Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine

142 Pages·2006·22.12 MB·English

by  Naomi Schor

DETAIL
READING IN
DETAIL
. READING IN
Aesthetics and the Feminine
Naomi Schor
Foreword by Ellen Rooney
~~ ~~~.t~~n~~~up
New York London
Figure I. llya Schor, Bracelet Routledge is an imprint of the
Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
First published 1987 by Methuen, Inc. This edition published 2007 by Routledge.
Pour mes morts
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Note on Permissions
T he author wishes to acknowledge the cooperation of the follow
ing in granting permissions to reprint articles or to reproduce
works of art: New York Literary Forum for "Duane Hanson: Truth
in Sculpture" in the issue "Fragments: Incompletion & Discontinuity,"
vols. 8-9, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman; Poetics Today for "Details
and Realism: La Cure de Tours" in vol. 5, no. 4, 1984; Princeton Univer
sity Press for "Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction" from
The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, edited
by Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman, 1980; Union Generale d'Editions
for "Le delire d'interpretation: Naturalisme et paranoia" from Le natu
ralisme: Colloque de Cerisy, 1978; Dada/Surrealism, vol. 6, for "Dali's
Freud," 1976; the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Schor, Bracelet,
and for Brouwer, The Smokers; the Brera di Milano for Rubens, Last
Supper; the Louvre for Veronese, Marriage at Cana, and for Millet,
L'Angelus; the Alte Pinakothek, Munich for Murillo, The Melon Eaters;
and 0. K. Harris Works of Art for the Duane Hanson figures.
CONTENTS
Note on Permissions vii
List of Figures xi
Foreword xiii
Acknowledgments xxxvii
Introduction xli
PART I: ARCHAEOLOGY
r. Gender: In the Academy 3
2. Sublimation: Hegel's Aesthetics 19
3· Decadence: Wey, Loos, Lukacs 45
4· Displacement: The Case of Sigmund Freud 75
5. Desublimation: Roland Barthes's Aesthetics 9 3
PART 2: READINGS
6. Dali's Freud r2r
7· The Delusion of Interpretation: The Conquest of Plassans 133
8. Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction 147
9· Duane Hanson: Truth in Sculpture r6r
ro. Details and Realism: The Cure de Tours 175
Notes r85
Bibliography 213
Index 225
List of Figures
I. llya Schor. Bracelet. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. Frontispiece
2. Peter Paul Rubens. Last Supper. Brera, Milan. (Art
Resource.) 6
3· Paolo Veronese. Marriage at Cana, detail. Louvre, Paris. (Art
Resource.) 7
4· Adriaen Brouwer. The Smokers. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York. 4I
5. Murillo. The Melon Eaters. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. (Art
Resource.) 42
6. Adolf Laos. Advertisement. 59
7· Giovanni Morelli. Kunstkritische Studien iiber Italienische
Malerei, val. I. 78
8. Studio Harcourt. Martine Carol. Agence France Presse. 97
9· Greta Garbo as Queen Christina. George Eastman
House. 98
Io. Sergei Eisenstein. Potemkin. I I I
I I. Sergei Eisenstein. Potemkin. I I 2
I2. Jean-Fran<;ois Millet. The Angelus. Louvre, Par.is. (Art
Resource.) I25
I3. Duane Hanson. Tourists. 0. K. Harris Works of Art. I63
I4. Duane Hanson. Supermarket Shopper. 0. K. Harris Works of
Art. I64
Foreword:
An Aesthetic ofB ad Objects
Ellen Rooney
But what might my reader be asking him- or herself of my title?
What do I mean by bad objects? Aren't bad objects secretly good
objects anyhow? What I mean is simply this: at any given time,
within the carefully policed precincts of the academy, some criti
cal objects are promoted to the status of good objects (say, not
so long ago, dead authors), while others are tabooed (say, in the
old days, experience). I am drawn to what I perceive rightly or
wrongly as the bad objects.
Naomi Schor, Bad Objects:
Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995)
! would like to approach the timely reappearance of Reading in
Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine by reading the passage above
in the manner of Naomi Schor, after Schor, as we say. In other words, I
would like to begin obliquely, with Bad Objects, and by reading in detail.
