Book reviews -- Compulsive Beauty by Hal Foster

HAL FOSTER, Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. 334 pp.; many b/w ills. $30.00

What does it mean when an historian looks for a strong explanation, for a ruling metaphor, for a theory powerful enough to pull together an entire movement? What happens to history under the coercive pull of a single-minded reading? Certainly the best strong theories work by partly failing, by showing where they do not pertain, where they have no force. The "dream of the royal road," the perfect final interpretation, "the only key," must weaken just a little, in order to strengthen itself by showing what it is not (p. xvi). Strong readings are marked by this tension, this open space between what they say is the case and what cannot also be true.(1)

Hal Foster`s Compulsive Beauty has a strong thesis: that surrealism is best understood as an irruption of the uncanny--"the return of a familiar phenomenon (image or object, person or event) made strange by repression" (p. 7). Foster reads Surrealist texts and images against this standard, and finds the Freudian concept at work in each of them. He does not claim that the uncanny is a sufficient reading of Surrealism, but he does say that it is more than just a necessary reading: it "comprehends" Surrealism, "not as a sundry collection of idiosyncratic visions but as a related set of complex practices," so that it is a "principle of order that clarifies the disorder of surrealism" (pp. xvii, xviii).

An initial question that might be put to this text concerns the relation between the Freudian theories that Foster draws upon and the French artists and writers who are taken to exemplify Surrealism. How strong is the connection between the theoretical origin and its historical exemplification There are a variety of answers, from chronological coincidences (Freud and Breton were contemporaries; p. 1) and cultural links (Freud and Breton both developed theories based partly on their experience of soldiers traumatized in the First World War; p. 1) to specific conceptual relations (the Surrealists made use of a "synthetic principle" of Eros, "in keeping with the new Freudian formulation" of the second topography; p. 47). The connections vary in specificity and explanatory power, and they necessarily vie against a miscellany of reasons why the connection between Freud and Surrealism is weak: for example, only one of Freud`s texts appeared in a Surrealist journal (p. 219, n. 1); there are no Surrealist references to the uncanny before 1929, "and only a few thereafter" (p. 13); the essay on the uncanny was not translated into French until 1933 (p. 231, n. 10); Bataille does not cite Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the important text Erotisme (p. 262, n. 40); Breton only quotes fragments of Freud, and nothing from the texts central to Foster`s interpretation (p, 46). As Elisabeth Roudinsco and others have demonstrated, Surrealism owes more to Lacan and French versions of Freud than to Freud himself (p. 219, n. 2). Given the possibility that the "French Freud" is what is at stake in Surrealism, there are many openings for alternate accounts. The link between Lacan and Dali, for example, is still largely unexplored (p. 218, n. 16). Yet despite these alternate histories, Foster prefers the link to Freud "for historical reasons" (p. 218, n. 19)--a curious thing to say, since those same reasons might be taken as evidence for the necessity of rival accounts.

This is an outline of the historical problem posed by the book`s reliance on Freud. Foster`s case might be said to depend on these considerations, and certainly the weighing of such evidence is a principal task of an art-historical evaluation. When art history questions itself on these matters, the issue is usually the strength of the connection that will count as an unarguable instance of historical influence. How strong a link should there be between Freud and Breton in order for it to make sense to speak of Freud`s uncanny in Breton`s writing? Would we want to say that Breton would have had to study with Freud? Would he have had to translate "The Uncanny" and publish it in a Surrealist journal? Different organs of art history decide the matter differently. In iconography, direct textual and pictorial influence is normally required, so that an artist must be demonstrated to have seen a work in order to be influenced by it: Correggio must have visited Rome to have been influenced by its paintings. In modern art history, the criteria tend to be somewhat looser, and so Foster`s search for historical connections can be more open-ended.

I would like to say, though, that there is much more at stake, no matter how we might decide the question. To stop at this point would be to eclipse opportunities to deepen our reading, and it would involve a commitment to a certain way of putting the relation between psychoanalysis and art history. In Compulsive Beauty, it is especially interesting that Foster tries at all: why not proceed with the interpretation of Surrealism without worrying if Freud`s doctrine was known to the Surrealists? The very search for historical connections does not fit with the way Foster uses Freudian doctrine as an ultimate explanatory model: if the Freudian concept can be said to describe a potential state of affairs--if it can be represented as a model of what happens in the psyche--then it is in no immediate need of historical setting. It can be as true, and as simply true, as any other fact, and for a while it will not matter that Freud was writing in the same century, or on the same continent, as the Surrealists. his is the commonplace, entirely obvious, and utterly unasked question of the status of psychoanalytic thought that historians often note and never solve. Much psychoanalytic art history applies psychoanalysis to artworks of any period, thereby lifting psychoanalysis out of history and proposing it as a theoretical interpretive tool. Compulsive Beauty does that, but it also attempts to show the historical relevance of psychoanalysis. In doing so, it constructs the common contradiction: either psychoanalysis is to be a preferred model of interpretation in general, so that it may be legitimately exempted from historical inquiry; or else psychoanalysis is a historical movement like any other, in which case it must be assigned to the world of the reader and the historian, and its connection with Surrealism must be demonstrated if it is to be relevent at all. When Foster draws on psychoanalysis to explain Surrealist phenomena (and that is the book`s central and stated strategy), he describes Surrealists as "resisting" parts of psychoanalysis, or "intuiting," "exploiting," or "appearing aware" of them, or "sensing" them: that is, he presents psychoanalysis as a truth that enters the narrative from outside, and can explain the very reception of psychoanalysis (pp. 17, 44). For the moment, and for these purposes, psychoanalysis is inexplicably immune from the historical sifting of evidence.

