques,trans.J. and D. Weightman, New York, Atheneum, 1978, p. 389. 46. This definitionof art (see note 7) was developed by Levi-Strauss in relation to a tribal form,Caduveo face painting; see TristesTropiques,pp. 196-197.

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in a Western teleology,but of an active exorcismof externalforceor hierarchical power: a societynot withoutbut againstthe state.47 Such a theoreticaldisplacement is not simplyan event internalto ethnolit ogy: is partlyincitedby anticolonial movementsofthe postwarperiod and by thirdworld resistance in our own; and it is partlyaffirmedby a politicization of otherdisciplines. For ifprimitivismis denial of difference,then the countermeasure is precisely its insistence,"opening the culture to experiences of the Other," as Edward Said writes,"therecoveryof a historyhithertoeithermisrepresentedor renderedinvisible."48Finally,no doubt, a counterdiscoursecan only come througha countermemory,an account ofthemodern/primitive encounter fromthe "other"side.49But lest thisrecoveryof the otherbe a recuperationinto a Western narrative,a political genealogy of primitivismis also necessary,one which would trace the affiliationsbetween primitivistart and colonial practice. It is preciselythisgenealogythatthe MOMA show does not (cannot?) attempt; indeed, the issue of colonialism, when raised at all, was raised in colonialist terms, as a question of the accessibilityof certain tribal objects in the West. As fora culturalcounterpractice,one is suggestedby the "primitive"operand by the surrealistreception of the primitiveas a rupture. ation of bricolage the dissident surrealists(Bataille chief among them) present, if not a Indeed, as "counterprimitivism" such, then at least a model of how the othernessof the primitivemightbe thoughtdisruptively,not recuperated abstractly.It is well known that several ofthese surrealists,some ofwhom were amateur anthropologists,were not as oblivious as mostfauvesand cubiststo the contextsand codes of the primitive,that some politicized ratherthan aestheticizedthe primitivistimperialistconnection (in 1931, Aragon and others organized an anticolonial exhibitionto counterthe officialExpositioncolonialein the new Musee des Colonies). And when these "ethnographicsurrealists"did aestheticize, it tended to be in the interestsof"culturalimpuritiesand disturbingsyncretisms."Which is formbut its bricoli to say that theyprized in the tribal object not its raisonnable but its not its mediatory possibilities transgressivevalue. In heterogeneity, short,the primitiveappeared less as a solution to Western aestheticproblems 47. See, in general, Marshall Sahlins, Cultureand PracticalReason,Chicago, Universityof ChiAgainsttheState,trans. Robert Hurley, New York, cago Press, 1976; and Pierre Clastres, Society Urizen Books, 1974. 48. Edward W. Said, "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community," in TheAntied. Hal Foster, Port Townsend (WA), Bay Press, 1983, p. 158. Aesthetic, 49. As for a Western text that involves this "other"account, an example is provided by the Jean Rouch filmLes MaitresFous, a documentary of the trauma of imperialistsubjection ritually worked throughby an Africantribe. In a trance the tribesmenare one by one "possessed" by the white colonial figures,the Crazy Masters--an exorcism that inverts the one in the Demoiselles. Here, though, the image of the other is used to purge the other, and the objectificationis reversed: it is the white man who appears as the other, the savage, the grotesque. At the end the tribesmen returnto the colonial city and once again assume subject-positions- in the army, in road crews, in the "native population."

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than as a disruptionof Western solutions. Rather than seek to masterthe primitive-or, alternatively,to fetishizeits differenceinto opposition or identitythese primitivistswelcomed "the unclassified,unsought Other."o50 It is most likelyexcessive (and worse, dualistic!) to oppose these two readings of the primitive- the one concernedto incorporatethe primitive,the other eager to transgresswith it- and to extrapolatethe latterinto a counterpractice to the former.(Again, such a counterpracticeis not forthe West to supply.) However, bricolage-which Levi-Strauss, influencedby the surrealists,did after all defineas a "primitive"mode - is today posed in the Third World (and in its name) as such a resistantoperation, by which the othermightappropriatethe formsof the modern capitalist West and fragmentthem with indigenous ones in a reflexive,critical montage of syntheticcontradictions.51Such bricolage might in turn reveal that Western culture is hardly the integral"engineered" whole that it seems to be but that it too is bricold (indeed, Derrida has deconstructedthe Levi-Strauss opposition bricoleur/engineer to the effectthat the latter is the product, the mythof the former).52 One tactical problem is that bricolage, as the inversionof the appropriative abstractionof primitivism,might seem retroactivelyto excuse it. Indeed, the famous Levi-Strauss formulaforbricolage is uncannilyclose to the Barthes definition of appropriation(or "myth"). In his definition(1962) Levi-Strauss cites Franz Boas on mythical systems: "'It would seem that mythologicalworlds have been built up, only to be shatteredagain, and that new worlds were built fromthe fragments'"; and adds: "In the continual reconstructionfromthe same materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the signifiedchanges into the signifyingand vice versa."53 Compare Barthes on myth(1957): "It is constructedfroma semiological chain which existed beforeit: it is a second-order semiological system.That which is a sign . . . in the firstsystembecomes a mere signifierin the second."54The differenceis that is a process of texmythis a one-way appropriation, an act of power; bricolage