The original critical intervention of Reading in Detail, which was first
published in 1987, is still at work in myriad fields, from philosophical
aesthetics to cultural studies, literary criticism to feminist theory, where
XIV Foreword Foreword
XV
Schor's insights into the history and critical fortunes of the aesthetic "the detail as an aesthetic category undergirds the entire edifice of the
detail have engendered and enriched a wide range of scholarly projects. Aesthetics, serving as a means of distinguishing both between periods
Schor's book appeared as feminist criticism was turning away from the of art (Symbolism, Classicism, Romanticism) and between major artis
critique of a predominantly masculine literary canon toward "gynocriti
tic modes (e.g. sculpture, poetry, painting)" (23). More generally, she
cism," the study of women writers and their (arguably) distinct literary
contends that "at moments of aesthetic mutation, the detail becomes a
practices and traditions. By contrast, Reading in Detail addressed the
means not only of effecting change, but of understanding it" (25), and
emphatically masculinist canons of Western aesthetic theory and art,
Reading in Detail embraces this insight by working the history of the
insisting on the urgency of an ongoing feminist critique and on the vital
detail to extend our understanding of the aesthetic politics of gender.
gender politics of the philosophical tradition's seemingly neutral exami
Mutation is a process without a telos, an unpredictable leap into the
nations of aesthetic value, especially the aesthetic value of the detail.
future, whose ultimate consequences cannot be known in advance. In
Schor found a powerful ally in the advocates of poststructuralism and
fact, the temporal logic of mutation is not so different from that of the
a warrant for her project in their late twentieth-century valorization
bad object. The bad objects Schor contemplated and celebrated in her
of the detail; her feminist appropriation of deconstructive practices
last book illuminate the critical work that rereading Reading in Detail
defied the identity politics of those contemporary feminists who saw
can animate today.
in deconstruction simply another "male model." And yet, Schor never
simply apprenticed herself to poststructuralist masters or collapsed fem
inist critique into deconstruction. Reading in Detail interrogated both I. The role of academic literary criticism ... is always
the history of the detail's debasement and the terms of its new-found to risk a certain "badness"1
authority, including the authority it enjoyed in the work of contempo
The "bad objects" Schor invokes in the title of her I995 collection of
rary theorists, and disclosed the unacknowledged gender politics that
essays and in the passage above are produced by heterogeneous forces.
remained silently at work.
Their awkward or illicit character as objects of critical attention can
Our historical moment is of course in many respects quite differ
ent from the time of Reading in Detail. And yet, certain contemporary be traced to any number of causes: their aesthetic inappropriateness,
questions, about the proper objects of literary and cultural studies, the their subversive possibilities, their pettiness. Pleasure, fear, boredom,
status of reading, the future of feminist criticism, and the meaning and and power are all forces that might render a specific critical topos either
methods of historical analysis itself, directly engage Schor's preoccupa a bad or a good object.
tions in her "detail book," as she called it. The status of the detail as a Schor's remarks draw particular attention to time as a factor in
critical object and the question of how to write its history are always cordoning off the bad objects from the good. "Not so long ago," she
very near the surface in her argument. While patiently excavating the reminds us, the prevailing standard applauded work on canonical
particularities of her texts, from Joshua Reynolds and Hegel to Balzac, authors, safely dead; "in the old days," she recalls, without nostalgia, a
Roland Barthes and Dali to the sculptor Duane Hanson, Schor asks: hostile critical establishment ruled on the unspeakable and the speak
"What is a detail? At what point does a detail cease to be, in a pejora able of our experience. 2 But things-objects and the forces that mark
tive sense, a 'detail"' {I45)? In other words, when (and how) does the and police them-change. "At any given time," the academy's terms of
detail cease to be a "bad object"? The persistence of such questions in critical evaluation enable and incite, impose standards upon and ban,
Reading in Detail and Schor's demonstration that they inspire a range divergent forms of intellectual work. And, as Schor's telegraphic history
of not always compatible answers indicate her interest in the work of discloses, "at any given time" these terms may shift. Reading in Detail
the detail. She argues, for example, that Hegel drives the detail hard: is, among other things, an eloquent testament to the vicissitudes of the
Foreword xvii
xvi Foreword
"to retell the story from the perspective of the detail [and thus] inevita
detail as an aesthetic concept and critical object. No object is a bad
bly to tell another story" (4). This shift entails a focus on the "detail as
object-or a good one-for all time.3
negativity" and discloses "its participation in a larger semantic network,
Indeed, it might be more correct to say that the hierarchies of value
bounded on one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connota
that distinguish the bad objects from the good are constantly in motion;
tions of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other, by the everyday,
the intellectual challenge is to keep up with (and somehow to assess)
whose 'prosiness' is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided
rapidly changing valorizations rather than to protest any given object's
entrenched status. Schor's critical and political interest in time pass over by women" (4). From this angle, from the perspective of the detail,
Schor demonstrates that "the detail does not occupy a conceptual space
ing, in shifting intellectual paradigms and historical change, is visible
beyond the laws of sexual difference: the detail is gendered and doubly
everywhere in her work, despite the fact that as a feminist theorist and
scholar she is most frequently reread and remembered for the formal gendered as feminine" (4). This feminist insight illuminates the political
inventiveness of her textual analyses, her theoretical innovations, and history of the detail as a "bad object."
