WHITHER ART HISTORY?
Griselda Pollock
There is an affliction in the liquid modernist consciousness.
It seems we always need to be going somewhere. If we ask,
“Whither art history?” there is an assumption that we are
either going somewhere (good), or not doing so (bad). Per-
haps there is a shadow thought that we have lost our way and
must now seek a new direction, or that where we might be
heading is not good for us. Does tradition beckon? Is recon-
solidation a retreat from recent challenges? So are we at a
standstill or a crossroads? Whatever the case, the question
itself suggests a formidable pressure to be going somewhere
and doing something new.
In March 2012, I gave a lecture at a conference titled “After
the New Art History.”1 I personally disowned the false category
“new art history,” rejecting the idea that whatever was thus
named had anything new about it. Whatever “new art history”
referred to took its value not from being new but from having
been critical, engaged, historically grounded, fueled by the
emerging voices of hitherto excluded constituencies, and
enriched by participation in massively significant reorientations
of thought and practice in the humanities in general. I also
found the compulsion to supersede—to be new in place of the
old new, encoded in the term “after”—implicitly deadly.2 That
which is cast as “old” can be dismissed as being tired, out-of-
date, to be replaced. Clearly, the larger context of what leading
sociologist Zygmunt Bauman diagnoses as the condition of our
times—liquid modernity—is at work in our field.3
Liquid modernity, according to Bauman’s analysis of our
current situation of globalizing capitalism, identifies a com-
pulsive modernization (change) for the sake of moderniza-
tion (change). Once, Bauman argues, there was ideology or
an ideal behind progress; modernization unsettled a petri-
fied past in order to install a new order. It had a telos, trans-
forming the old into the modern. Now, it seems, there is no
imagined destination. Fashion alone drives the necessity for
constant newness of commodities, bodies, relationships, and
intellectual “turns,” all that makes anything or any idea obso-
lete almost at the very moment of its appearance. So being
faithful becomes being outmoded, with an attendant loss of
the possibility of a politics of history.
The idea of the new creates what then becomes the old.
There are psychological fantasies of Oedipal supersession
(sons replacing fathers) as well as sociological operations of
generational displacement involved in this mirage of compul-
sive posterity. Paralleling this tendency are the declarations
of either the death of feminism, or the supersession of femi-
nism by postfeminism, or the drowning of the second wave
in the third or fourth waves, all of which share this compul-
sory “coming after” and going somewhere long before any
serious understanding of the impact, resonance, or signifi-
cance of any feminist intervention so far has been achieved.
I do not believe I am going anywhere nor do I want Art His-
tory or feminism to set off in “novel” directions for the sake
of finding the new. (Throughout, I shall use the term “Art
History” to designate the discipline and to distinguish it from
its field, the History of Art: a conceptual distinction available
in English.) This is not to suggest a defiant complacency, a
refusal to respond to unanticipated historical forces necessar-
ily warranting changes in our practices and thinking meth-
ods. On the one hand, I am arguing that it will take a long
time to absorb fully the initiatives that have tried to reshape
art historical studies in the later twentieth century. To do
them justice we must challenge the misrepresentations to
which the brute “killing”-of-the-past mentality has given rise
because such distortions make invisible what we might call
the necessary working through of the event—itself traumatic
in its shock to the system—its contradictions and its continu-
ing potentialities as an emancipatory and critical project.4
On the other hand, we will not come to grasp what has in
fact occurred if we fail to understand the complex relays
between any kind of thinking practice and the social and his-
torical conditions that determine it, compliantly or as resis-
tance. What becomes urgent to think about now, or indeed,
what we may be challenged to resist now, is not internal to
the intellectual formation or discipline of Art History. The
issues we confront as art historians arise in the world; art
practices and those practices that are its larger framing, insti-
tutionalizing and analysis, both register what is happening in
the world and challenge us as scholars and thinkers to dis-
cern the genuinely critical, thoughtful, and not merely
responsive engagements with the world in their transforma-
tion in/into contemporary art. Insulating the problem inside
the academy or museum world betrays both the simplistic
view of art and its discourses as indexical of culture’s refract-
ing of history and the more complex view of art’s serious
working through of that which bathes it and gives it its mate-
rials, shocks, and challenges.
If we are told that we must find a new track because we are
now lost in a fog of theoretical confusion and a forest of com-
peting methodological possibilities, it might be a good time
for a dose of intellectual fidelity to the rich settlements of
thought and critical practices produced by the exciting devel-
opments in both art history and art in the last half century.
We might do well to dally longer at any one of the stations
dotted across the now-complex landscape. Instead of pressur-
ing us to stay on the move, or to retrench behind the fortress
gates of the past that seeks to ignore the challenges of recent
art histories, let’s travel in that landscape, although without
the bad guidebooks that make the past anachronistic and
provide only limited pathways to selected spots while warning
visitors off other possible pathways.
One central problem is the historical gesture with which
our discipline was founded. It was, of course, deeply paradox-
ical. For Art History (the intellectual formation) to emerge,
art qua art had to discover that it had a history (rather than
10 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 1
being a timeless problem for philosophical aesthetics or aca-
demic standards). Formulating a discipline to study art’s spe-
cific historical dimension, with art having a singular
substance both passing through while being changed over
time, progressively separated art from history understood in
its broadest sense and from the broader field of cultural his-
tory and humanistic thought in which it had been but one
sideshow. The discipline of Art History manufactures a spe-
cific, separate history for art as a formal succession of styles,
shifting iconographies, self-defining movements, periods,
and institutions (for example, training, patronage, display,
trade, collection). While invaluable in one sense, the isolat-
ing tendency achieved its most extreme form at the moment
when thinking historically about artistic practices at all was
deemed to be anti–art historical; that field could only be
articulated by the qualification as a social history of art. This
suggested the odd possibility that any history might be nonso-
cial. Working as a feminist scholar in the field, I have encoun-
tered the oddity that my references to social, cultural, or
historical issues such as sexuality or gender are considered
non–art historical, and instead are labeled sociological—
alien in essence, or worse, to the history of art.5 Here we
encounter one of the problems in the formulation of the sub-
ject as the singular “art history” as opposed to my preferred
neologisms “the histories of art” (1988) or “art’s histories”
(1996). In what follows, I offer three eccentric points of entry
to this discussion.
A Local Starting Point
I have just completed a quite extraordinary task. I was
commissioned to compile a research bibliography on “women
and art history” (already a confusing category—women in the
history of art, women in the discipline of art history, gender
and art?) and given 8,000 words to do so. As my final text
peaked at 38,000 with considerable lacunae resulting from
my own partial perspective on the full range of this massive
field, a peer reviewer registered irritation at one specific sec-
tion I had added which s/he found “eccentric.” The section
was on feminism and Aby Warburg. I can understand that
this is hardly mainstream Art History. It is also not what is gen-
erally understood as a key trend in the American picture of
feminist art histories. Even so, there have been many femi-
nists in Latin America and Europe who have long engaged
with Warburg’s legacy. The founding text of this trend is by
the German art historian Sigrid Schade.6 During the later
1970s, Schade turned to the Warburg Institute Library in
London as the only location in which she could explore the
troubling eruption of witch burning, with its attendant visual
inscriptions and incitements during the early modern period:
How could such brutish, misogynist violence accompany what
historical thought marks as the beginning of the modern
period and a Renaissance of humanist culture? Not embed-
ded in any period the modern Western consciousness could
consign to otherness and primitivism, this sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century assault on women and its vivid cultural
refractions had to be confronted as both symptoms of the
emerging “modern” and in relation to resurfacing then of
deeper conflicts that produced both symbolic and real
violence. How could one make sense of this paradox? Schade
followed Warburg’s rejection of the dominant myths of Art
History that track continual progress and posit modernity as
an unquestionably progressive destination.
During a Clark Art Institute symposium convened by
Judith Rodenbeck entitled “Feminism after the Waves” in
May 2012, I was introduced by a younger feminist art histo-
rian, Jaleh Mansoor, to the work of Sylvia Federici, an Italian
feminist political theorist, and her book Caliban and the Witch:
Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.7 As a historian,
Federici traverses historical territory similar to that covered
by Schade, in order to argue that the violent depropriation
of women—namely, their forced domestication and the
exclusion of their labor from the exchange system and the
reconfiguration of their services to adult and child care as
natural—was foundational to the primitive accumulation on
which the rise of early capitalism depended. Far from dancing
on a pin to work out how Marxism and Feminism might
“marry,” Federici placed an overt gender war, and thus gen-
dered exploitation itself, at the basis of the new economic sys-
tem that shaped the modern world. Witch burning was part of
the violence with which the new system imposed itself. Ideo-
logically, it enforced a novel definition of womanhood specific
to a new socioeconomic system.8 This concept of womanhood
could, however, be represented as “natural” (rather than vio-
lently imposed) only by posing itself against its opposite, the
monstrous resister, the witch. Federici compares the function
of the witch to the fictive Caliban, who has been read in turn
as a projection of the other in the equally violent rhetoric of
early colonialism. Caliban is read by Federici as struggling, in
vain, against the imposed worlding of his world from which
he is now alienated and in which he is rendered monstrous by
the dominant discourse. Federici’s study had contemporary
applications. When teaching in Nigeria during the 1990s,
Federici witnessed the violent remodeling of the Nigerian
economy by the International Monetary Fund. This effectively
combined both the drastic economic transformations and the
ideological reconfigurations of “natural” versus monstrous
forms of subjectivity that she had discovered in her analyses of
what happened in Europe during the seventeenth century.
Both the reminder that the feminist adoption of
Warburg’s model for studying violence, history, and the
image is incompletely recognized and the examples of femi-
nist studies challenging models of progressive modernization
by exposing underlying and specifically gendered violence
within it serve to introduce one line of my reflections on
“whither art history.” I am not advocating a trip down a femi-
nist forgotten side road in the historical map of the discipline
of Art History. Rather, the confluence of the overlooked fem-
inist art historical scholarship on Warburg in, for instance,
the German feminist community of the 1970s, with its con-
nections to Federici’s recent feminist materialist interven-
tion, taken up by several key younger feminist art historians
in the United States poses the question, How could such vio-
lence against women and its significance have become invisi-
ble, unknown, and unthought? How might the reconnection
with both Schade’s Warburgian art history (long before the
current attempt to propose as new a turn to Image Art His-
tory, or Bildwissenschaft) and Federici’s cultural analysis open
a perspective on current necessities in the field?