50. Clifford,"On Ethnographic Surrealism," p. 564. This strategywas posed by Abdellah Hammoudi at the symposium (Nov. 3-4, 51. 1984) held at MOMA in conjunction with the show. 52. Jacques Derrida, "Structure,Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 285. In Writingand Difference, Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 105), Derrida writesof Levi-Strauss: "At once conservingand annulling inherited conceptual oppositions, this thought, like Saussure's, stands on a borderline: sometimes within an uncriticizedconceptuality,sometimes puttinga strainon the boundaries, and workingtoward deconstruction." 53. Livi-Strauss, The SavageMind, p. 21. 54. Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York, Hill and Wang, 1972, p. 114. In For a CritiqueofthePoliticalEconomyoftheSign (trans. Charles Levin, St. Louis, Telos Press, 1981, p. 96), Jean Baudrillard writes: "This semiological reduction of the symbolic propertyconstitutesthe ideological process."

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tual play, of loss and gain: whereas mythabstractsand pretendsto the natural, cuts up, makes concrete,delightsin the artificial- it knows no identity, bricolage stands forno pretenseof presence or universal guise forrelativetruths.Thus, if it is by a "mythical"reduction of content to formthat the primitivebecomes primitivist, by a mythicalabstractionof signifiedintosignifierthatAfricanritual objects, customs,peoplebecome "Africanity"-ifit is by myththatone arrivesat and universality- then bricolage may well constitutea counterpractice. affinity For in bricolage not only may the primitivesignifiedbe reclaimed but the Western signifiedmay be mythifiedin turn, which is to say that primitivism(the mythsof the African,the Oceanic, that stillcirculate among us) may possibly be deconstructedand other models of interculturalexchange posed. However compromisedby itsappropriationas an artisticdevice in the West (superficially understood, bricolagehas become the "inspiration"of much primitivistart), remains a strategicpractice, forjust as the concept of mythdemystifies bricolage "natural"modes of expressionand "neutral"uses of other-culturalforms,so too or deconstructssuch notions as a modern/tribal"affinity" the device of bricolage modernist"universality"and such constructsas a fixedprimitive"essence" or a stable Western "identity." The OtherIs BecomingtheSame, theSame Is Becoming Different Below, I want brieflyto pose, to collide, two readings of the primitiveencounterwiththe West: thatof its progressiveeclipse in modernhistoryand that of its disruptivereturn(in displaced form) in contemporarytheory. The first history,as we have seen, positionsthe primitiveas a moment in the "luminous spread" of Western reason; the second, a genealogy, traces how the primitive, is to thinkthese contaken into this order, returnsto disruptit. The difficulty traryreadings simultaneously,the firstaggressivelyhistoricist,the second historicallyenigmatic. If the identityof the West is defineddialecticallyby its other, what happens to this identitywhen its limitis crossed, its outside eclipsed? (This eclipse may not be entirelyhypotheticalgiven a multinationalcapitalism that seems to know no limits,to destructureall oppositions,to occupy its fieldall but totally.) One effectis that the logic thatthinksthe primitivein termsof opposition or as an outside is threatened(as Derrida noted in the work of LUvi-Straussor as Foucault came to see within his own thought, such structuralterms can no longerbe supportedeven as methodologicaldevices).55In the second narrative, 55. See Derrida,"Structure, Sign,and Play,"and Foucault,"History,Discourse,and DisconofFrenchdeconstrucFredericJamesonhas suggestedin thisregardthatone "referent" tinuity." ed. Victor tionmaywellbe Americancapital.See his"Pleasure:A PoliticalIssue,"in Formations, Burgin,et al., London, Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1983.