her critical engagements with feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and the But the passage of time is not the only factor disrupting the stabil
panoply of poststructuralisms. While it is certainly true that literary ity of Schor's critical objects. She also entertains the possibility that an
form-and therefore the problem of reading-is always at the center object may be simultaneously good and bad. Schor imagines a skepti
of her thinking, it seems important,. as we now undertake to reread cal question, provoked by her title: "Aren't bad objects secretly good
Reading in Detail, to acknowledge that Schor was in her time acu~ely objects anyway?" She doesn't go so far as to answer this query; the
attuned to the historical displacements of both feminism and literary fruitful suspension of questions is one of her signatures as a reader. The
studies. She frequently observed the restlessness of feminist scholars and word "secretly" enables Schor to hold this question open. Where she
the speed with which feminist thought kept remaking itself during the might have asked "aren't bad objects really good objects anyway?" to
198os and 1990s, the very period when feminism acquired the forms of imply that they are good objects in truth, beneath a simply false (bad)
institutional power that permitted it, too, to police the formation of bad appearance, she instead introduces the suspicion that something is nec
essarily withheld here, that the bad object has the structure of a secret.
and good objects, for better or worse. 4
Reading in Detail is a profoundly historical work, motivated by Schor guards that secret. But she proposes a strategy to read it.
Schor's concern that we have forgotten the historical debasement of the The bad objects beckon: "I am drawn to what I perceive rightly or
detail and thus misunderstand its quite recent prestige, which is due wrongly as the bad objects" (my emphases). The structure of the secret
largely to the interventions of post-structuralism: the "pervasive valori reasserts itself in this admission as something the critic herself cannot
zation of the minute, the partial, and the marginal," she argues, "runs unravel. Schor is not completely convinced by her own perceptions; she
the risk of inducing a form of amnesia that in turn threatens to diminish may be mistaken. Although she seeks to articulate her contrarian criti
the import of the current privileging of the detail" (3). Her "feminist cal impulses, the literal status of the object remains in question, hidden
archaeology" of the detail recalls us from our forgetful immersion in the even from the interpreter drawn to it. Perhaps this unsettled, impure
present, not least in order to expose the "persistence of the principles of form of the bad object defines its allure? Or is what renders an object
neo-classical aesthetics well into the twentieth-century," a persistence bad and desirable-and thus perhaps ultimately good-a mode of per
that is crucial insofar as those aesthetics were idealist, "anti-particu ception? Schor concedes that her view may be skewed, but she does not
larist" and overtly hostile to the detail. But Schor's archaeology of the undertake to solve this puzzle, to set us straight. Rather, the enigma of
the (potentially) bad object unfolds as a deliberate strategy of reading.
detail departs from convention in another respect: whereas "the story of
Schor characterizes this strategy through the figure of "female
the rise of the detail is, of course, inseparable from the all too familiar
fetishism."s The passage from Bad Objects continues: "What I am
story of the demise of classicism and the birth of realism," she proposes