Warburg’s eccentric thinking as a self-exiling but still self-
conscious member of the Jewish minority in the newly united

nation of Germany, at a point when that specific kind of self-
critical pariah status (which Hannah Arendt would later iden-
tify with Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin) made a new
stance as both insider and outsider possible, is not to be
assimilated to the now-expanding industry in Art History
reclaiming Warburg as a new object of idealized research or
as a refound founding figure of another new direction:
image culture.9 Warburg’s work offers an archive worthy of
continuing research into the history of the discipline and its
alternative pathways. I would like, however, to introduce his
primary contribution not as an archive but, intead, focusing
on his psychologically aware historical study of the image, as
a thinking machine for confronting contemporary Art His-
tory.10 It is important to grasp that Warburg did not found
the method of iconography in opposition to Heinrich
W€ olfflin’s formal method. The politics of both art historical
thinkers were infinitely more complex than this oppositional
caricature we have inherited.11 For Warburg, the image was a
complex form, not a content alone. It was a figuration of
memory of what had once been originally gesturally per-
formed by the body and was then formalized and iconically
remembered, its gestures and hence its affects transmissible
via the iconization, becoming available for travel across cul-
tures. The image is both a temporal and spatial translation in
a psychically charged memory form in which figuration plays
multiple roles. Rooting the origins of art in ritual perfor-
mance and mimicry, as well as being sensitive to symbolic
transformation of imagined and fantasized affects, Warburg
understood art as a mediation—he named its achievements a
Zwischenraum—between what we might now name the Real of
physical and psychological intensities in the face of human
frailty in the struggle for life in nature and in society and the
Symbolic.12 Warburg understands the symbolic as the cultur-
ally fashioned space whose iconic remembering might hyster-
ically revive and let loose destructive affects. It might equally,
however, transform them into resolutions that temper such
affective intensities into thoughts. Thought is valuable, but
not when abstracted. Warburg thus defines the specific ele-
ments of the image or types of image whose history he charts
a Pathosformel, a formulation of pathos, of passion, of suffer-
ing, or in our terms, affective intensity, that breaks the
bounds of language and inhabits the body as its site and its
expressive alphabet. The term “formula” usefully includes
the idea of form, which reminds us that pathos is a formal
operation, not a content that can be detached from its for-
mulation. “Formula” also invokes that which can be repeated.
Thus, the Pathosformel functions aesthetically, subcognitively,
perhaps, as a formulation of intensity that registers specific
ranges of human affects, from the violent and the ecstatic to
the depressive and the static. The Pathosformel stores such
intensities but also enables a potential passage into a subli-
mating symbolic.
Resisting both banal romanticism (does art move me?) and
impersonal formalization (art as a rule-determined telos), I
have embraced different resources for moving beyond this
double bind. Semiotics was one such resource during the
1970s and 1980s for breaking open the oppositions form/
content, idea/affect. Semiotics was at first the product of the
intersection of an early twentieth-century linguistic modern-
ism (Ferdinand de Saussure’s modernist question being,
WHITHER ART HISTORY? 11
“What is language?”) with its belated reconfiguration in
“structural” anthropology (Claude L evi-Strauss’s question
being, “What is culture?”). Returned to the linguistic as part
of literary studies’ revolt against its own romanticism and the
reclaiming of Russian formalism’s idea of the literariness of
the literary text, semiotics came to us, in art historical circles,
however, often more directly through film analysis that
adapted literary semiotics to cinematic texts.
Yet for feminist thought, one of the theorists of literary
semiotics, Julia Kristeva, was crucially important in ways that
resonate with what I am discerning in Warburg’s balancing
of the Real and the Symbolic mediated via what he called the
image. Resisting trends in semiotics toward a kind of authori-
tarian formalism (the laws of signification), Kristeva alerted
us to a potential fascism inherent in any formalism, notably,
when the system was understood only as rules that foresaw no
space for resistance and no resources for change. Kristeva
turned to psychoanalysis to reintroduce into the system of
meaning production identified by semiotic approaches to
language the “speaking subject,” a psychoanalytically con-
ceived, split subject. This subject’s formation is never, how-
ever, complete. This subject, therefore, is perpetually “on
trial.” Its internal other and perpetual contestant is an
unconscious. It also carries the affecting traces of the forma-
tive psychocorporality of the infant state, still recalcitrant in
the face of the signifier and the law by which the subject
must be necessarily constituted in order to speak and be
sexed. Kristeva argues that because both the drives and the
preconscious are in excess of the law, they offer a resource
for changing meaning and shifting subjectivity in its endless
“process” (the French word proce s evokes both a trial and a
process). Psychoanalytic theorizations of subjectivity and its
interfaces with both language and the psychocorporeal pro-
duced Kristeva’s specific notion of “the semiotic.” Kristeva’s
use of the term “semiotic” refers at once to the prelinguistic
predispositions of what later become language—rhythm,
assonance, echolalia—and to the outer edge of the symbolic
realm of language itself, a liminal zone whose semiporous
boundaries remain in touch with, though not reduced to,
the traces of a corporeal, emergent, prelinguistic semiotic
through which language can constantly be renovated and
sometimes revolutionized. This double concept of the semi-
otic as both preceding the symbolic and dancing at its edges
allows Kristeva to identify art, music, dance, and poetry as
moments of the extralinguistic semiotic touching and shift-
ing the realm of meaning, activating the unconscious and
even earlier traces of the formative semiotic phase of becom-
ing-subjectivity. While we can see “semiotic” elements in art
in its gestures, pace, surfaces, and affects (akin to Rosalind
Krauss’s appropriation of Walter Benjamin’s optical uncon-
scious to plot out the informe in modern art), what do we do
with its image (which can be as abstract as much as
figurative)?13
Image is neither depiction nor iconography. It might bet-
ter be understood as configuration. For instance, abstract art
produces an effect that, even if it remains at the very edges of
figurality, the viewer experiences as an image—not of any-
thing specific but with a kind of structure through which it
can be remembered. I define that kind of image as both a
holding together of visual events (it is not just a chaos of
12 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 1
stuff) and a holding before the viewer of an arrangement by
which we experience simultaneously the tug toward the pre-
linguistic semiotic (rhythm, pulse, and so on) and the often
fragile or elusive sense of becoming symbolic (forming, hold-
ing, saying). In this way, Kristeva overcomes the opposition
of form (empty) versus content (explicit representation) by
not detaching image from the semiotic processes and the dia-
lectic of semiotic and symbolic.
In my sustained project to create “feminist interventions in
art’s histories,” I have been working through the dialectic of
subjectivities and their inscriptions in the field of vision and
the image. In so doing, I have sought to balance Kristevan
theory with the historical questions of my own discipline,
whose focus falls on materially produced but affecting and
“speaking” outcomes that we misname as visual images. They
are as tangible as they are visible, as physically manufactured
as they are able virtually to generate affects and thoughts,
while any field of vision is mediated by tangibility and materi-
ality. In this effort, I have found my reading of Warburg’s
minoritarian/pariah modeling of a history of art as a historical
psychology of the image unexpectedly hospitable to the cur-
rent stage of my project.
Over forty years I have been engaged in a long-term think-
ing project that has not proceeded through typical art histori-
cal forms of artists, periods, movements, or even themes.
Instead, I can now see clearly that I have had to create con-
cepts that enable my thinking through the problematics posed
by gender, class, sexuality, representation, and difference.
Some of these concepts have been linguistic and address the
language in which we think about art of the past, such as “old
mistresses,” the term first coined by Ann Gabhart and Eliza-
beth Broun for their founding feminist exhibition at the Wal-
ters Art Gallery in 1972, pointing to gender ideologies already
encoded in our gender-exclusive terms for the artist. Others
touch on problematics, such as “vision and difference,” while
yet others propose formulations: “reference, deference and
difference” as the strategic and dynamic driver of avant-
gardes.14 Some propose axes for nonessentialist, postcolonial
comprehension of both the singularity and the historical and
geopolitical belonging of each artist: generations and geographies.
More propose methodologies for practice: differencing the canon
using feminist desire.15 My current working concept is “the vir-
tual feminist museum,” first presented in 2007 and having its
second major installation in 2013.16
The qualifier virtual relates to feminism, not to the
museum. Not cybernetic, the virtuality of feminism is philo-
sophical. As Henri Bergson taught us, the virtual is an unex-
hausted and as yet unrealized potentiality that may be
actualized variously at different times and places without
exhausting that which is still to come: virtuality. Far from
being over, dead, done with, feminism, I propose, should be
understood as becoming in this sense. Indeed, I suggest that
any radicality is not merely becoming-woman—as argued in
Gilles Deleuze and F elix Guattari’s formulation for postphal-
locentric culture—but becoming-feminist in the spirit of the
long-term meaning of feminism as a continuous work for
democracy, social justice, and the safe and dignified coexis-
tence of a plural and diverse humanity. Aspects of the
immense virtuality of feminism-still-to-come have been actual-
ized since the medieval period in the West and in world
cultures according to their specific time-scales and histories.
In the West, for instance, each feminist moment has been
shaped by the different priorities and possibilities of the era
of actualization, be that the contestation of crude misogyny
(Christine de Pizan), the struggle for virtue (Mary Wollstone-
craft), the right to political citizenship (suffrage movement),
the rights to free labor and human dignity as well as a gen-
dered identity (the antislavery movement), the right to revolt
(suffragette movement), the rights to work and to education
(early twentieth century), the rights to one’s own body, sex-
ualities, and safety from violence and degradation (later
twentieth century). Worldwide feminist contestations con-
front the intersections of different patriarchies and histories
in their varied temporalities, increasingly in dialogue with
each other as modernization opens new pathways for change
as well as importing new risks. Equality (always incomplete
and relative to existing states of selective inequalities) is one
minor if necessary precondition for feminism; it is not femi-
nism’s destination. The most recent feminist movements
worldwide in the later twentieth century are but another epi-
sode (and not a second wave that obliterates all that pre-
ceded and is thus shortsightedly named the first wave) that
had, however, a specific and novel dimension: a sustained
and expanding cultural dimension that also included the
first profound engagement between feminism and visual art.
This conjunction furthermore transformed art by the interro-
gation and the creativity that arose from within feminism that
was itself modified by the novelty of its cultural, intellectual,
and aesthetic turns. More actualizations of feminism’s virtual-
ity are to come. In turn they will be different, depending on
the current configuration of both possibilities and resistance.
