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8/12/2019 Proudhon, Marx, Picasso REVIEW by TAGG http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/proudhon-marx-picasso-review-by-tagg 1/6 Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: Three Studies in the Sociology of Art by Max Raphael; Inge Marcuse; John Tagg Review by: David Craven Theory and Society, Vol. 12, No. 5 (Sep., 1983), pp. 692-696 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657425 . Accessed: 19/07/2014 09:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at  . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp  . 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].  . Springer  is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Theory and Society. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 202.41.10.21 on Sat, 19 Jul 2014 09:08:28 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: Three Studies in the Sociology of Art by Max Raphael; Inge Marcuse;John TaggReview by: David CravenTheory and Society, Vol. 12, No. 5 (Sep., 1983), pp. 692-696Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657425 .

Accessed: 19/07/2014 09:08

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

 .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].

 .

Springer  is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Theory and Society.

http://www.jstor.org

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69292

well-documented changes in culture, in values and preferences. We leave it to

pollsters to report in the newspapers,and to a fringe movement of academic socialindicatorspeople.

The question of Hirschman'sessay can be formulated as: Is it sometimes useful to

think of humans as the kinds of animals who changetheir mindsa lot, oftenjointly,about what is good, true, beautiful,just, and preferable? am convinced that the

answer is yes, along with Hirschman and Sorokin and James A. Davis. The prefer-ence for public versusprivate consumption goods is probablyone of these changingvalues.

It seems to me, however,that mechanisms ike disappointment will not do thejob.First, much of the change is by new cohorts learning different values than older

cohorts;theyare not likelyto be the most disappointed.Second, not all suchchangesare cyclical - for example the proportion of all economic activity done by govern-ments has moved always upward (though irregularly) n Western Europe and the

United States in recent history. Alternating private and public disappointmentscannot explain public movement in a single direction. Many of the other value

changes (e.g., on virginity or abortion) do not seem to representonly individual

choices of behavior; instead they represent(mostly) judgments of the behavior of

others.

Hirschmanhas shown us againthat culturalorvaluechangeis out therein theworld;

butwe arenearlyas theoretically impoverishedfor the explanationas we were before

Hirschman'sessay.

ArthurL. Stinchcombe

NorthwesternUniversityStanford GraduateSchool of Business

Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: ThreeStudies in the Sociology of Art by Max Raphael,translated by Inge Marcuse, edited, introduced, and with a bibliographyby John

Tagg (New Jersey:HumanitiesPress, 1980).

In 1965 John Bergerdedicatedhis book on Picasso to Max Raphael,whom he called

a forgotten but great critic. This characterizationwas true duringRaphael's later

years, when he died in 1952, as well as in the decade after his death. In the last

ten years,however,Raphael'scriticismhas received ncreasingattention.His critiqueof Picasso's work, for example, has become more timely than ever in light of the

extravagantPicasso retrospective n 1980 at the Museum of Modern Art. Ironically,

many of the observationsnow used to praisePicasso'sart wereinsightsearliermade

by Raphael, but for reasons that were often critical.Not only did Raphael anticipatemuch of the continued acclaim, he also showed how this acclaim would itself be

relatedto contemporarysocial developments.

Raphael's most significant criticism does not entirely divorce what art formally

expresses from the way art is receptively completed. In this respect, his essays are

notable for methodological reasons, as evidenced by the recent emphasis in art

criticism on rezeptiongeschichte. This is not to say that Raphael's writings are

well-documented changes in culture, in values and preferences. We leave it to

pollsters to report in the newspapers,and to a fringe movement of academic socialindicatorspeople.

The question of Hirschman'sessay can be formulated as: Is it sometimes useful to

think of humans as the kinds of animals who changetheir mindsa lot, oftenjointly,about what is good, true, beautiful,just, and preferable? am convinced that the

answer is yes, along with Hirschman and Sorokin and James A. Davis. The prefer-ence for public versusprivate consumption goods is probablyone of these changingvalues.