I do not want to lose sight of the universality and obviousness of these problems: they are neither uncommon nor subtle. As Foster himself says in a recent text, "It is a familiar question: how to use and critique Freud at the same time."(2) Art history as a whole has no settled relation to psychoanalysis, no way of coming to terms with it, and that condition finds its clearest expression in texts such as this one where Freudian theory is introduced as a mode of explanation so strong, so much more foundational than any rival, that it is effectively beyond anything but local amendment: but at the same time, and in the same text, it has no exemption from existing in history alongside the evidence it is purported to explain.

Psychoanalytic history may have a certain aversion to this problem, both because it is extremely difficult to see one`s own interpretive frame as part of the picture of history--to give up, as it were, the very possibility of standing outside the material and commenting on it--and also because the issue seems so simple, as if it were too crass, or too abstract, to be allowed to interrupt historical readings. But I would insist on the problem. Foster tries to make the historical connection, and at the same time treats psychoanalysis as an interpretive strategy, but he does not raise the issue of the logical disparity between those two activities. That places a certain methodological problem outside the narrative, and that act of exclusion has consequences for the text of Compulsive Beauty. The same essay that points to the problem of using and critiquing Freud continues: "Here I will hold to [Freud`s] conception of stages but not to its association with tribal peoples." But Foster says nothing more about the choice, either in the essay or at analogous places in the book. Why is it not necessary to defend and elaborate, precisely at this point What construction of "theory" and history or psychoanalysis and explanation, can make it seem reasonable--or even possible--to let that problem solve itself, work itself out through and in the text? Jacques Derrida has recently argued that in certain texts by Foucault, there is an "imperturbable" pendulum swing between the two senses of psychoanalysis, and no "structural possibility of an event or a place being analyzed for itself"--in other words, no way of expositing either without the illogical return to the other.(3) Essays such as Derrida`s are the best argument in favor of attending to the "pendulum swing," since he shows how much depends on the reflective encounter with the silence that usually attends those moments.

One of the ways to make some headway with this problem is to construct alternate histories. If we step back from psychoanalysis--detaching ourselves as far as possible, and for the sake of argument, from any sense that psychoanalysis has privileged interpretive force--and if we refuse to take its "metapsychological fable" or "myth" seriously, then how might we characterize its possible places in art-historical narratives?(4) It is likely that without some belief in its truth, there will be less sense in calling on psychoanalysis to provide a "principle of order that clarifies the disorder of surrealism" (p. xviii). The field looks wholly different from this more distant perspective. On the one hand, there is psychoanalysis, a doctrine emerging from German-speaking countries, and then there is Surrealism, a heteromorphic collection of theories and practices principally developing in French-speaking countries. Neither one interprets the other, and neither is closer to anything we may want to call theory. Psychoanalysis is no longer the interpretant, and Surrealism is no longer in need of interpretation. Of course this scenario is principally functional because even the most disaffected observers of psychoanalysis--for example Adolf Grunbaum, Frank Sulloway, and Frederick Crews--spend their time struggling against it: as Harold Bloom might say, there are few ways of writing as strong as Freud`s, and man ways of writhing ineffectually against him.(5) But let me entertain this fiction, for its small measure of truth contains, I think, an essential possibility for texts that might make more reflective and eloquent negotiations of psychoanalysis.

Seen in this way, therefore, Compulsive Beauty begins to exhibit a remarkable internal disparity. On the one hand, there is Surrealism, a "disorderly" mixture, mingling scientific and philosophic narrative with visual art, alternating brilliant works with crude transcriptions of dreams, mingling idiosyncratic manifestoes with fruitful movements. On the other--and I am confining myself strictly to the text of Compulsive Beauty, and not yet asking what might be the case in another account--there is psychoanalysis, a nearly monolithic, strongly united "theory," whose surface is only periodically troubled by conflicting interpretations. In my reading, this contrast itself is one of the most intriguing features of compulsive Beauty. And my response, from the imagined point of view "outside" psychoanalysis, would be twofold: I would wonder why Surrealism is in need of coherence, and why psychoanalysis is not in need of diversity.