The world that feminist artists, thinkers, and art historians
face now is radically different from that of the 1970s. It is
enlarged and scarred by radically diverse events such as the
end of Communism in Europe and the inception of new
phases of globalization after 1989, the rise of terror and
9/11, the Arab Spring and its anxious and still uncertain
aftermaths, continuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and
their legacies, world economic crisis, emerging economies.
Change is not necessarily improvement, although there have
been undeniable elements of genuine progress in limited
and privileged spheres.
Warburg’s model of concurrent encounters between mate-
rial, iconic traces of the various cultural moments’ struggles
with, renewals by, or regressions exhibited by resurgences of
the structuring tensions of humanity’s vulnerabilities vis-a-vis
the world on which it depends for life and the others
with which it cohabits that world enables a kind of feminist
thinking about the time-space formulations and their result-
ing pathos-formulations that specifically touch on sexual dif-
ference and, hence, on life making and its humanized
continuation, on alterity and formations of differentiated
subjectivities and sexualities.17 While Warburg’s intervention
in emergent Renaissance studies involved his making clear
how odd it was that pagan antiquity had “returned” to ani-
mate Christian culture and to initiate its long journey of
modernization through borrowing energizing Pathosformeln
from a pagan world, the virtual feminist museum notes that
the modern era is marked by revolution and catastrophe.
The latter has mandated not the revival of classical formulas

of Western antiquity but their abandonment in the face of
the horror of what happened in the real. The vision of a hab-
itable world (landscape) and the human body as idealized
locus of a projected humanity (the nude, perhaps) created
by the Greeks and perfected by Raphael and company in six-
teenth-century Italian art, then becoming the model for aca-
demic art education, was shattered beyond repair in the face
of what was done in the lands of Europe and elsewhere and
to human bodies in atrocities perpetrated by totalitarian
states and the genocidal regimes of the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. Among serious and thinking artists we can detect a
sense of the necessity for the invention of new formulations
for suffering and affective intensity adequate to the unprece-
dented events that have horrifically shaped our world. Let
me spell out this claim again: the classical imaginary, so often
and politically variously revived by the West, could be said to
have been violently shattered in what happened to the
human body in the West and now elsewhere during the
racialized genocides such as the Holocaust or Rwanda and
during the totalitarian experiments of the concentrationary
throughout the twentieth century.18 This possibility has
implications for how we think and write histories of art since
1945.
Warburg proposed a different concept of time—not direc-
tional, developmental, and historicist but bending, recurring,
repetitive, and, above all, traumatic. Warburg thought the
nascent discipline of Art History failed because it was plotting
out the histories of art without returns or that which resurfa-
ces and recharges, that is, without Nachleben: this difficult Ger-
man term has been translated as “survival” or “persistence.” I
prefer “afterlife,” which catches the vividness of the living and
the relation to Freudian thought, to Nachtr€ a glichkeit, a concept
that Jean Laplanche translates as “Afterwardness.”19 I would
argue that Art History fails because, in the face of twentieth-
century history, it continues to plot out a history of art without
rupture and catastrophe.
It was once enough to complain, following Meyer Schapiro’s
critical reading of Alfred Barr’s exhibition Cubism and Abstract
Art (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936), that Barr had
created a “story of art” by substituting chronology for history,
floating art’s incessant flow above a formal grid of abstracted,
hence empty time.20 Writing his critique in 1937, Schapiro had
not yet integrated the implications of World War I, the Russian
Revolution of 1917, the stock market crash of 1929 in reshap-
ing art’s projects. Obviously, he was as yet not witness to what
was done during World War II, specifically, the massive experi-
ment in industrial genocide of two—the Jewish and Roma—
communities of Europe. Taking on board Theodor Adorno’s
renaming of the post-1945 era as “Nach Auschwitz” (nach
meaning both “after” and “toward”), I consider it necessary
now to orient art historical studies toward that which we come
after, which is defined by Adorno and others as the terrifyingly
novel condition of life and death on this planet. The shocks
multiply, from living under the postwar threat of nuclear
destruction in a world held nervously in a permanent Cold
War, to post-1989 political realignments, the shattering event
of 9/11, prolonged wars on several fronts in the first decade of
the twenty-first century, long-unresolved conflicts, a new crash
of 2007 . . . and on and on. If art has radically changed its forms
and grounds, should we be struggling to make a new temporal
WHITHER ART HISTORY? 13
category called the “contemporary” and be discussing appro-
priate art historical methodologies? Is that not still more of the
Barrian attempt to contain inside a comfortingly knowable
model the dramatic and sometimes even dangerous relations
between the historical, our imaginaries, and many varied sites,
including art, of critical thinking or response to the urgencies
of human living and dying in our time?
Warburg condemned the art historical trends he witnessed
around him as “aestheticizing art history,” which he consid-
ered irresponsible and deluding. If we allow Art History
to remain isolated inside its own fences, absorbed in its
abstracted history of art, it ceases to be a historical discipline
at all. It neither reads the past historically nor reads for the
historical in the art of its present. It offers a false screen(ing
off) of history by setting up an autonomous history—a history
of art alone, in which historically determining conditions are
framed and tamed as background or acknowledged vaguely
as context. For Warburg, what was necessary to think about
art was not “art history” but everything the discipline was in
his time seeking to set apart. Warburg’s multifaceted and
interdisciplinary library materially and symbolically instates
the intellectual traveling between fields of knowledge and
representation that might be necessary to make any sense of
this deeply complex mnemonic, affective, and symbolic oper-
ation he called the image. It is worth noting that Warburg
did not loosen the image entirely from the subject of its crea-
tion. His is not an art history without artists, but it is not an
art history of artists.
Institutionalized Art History began as a university disci-
pline in the German-language universities of Europe, whence
it was exported to the rest of the world during the nineteenth
and early twentieth century (with the odd exception of Brit-
ain, which only belatedly joined in during the twentieth cen-
tury).21 From its inception, we know that the geopolitical
ideologies of nationalism shaped the manner in which the
field was being defined, even while a transnational axis of
“the European” was constructed by appropriating selective
sites in the ancient world as the foundations and recurring
forerunners of the Western. As Robert Nelson has shown
through tracking PhD classifications in the United States
academy, we still work in the basic frameworks of national
cultures, within which fall subsections of periods, schools,
movements, masters, and oeuvres.22 As a scholar well aware
of the dangerous place allocated to the outsider or minority
in homogenizing nationalist ideology, Warburg contested
historicism and nationalism by tracking the promiscuous
migration of images across a temporal-spatial planetarity (a
term I shall explain below) long before such concepts
became part of contemporary critical vocabularies.
Looking Sideways: Reading for the Planetary
In Death of a Discipline, the feminist postcolonial literary
scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considered the crisis in
both “Area Studies” and Comparative Literature in the Amer-
ican academy.23 Area Studies had enlarged the geopolitical
reach of interdisciplinary research concerning various coun-
tries and regions of interest to the United States in the post-
war/Cold War era. Comparative Literature had served to
expand into European languages the literary imagination of
American students, if less obviously motivated by political
14 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 1
expedience but still valuably so in terms of fostering postwar
world relations. Nevertheless, out of these not necessarily
humanistic but rather politico-ideologically motivated foun-
dations emerged the critical spaces in which innovative
literary studies shaped by feminist, queer, postcolonial theo-
retical initiatives have flourished. What now—asked Spivak in
2000, before even 9/11 as a new historical benchmark—
when the drivers that generated the space of possibility
within Area Studies/Comparative Literature no longer have
relevance? Are these projects tainted by their political condi-
tions of emergence or to be preserved for some of their now-
valued critical effects and recast to meet new exigencies?
Spivak’s complex exploration of the vicissitudes of her
overlapping fields concludes with two points relevant to this
inquiry into the current dilemmas within our disciplinary
area. That area seems to be consolidating around its tradi-
tional procedures. I detect a certain reconsolidation of the
old ways or, rather, signs of a deep blocking of the recent
innovations by an obduracy that can weaken any critique
through prolonged indifference and a real failure to accept
that its arguments need be digested and incorporated. At
the same time it is, paradoxically, constantly searching for
some novelty. This trend, I suggest, serves also to keep
marginal the really critical innovations of the later twentieth
century in our expanded field by suggesting that they
are now outmoded, even before they have been fully taken
in. So, who needs to know about the difficult, challenging art
histories anymore if they are superseded? Whither Art
History?
One of the novelties at the moment is “World Art” or
“World Art Studies,” and another, not a novelty but a mad
dash, is the wholesale shift in doctoral studies, curating, and
art writing to “the contemporary” and curatorial studies/
practice. What is art history if it is becoming the companion
of the endlessly and proliferatingly synchronous? How is the
past of art becoming merely an archive of referents against
which the constantly novel and emerging might be legiti-
mated? What kinds of art and historical consciousness does
the liquid modernity of this “new” new Art History promise,
or perhaps evacuate? Of what are the globalizing and the
contemporary symptoms? Is this the Hegelian telos of the his-
toricist and developmental tendencies that has not ended, as
Hegel forecast, in art yielding to philosophy but in art suc-
cumbing to market-led curation with its value-legitimizing
scholarly texts, both of whose underlying engines are as eco-
nomic as ever and reflect the increasing influence of art deal-
ers and collectors?
Why has there been such a widespread turn to the contem-
porary? What is causing it? What has sustained it? How do we
read it as symptomatic of a larger historical shift to liquid
modernity and a local art historical reorientation to its own
economic unconscious? What happens to Art History when it
effectively abandons any kind of historical framing or critical
work of memory? What relation exists between “historical”
Art History and Contemporary Art History?
Spivak argued that we now confront globalization, by
which she means the unfettered economic sway of transna-
tional capitalism without borders and thus subject to few
local political checks and balances such as were possible
within the earlier national phase of this economic-political
system. Yet we do not want to retreat from the geocultural
expansion of our imaginations and the futures fostered in
the postcolonial and international feminist projects, since
both created transverse and differentiated collectivities. So
Spivak proposes a virtual counterconcept to the global, which
she names the planetary.
I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization
is the imposition of the same system everywhere. In the
gridwork of electronic capital, we achieve that abstract
ball covered in latitudes and longitudes, cut by virtual
lines, once the equator and the tropics, etc., and newly
drawn by the requirements of Geographical Information
Systems. . . . The globe is our computer. No one lives there.
