The Brooklyn Rail

Whatever we mean by historicism, at the very least it means that the conditions in which a work was made play a role in interpreting the work.¹ In this sense, art criticism is always historicist. And because there is no other option, saying “always” before it is always useless.

Consider, by contrast, a well-known anti-historicist position. “Context Stinks,” Rita Felski insists, rejecting the “idea that the original historical meaning of a text is its salient meaning.” The problem, as Felski sees it, is that “literary objects remain trapped in the conditions that preside over the moment of its birth,” and being trapped in history, the work is thereby deprived of its “agency.” What does it mean to say that a work of art has agency? Works of art have agency like everything has agency. Bruno Latour—the source of Felski’s anti-historicism—identifies “characters in novels” with other “natural actors” like the Mississippi River. “Flat ontology” means that characters and rivers both function equally as agents.

But think of the river, or foliage, that runs vertically across the left-hand side of Matisse’s Bathers by a River (1909–17). Is it sincerely meant to evoke the Garden of Eden or is it, in its inflated state, an ironic reference to that myth? Or how about the schematized snake at bottom: is it the Biblical snake sliding toward Eve or a secular snake that has slithered onto the scene, or maybe the snake is not a “snake” at all (ironic or ordinary), but a line that serves to bridge the left and right sides. How does Matisse’s (painted) river compare with Latour’s (actual) river? An actual river cannot flow sincerely or ironically and when two of them meet, they are not understanding or misunderstanding one another. Following Latour and Felski it is true to say that when artworks are agents the original meaning is irrelevant, but that’s because there is no meaning at all. Unlike a river, the elements in Matisse’s paintings, all of the elements in any work of art, are there for a reason—because the artist put them there. And since they were put there by the artist, we are necessarily historicists as soon as we wonder why anything is there and what does it mean.

Stanley Cavell puts the point this way, “when I experience a work of art I feel that I am meant to notice one thing and not another,” that the placement of elements “has a purpose.” What would it be like to not feel that way, not to feel that the arrangement of the lines, color, planes and figures is purposeful? It would feel like looking at Matisse and treating it like a river deposited the marks there. Of course experiencing a work of art does not feel like it has a purpose, it does have one.

Cavell’s phrasing is his way of making sense out of Kant’s infamous notion of “purposiveness without a purpose.” Kant’s phrase has created enormous mischief, paving the way for the anti-historicism of Felski and Latour. Cavell’s phrase is tortured because Kant is not actually talking about artworks. According to Kant, anything that is “regarded as a work of art is already enough to require one to admit that one relates their shape to some sort of intention and to a determinate purpose.” Simply put, because works of art are intentional, he’s not interested in them: “A flower, by contrast [to a work of art]…is held to be beautiful because a certain purposiveness is encountered in our perception of it which, as we judge it, is not related to any end at all.” Kant’s flower and Latour’s river are both treated like agents, but as Kant sees, and object-oriented ontologists do not—that has nothing to do with art.

What about politics? If we are always historicists when it comes to artworks, we should never be historicists when it comes to questions of social justice. To think of justice as making up for past wrongs that were done to people or their ancestors—as with reparations—is historicism as politics. It is also capitalism as politics. Why? Because it makes being deprived of property that ought to have been yours the core of political redress. On this score, if you are poor because you or your ancestors were discriminated against, you are entitled to compensation. If you’re poor because the factory shut down or because your parents were poor (but unrelated to ancestry), you’re out of luck. As a political project, historicism gives capitalism another tool to justify, rather than undermine, how it does business.

So on the one hand (speaking of art), we can’t help but be historicists, so there’s no need to “always” do it; on the other hand (speaking of politics), we should never be historicists, because the ills of capitalism can’t be fixed by tort reform.

1. I am indebted here and throughout to the arguments of Walter Benn Michaels.