by Jon Lackman | 6 March 2011 | Books, Theory
I recently received three striking publications that consider the intersection of word and image from a French perspective. My personal favorite is Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. Don’t let the cover’s drab reproduction of a Henri Cueco painting fool you — this book crackles visually, lavishly reproducing the fascinating French artists of the 1960s and 70s who conversed extensively with the theorists they lived among (the subject of a 2008 retrospective at the Grand Palais). Much contemporary art has suffered from its sordid relations with these theorists, but this book is evidence that the relationship can be a positive one even (especially?) at its most intimate:
[This movement] was position on the very cusp of postmodernism: it exemplified the last moment in France of grand history painting and the tradition of revolutionary romanticism. Its works are rich with critical satire, strategies of appropriation and a post-Situationist détournement … In a period in which an attempt to contextualize Marxist theory was seen as urgent, the Narrative Figuration movement sought to ‘mirror’ or reflect the society of its times. Militantly figurative, its broken narratives anticipated anticipated Lyotard’s very definition of postmodernism as based on narrative collapse and a critical analysis of the grands récits and the petits récits of the times.
Jean-François Lyotard seems to experiencing a revival, one sign of which is the fact that his 1971 doctoral thesis Discourse, Figure is finally being published in English, translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Of this book Georges Van Den Abbeele wrote in the recent Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought:
This monumental chef d’oeuvre of poststructuralism, comparable in its ambition, critical scope, and conceptual rigor to Derrida’s Of Grammatology or Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, proposes its own theory and history of difference … Discourse refers to the Saussurian semiotic model, whereby signification is a function of negativity and opposition; whereas figure designates the relational differences implied in spatial distribution and depth but also between sign and referent or between proper and figural meaning. In graphic terms, discourse is the realm of the letter, where signification derives from the fact that no two elements can occupy the same space at the same time (the principle of opposition or negation), whereas figure is the realm of the line, where the simultaneity of different graphisms can lead to visual effects of depth and semiotic effects of reference (the principle of difference).
John Mowitt contributes an introduction to Discourse, Figure that includes the following amusing anecdote about the book’s co-translator Mary Lydon:
On 21 April 1998, Jean-François Lyotard succumbed to an aggressive form of leukemia. Shortly after, at the annual meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature hosted by the University of California, Irvine, an impromptu commemorative event … Aware that he was compressing much time and space, Derrida nevertheless permitted himself the observation that toward the end they disagreed most passionately about Marxism: Lyotard sacrificed it to the postmodern, Derrida sustained himself on its weak yet indestructible, hauntological “spirit.” If I begin these remarks by reconstructing this somber scene it is because next to me in the auditorium sat my late friend Mary Lydon who, when Derrida contrasted himself with Lyotard in this way, said under her breath, “oh, la, la,” that oddly translingual statement that when translated specifically from the French might, in this context and with that intonation, simply be rendered as “bullshit.”
The third book, Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings, edited by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw, is a collaboration among French and American academics from several disciplines that grew out of a 2006 conference. “Exploring the concept and history of visual and graphic epistemologies, this multicultural collection provides insights into the many forms of connection between visibility and legibility.” Chapters address ancient Mesoamerican scripts, Mallarmeé, comic books, and the Alhambra, among other topics. Béatrice Fraenkel contributes an essay on the impromptu memorials that appeared all over New York City after 9/11:
The apparent disorder of the shrines and the repetitive nature of the messages led to changing reading strategies that were sometimes compulsive, often erratic, always intermittent, and coherent with the general situation in the city at the time. As writings from “us,” encompassing both the writer and the reader, the pieces displayed gave to the “being together” they helped to define a corporal existence that was both somatic and semiotic.