It allows us to think that we can aim to control it.24
Spivak then proposes the planet as a counterfigure that
opens onto a different way of being and thinking:
The planet is a species of alterity, belonging to another
system: yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable
to a neat contrast to the globe. I cannot say, “the planet,
on the other hand.” When I invoke the planet, I think of
the effort required to figure the (im)possibility of this
underived intuition.25
Not given or imagined, the planetary, like virtual feminism, is
a becoming based on the work we do both in opposition to the
dominion of globalization and in fidelity to incomplete
dreams and desires for deep and real social justice and world-
wide human dignity.
Finally, arising from what Spivak defines as our condition
as humans intending toward one another, comes planet
thinking. Instead of imagining the global world as a place
dominated by market thinking, rendering people and the
earth instruments of use, Spivak defines humanity as drawn
to its others—drawn to itself, in fact. Intending toward the
other may arise from notions such as mother’s love (family
bonds), belonging to a nation (national identification) or to
a religion (being the children of this or another divine being,
the earth or nature as the source of bonding). But these have
proven as divisive as they have served to create bonds, locally
and exclusionary. Spivak poses the planet as a concept that
displaces all of these without equally falling into globalism or
universalism, empty concepts, often secreting their own privi-
leged groups behind their facade. For Spivak, the becoming-
planetary involves a specific kind of work that we do together.
In the case of education as a distinctive and precious locus of
encountering the other through literature or through art,
Spivak privileges reading as a fundamental necessity. Is it that
simple?
Crucially, while displacing the imagined sources of our
bonding with or interest in others, planetary thought stops in
its tracks the kind of centrism (androcentrism, Eurocentrism,
Christian-centrism, and so on) that postcolonial critics
repeatedly detect in what remain colonial gestures of expan-
sion practiced by the First and Second Worlders. Alterity, the
otherness we seek in order to know ourselves better, is not
derived from those centered in privileged locations.
Planetary thinking disowns many of the models for thinking
the world and its others. That strange phrase means that we

are neither thinking about them nor conceptualizing them:
“them” becoming an other to the “we” who make them an
object of thought. We think the issue. Thinking is a process,
thinking otherness, thinking the world, thinking sexual dif-
ference, means encountering the challenge of that which
already includes us and from which we cannot abstract our-
selves as “thinkers about . . .” As a concept that we cannot fully
master, planetary thinking is, therefore, a transgression of
our typical conceptual models, and of the mastery encoded
in such models. Planetary thinking involves reading for the
words, voices, images, inscriptions of those other planetary
subjects with an openness and self-fragilization—a concept I
learned from Bracha Ettinger that might enable us to sense
this differencing configuration of our relations with our
others via the mediation of the aesthetic practices we value.26
Having listed the names of alterity—names for the transcen-
dental figurations of what we think of as the origins of this
gift that intends us toward the other: mother, nation, god,
nature—Spivak writes:
Planet-thought opens up to embrace an inexhaustible tax-
onomy of such names. . . . If we imagine ourselves as plane-
tary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures
rather than global entities, alterity remains underived
from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as
much as it flings us away. And thus to think of it, is already
to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we meta-
phorize differently, as outer and inner space, what is above
and beyond our reach is not continuous with us as it is not
indeed specifically discontinuous. We must persistently
educate ourselves in this mind-set.27
Planetary thought is a mind-set to which we must move our-
selves by a practice she names as “reading.” Reading respects
the figurality of language that becomes the space for poiesis,
for a making or a becoming of meaning that arrives through
our work with its figurations, poetics, movements, and
struggles for articulation. We have borrowed “reading” from
literature so that we now read films or read images. I translate
the rhetorical, hence figural, aspects of literary language into
both visual semiotic and frankly formal analysis of all aspects
of what Ettinger frames as artworking (using a Freudian
economy of “work” as labor and transformation rather than
as finished product: the work of art).28
I cannot pretend to grasp immediately all the implications
of Spivak’s argument, enriched as it is with such deep involve-
ment with philosophical and literary systems so much larger
than my own, often only Euro-American, imaginative world
offered through both Art History and its limited histories of
art. I am quoting it because the effort of understanding how
such a thinker is working away at issues that touch us all in
the arts and humanities is precisely what I have always felt
was necessary for me to pursue my own studies in producing
differencing histories of art. Art History in our time has
come to suffer from its intellectual isolation, defining its
specificity against rather than in real conversation with other
modes of thinking.
Perhaps we would do well to recall the much broader intel-
lectual conditions under which the nineteenth-century initia-
tors of art historical scholarship were trained before there
WHITHER ART HISTORY? 15
was Art History as a fully independent subject. The German
speakers whom we still respect as the founders of Art History,
like Warburg and W€ olfflin, studied theology, philosophy,
philology, were beginning to encounter anthropology and
early psychology, and were not afraid of borrowing from vari-
ous forms of emerging science. This intellectual range does
not correspond to our twentieth-century liberal arts degree,
for the profound level at which those scholars studied these
resources for thinking clearly surpassed the shallow repast
collected by the mere tasters in the supermarket of under-
graduate intellectual grazing.
The second point I want to make with Spivak is that she
understands the implications of her own field—literary stud-
ies—as touching on the major issues of something as vast as
human life on this planet. This is not conventional human-
ism. It is attuned to the altered conditions—the planetary in
the making versus the globalizing—of humanistic thought,
altered both historically and theoretically. In suggesting the
planetary as a counterforce to the arrogance of the carto-
graphic mapping and then reading of world cultures “in
translation” or the placatory gestures of multiculturalism in
the face of new student constituencies that reflect the effects
of globalization, Spivak invokes Sigmund Freud to ask, “Is
this to render our home uncanny?”29 The home in question is
the planet as it might have been made through our work as cul-
tural analysts. Spivak’s reference to Freud reminds us that the
German word for uncanny is unheimlich, the undoing of the
notion of the homely: the heimlich. In his essay “The Uncanny,”
his most enigmatic statement about the sources of the aesthetic
affect, Freud argued that the chilling—uncanny—effects of
finding something unexpectedly “homely”—affecting—signal
the return of a repressed trace of the first dwelling, the moth-
er’s body or, rather, the birth canal. Spivak leaps from Freud’s
heavily linguistic preamble and then overtly corporeal
referencing to argue that the purpose of planetary work is not
to make us feel at home but to unsettle any mastering of the
world, and to make us fragile before affect and before alterity.
In our attempt to track planetarity as making our home
unheimlich or uncanny, we will construct an allegory of
reading whereby the discursive system shifts from vagina
to planet as a signifier of the uncanny, by way of nation-
alist colonialism and post-coloniality. This is in keeping
with my method: gender as a general critical instrument
rather than something to be factored in in special
cases.30
If once the thought of a body as first home generated anxiety
that accompanies any return of the repressed, might the
confrontation with the planet as the condition of human life
from which we have wandered and to which we might now
return not also generate a certain uncanniness, an unsettle-
ment, which is, in fact, one of the key affects of the aesthetic?
Might that be also why we value the aesthetic not as
that which we must map, explain, know, and master but
through which we might learn another mode of living
on this planet with the otherness of other times as well as the
otherness of others to us in the present?
Spivak also thinks with gender as at once a real, effective
axis of differential and asymmetrical power relations and as a
16 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 1
symbolic organization of hierarchical thought, images, and
fantasies. What would happen if we took feminist thought
seriously, therefore, rather than imagining “gender” to be
that “thing” that gendered people, that is, women, uncom-
fortably go on about, and that might just be acknowledged
with a passing nod toward political correctness? We would
grasp the figurative power of gender as a thinking resource
that exceeds its own particular issue to become a critical
instrument for undoing hierarchy and encountering alterity.
In other words, if, instead of anxiously thinking of alterity as
a former home or origin—the maternal body, mother,
nation, earth, and all figures that lodge us in beginnings,
hence risking fundamentalisms—we took the planet—the
intending toward one another of cohabitants of a shared but
only loaned “world”—as the constitutive alterity of our work
as thinkers and scholars or creators, what would be the effects
on our practices as scholars and teachers working in that rad-
ical field of art as making, thinking, representing, transform-
ing? What would be the strategies we would evolve to practice
such planetary thinking in writing and the classroom? How
could the study of art’s histories facilitate planetary thinking
and resist the homogenizing implications of globalization as
a fake erasure of nationalist and hierarchical thinking deeply
embedded in the conventions of Art History and its
machinery?
Let me come back to Art History, which can be defined as a
geopolitical thinking system. Founded in the nineteenth cen-
tury, an era that witnessed the formation of nationalisms, the
discipline served to enshrine that model of separating art
into national cultures while also supplying fantasies of dis-
crete sources in culture, language, religion, and art forms for
the nations’ cultural narratives of their origins. The national
is reflected in the layouts of our museums, the categories of
our books, the shape of our curricula, where the art of the
world is divided, regionally in the prenational eras and by
national school in the modern eras. Is one of the effects of
this mode of thinking to leave without a legitimated space in
art’s histories the transversal cultural groups such as women
or cultural or sexual minorities?
Disciplinary Art History enshrines a politically cartographic
imagination. The double gesture of imagining a World Art
History and moving to the globalized contemporary fails to
deconstruct that legacy. How to begin to think in “planetary”
rather than in global terms: the former being grounded, con-
nective, and differentiating, and the latter being abstracting,
homogenizing, and indifferent? Again the legacies of femi-
nist thought peek through. Teresa de Lauretis identifies the
phallocentric system not as producing sexual difference
despite appearing to produce masculine and feminine as a
complementary pair, but as enacting “sexual indifference”
in which there is in effect only one sex, the masculine and its
other, an empty space of the not-masculine named the
feminine. Phallocentric sexual difference does not imagine
alterity; it represses its possibility in establishing the hege-
mony of one sex (mirrored and supported by its emptied
non-other).31
How can we share the planet while allowing it to be
uncanny, that is, a source of anxiety that may be important
for resisting the mastering of our own sense of fragility by cre-
ating abstracted models? Spivak’s recommendation or,
rather, her explanation of what is left to us in the humanities
as teachers concerns a practice of reading and of teaching read-
ing. Instead of a satellite view of a globe from afar beamed
across space by telecommunications, we need to be close
down with the loci of aesthetic inscriptions and the attempts
at voicing lived experiences in the spaces of the commons of
the planetary. Demonstrating what this means in her own
field by a series of close readings of texts from different geo-
cultural spaces and their literatures, each in their own lan-
guage, read necessarily, however, with translation (not in
translation as a substitution), Spivak clarifies that something
must happen in this encounter she calls reading that is not a
search for either identity (of the writer/artist) or identifica-
tion (with the writer/artist). “What I am attempting is to
force a reading. I would like to see if the text could possibly
sustain the turning of identitarian monuments into docu-
ments for reconstellation.”32 Here is the echo of Benjamin’s
constellation. How often is the art historical purpose to place
a work, to establish its identity in relation to an author, a
place, a movement, a style, a chronology, a culture, a national
spirit? Linking it to the lessons of Kristeva for whom litera-
ture is a working away and transgressing of authority and bor-
ders, discussed above, the idea of reading renders an image
or a text a space for reconstellation of relations of the plane-
tary community, not interpretation of a reified object of
culture.