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this"eclipsed"or sublated primitivereemergesin Westerncultureas its scandal -where it links up genealogically with poststructuralistdeconstructionand politicallywithfeministtheoryand practice. In thispassage the primitiveother is transformedutterly,and here in particular its real world historymust be thought.For the historicalincorporationof the outside mightwell be the condition that compels its eruption into the fieldof the same as difference.Indeed, the eclipse of otherness,posed as a metaphysicalstructureof opposites or as an outside to be recovered dialectically, is the beginning of difference-and of a potential break with the phallocentricorder of the West. This genealogy is not as conjectural as it may seem: connectionsbetween certain "ethnographicsurrealists"and poststructuralists are thereto be traced. The intermediaryfiguresare Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and, above all, Bataille, whose notions of dipenseand la partmaudite,developed out of Mauss's theoryof the gift,have influencedBaudrillard, and whose notion oftransgressionhas influencedFoucault and Derrida. On thisreading, ifthe early moderns sublated the primitiveinto reason, the dissident surrealiststhoughtit transgressively; but it was leftto poststructuralismand feminismto theorizeit, however transformedin position and effectivity. As Rosalind Krauss has suggested,the poststructuralistand feministdeconstructionof phallocentricoppositions is related - i.e., of oppositions to the "collapse of differences" between natural and unnatural forms,conscious and unconscious states,realityand representation,politics and art- thatis at the heartof surrealistscandal.56 It is thistransgressiveenterprise that is dismissed as "arbitrary"and "trivial"in postwar American formalism in which, in a neomodernist moment, crisis is once more recouped for continuity.Indeed, this collapse or ruptureis not thoughtdeeply again till the art of the generationof Smithson, in which formalistcriteriagive way to a concern with "structure,sign, and play," in which, with such devices as the sitenonsite, the formof the exhibitionwork with expressive origin and centered meaning is displaced by a serial or textual mode "witha concept of limitsthat could never be located."57 On the one hand, then, the primitiveis a modern problem, a crisisin cultural identity,which the West moves to resolve: hence the modernistconstruction "primitivism,"the fetishisticrecognition-and-disavowalof the primitive difference.This ideological resolutionrendersit a "nonproblem"forus. On the otherhand, this resolutionis only a repression:delayed in our political unconscious, the primitivereturnsuncannily at the moment of its potential eclipse. The ruptureof the primitive,managed by the moderns, becomes our postmodern event.58 56. Rosalind Krauss, "Preying on 'Primitivism,'"Artand Text,no. 17 (April 1985). 57. Ibid. 58. Such "delays" are common enough: for example, the critique of representation,initially undertaken in cubism and collage, that returns in a differentregisterin postmodernistart.

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The firsthistoryof the primitiveencounterwiththe West is familiar narrativeofdomination.In thisnarrative1492 is an inenough,thefatalistic ofAmerica(and auguraldate,foritmarkstheperiodnotonlyofthediscovery therounding oftheCape ofGood Hope) butalso oftherenaissance ofantiquity. withtheotherand a returnto the allow These twoevents- an encounter same-ofthemodernWestand theinstauration dialectical fortheincorporation ofits in Spain, 1492 also marksthebanishmentoftheJews history.(Significantly, modernEuropeangrammar;in other and Arabsand thepublicationofthefirst of the within and the encodingof the otherwiththe other words, expulsion the first in Europeand of"thefirst is the of museums period out.)59This, too, workson the'lifeand manners'ofremotepeoples"- a collectionoftheancients and spatiallydistant.60 This collectiononly and "savages,"of the historically with and intoa worldas the West colonialism develops capitalism expands, with the the is able to the West century, system.By eighteenth Enlightenment, and thusall othercultureswere reflecton itself"as a culturein theuniversal, enteredintoitsmuseumas vestigesof itsown image."61 dominaThereis no need to rehearsethis"dialectic" here,theprogressive tionofexternaland internalnature(thecolonizationoftheoutsideand theunto notethatthishistoryis notwithoutitsrepreconscious),but it is important in moderntheory.Indeed,in 1946Merleau-Ponty and contestations sentations could write: - thephilosophies ideasofthepastcentury All thegreatphilosophical and Germanexistentialism ofMarxand Nietzsche,phenomenology, who started it was he in their -had Hegel; beginnings psychoanalysis itintoan expanded and integrate to exploretheirrational theattempt reason,whichremainsthetaskofour century.62 There is, however,an obvious paradox here: the Westernratiois defined itsdialecticalidentity requiresthe againsttheveryunreasonthatit integrates; reducesto thesame. It is this veryotherthatitabsorbs,disavows,or otherwise as elaboratedby Batailleamidstdisparadoxthatthenotionoftransgression, addresses. the oftheprimitive, and otherness cussionsofboth"theendofhistory" in Alexandre lectures on the Kojeve the'30s; Hegel givenby (Batailleattended as transgressive.) oftheprimitive he was also, ofcourse,theprincipaltheorist concernwiththeother In hisessayon Bataille- an essayin whichthesurrealist Foucaultopconcernwithdifferencemay be linkedto the poststructuralist trans. Richard Howard, New York, Harper 59. See Tzvetan Todorov, The ConquestofAmerica, and Row, 1984, p. 123. Todorov argues thatthe conquest of America was fromone perspectivea "linguistic"one. 60. Todorov, p. 109. 61. Baudrillard, The MirrorofProduction, pp. 88-89. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Senseand Nonsense,trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus, Evans62. ton, NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1964, pp. 109-110.

