Upload
becky-bivens
View
223
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 1/12
An Allegory of CriticismAuthor(s): David JoselitSource: October, Vol. 103 (Winter, 2003), pp. 3-13Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397604 .
Accessed: 16/07/2011 14:50
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 2/12
An Allegory of Criticism*
DAVID JOSELIT
I
subvert: 1. to destroy completely; ruin1
In the 1980s a new critical desideratum arose: to subvert.Works of art-especiallythose engaged in various modes of appropriation-were seen to unveil the
mechanisms of commercial culture, and in so doing to deliver a fatal blow to
the society of the spectacle.2 When Sherrie Levine, for instance, rephotographedthe reproduction of a modernist photograph, orJeff Koons imprisoned a pristinevacuum cleaner in Plexiglas, these works were interpreted as blunt reiterations
of reified social relations. In a dazzling instance of vulgar Freudianism (especiallyremarkable for an art world besotted with
Lacan),such acts of revelation were
themselves regarded as politically efficacious,just as the analysand'sfree associative
speech is supposed by her analystto release her from the grip of pathology.3What I
wish to remark on, however, is not the legitimacy of such judgments, but rather
the distinctive nature of their form. It is worth noting that in the years between
the respective heydays of modernist and postmodernist criticism in the United
States, the locus of aesthetic value shifted from quality to criticality-from the
"good" to the "subversive." take it as axiomatic that with postmoderism the art
object began to absorb the critic's function into itself, rendering the boundary
* An earlier version of this text was delivered as a lecture at the Clark/Getty conference "Art
History and Art Criticism" at the Getty Research Institute in February 2002. I am grateful to bothinstitutions for their support and especially to the ClarkArt Institute, which granted me a fellowship in
2001-02 to work on this and related projects. This version of the text also reflects my participation inthe roundtable "The Present Conditions of Art Criticism,"published in October00 (Spring 2002).1. TheAmericanHeritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Boston: HoughtonMifflin Company, 2000), p. 1728.2. Subversion is clearly related to avant-garde models of revolution but it is also quite distinct fromthem. Whereas the revolutionary paradigm suggests a clearing awayof tradition and the establishment
of a new-perhaps utopian-social order, subversion seems arrested at the initial moment of destruction,
having few, if any, programs for a new society.3. My criticism here pertains to the writing around appropriation techniques rather than to the
art itself, which I think has yet to be given its due.
OCTOBER 03, Winter 003, pp. 3-13. ? 2003 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and Massachusettsnstituteof Technology.
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 3/12
between art and criticism confusingly
porous, and more or less causing the lat-
ter's obsolescence.4 An analysis of this
condition begs three sets of questions.
_~-^y~ ^^^KFirst, what exactly constitutes efficacyin an art work and how does an aes-
thetics of "subversion"-or its more
,1'IB - recent lexical cousin, "criticality"-
.. ~. B-~ -~- function as a politics? Second, what
].- ^ kind of critic is the artist? And third,what is left for the critic to do?
:,,^ - .....~:_. ~'
-1 Craig Owens's theory of allegory
"- ?-:.:;*"^^ is a good place to start. Building on a
...-- iv.' r variety of thinkers, and especially
.: .- l. :. " Walter Benjamin, Owens developed a
\' 29 - - ; ~pithy model of postmodern allegory in
-:
;- a two-part essay published in successiveiT^~~ " i) . .numbers
of Octobern 1980. Early on in
the text he offered a fundamental defini-Sherrie evine.AfterWalkerEvans: . 1987. moment thattion: "Let us say for the moment that
allegory occurs whenever one text is
doubled by another..."5 Allegory, then, is the doubling-indeed, the multiplica-tion-of "texts" within and around a work of literature or art. Such doubling (or
multiplication) necessarily functions as an act of interpretation-a mode of
criticism that is built into the work. Owens makes this point explicitly through a
comparison: "In modern aesthetics, allegory is regularly subordinated to the
symbol, which represents the supposedly indissoluble unity of form and substance
which characterizes the work of art as pure presence."6If allegory is the rhetorical
figure corresponding to postmodernism, the symbol, in which essential experienceis made manifest, corresponds to American midcentury modernism. Owens's
distinction clarifies the fundamental role of the critic in assessing modernist art:
it is s/he who recognizeshe essential link between gesture and the unconscious
among painters of the New York School, or opticality and "grace"in the canvases
of their successors. Such an act of recognition is superfluous to the critical doublingof allegorical (postmodern) art, which is by definition self-conscious.Here is
where the violence enfolded in the term "subversive"surges forth in the seemingly
benign concept of allegory.An allegory destroys the autonomy of the text. Benjamin
4. For a provocative discussion of the obsolescence of criticism see the roundtable "The Present
Conditions of Art Criticism,"October 00 (Spring 2002), pp. 201-28.
5. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism" [1980], reprintedin Owens, BeyondRecognition:Representation, ower,and Culture, d. Scott Bryson, BarbaraKruger,LynneTillman, and Jane Weinstock; introduction by Simon Watney (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), p. 53. For another important and influential account of allegory and postmodern art that, like
Owens's, relies heavily on Walter Benjamin's The Origin of GermanTragicDrama, see Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,"Artforum 1, no.
1 (September 1982), pp. 43-56.
6. Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse," p. 62.
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 4/12
An Allegory of Criticism
compares allegory to a ruin, and, as The American Heritage Dictionary affirms, to
subvert is to "destroy completely; [to] ruin."
The allegory of my own title denotes something simpler than the nuancedassociations elaborated by Owens. For in this essay I have elected a single figure,
Michael Shamberg, as the protagonist of a fable-an allegory-of criticism.
Shamberg was not a major figure in art criticism; indeed, he had little to do with art
at all. This very marginality vis-a-vis the art world in combination with his current
power and influence in the realm of commercial culture make him a fit object of
allegorization. As will become clear in the course of this text, Shamberg's story has
everything to do with the shift marked by Owens: from an art of essence to an art of
appropriation rooted in allegorical extensions of the mass media. In that sense, I
hope the allegory of my title will carry the complexity of Owens's use of it after all.
For what I will demonstrate is a second order of doubling or
multiplication,
not
solely of texts, but of the publics interpellated by those texts.
II
At different points in his career Michael Shamberg worked as a writer, video
activist, and Hollywood producer, earning himself a significant place in the historyof video, television, and film. In these capacities he was among the first to
recognize the thoroughgoing commercialization of public space brought about bytelevision's explosion at midcentury. He
called this phenomenon "Media-America," _ to"
and in his 1971 book Guerrilla Television, heidentified an array of visual practices of the
1960s and '70s, ranging from psychedelia to
video art, which were aimed at democratiz-
ing or revolutionizing the electronic
nation. The allegory suggested by his
career pivots on the difficulties of sustainingsuch criticism. Most professional art critics
produce little more than sophisticated
press releases. Such writings are valuable
to art history as documents, which may be
read symptomatically in the brilliant waysthat figures like T. J. Clark have done. I am
less interested in this diagnostic use of
criticism than in those moments when , MVcritical writing becomes prescriptive- - 4
when it invents new kinds of objects rather A
than simply interpreting those it finds
readymade. Shamberg's story is exemplaryin this regard because he tried in a variety
Guerrilla Television. ? 1971 byMichaelShambergnd
RaindanceCorporation.DesignedbyAnt Farm,publishedbyHolt,Rinehartand Winstonof Canada,Ltd.
5
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 5/12
OCTOBER
of waysto construct new networks for criticism. These efforts fall roughly into four
stages, which I will describe briefly.