While attuned to thinking resources that do not reconfirm
the procedures that define the discipline’s dominative carto-
graphic expansionism, Spivak’s gesture of engagement to dis-
avow domination is close reading. Deceptively simple,
reading, nonetheless, assumes a difference in and a produc-
tivity for the text, a resistance to mastery, that can be shown
to be at work by the kind of reading practice that seeks
“persistently and repeatedly [to] undermine and [to] undo
the definitive tendency of the dominant to appropriate the
emergent. It must not let itself be constituted by the
demands of liberal multi-culturalism alone.”33 The process of
reading texts for their figures of difference requires training,
in the classroom, a being together in time and space and
with the teacher. Can one to learn to read this way through
Mass Open On-Line Courses? I do not think so. Spivak insists
that teaching, and, therefore, learning, is intimate, with the
text and with the momentary community of reading between
peers and generations.
I have always sensed that much of what is done in the his-
tory of art classroom is a kind of disciplining of thinking
about art. The discipline requires that the students learn the
defining habits not only of the discipline’s distinctive proce-
dures for the study of art but also of its mode of narrating a
story of art. This disciplining is more urgent the larger the
art historical constituency or its potential influence. Consis-
tency and even uniformity of message safeguard the passing
on of cultural capital for the next generation or across social
constituencies. The museums perform a similar function,
but architecturally and curatorially, telling their publics
again and again the same story through selection, layout,
and text panel. The same story is the politically right (not the
politically correct!) story. A few novel touches may season the
old story, such as a methods class that mentions feminist,
queer, or postcolonial perspectives, but only as potential

supplements, that are thus included only to be located at the
margins.
What I am exploring is not the rejection of one set of
disciplining procedures for another that leads to new disci-
plines, such as the breakaway from art history into visual cul-
ture, the latter rejecting the foci of art, artist, and historical
succession as their objects of study. If the making of art and
its complex negotiations of its own practices both semioti-
cally and historically remain a chosen focus, how could the
Art History classroom be imagined as a locus of learning to
read? What is being read (this is not necessarily to make this
verbally based, as we talk now about reading a painting or art-
work) then ceases to be an object to be inserted into existing
taxonomies of art historical knowledge (periods, movements,
styles, iconographies, oeuvre, personal intentions, artistic
development, genres, and so on); it becomes what we might
partially come to know otherwise as itself a carrier of alterity
opening onto the virtuality of the planetary. What kind of
knowledge would be produced and what kind of subjects
would we become through such readings that make art not
the support for the narratives we learn to, or are disciplined
to inhabit but the critical space of its own working through/
working out as part of this making of the planetary as a fic-
tion we are constantly in process of forging and seeking to
share?
Idolatry Resists Iconoclasm
In 1978, Rozsika Parker and I completed our first collabora-
tion on the book published eventually in 1981 as Old Mis-
tresses: Women, Art and Ideology.34 In reviewing the already
quite considerable international scholarly literature on
“Women Artists,” we asked ourselves a specific question: Why
was our project dismissed as ridiculous by our academic
supervisor, a distinguished academic and later director of a
major modern art museum? If we could only understand
what made studying women in the history of art appear to
him both trivial and laughable, we felt we would have been
able to expose not merely old-fashioned prejudice, indiffer-
ence, or forgetfulness of women artists but also the structural
character of an active, we would now say performative, institu-
tionalized androcentrism and sexism. What we discovered
was that the discipline of Art History systemically produces
an androcentric and exclusivist canon as its (desired) effect.
A selective canon is secured through the already gender-
freighted terms “art/artist,” whose apparently unmarked
neutrality disguises the appropriation and occupation of
these terms by a geopolitically, socially, and ethnically privi-
leged masculinity. Feminist analysis of the discipline’s forma-
tions, habits, protocols, and its own political unconscious
stripped away the cloak of invisibility so as to allow for critical
reformulations of ways of doing art history and reading art-
works and their institutional, critical, and expository sites of
practice and distribution by many constituencies. Even as I
use this vocabulary, its foreignness to the conventional terms
of Art History identifies the modes of hegemonic resistance
to such a critical exposure embedded in its preferred terms
which are, in effect, its modes of thinking.
In 1980, I showed how a feminist approach could yield an
analysis of the mythic construction of “Van Gogh.” I identi-
fied the discursive production of an artistic subject for the
WHITHER ART HISTORY? 17
work of art as what Art History in its various forms performs,
notably in the modern period.35 Art is clearly made; but “the
artist” is not synonymous with the producer. “The artist”
becomes the mythic locus of invested fantasies of authorship,
selfhood, intentionality, and the autonomous interiority of
meaning making. This artist-as-sign is, I suggested, an effect
of writing procedures and discursive conventions that secures
the artwork as the product of, and hence the site of inscrip-
tion of, an autonomous, self-creating subject of a particular
kind: the artistic subject who is “set apart” and sacralized by
the modes of discursive construction.
I followed up this initial analysis with a much longer study
of the issues of authorship, because it had become necessary
to resist the banalization of Roland Barthes’s idea of the
death of the author by explicating his text more closely and
comparing the function of the author in literary studies,
where Barthes revealed it actually serves to instate the author-
ity of the critic/interpreter, to that somewhat different but
parallel operation of the artist in art historical practice, nota-
bly, in modernist criticism.36 I also worked through the
aggravated issue of the relation between the life and the
work, the biographical narrative of the artist and the formal
procedures of the artwork. These twin poles of Giorgio Vasari
and Roger Fry, as it were, remain unresolved and anxiously
misunderstood among scholars and students even today.
Vincent van Gogh was again my case study. First, I explored
nonauthorial models that nonetheless allowed us to consider
the artist as both an intending producer and a creative agent
participating in, if never determining entirely, the work s/he
made, which was, once made, subject to textual reading. Tex-
tual reading, in literary theory, means intertextuality, where
meaning is produced in relation to codes, genres, and refer-
ences. The key point is that the process of thus reading a work
does not involve tracing the source of its meaning back to
the artist, paradoxically found by conventional criticism in
the work and then projected out as the work’s anterior, and
personalized, source. Barthes suggested that in conventional
criticism, while the “author/artist” is the effect of textual
analysis of the work, the critic invents the artist as an imag-
ined space holding and personalizing all of the text’s levels
and meanings all the better to assert the critic’s interpreta-
tion under the guise of its being the artist’s own purposes.
This fiction of an author, as Barthes revealed it, occludes a
more critical reading for the artist as but one level of mean-
ing in a polyvocal text with many lateral relations to other
texts and other sites, and to history. It thus becomes possible
to include consideration of the specific effects of the artist as
a gendered, classed, and socially or culturally positioned pro-
ducer rather than the individualistic source and guarantee of
the humanistic meaning floating free from social determina-
tions (the word referring to both pressures and limits within
which the producer inevitably operates socially, culturally,
and aesthetically).
In 1999, I revisited the initiating problematic of Art History
as discourse that Parker and I had explored in Old Mistresses.
After almost thirty years of feminist critique of gender exclu-
sion, the question was no longer, “What is the canon and how
is it formed?” or even, “Why is it selective?” Now my questions
were, “What keeps the canon in place?” and “What accounts
for its persistence in the face of the massive evidence of
18 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 1
international creative work and histories by both women and
men?” This time my answer took me from Barthes and Michel
Foucault to psychoanalysis, the thinking machine that deals
with the nonrational forces that inflect actions, fantasies, and
thought systems. I argued that the canon’s tenacity could not
be accounted for by a potentially corrigible, gender-ideologi-
cally-inflected scholarly ignorance. Instead, such tenacity regis-
tered a deep psychological investment in, as well as narcissistic
fantasies about, the artist. The canon is, I argue, part of the
apparatus that produces and preserves the fiction of the crea-
tive individual that I had identified as the deep discursive effect
of Art History’s normative procedures represented by the typi-
cal forms of research and writing: the monograph and the cata-
logue raisonne. Psychoanalysis enabled me to understand both
the passionate attachment to the artist as core of the project of
modern art history and the continuing inability to enlarge the
field of valued creative subjectivities who could be acknowl-
edged as artists.37 A different kind of resistance had to be
deconstructed.
Witness to the production of the early monographs that
created Leonardo and Michelangelo, among others, in the
then new forms of academic and connoisseurial art history in
the later nineteenth century, Freud identified an affective
knot in the preferred form of the monograph. The knot was
the overpowering fascination with the biography of the artist.
We—connoisseurs and public alike—are, according to
Freud, most interested in the stories of art as stories of artists
because the “artist” functions in the literature as a figure con-
taining both the early infantile idealization of the father as
omnipotent and the substitutive creation and narcissistic pro-
jection of a hero who emerges when the father’s fallibility is
exposed. This combination of the theological (father ideali-
zation) and the narcissistic (hero idealization) overdeter-
mines the investment in the construction of the artist as the
subject of art because the artist is both an ideal mirror for the
art lover (the narcissistic dimension) and a figure kept at a dis-
tance, other, and elevated by genius to sufficient difference to
reignite theological worship (the idealizing dimension).38
Following Freud’s logic, it becomes apparent why the inte-
gration of diversity into Art History never quite happens. For
no subject does woman-as-artist perform such a combination,
women art historians included. For the masculine subject,
straight or queer, woman is the site of neither theological
nor narcissistic idealization. If we accept for the moment
Freud’s difficult but astute concept of the feminine subject
as a subject formed through both the disappointed recoil
into the negation of the feminine-maternal and the envy of
the phallic that enables a kind of transgendering identifica-
tion with the phallus and aspiration to receive it indirectly
from the father, we can see that there is also, in the phallo-
centric imaginary by which she, like he, is formed, nothing of
value in that which is coded feminine (narcissistic)/maternal
(idealization). In many cases, women scholars comfortably
identify with the dual idealization of the canonical masculine
artist through femininity’s remarkable psychological flexibil-
ity generated by the much maligned, but in fact creative,
force of envy.