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poses the transgressiveto the dialectical as a way to thinkthroughthe logic of contradiction,as a "formof thoughtin which the interrogationof the limitreplaces the search fortotality."63Yet iftransgressionchallenges the dialectic, the end of history,and the incorporationof the primitiveother,it also presupposes (or at least foreshadows)them. Which is to say thatthe transgressiveappears as a stopgap of the dialectical; it recomposes an outside, an other,a sacred, ifonly in its absence: "All our actions are addressed to this absence in a profanation which at once identifiesit, dissipates it, exhausts itselfin it, and restoresit in the emptypurityof its transgression."64 Transgression is thusbound by a paradox of its own: it remarkslimitseven as it violates them, it restoresan outside even as it testifiesto its loss. It is on the borderlinebetween dialectical thought and the becoming of difference, just as the structuralismof Levi-Strauss is on the borderlinebetween metaphysicaloppositions and deconstruction. There is no question that today we are beyond thisborder, that we live in a time of cancelled limits, destructuredoppositions, "dissipated scandals"65 (which is not to say thattheyare not recoded all the time). Clearly, the modern structuresin whichthe Western subject and socius were articulated(the nuclear family,the industrialcity, the nation-state)are today remapped in the movement of capital. In this movement the opposition nature/culturehas become not only theoreticallysuspect but practicallyobsolete: thereare now fewzones of "savage thought"to oppose to the Western ratio,few primitiveothers not threatenedby incorporation.But in thisdisplacementof the otherthereis also a decenteringof the same, as signalled in the '60s when Foucault abandoned the logic of structuralor dialectical oppositions(e.g., reason/unreason)in favor of a field of immanent relations, or when Derrida proclaimed the absence of any fixedcenteror origin,of any "originalor transcendentalsignified. .. outside a systemof differences."66 It was this that led Foucault to announce, grandly the of dissolution man in language. More provocative, however, was enough, his suggestion,made at the same moment (1966), that"modern thoughtis advancing towardsthatregionwhere man's Other must become the Same as himself."67In the modern episteme, Foucault argued, the transparent,sovereign cogitohas brokendown, and Western man is compelled to thinkthe unthought. Indeed, his verytruthis articulatedin relationto theunconscious and the other; thus the privilege granted psychoanalysis and ethnology among the modern human sciences. The question returnsthen: What happens to this man, his

63. Foucault, "A Preface to Transgression," in Language,Counter-Memory, Practice,ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 50. 64. Ibid., p. 31. 65. The phrase is Robert Smithson's; see The Writings ed. Nancy Holt, New ofRobertSmithson, York, New York University Press, 1979, p. 216. 66. Derrida, "Structure,Sign, and Play," p. 280. 67. Foucault, The Orderof Things,New York, Vintage Books, 1970. p. 238.