Phase1:IndustrialJournalism.fter graduating from college in 1966 and writingfor a newspaper called Chicago'sAmerican, where he covered the Democratic
Convention in 1968, Shamberg worked for about a year for Timeand Life.It is well
known that these publications require a highly Taylorized form of writing where
individual authorship is less important than a "house voice."As Shamberg remarked
in an interview of 1971, "I quit because I felt irrelevant, not co-opted."7 This
distinction is significant because it indicates Shamberg'scareer-longrecognition that
constructing an audience is as important as constructing an argument. At least one
of his assignments for Time did prove relevant. In the issue of May 30, 1969,
Shamberg published an unsigned review of the video exhibition TV as a Creative
Medium at the Howard WiseGallery
in New York. In hisopening paragraph,Shamberg perhapsunwittinglysummarizeshis program for the next decade:
The younger generation has rebelled against its elders in the home. It
has stormed the campuses. About the only target remaining in loco
parentis s that preoccupier of youth, television. Last week the television
generation struck there too, but the rebellion was half in fun: an art
exhibition at Manhattan's Howard Wise Gallery entitled "TV as a
Creative Medium."8
Included in TV as a CreativeMediumwas WipeCycle 1969), a work by Frank Gillette
and Ira Schneider, which particularly impressed Shamberg. WipeCycleconsisted
of a bank of nine monitors and a closed-circuit video camera, which recorded live
images of viewers as they approached the work. These fragments of footage were
played on eight- and sixteen-second delays, jumping from monitor to monitor and
intercut with broadcast TV and prerecorded segments. Periodically all of the
screens would be wiped clean. Gillette's description of the work links it explicitlyto an ethics of televisualcommunication: "The intent of this [image] overloading ...
is to escape the automatic 'information' experience of commercial television without
totally divesting it of the usual content."9 In other words, WipeCyclewas meant to
break apart the monolithic "information" of network TV through a spectator's
unexpected encounter with her or his own act of viewing. As I will argue, such a
shift in the balance of power between the producers and the consumers of mediaimages would remain central to Shamberg's program.
Phase 2: Raindance Corporation.Shamberg was so impressed by Gillette and
Schneider that he joined with them to form the Raindance Corporation, a video
7. Interview with Raindance (Michael Shamberg) and Videofreex (David Cort), in G. Roy Levin,
DocumentaryExplorations:15 Interviewswith Film-MakersGarden City, N.Y.:Doubleday and Company,Inc., 1971), p. 373.8. "The Medium: TakingWaste Out of the Wasteland,"Time(May30, 1969), p. 74.9. Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, "WipeCycle"n TV as a CreativeMedium(New York: HowardWise Gallery, 1969), unpaginated.
6
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 6/12
Frank Gillette nd Ira Schneider.Wipe Cycle. 1969.
collective intended to function as an alternative think tank-a progressive version ofthe RAND Corporation. The activities of Raindance proceeded on two tracks-
video-making and publishing-but all of its work emerged from the group'sfascination with the kind of media ecology theorized by such figures as Marshall
McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Gregory Bateson. Raindance believed that
television could be democratized by redressing the imbalance of power between
video producers and video consumers. To this purpose, its members executed a
number of informal videotapes in which ordinary people on the street were given the
time and space to communicate. The group attempted to institutionalize its
alternative vision of media communication in an unrealized Center of Decentralized
Television that would have beenhoused at the
Jewish Museum where the watershedexhibition Softwaretook place in 1970. Between 1970 and 1974 Raindance was affili-
ated with a fascinating journal, Radical Software,whose founding editors were BerylKorot and Phyllis Gershuny (now Segura). This publication included a frothy mix of
Zen, cable activism, video theory, and applied cybernetics. While some have pokedfun at this delirious collision of politics, media, and ecology, it is sobering to acknowl-
edge how closely it prefigures the ecstatic prognostications that surround the
Internet in our own time. In fact, from a political perspective, Radical Software's
analysis of the failings and potentials of television was both more prescient and more
radical than any recent product of the digerati I am aware of.