This account then further raises the deeper question of
how it became possible at all, psychically speaking, for feminist
interest in women artists to have emerged. In Differencing the
Canon (1999) I reflected on the minimal cultural and psychic
capital that accrues from working on women artists, so deval-
ued or valueless within the phallocentric psychic structure
that sustains the phantasmic underpinnings of the canon. I
proposed, therefore, the neologism “feminist desire,” to
introduce, politically as well as psychically, a counterdesire
for difference, that I would now, using a concept of aesthetic
sexual difference created by Bracha Ettinger, name fascinance
before a woman other.39 Feminist desire is not erotic in the
homoerotic sense. It is linked to fascinance, which Ettinger
defines as a yearning on the part of the girl-who-is-not-yet-a-
woman to learn what it is to become an adult woman through
a prolonged moment of gazing—which is not specular, more
an opening to learning through watching and absorbing.
This yearning must be reciprocated by the hospitality of the
other, already mature woman toward the curious girl in a
manner that is not erotic while still including sexuality as an
inevitable part of the transmission that assists the girl in her
becoming-woman. This other woman offers the time and
space for this girl-beneath-the-woman (Ettinger’s term for
the immanent and imminent adult femininity of the femi-
nine subject) to learn about femininity, not as the negated
other produced by the phallocentric Oedipal complex, but
as what Ettinger formulates as ffam: femme-fatale-autre-me re,
pronounced like the French word femme, meaning “woman.”
Ettinger’s proposition accords with the fragmentary insights
Freud himself had, late in his thinking, about the potentiality
for formations of feminine subjectivity and sexuality that
were not explicable via his Oedipal model.40 Subsequently,
theorization of the feminine has tended to be linked only to
the pre-Oedipal phase and to the conflicts of the mother/
daughter axis. Ettinger introduces the concept of a formative
encounter for the feminine subject with feminine desirability
located in a site of femininity other than the maternal,
enabling us to imagine how culturally, through such psychic
dispositions, we might invest value and desirability in, for
instance, the intellectual and artistic creations of women,
thus explaining the basis for a differencing psychic nexus
parallel to the idealizing of the masculine father/hero that I
have suggested has held an almost all-masculine canon in
place.
So long as the phallic logic of subject formation rules as sole
sovereign over our understanding of subjectivity, however
much we research, write about, and argue for the interesting
quality of artists who are women, a deep bedrock of resistance
remains in place in both masculine and phallicly identified
feminine subjects who may be unable to acknowledge or be
open to such fascinance, and remain unmoved by feminist
desire. What we might hope for consciously—evidence shift-
ing the scholarly world to accept an inclusive vision of the his-
tories of art—is unconsciously blocked.
Film theorist Kaja Silverman offers another reading for the
psychic dispositions that are necessary for fostering feminist
consciousness through her work on Julia Kristeva’s revalua-
tion of the maternal-homosexual facet and on Freud’s propo-
sition of the coexistence of positive and negative (in the
photographic sense) Oedipus complexes. Freud allowed for
a negative Oedipus complex in which the mother is desired
by the daughter. This facilitates representational support for
another phantasmic scene in which that which is the other

woman—the m/Other and the Mother—acquires desirability
for what they have done, thought, and made.41 Both Silver-
man and Ettinger, in different formulations, remind us that
to change the psychic economy of our disciplines, we must
want to know differently: that is, phallocentric models of
desire and psychological formations can inhibit the desire
for knowledge of what has been rendered by them undesir-
able as the figure of identification and idealization.
Feminism can be understood as a rewriting of desire, under-
pinned by fascinance.
Furthermore, when, as Spivak suggests, we use gender as a
thinking machine, we can also see that gender as symbolic
orchestrator of asymmetrical difference and valuation colo-
nizes all manner of relations of difference—class, ethnic,
colonial, geopolitical, and so on—rendering only one figure
the icon of desirably narcissistic identification and theologi-
cal worship. Because of the damage done by dominative
orders of class, race, colonialism, homophobia, and more,
self-defense against the disabling hegemony of white mascu-
linity, leads othered, wounded masculinities to invest in phal-
lic identification. They themselves find it hard to
accommodate to being one with other undesirable and
unidealizable artist-subjects, such as women.
What has come of all this exploration into the discursive
formation and psychic investments that shape the larger or
deeper structures of art historical thinking? I would answer:
very little. I see very little real impact of such feminist writing
across the discipline. Undoubtedly, there is some, respectful
at best, superficial at worst, acknowledgment of the feminist
project. Personal respect for the scholars who have forwarded
it is also evident, but often without deeper engagement with
the continuous unfolding of each intellectual project or the
overall project of feminist thinking itself. Feminism is more
often confined to an author name rather than being grasped
as many different sets of ideas that need to be worked
through, digested, and even integrated in all scholarship.
The multisited and internally agonistic feminist critique’s
demand on the hegemonic practices of Art History radically
to take on board the analytic interpretations of the neurotic
knots and the political unconscious of the discipline has
been ignored or, I would even suggest, repressed. As I survey
the current field, I do not see evidence of the discipline
allowing itself to be changed in any way that has rendered
normal such a critical reading of its disciplinary formation.
Labeling it as “feminist,” and by this naming, setting it aside
while appearing to acknowledge its presence, refuses the
feminist transformation of the practice of Art History to the
point at which gender and sexual difference would become
part and parcel of our thinking operations rather than a spe-
cial case, an addition, something with which those “feminists”
occupy themselves.
Put in simple terms, the idolatry (of the artist) deep within
Art History has resisted and repressed the critical iconoclasm
of feminist and other interventions. Worse, I have recently
begun to notice how pathetically inadequate what is pre-
sented or taught as the “feminist” intervention in art or the
history of art has been. Both androcentric and feminist art
histories are creating for feminism what I can only name a
bad memory. Despite the energetic attempts of many femi-
nist scholars from left and right to shift the academic
WHITHER ART HISTORY? 19
institutionalization of an indicative and provisional narrative
as the only narrative of feminism and the history of art, the
story of waves, or of two generations—and of American ver-
sus British art historical tendencies, culturalist/essentialist ver-
sus theoretical/poststructuralist/postmodernist oppositions—
remains the “truth” that most students now receive and hence
confuse with a much more interesting and infinitely more
complex history that bears very little relation to these recur-
ring tropes of generations, waves, and theoretical oppositions.
When I listen to papers given at the Annual Conference of
the College Art Association or meet with prospective gradu-
ate students from all over who wish to study feminist art his-
tory and theory, I encounter such profound distortions
presented as unquestionable historical truths that I can only
once again turn to my psychoanalytic resources to explain
this unconsciously repeated symptom. Not quite a murder-
ous impulse, reducing the complexity, intellectual brilliance,
and ethical beauty of a vast world landscape of feminist crea-
tivity in, and feminist thought about, art to reductive, opposi-
tional categories effectively kills thinking with it.
The British sociologist Claire Hemmings studied the trends
in the writing of the history of feminist theory in the social sci-
ences, published as Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of
Feminist Theory.42 Hemmings discerned three recurring narra-
tives—progress, loss, return—at work across the current his-
toricization of feminist scholarship. Each narrative dealt with
the positions and trajectories of the field since the 1970s in
ways that reflected differences in the politics and investments
in moments that were seen as progressive (from simple cultur-
alism to theoretically sophisticated poststructuralism), oblitera-
tive (genuine activism to arcane theoreticism), or measured
return (through integration of aspects of what the other two
narratives represented as either progress or loss). In Art His-
tory, too, we generally write histories of recent trends through
our differencing affiliations. The progress narrative welcomes
the critical turns toward theorizing difference and social, femi-
nist, queer, and postcolonial studies. The loss narrative decries
such theoreticist interference in a unifying activist orientation
and a focus on women’s agency. The reconcilers would fudge
the real agonism of the historical irruption of change, mixing
and matching.
Since the later 1980s feminists have produced such histori-
cizations, some as review articles in, for instance, this journal
(Thalia Gouma Peterson and Patricia Mathews, 1987), others
by means of exhibitions (such as WACK! Art and the Feminist
Revolution or Global Feminisms, 2007).43 These nongeographic
cartographies—namely, attempts at making sense of a com-
plex field of actions, many singular while sharing a common
inspiration of the women’s movement and expanding femi-
nist thinking—seek to impose grids of meaning by date, by
place, by category, by thematics. Yet no artist makes art in
order to belong within such grids, to be like anyone else even
if there are implicit conversations laterally and historically
that foster the making of art. Something gets lost in the
gridding up. The factors that enable sustaining conversations
between creative singularities, artists, are indeed to be found,
but in nondeterminate ways, in social, material, economic,
historical, and cultural conditions better teased out in close
reading and case study.44 So what would happen if we did
not create categories such as feminism, feminist art, or even
20 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 1
feminist art history, but considered the problematics that cer-
tain artists or art historians consider significant to work on
and with, or if we tried to track the informing and enabling
debates and then read the specific works (artistic or analytic)
that have been created for what they were doing, for the effects
they had strategically in the spaces and places in which they
intervened, rather than endlessly seeking to fit them in as the
icons of a named artist or group that reductively illustrate
the imposed art historical grid and categorization?
Let me give one example. A student who approached me
because she had become interested in the “conflicts between
Marxism and Feminism in the early 1970s” recently inter-
viewed me. She had a T. J. Clark–Pollock bun fight in mind,
that is to say, that the thinking of different art historians, their
conversations, shared concerns, and differentiating argument
had been iconized as two author names set in rank “-ismic”
opposition. To begin with, these terms marxism and feminism
are not helpful for grasping what was happening in Art His-
tory in Britain in the 1970s. Feminism was not an -ism yet. I
was active in the women’ s movement, which is how we under-
stood our moment in about 1970 to 1980. The movement in
Britain had little use for artists and certainly none for art his-
torians. Art was hardly relevant to this intensely political strug-
gle rewriting every aspect of everyday life. But as I was then in
the process of becoming an art historian, the feminist ques-
tion of gender in art and art history presented itself to me for
investigation in my “everyday” workplace: the academy. It was
obvious to ask: Were/are there women artists? But what would
it mean to discover them, and then, further, to make sense of
how and why their traces had been erased so recently while
also finding ways to write about them without making them
the negative cipher to “the artist”? What would Art History
become if we dared it to think inclusively?