Psychoanalysis is only gently critiqued and emended in Compulsive Beauty. Foster asks whether the concept of the uncanny can be "deployed...in a social-historical frame" as well as in a psychic one, as it was originally intended (pp. xx, 157ff., 251, n. 38). And he cites very briefly the foundational critiques of Lacan and Laplanche, which have transformed texts such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle from theoretical stages in Freudian thought into hornet`s nests of self-contradiction and repression, rendering them nearly incoherent for use as "theoretical" sources.(6) As Foster says, the theory of the death drive is "ambiguous," "notoriously complicated, even self-contradictory," but he also finds it coherent enough to be used as an explanatory model (pp. 11-12). Anything more critical of Freud would upset Freud`s function as explanatory source (e.g., p. 145). By and large, Foster`s gestures in the direction of those critiques serve only to indicate their existence. Since he means to use the Freudian texts for specific purposes, he employs an ineloquent model of psychoanalysis that exempts it from serious philosophic or historiographic interrogation. But what does it mean for Compulsive Beauty that it construes historical practice as something in need of explanation and psychoanalysis as something largely given? This would be a second route for further inquiry, in addition to the historical weighing of evidence: a psychoanalytic critique might ask how Foster`s account might be modified if it were to take work by Lacan and Laplanche more seriously. Are there parallels, for example, between the kinds of rejections and revisions Freud performed on his own previous work, and the new departures of Surrealism in relation to Cubism and Dada?

And for its part, Surrealism seems very interesting as a nearly incoherent set of practices and theories, without any overarching explanation. Why model any emerging, conceptually irregular, and hallucinatory group of works and images in terms of another, more consistent one? Why not work to bring out the differences? Why not set psychoanalysis beside Surrealism?(7) As Foster points out, Surrealist practice is sometimes predicated on a repression of the uncanny--specifically, a repression of the implications of the uncanny in the death instinct, in the "primally conflicted, instinctually repetitive" experience whose "stake is death" (pp. xix, 5). But there is another, parallel repression here since every act of interpretation that elucidates a Surrealist move as an instance of the uncanny also works to undo its uncanny effect. The doctrine of the uncanny dismantles the uncanny and dilutes the experience of the Surrealist accomplishments. I would sometimes rather see the strange, half-finished figures, automatons, mechanomorphs, exquisite corpses, and resonant allusive fragments of Surrealism as just that--as fragments. Wittgenstein says something of the kind when he rails against Freudian dream interpretation: why can`t a dream be something that is strange? Why must it always already mean something as well?(8) Surrealism is rich in examples of inassimilable, theory-resistant images and texts. The entire early work of Dali, for example, is still waiting for a careful response: who knows how to read Dali`s preposterous but compelling book The Tragic Myth of Millet`s Angelus? Who can say how Lacan`s dramatic first meeting with Dali affected either one of them

Let me put this extravagantly, in the Surrealist spirit: imagining the Surrealist monuments, psychoanalysis, and Foster`s own text "in ruins," as they will be in a hundred years (I`m imagining the final scene of Un Chien andalou), the question will no longer be truth, but interest whose account is more compelling? Foster quotes from Giorgio de Chirico`s account of his experience in the Piazza Sta. Croce, Florence, which led to the seminal painting Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910). De Chirico had a "strange impression" in front of the 19th-century statue of Dante in the center of the square, and he began to think the whole world might be appearing before his eyes for the very first time. The result was an odd painting with a headless Hellenic sculpture in place of Dante, and a blank, almost Etruscan facade in place of the intricate forms of Sta. Croce. Would we rather understand this as de Chirico does, as the result of an unexplained "long and painful intestinal illness," yielding an "inexplicable...enigma"? Or would we rather condense that scene into the word "uncanny," and even read (as Foster does, p. 62) the statue of Dante as a figure for the artist`s father? De Chirico says over and again that he does not want to know what he does not know: "My compositions had no see, above all no common sense....One must picture everything in the world as an enigma....To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness."(9) In accord with psychoanalytic practice, Foster says he wants "to locate a problematic in surrealism that exceeds its self-understanding," but that decision can always be weighed by what it produces (p. xvii).(10) Perhaps in cases like this, it would be as interesting to interpret by sensing and recapturing the oddity of the experience and the confusion and elation of the paintings that followed. Why does it not matter that de Chirico could easily have come up with a monothematic explanation of his experience, if he had wanted to? What happens to the delicate state of mind that de Chirico called "enigma"--composed of a pseudo-Nietzschean sense of lateness and "long shadows," a Leopardian emptiness and noia, together with secret thoughts of solitude and strangeness embodied in the squares of Turin--when it is collapsed into a psychoanalytic explanation? (And why not use any of those words, including "enigma," in place of the uncanny) An interpretation that tries to discover how de Chirico`s text works, and how his paintings echo or parallel that dynamic, need not solve the enigma by any theory.