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 7/12
OCTOBER
Shamberg's book, GuerrillaTelevision,was a Raindance publication and it
brought together many of the themes that percolated through Radical Software,
including a combination of theoretical analysis and practical advice for the manycommunity-based groups that sought to use video as a tool during this period.Two themes recur throughout GuerrillaTelevision.First, a call to transform passivevideo consumers into active video producers by making video equipment accessible
to anyone, and by establishing alternate community-oriented networks in
partnership with cable television. Second, Shamberg insisted that the media be
regarded as a social and psychological processrather than as a static product.In
other words, rather than simply watching a commercially derived reality on TV,viewers could use videotape therapeutically to become aware of their own
experience. As in Gillette and Schneider's WipeCycle,where the efficacy of the
workhinged
on the viewerseeing
her- or himself onpar
with a live feed of network
TV, Shamberg proposes a politicsof feedback. He gives several examples of what
such a politics might look like in GuerrillaTelevision.n one passage he writes:
A more genuine radical strategy for middle-America would be to build a
base at the actual level of repression, which for whites is mostly psychic,not physical. This means developing a base of indigenous information to
work from. It might include tactics like going out to the suburbs with
video cameras and taping commuters. The playbackcould be in people'shomes through their normal TV sets. The result might be that business-
men would see how wastedthey look from buying the suburban myth.10
Phase 3: Top Value Television(TVTV). The self-reflexivity characteristic of
Shamberg's recommendation that suburbanites play back images of their own
middle-class alienation was applied to the forms and biases of network news in the
next project he was involved with, Top Value Television (or TVTV), an open-endedvideo collective that produced a variety of programs throughout the seventies.
TVTV originally included Shamberg's companion Megan Williams and the media
activist Allen Rucker, as well as members of the flamboyant San Francisco artists
collective Ant Farm (famous for upending a row of Cadillacs in Amarillo, Texas).The group was initiated to produce alternate coverage of the 1972 Democratic
and Republican conventions in Miami. After succeeding against the odds in
acquiring press credentials for the conventions as well as raising a modest budgetof a few thousand dollars contributed by four cable TV stations, TVTV moved in
together in a rented house in Miami like members of a commune or a rock band.
Unencumbered by the heavy equipment the networks required to make
broadcast-quality footage, TVTV members gained greater access to the intrigue of
the convention floor with their portable PortaPak cameras, capturing stories that
more experienced journalists missed. Most significant was TVTV'spolicy of turning
10. Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, GuerrillaTelevision New York:Holt, Rinehartand Winston, 1971), p. 29.
8
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 8/12
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 9/12
OCTOBER
Phase 4: Hollywood.Given Shamberg's rather startling nomination of the
television characterArchie Bunker as a working-classhero, it is not surprising that in
the next and current phase of his career he moved entirely into the realm of fictionas a producer of Hollywood films. His first hit, and for my purposes the most
interesting of his many credits, which include Pulp Fiction (1994), Gattaca(1997),and ErinBrockovich2000), was TheBig Chillof 1983, a paean to the lost hope of the
sixties generation. In this movie a crowd of former college radicals-now mostly
prosperous professionals-reunite for the funeral of one of their friends. TheBig Chill
is a sophisticated and nuanced story about the vulnerabilityof idealism, which, like
Shamberg's earlier work, includes prominent scenes of video therapy in which the
WilliamHurt character-one of the few who has failed to "evolve"nto yuppiedom-interviews himself and his friends using a home video camera, allowing everyone to
watch his or her confessions on the television screen.
It would be easy enough to describe Shamberg's shift from political
documentary to palliative entertainment as a simple instance of selling out, but I
think this would be unfair. Shamberg and his colleagues spent ten years of their
lives, at significant economic sacrifice, attempting to build an alternative mode of
television. If today Michael Shamberg were on the faculty of the UCLA Film
Department instead of occupying an office atJersey Films a few miles away,would
that make him any less of a sellout? Logically, I think, the answer can only be "no."