At the same time, dissatisfaction with a reductive formalist
approach, which was not a critically understood formalism,
led me to an impassioned reading of certain books that
appeared as lifelines as I struggled to find a way to be an art
historian. One of these, written by T. J. Clark, reclaimed and
redefined an already existing, prewar social-historical prac-
tice in Art History that had been displaced by a postwar,
depoliticized formalism. The point about Clark’s book that
mattered was that it recharged art historical research with
intellectually rich debates about complex relations between
the historical and the formal. Social History of Art was never
antiform, never purely iconographic, never subject-oriented
instead of being formalist. Clark’s Social History of Art set
about to inquire how we could understand the modernist
negotiations between experience and form, the mediations
performed in art between history and ideology by means of
procedures, materials, and effects. Such questions were as
necessary to forging a historical and historical-materialist
thinking about gender relations and their formulation as they
were about thinking about racialization and its effects as they
were for Clark to think about class relations and their aes-
thetic inscriptions on both making and responding to art. As
various strands opened up with common purposes across
film, photography, and art history, queer, postcolonial, and
feminist as well as social historical projects, there were rich
exchanges as well as serious arguments. It was not a matter of
camps and identities, but debates sustained across
conferences, journals, conversations, and teaching. We were
trying, book by book, article by article, conference by confer-
ence, reading group by reading group, to work out massively
difficult issues with considerable implications for the nature
of our studies. Alliances and constellations formed and
reshaped, fed by many sources that each generated careful
reading and subsequent debate. What might in retrospect
have been all swept up into narratives of either progress or
loss were experienced by the participants as constantly chal-
lenging new possibilities opening up long-term projects. My
own experience of the reading groups, the debates, the small
magazines that circulated them, and the encounter with
artists often leading the field in such debates and in critical
awareness of the trends and stakes in both art and the world
has informed my own art historical understanding of the
necessity for careful reading of the conditions under which
any practices emerged and my own deep resistance to the
-ism mentality as a mode of making sense of either artistic or
thinking practices. Armed with the -ism, the student merely
sees what confirms that designation and misses the work
involved or the problematic being worked through, perhaps
badly. Instead of entirely returning to the historiographical
project of trying to understand historical events without
knowing what happened next, we need to suspend the habit
of retrospective gridding, even while we use every tool in the
bag of historical research methods and reading skills to think
about what artworks and art practices in their extended con-
ditions do.
Some argue that this phrasing should always be in the pres-
ent tense. I agree that art is always doing—working in the
present. This is the paradox. When, for instance, is Vermeer?
The works, we know, were physically made in a situated, tem-
porally precise practice in mid-seventeenth-century Delft. Yet
if we understand art in the sense of its continuous performa-
tivity, the work as art happens every time a painting by Ver-
meer is encountered by a viewer. The historicist tries to bind
“Vermeer” to the time-space of production and the identity
of the artist that such historical precision creates. But paint-
ing creates its own time-space that cannot thus be confined,
although it is interesting, for specifically art historical pur-
poses, to ask how its first viewers saw each work and in what
conditions such a practice had become possible. The capacity
not to be confined in time is indeed part of what makes
painting painting, both historically as an event in Western art
and in its capacity continuously to occur in viewings far
removed from the moment and place of emergence.
Those who would use only a present tense introduce a
semiotic capacity that is part of the work’s presence as pres-
entness. At the same time, those of us historically engaged
without being historicists also want to wonder about that
other question: What made this artwork possible at that
moment of its emergence, and what might knowing this tell
us even now as we encounter its continuous working, about
that otherness of its generative elsewhere in time and space?
History, I suggest, offers neither anteriority for the work nor
mere succession of cause-effect events. I define it as both sin-
gularity (its own time-space) and an enriching alterity (differ-
ence from that of the scholar or viewer). The configuration
of factors within which a Catholic convert called Johannes
Vermeer sat to paint day after day in oil on smallish canvases

and panels in a small town in the newly formed, predomi-
nantly Protestant Dutch mercantile republic, linked through
trade and travel to other centers of entirely differently config-
ured artistic production, cultural and political memory, does
interest me sufficiently to seek to find a means of holding
together what is happening in any painting when I view it
and what made it possible for that happening to have become
possible at the moment it was made.
To the inquiring student studying the tension between
marxism versus feminism in the 1970s, I responded by draw-
ing a scene of informal, overlapping, yet combative communi-
ties animated by a shared necessity to shift the paradigms we
had received without betraying the continuing efficacies, con-
ditions of existence, or even still unharvested potentials of a
field, Art History, that impassioned us. We never imagined
that we were conforming to some future movement; we were
engaged in debates and thinking about art and history. Ironi-
cally imposing the concept of a movement precisely stops
movement, loses track of the moves, shifts, returns, losses of
focus, recovered threads, arguments, accumulating outcomes,
long-term fidelities, and so forth. I cannot recognize anything
of my own memories of becoming an art historian engaged
with major challenges to the discipline in the reductive, banal,
stifling grids that are now being passed on to students in the
surveys and handbooks that furthermore wither and homoge-
nize very distinct intellectual projects under one banner, femi-
nism, or make feminism the site of simplified oppositions and
antagonisms to other equally impoverished -isms. Perhaps this
might explain my use of the neologism “thinking machine”
for theoretical and historiographical resources. It signals my
resistance to confinement by category and my desire to stress
the endless work of thinking itself.
The impulse to make Art History intelligible as a subject
to prospective students and interested readers performs, to
my mind, a terrible distortion. Various -isms are invented;
individuals become the icons of ideas, not the changing
producers of bodies of evolving thought. Diversity and
debate become tabulated as oppositions or developments,
initiation or supersession. Under the category of feminism,
radically different intellectual projects by so many creative
thinkers and scholars agonistically differentiated across
class, ethnicity, sexuality, and able-bodiedness, working con-
sistently and evolving over forty to sixty years, are frozen in
time, reduced either to concurrent “positions” or to sequen-
ces of Oedipal generations summarized in a few lines. The
student or reader becomes spectator to a kind of intellec-
tual bear pit. Art History claims all of us as merely its inci-
dents, some considered the backbone, others the sideshows
to be allusively mentioned in typifying categories and the
bunching of names. Those of us identified with the dynamic
field of “feminism” hence do not appear under general
methodological thinkers, or in the sections on the postcolo-
nial, the queer, the social historical, despite the urgency
with which, for my part, I consider myself constantly chal-
lenged to engage with all of these major questions in what-
ever I do.
Finally, I think the manner in which feminism is isolated
and demoted from being an equal participant in and inflec-
tor of the larger questions of authorship, textuality, sociality,
subjectivity, reading, history, meaning, practice, and so on
WHITHER ART HISTORY? 21
produces a caricature that effectively empties its intellectual
contribution to the discipline’s evolving present. Moreover,
identifying it with gender, often understood as synonymous
with women—a gender category that does not really impli-
cate all within and across gendering—ensures that feminist
thought and practice have become as unloved, undesirable,
uninteresting, and unexciting as I suggested “women” to be
in the overall structure of the psychologically androcentric
and sexist habits of the discipline as a whole.
A Moment of Reckoning
Far from being in any position to propose new directions or
to concur that Art History is currently lost or going some-
where else, I have been arguing for a moment of reckoning
with where it has been, for its immensely rich history in the
last fifty years. Why, I am asking, is the memory of Art History
so selective, so faulty, so self-destructive, so continuously
repressive of some of its most radical, even recent moments?
What modes of thinking close down or bowdlerize major ele-
ments of its own historiography? I have posed this psychoana-
lytically, since that is the historical, modernist thinking
machine for the study of desire, the unconscious, and phan-
tasy. I have also insisted on the integration of social-historical
and feminist, postcolonial and queer art historical reading
practices rather than their segregated categorization, some
still hot, others deadly cold.
I think we need to place the problem of any kind of think-
ing in relation to the conditions of our immediate history, its
material, economic, and political configurations to which we
are answerable even while they both shape the possibilities
and determine blockages for our work as critical intellectuals.
The tension between the discipline and the field it invents,
charts, and possibly deforms through its historically gener-
ated and politically effecting protocols requires a double per-
spective that can draw on the otherness of history to make
visible the lineaments of the present and to use the urgencies
of the present to elucidate new aspects of the otherness of
the historical.
While writing an impassioned plea for a closer reading and
real understanding of, if not digestion of and transformation
by, our recent intellectual past in the discipline and its vigor-
ous critical debates around difference, I realize that we face
perhaps even more desperate difficulties as the arts and
humanities are brutally marginalized by policies exclusively
valuing technological and narrowly defined economically
useful education.45 “Wither Art History!” might be closer to
what our governments are effectively saying. In Britain, Art
History, an already small and relatively young discipline, is
deeply threatened as a university subject by current govern-
ment policies that are reducing student numbers, closing
down degrees, and leaving brilliant graduate students jobless.
Maybe we, too, will soon be history, but one I hope that
might remain a resource for thinking, if only the history of
art’s histories that Art History allows us to know becomes gen-
uinely inclusive and seriously respectful: embracing the chal-
lenge of planetary thinking and its urgent, humanistic
defense of reading to learn difference rather than succumb-
ing to globalizing massification managed through reductive
categorization.
22 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 1
Griselda Pollock is professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art
and director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History,
at the University of Leeds. Her most recent publication is After-
Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation
(2013); The Nameless Artist: Charlotte Salomon’s “Leben?
oder Theater?” 1941–42 is forthcoming [School of Fine Art,
History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2
9JT, U.K., g.f.s.pollock@leeds.ac.uk].
Notes
1. Griselda Pollock, “Unexpected Turns: The Aesthetic, the Pathetic and
the Adversarial in the Longue Dure e of Art’s Histories,” Journal of Art Histo-
riography 7 (December 2012), http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress
.com/2012/12/pollock.pdf.