In my reading, Foster is at his best when he meditates on the relation of Surrealism to Postmodernism (pp. 209-13), or when he constructs irregular, nonpsychoanalytic accounts--such as a provisional description of the Surrealists` interest in outmoded architecture and "demode forms," which he says were sought out "in a campy mode of retro-risque but also as `anti-aphrodisiacal` reminders of the just-past, in antimodernist gestures but also as provocations against a modernism become chic" (pp. 158-59)--and he is at his least helpful when, several pages later, he reduces this and other insights into psychoanalytic terms (p. 163).

I am not arguing against interpretation, or against strong theory, or even against theory, nor am I advocating we give up the business of trying to employ psychoanalysis as an explanatory strategy. I am suggesting that unexplained explanation is inexplicable explanation. If we need to see one thing in terms of another, then we also need to know why we are content to do violence to the object we seek to understand. The price of using a theory without saying why it is reasonable to take it as a theory, to proffer it as something that is known, to use it to help with something that is (again without explanation) taken to be unknown, is a brittle text: it breaks just where the interpretation is announced, between the historical prologue and the theoretical monologue.(11)

And thinking along these lines helps open the way to seeing the aporias, "repressions," elisions, self-contradictions, and antilogical moments in psychoanalsis. Whose psychoanalysis are we to read Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, who Foster cites briefly, is at work on one problematizing rereading, but there are others, and they can only remain invisible as long as "psychoanalysis" is an object, a "theory," a doctrine with only one foot in history. And last, if psychoanalysis must provide our explanations, if it has to be the site of our best truths, if it insists on being seen as the horizon of our interpretive domain, then why not question that configuration as a desire, as a repression of some more disruptive or open-ended possibility--and even as a site for the uncanny?

1 . For an interesting discussion of this in the case of philosophy, see A. MacIntyre, "Are Philosophical Problems Insoluble? The Relevance of System and History," in P. Cook, ed., Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memo, Appropriating Historical Traditions, Durham, N.C., 1993, 65-82 and esp. 77ff.

2. Foster, "Primitive Scenes," Critical Inquiry, xx, Autumn 1993, 69-102, esp. 72.

3. J. Derrida, "`To Do Justice to Freud`: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis," Critical Inquiry, xx, 2, Winter 1994, 227-66, esp. 252-53.

4. For "metapsychological fable." see J. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," trans. J. Mehlman, Yale French Studies, XLVIII, 1972, 73-117, and for "myth," see H. Bloom, "Wrestling Sigmund: Three Paradigms for Poetic Originality," in The Breaking of the Vessels The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine), Chicago, 1982, 42-71, esp. 62.

5. See, e.g., F. Crews, Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method, New York, 1975; idem, Skeptical Engagements, New York, 1988; A. Grunbaum, Validatio in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Madison, Conn., 1993; F. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, New York, 1979; and Bloom (as in n. 4).

6. See, e.g., J. Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Mehlman, Baltimore, 1976.

7. Here I am thinking of Stephen Melville`s Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism, Minneapolis, 1986. For a discussion of alternate "uses" of psychoanalysis, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Principales tendances actuelle de l`etude psychanalytique des expressions artistiques et litteraires," in Derive a partir de Marx et Freud, Paris, 1973, 53-77, cited and critiqued in Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, trans. Dana Polan and Thierry de Duve, Minneapolis, 1991, 1-3. For a related case, see the critique of Michael Leja, "Art for Modern Man: New York School Painting and American Culture in the 1940s," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988, in Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, 323-24. (And see now Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, New Haven, 1993.)

8. L. Wittgenstein, "Conversations on Freud," in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. C. Barrett, Berkeley, 1967, 41-52.

9. Giorgio de Chirico, MS from the collection of Paul Eluard, trans. in J.T. Soby, Giorgio de Chirico, New York, 1955, 246.

10. See Elkins, "The Failed and the Inadvertent: Art History and the Concept of the Unconscious," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75, 1994, 119-32.

11. Elkins, "The Snap of Rhetoric: A Catechism for Art History," MEANING, LXVIII, 1992, 3-16.

COPYRIGHT: Copyright College Art Association of America Sep 1994. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the United States copyright law is permitted.

PROQUEST-CSA, LLC- MAKES NO WARRANTY REGARDING THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR TIMELINESS OF THE LICENSED MATERIALS OR ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.