Texts
Rupturing Beauty Exhibition
How Not to Use Your Eyes
An open letter to James Elkins on two notions of obscurity
January 2002
Dear Professor Elkins,
It was Phillippe Sollers who, in the April 30, 1999 issue of Le Monde, said that, "One day, we must hope, we will acknowledge that the true explosive center of twentieth century thought will have been Georges Bataille, and not the names that obscure [cachent] him or are automatically associated with him."
I find this statement particularly pertinent in regard to the comment you made in your essay "Toward a New Definition of 'Strange,'" published in the Rupturing Beauty catalogue. Here you claim that you "would want to argue that the informe is the theory du jour, which actually functions in an illogical manner to get all sorts of unrelated projects started." I do not doubt that you can and will argue that the informe is used "illogically," nor that it functions "to get all sorts of unrelated projects started" (the current exhibition being, you seem to suggest, a symptom of both of these). But neither do I see why, in principle, this should be held as problematic for those of us outside the discipline of art history. What I would take issue with, however, is your treatment of the informe as (1) a theory (2) du jour.
Whether or not Bataille will emerge, as Sollers would have it, as the center of contemporary thought, one might hope with Sollers that Bataille will cease to be obscured by the plethoric figures and theories that have arisen around him. These names and theories have had the paradoxical effect of at once heightening Bataille's popularity (writing on Bataille has exploded in the past two decades, especially in America) while also diverting attention from the writings of the man himself. For instance, while Rosalind Krauss (with her colleague Yve-Alain Bois) has done much to elaborate Bataille's notion of the informe, her efforts in this regard have nonetheless led to a kind of dogma -- a defining, delineating, and, in short, theorizing of the informe. You suggest as much when you claim that the informe is "the very specific product of just two art historians [named above], at a specific place in their careers..., responding to particular historical sources..., and reconfiguring particular disciplines....." It is interesting that you mention Bataille only parenthetically here, where I have placed ellipses -- as if his notion of the informe could only be addressed, and rejected, according to the parameters you have allowed Krauss to define. It must be noted well here that the informe, if it can be called a theory at all, is such only in the hands of theorists. It was not so for Bataille. The informe might be a method, an operation, or even a means to start unrelated projects in the most illogical of manners; whatever the case, Bataille himself used the term not to found theories, but to undermine them.
The refusal to look Bataille in the eye -- a refusal that you seem to exhibit in your essay -- I find perplexing. Indeed, I would suggest that it is just this willful obscuring of intractable sources in favor of more docile theories that demonstrates one of the causes of the "strange" as you describe it in your essay: "a sense that history has become either unreliable or dysfunctional, and therefore in need of artificial regimentation and protracted study." Might one go so far as to say that the "feeling that the past has just fractured a bit" is due, to some extent, to such a refusal to look squarely at what most frightens us: that which blinds us, perhaps with obscurity?
In your book The Object Stares Back, you seem to address this point, again in relation to Bataille, and again suggesting that what he offers is a "theory." You claim there that Bataille says "that there are three things that cannot be seen, even though they may be right in front of our eyes: the sun, genitals, and death" (103). As your source for this list, you cite Bataille's Story of the Eye and his essay "Eye." However, my guess is that this list is derived from Bataille's utterly non-theoretical text "The Solar Anus," in which he states that "human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions." If I am right that your list comes from this essay (since no similar list as such is to be found in the other two sources), your omission of the last element, "obscurity," is interesting indeed. Have you found that eyes are unable to tolerate Bataille's peculiar obscurity? Or is it that the obscurity imposed by the blinding accumulation of theories surrounding Bataille has made him impossible to see?
According to Bataille, obscurity is the night, the blind spot in knowledge, that which at once completes and destroys vision. It is, like the informe, a movement from the heights of luminous knowledge, in which each thing is clear and distinct, to the depths of the labyrinth of non-knowledge and blindness. The informe is thus anything but du jour, of the day. It is the night, with its obscurity, its rapturous continuity, its intractable darkness.
I would suggest that one step that might be taken to confront this obscurity, to address the feeling of strangeness, to repair the machine, would be to look at Bataille with greater scrutiny, before turning to those who have overshadowed him. Perhaps this would go some way in addressing the "cultural dislocation" which, you say, is "a principal form of art history at the moment," that is, du jour.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Biles
HYDE PARK ART CENTER
January 13 – February 23, 2002
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