2. For a profoundly important discussion of the logic of supersession in the
formation of a Christian imaginary to displace the coevality of Judaism
and its recurrence in modern theory, including psychoanalysis, see
Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, His-
tory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
3. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
4. Exploring the political ambiguity of the term “postmodernism,” Hal Fos-
ter identified contradictory tendencies. One form of postmodernism was
conservative, antimodern, seeing the postmodern as the escape back
from the modern to tradition in some form. The other tendency was criti-
cal postmodernism seeing itself as a reckoning with both the contradic-
tions and betrayals of the modern and a critical exploration of its
unfinished business. Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in The Anti-
Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press,
1983), ix–xvi.
5. Let me clarify my terms. Art History refers to the institution and disci-
pline that studies a field, the history of art. My feminist and postcolonial
intervention challenges the hegemony of androcentric and Eurocentric
Art History by positing a plurality of histories, art’s histories, still being
written or being made. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism,
Femininities and the Histories of Art (1988; classic edition with new preface,
London: Routledge, 2003).
6. Sigrid Schade, Schadenzauber und die Magie des K€o rpers: Hexenbilder der
u hen Neuzeit (Worms: Werner, 1983).
fr€
7. Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accu-
mulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
8. A major debate in the 1970s was focused by American feminist economist
Heidi Hartmann in “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital and Class 3, no. 2 (1979): 1–33.
9. Griselda Pollock, “Aby Warburg and ‘Thinking Jewish’ in Modernity,” in
Thinking Jewish Modernity, ed. Jacques Picard et al. (Basel: University of
Basel Press, 2013).
10. The concept of a thinking machine is intended to move us on from intel-
lectual histories of ideas or great thinkers and to treat a practice, or a
body of work, as a complex set of resources for thinking through specific
problems. The concept is partially indebted to the philosophical inter-
ventions of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who sought to shift thought
from psychologism and to suggest instead a series of “machines,” such as
desiring machines, the literary machine, to which I am adding a thinking
machine. The stress falls on the assemblage of which any one site or per-
son is an element and focuses on combinations and connections rather
than discrete entities.
11. Evonne Levy, “The Political Project of W€
olfflin’s Early Formalism,” Octo-
ber, no. 139 (Winter 2012): 39–58.
12. I am capitalizing Real and Symbolic in the tradition of Jacques Lacan’s
vocabulary. The Real is the zone of trauma, in which the protosubject is
affected without the means to process incoming events, and the Symbolic is
the zone of thought and words. Warburg clearly did not use such concepts,
but I feel that in his pressing at the limits of a prepsychoanalytic explora-
tion of subjectivity and the psychological history of the image, his work
finds useful clarification in Lacan’s formulations of an unthought affective
zone and a zone of affects transformed into thought. The Symbolic capital-
ized differentiates a zone or register of signification and subjectivity from
the normal understanding of something being symbolic in semiotic terms.
13. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1994). She is referencing Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photo-
graphy,” in One Way Street and Other Essays, trans. Edmond Jephcott and
Kingsley Storey (London: Verso Books, 1979), 240.
14. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference; and idem, Avant-garde Gambits: Gen-
der and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).
15. While some readers will recognize these “concepts” as coinciding with
titles of books, it is important to stress that these titles mark a conceptual
field rather than a theme and are intended to become concepts with
which to work, beyond the book in which they are introduced, in creating
a constantly emerging feminist project.
16. Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and
the Archive (London: Routledge, 2007); and idem, After-Affects / After-Images:
Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum
(Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2013).
17. I use “moment” in conscious contradistinction to disciplinary Art Histo-
ry’s categorization of time into period and art into movement. Moments
indicate a different concept of temporality deeply derived from the lega-
cies of Walter Benjamin, who was in turn drawn to the kind of cultural
thinking developing around Warburg and his library. Benjamin used
terms such as “constellation” to think about conjunctions and relations.
His still fragmentary thoughts are assembled in one of his last manu-
scripts, “On the Concept of History” (1940), published as “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah
Arendt (London: Fontana, 1970), 255–66.
18. For the distinction between the Holocaust and “the concentrationary,”
see Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, eds., Concentrationary Memories
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). See also Griselda Pollock, “From Horrorism
to Compassion: Refacing Medusan Otherness with Adriana Cavarero and
Bracha Ettinger,” in Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art & the Image in Post-
Traumatic Cultures (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 159–98.
19. The Freudian concept, also variously translated as deferred action, refers
to the relay between an event that happens but cannot yet be assimilated,
and is therefore traumatic, and a later occurrence that may inherit the
surcharge of unassimilated affect associated with the earlier trauma. That
event, however, comes to exist in this secondary situation, creating the
paradox of an originary repetition. Freudian thought thus curves time
back on itself while conceptually holding two events apart. Thus, it is not
merely a sense of persistence or survival, but reanimation of still-charged
event or memory by its reconstellation with a later moment that both
needs and inherits this earlier freight of affect. At times this relation can
be regressive; at other times it is a renewal. For Warburg, as for Freud, the
analytic question is, in a sense, always “political.” On Nachtr€
a glichkeit, see
Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardness,” in Essays on Otherness
(London: Routledge, 1999), 260–65.
20. Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly (January–
March 1937): 77–98, reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art: Selected Papers
(New York: George Braziller, 1996), 185–211. On the cover of Alfred
Barr’s exhibition catalog Cubism and Abstract Art is a diagrammatic repre-
sentation of the origins of modern art in the work of four masters: Paul
Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh. From
them flow arrows clustering in major movements such as Cubism and
leading ultimately to geometric and nongeometric abstraction via various
minor movements. The chart creates a destiny for modern art. It is a bril-
liant conceptualization, ordering the chaos of competing coteries and
groupings into a logic that is not without its insight into and relevance to
one interpretation of the trajectory in art of the early twentieth century.
Social historians of art have repeatedly used this diagrammatic cover as a
kind of shorthand for what they oppose. This shortchanges Barr’s
achievement historiographically and often fails to pierce the deeper sig-
nificance of what is thus occluded and, more important, why evident ele-
ments of the complexity of modern art and its many participants were
rendered invisible and unintelligible by Barr’s schema. Schapiro’s coun-
ternarrative, and his politically acute analysis of abstraction as the out-
come of a logic relating to contemporary capitalism, its alienations and its
imaginative oppositions, did not, in contrast, become as hegemonic as
that which, in Barr’s model, made social and political foundations of
modernism unimaginable.
21. For a superb history of the national formations of the discipline in
Europe, see Matthew Rampley et al., Art History and Visual Studies in
Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks (Leiden: Brill,
2012).
22. Robert Nelson, “The Map of Art History,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997):
28–40.
23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003). The book is the published form of the Welleck
Library Lectures in Critical Theory delivered in 2000 at the University of
California, Irvine.
24. Ibid., 72.
25. Ibid.
26. Bracha Ettinger, “Fragilization and Resistance,” in Fragilization and Resis-
tance (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, 2009), 97–134.

27. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72–73.
28. On Ettinger’s thesis about art working, see Pollock, After-Affects / After-
Images, 1–36.
29. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche,” 1919), in Art and
Literature, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Pen-
guin Books, 1990), 339–76.
30. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 74.
31. Teresa de Lauretis, “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,”
Theatre Journal 40, no. 2 (1988): 155–77, reprinted in de Lauretis, Figures
of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2007), 48–71.
32. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 91.
33. Ibid., 101.
34. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideol-
ogy (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1981; reprint, London: Pandora
Books, 1993; London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).
35. Griselda Pollock, “Artists, Mythologies and Media: Genius, Madness and
Art History,” Screen 21, no. 3 (1980): 57–96.
36. Griselda Pollock, “Agency and the Avant-Garde: Studies in Authorship by
Way of Van Gogh,” Block 15 (1989): 5–15, reprinted in Fred Orton and
Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester, U.K.: Manches-
ter University Press, 1996), 315–42.
37. In certain periods without authorship or even the concept of art as post-
eighteenth-century aesthetics formulates it, art history has nonetheless
tended to organize images under projected authorship by inventing
Masters of the Good-Enough Manuscript. The example is taken from
Frederick (Frigyes) Antal (student of W€ olfflin and Max Dvorak),
“Remarks on the Method of Art History” (1949), in Classicism and Roman-
ticism: With Other Studies in Art History (London: Harper and Row, 1973),
175–89.
38. I drew on the detailed study of Freud’s aesthetics by Sarah Kofman, The
Childhood of Art, trans. Winifred Woodhull (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1988), esp. 1–21. The specific comments on biographers are in
Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in
Freud, Art and Literature, 223.
WHITHER ART HISTORY? 23
39. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of
Art’ s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999); and Bracha Ettinger,
“Fascinance and the Girl-to-m/Other Matrixial Feminine Difference,” in
Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Griselda Pol-
lock (Boston: Blackwell, 2006), 60–93.
40. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(1933), Penguin Freud Library, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin
Books, 1973), 153.
41. Kaja Silverman, “The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice,” in The Acoustic Mir-
ror: The Female Voice in Psychoanlaysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988), 119–24.
42. Claire Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist The-
ory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). I am grateful to Rachel
Theobalds for bringing this book to my attention.
43. Thalia Gouma Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of
Art,” Art Bulletin 63, no. 9 (1987): 326–57. For critical responses, see Norma
Broude and Mary Garrard, “An Exchange on the Feminist Critique of Art
History,” Art Bulletin 71, no. 1 (March 1989): 124–27; and Griselda Pollock,
“Generations and Geographies: The Politics of Theory and the Histories of
Art,” Genders, no. 17 (Fall 1993): 97–120, reprinted in Generations and Geog-
raphies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London: Routledge, 1996), 3–21.
Cornelia Butler et al., WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2007); and Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, Global
Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (New York: Merrell, 2007).
44. As an aside, I was once impressed by Marcia Pointon’s project for a first-
year survey course in Art History at Manchester University focusing on
centers of artistic production, thus favoring a mode of study that was
localized in palimpsestic situations of overlapping time and space, contin-
gency, and possibility. Cities or small or even virtual communities linked
by communication systems become enabling centers for artistic practices
that give precedence to the event, what happened there and its networks,
rather than to making what happened exemplary of a larger spatial and
temporal narrative: national history, school, -ism.
45. Griselda Pollock, “Saying No! Profligacy versus Austerity, or Metaphor
against Model in Justifying the Arts and Humanities in the
Contemporary University,” European Journal of Popular Culture 3, no. 1
(2012): 87–104.
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