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truth,when the unconscious and the otherare penetrated- integratedintoreason, colonized by capital, commodifiedby mass culture? Tellingly, it was in the '30s and '40s, afterthe high stage of imperialism and before the anticolonial wars of liberation, that the discourse of the other was most thoroughlytheorized-by Lacan, of course, and Livi-Strauss (who, in TristesTropiques, pondered "theethnologicalequivalentof themirrorstage")68 but also by Sartre, who argued that the otherwas necessaryto the "fusion"of any group, and Adorno and Horkheimer,who elaborated the role of otherness in Nazism. I mentionthese latterhere to suggestthat, howeverdecenteredby the other,the (Western) subject continuesto encroach mercilesslyupon it. Indeed by 1962 (when Levi-Strauss wrote that "there are still zones in which savage thought,like savage species, is relativelyprotected"),69Paul Ricoeur could foreseea "universalworldcivilization."To Ricoeur, thismomentwas less one of the imperialist"shockof conquest and domination"than one ofthe shock of disorientation:forthe othera momentwhen, withthe wars of liberation,the 68. CatherineClement,TheLivesandLegends ofJacquesLacan,trans.ArthurGoldhammer, New York,ColumbiaUniversity Press,1983,p. 76. 69. L vi-Strauss,TheSavageMind,p. 219.

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"politicsof otherness"had reached its limit,and forthe West a momentwhen it became "possible that there are just others,that we ourselves are an 'other' among others."70 This disorientationof a world civilization is hardly new to us today. In 1962 Ricoeur argued that to survivein it each culture must be grounded in its own indigenous tradition; otherwise this "civilization"would be domination pure and simple. Similarly,in our own timeJfirgenHabermas has argued that the modern West, to restoreitsidentity,must criticallyappropriateitstradition - the very project of Enlightenmentthat led to this "universal civilization"in the firstplace.71 Allegories of hope, these two readings seem early and late symptomsof our own postmodernpresent,a momentwhen the West, its limit apparentlybroached by an all but global capital, has begun to recycleits own historicalepisodes as stylestogetherwith its appropriated images of exotica (of domesticated otherness)in a cultureof nostalgia and pastiche- in a cultureof implosion, "the internalviolence of a saturated whole."72 Ricoeur wrote prescientlyof a moment when "the whole of mankind becomes a kind of imaginarymuseum."73It may be thissense of closure, of claustrophobia that has provoked a new "primitivism"and "Orientalism"in recent theory:e.g., the Baudrillardiannotionof a primitiveorderof symbolicexchange that"haunts"our own systemof sign exchange, or the Deleuzian idea of a "savnow deterritorializedby capital; Barthes'sJapan cast as the age territoriality" "possibilityof a difference,of a mutation, of a revolution in the proprietyof symbolicsystems,"or Derrida's or Foucault's China seen as an order of things that "interrupts"Western logocentrism.74But ratherthan seek or resuscitatea lost or dead other, why not turn to vital others withinand without- to affirm theirresistanceto the white,patriarchalorderof Westernculture?For feminists, for"minorities,"for"tribal"peoples, thereare otherways to narrate thishistory

70. Paul Ricoeur, "Universal Civilization and National Cultures," in Historyand Truth,trans. Charles A. Kelbley, Evanston, NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1965, p. 278. Also see Frederic Jameson, "Periodizing the Sixties," in The SixtiesWithout Apology,ed. Sayres, Stephanson, et al., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 186-188. 71. See JilrgenHabermas, "Modernity--An Incomplete Project,"in TheAnti-Aesthetic, pp. 3-15. 72. Baudrillard, "The Beaubourg Effect,"trans. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, October,no. 20 (Spring 1982), p. 10. 73. Ricoeur, p. 278. What clearer sign of this implosion-when mankind is treated as a museum of the West - can therebe than the "Primitivism"show? If the "universality"of the Enlightenment positioned the West in a transcendental relation to the primitive,then the "globality"of multinationalcapital (as representedby Philip Morris) may put us in a transcendentalrelation to our own modernity. 74. See Baudrillard, For a CritiqueofthePoliticalEconomyoftheSign, passim; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,trans. Hurley, Seem, and Lane, New York, Viking Press, 1977, pp. 139-271; Barthes, The EmpireofSigns,trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1982, pp. 3-4; and Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 77-93.

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- ways which reject the narcissisticpathos that of enlightenment/eradication identifiesthe death of the Hegelian dialectic with the end of Western history and the end of that historywith the death of man, which also rejectthe reductive reading that the othercan be so "colonized" (as if it were a zone simplyto occupy, as ifit did not emerge imbricatedin otherspaces, to troubleotherdiscourses)- or even thatWesternsciencesofthe other,psychoanalysisand ethnology, can be fixedso dogmatically.On thisreading the otherremains- indeed, as the veryfieldof differencein which the subject emerges- to challenge Western pretensesof sovereignty,supremacy, and self-creation.

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