On the contrary, it is more accurate to say that Shamberg ultimately looked to
commercial arenas of production and fictional narratives because noncommercial
networks, such as community, cable, and public television in the 1970s, proved
untenable. In other words, instead of scoffing at Archie Bunker as an effectivesocial critic, perhaps we should hold open the possibility that commercial culture
can carryoppositional content.
I wish to draw two sets of conclusions from my brief digest of Shamberg'scareer. First, his activities demonstrate that criticism is as much about producing an
audience as it is about producing a message. In Guerrilla Television Shamberg wrote,
"Truecybernetic guerrilla warfare means re-structuring communications channels,not capturing existing ones."12And, indeed, both the Raindance Corporation and
TVTV were efforts to challenge institutional networks as well as to develop new
kinds of oppositional or therapeutic information. In other words, the critical act
in guerrilla television consisted of developing and promoting new modesof imageconsumption. s it turned out, this proved much more difficult than simply producing
oppositional content. For nearly a decade, TVTVattempted to develop alternative
networks through, for instance, community television on cable. As the earlydemocratic promise of cable was extinguished through its ultimate commercializa-
tion,13 Shamberg and his colleagues identified particular genres within this
12. Shamberg, GuerrillaTelevision, . 29.13. I have written about the relationship between early cable and video activism in my "ATale ofthe Tape: RadicalSoftware," rtforum 0, no. 9 (May2002), pp. 152-55; 196.
10
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 10/12
An Allegory f Criticism
commercial arena-comedy and "reality TV"-as sites for criticism. Shamberg'scareer therefore illustrates the inverse relationship that exists between the radicality
of a message and the size of the audience to which that message may beaddressed. Ultimately Shamberg himself opted for the largest possible publicafforded by Hollywood cinema, and he has used this arena as a mild form of social
criticism in projects such as TheBig Chill.
The second insight regarding criticism that Shamberg's career allows is a
recognition of its mobility. Indeed, with the Raindance Corporation and TVTV,
Shamberg and his colleagues transported an artistic strategy-closed-circuitvideo feedback-into the very different realm of documentary video in order to
identify and critique the conventions of commercial TV and particularly network
news. In this instance criticism consisted of inventing new categoriesof analysisthat allowed
forthe invention
ofnew kinds
of objects.AlthoughI have derived this
conclusion from the realm of radical TV, it holds equally true with regard to art
history. Indeed, many of the most important developments in our discipline of
the past thirty years, such as its encounter with literary theory and the emergenceof visual culture, result from hybrid methodologies and the constitution of heteroge-neous objects of analysis. The fact that these new approaches are now acceptedif not universally acclaimed within the academy suggests that whether on
account of its success or its failure, efficacious criticism is short-lived, alwaysvulnerable to the twin dangers of incorporation or irrelevance. I think we are
naive to believe anything else. For me the poignancy of Shamberg's career-its
allegory-is precisely this demonstration of criticism's mortality.
III
Miwon Kwon has recently argued that "[t]he artist as an overspecializedaesthetic object maker has been anachronistic for a long time already.What they
providenow, rather than produce, are aesthetic, often 'critical-artistic,' services."14
Kwon's insight is confirmed by the widespread migration by artists such as JorgePardo or Pae White into design, and by the converse elevation of architect-designerssuch as Rem Koolhaas to star status within the art world.15Given this shift in the
nature of artmaking Shamberg's story is particularly pertinent. Unlike the latest
generation of aesthetic service providers, his career originates in industrialjournalism, embraces activism for a significant period of time, and only then
returns to commercial culture. In other words (under the most generous
interpretation), his work in the film industry is to some degree a continuation of
his activism (or an acknowledgment of its impossibility, which is not quite the
same thing). Furthermore, Shamberg'sengagement with television and film suggests
14. Miwon Kwon, One Place AfterAnother:Site-SpecificArt and LocationalIdentity (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2002), p. 50.
15. For an excellent account of these developments, see Hal Foster, Design and Crime and Other
Diatribes London: Verso, 2002).
11
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 11/12
OCTOBER
how the paradigm shift Kwon articulates may be tied to a particular historical
moment-one characterized by the rise of network television.
Owens suggested that the allegorical imagination proper to postmodernism isrooted in media of mechanical reproduction: for him, photography is "anallegoricalart... [that] would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a
stable and stabilizing image."16Through the mechanism of feedback, television too
functions allegorically. Feedback, like allegory, is a doubling back, not only of
information but also of the spectator who finds her- or himself reflected on the
screen, either directly in works such as WipeCycleor indirectly in the lexicon of
stereotypical identities that constitute television narratives. It is during the age of
network television that "communities" (as the term is currently used to indicate a
circle of shared identity or experience, like the "gay community" or the "AIDS
community"17) beganto be
intensivelycommodified. As Richard Serra
famouslyproclaimed in a work of 1973, what television sells (to advertisers) is its audience.18
The product of TV, then, is not merely its programming, but a set of highly stratified
demographic "communities"to which each program corresponds. Shamberg'scareer
manifests not only the search for new narratives,but a search for new communities-
both on the screen and among its audiences. Here, then, would be my prescriptionfor both the artist and the critic: to reinvent modes of the collective in a world where
publics have become a new type of commodity.
Rethinking "communities" is inseparable from rethinking identity politics.Just as postmodernism of the 1980s addressed what Sherrie Levine has identified
as the nature of images as property,19the best art of the last decade has explored
the conditions of identity as property n the fullest material and psychologicalsense. This does not mean simply asserting the identity one possesses, but rather
questioning why we should experience the self as a possession in the first place. To
relax one's proprietary hold on subjectivity might enable the kind of malleabilityand mobility characteristic of Shamberg's career. He happened to have landed in
Hollywood, but his allegory might lead elsewhere. In such an artistic/critical
project terms like "subversion" or even "criticality"no longer seem appropriate.
They connote revolutionary destruction divorced from its compensatory utopian
promise. Taking my inspiration from William Burroughs-and perhaps in an
effort to detourne he massive damage accomplished by AIDS in the era of post-
16. Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse," p. 5617. Kwon's discussion of the shift from site-specificity as rootedness in a place to an engagementwith a community or discourse is an important point of reference. See Kwon, One PlaceAfterAnother.18. In TelevisionDeliversPeople,Richard Serra presented a simple rolling text composed of excerptsdrawn from various papers presented at a broadcasting conference. It read, in part, "The product of
television, commercial television, is the audience. Television delivers people to an advertiser. There isno such thing as mass media in the United States except for television."19. "It's not that I'm trying to deny that people own things. That isn't even the point. The point isthat people want to own things, which is more interesting to me. What does it mean to own something,and, stranger still, what does it mean to own an image?" Jeanne Siegel, "After Sherrie Levine
[Interview],"ArtsMagazine 59, no. 10 (Summer 1985), p. 143.
12
8/6/2019 Allegory of Crit
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/allegory-of-crit 12/12
An Allegory f Criticism
modernism-I propose a viral mode of practice. In 1964, before there was an
Internet, Burroughs understood the relation between the virus and information.
In a section of his Nova Express 1964) titled "Technical Deposition of the VirusPower" he "explains":
Gentlemen, it was first suggested that we take our own image and
examine how it could be made more portable. We found that simple
binary coding systemswere enough to contain the entire image however
they required a large amount of storage space until it was found that
the binary information could be written at the molecular level, and our
entire image could be contained within a grain of sand. However it was
found that these information molecules were not dead matter but
exhibited a capacity for life which was found elsewhere in the form of
virus. Our virus infects the human and creates our image in him.20
The viral is a model of allegory multiplied ad infinitum. A viral art/criticismwould be impure and monstrous. It would erode or corrupt the sanctity of the
object. It would be recombinant.
20. William S. Burroughs, NovaExpress New York: Grove Press, 1992 [1964]), p. 49.
13