It seems to me, however,that mechanisms ike disappointment will not do thejob.First, much of the change is by new cohorts learning different values than older

cohorts;theyare not likelyto be the most disappointed.Second, not all suchchangesare cyclical - for example the proportion of all economic activity done by govern-ments has moved always upward (though irregularly) n Western Europe and the

United States in recent history. Alternating private and public disappointmentscannot explain public movement in a single direction. Many of the other value

changes (e.g., on virginity or abortion) do not seem to representonly individual

choices of behavior; instead they represent(mostly) judgments of the behavior of

others.

Hirschmanhas shown us againthat culturalorvaluechangeis out therein theworld;

butwe arenearlyas theoretically impoverishedfor the explanationas we were before

Hirschman'sessay.

ArthurL. Stinchcombe

NorthwesternUniversityStanford GraduateSchool of Business

Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: ThreeStudies in the Sociology of Art by Max Raphael,translated by Inge Marcuse, edited, introduced, and with a bibliographyby John

Tagg (New Jersey:HumanitiesPress, 1980).

In 1965 John Bergerdedicatedhis book on Picasso to Max Raphael,whom he called

a forgotten but great critic. This characterizationwas true duringRaphael's later

years, when he died in 1952, as well as in the decade after his death. In the last

ten years,however,Raphael'scriticismhas received ncreasingattention.His critiqueof Picasso's work, for example, has become more timely than ever in light of the

extravagantPicasso retrospective n 1980 at the Museum of Modern Art. Ironically,

many of the observationsnow used to praisePicasso'sart wereinsightsearliermade

by Raphael, but for reasons that were often critical.Not only did Raphael anticipatemuch of the continued acclaim, he also showed how this acclaim would itself be

relatedto contemporarysocial developments.

Raphael's most significant criticism does not entirely divorce what art formally

expresses from the way art is receptively completed. In this respect, his essays are

notable for methodological reasons, as evidenced by the recent emphasis in art

criticism on rezeptiongeschichte. This is not to say that Raphael's writings are

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withoutflaws,as this reviewwillshow. Nevertheless, he shortcomingsof hiscriticism

often resultfrom a betrayalof his own methodological sophistication.

Raphael beginshis triadicstudy, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, withan excellentdiscus-

sion of PierreJoseph Proudhon'stheoryof art. He startshere becauseof his viewthat

much of what is inadequate about early twentieth century art has its historical

precedentin Proudhon's ideas. Labeling most French artists Proudhonians, Ra-

phaelelucidatesboth how Proudhonattemptedto go beyondKantianformalismand

how he ultimatelyfailed to do so. Insteadof declaringartautonomous, as did Kant,Proudhon did the reverse.He subordinatedart to science and moralconscience,

which, as Raphael notes, were obviously related to Kant's concepts of theoretical

reason and practical reason. Having retained these abstractions, Proudhon thenreinstitutedapriorism, which he was supposedlydisavowing, by proclaimingall art

to be based on a principle inherent to the human mind, namely, the progressivemission to reconcileart with the moraland the useful. Proudhon'srecognitionthat

Kant'saesthetic was without any historicalgrounding led him to try to ground his

own position empirically.

By locating artempirically,however,Proudhon had in mindthat art works expressthe ideas of theage as advancedbythe collectiveforce. RaphaeldemonstratesthatProudhon's efforts as an art critic merely displayed internal contradictions of his

criticalframework.When the art was acclaimed and Proudhon disprovedof it, as inthe case of Vernet, the art was not fulfilling its mission. When the art was not

collectivelyacclaimedand Proudhon approvedof it, as in thecase of Courbet,the artwas fulfilling its mission. In both situations the mission was at odds with the

collective force and it was imposed a priori, not arrived at a posteriori as any

empiricalapproachwould. In neithersituation is the relationshipof collective forceto inherent principles or that of the ideas of the age to a universal mission

seriouslyaddressed.Consequently,Proudhon'scritiqueof the art in his own histori-cal epoch is based on a self-containedconcept of art'sdevelopment- a concept withlittle more concrete

groundingthan Kant's

argumentfor

autonomy.

The conclusions Raphael draws from Proudhon's flaws aresignificant, although forreasonsRaphael did not realize.He shows on the one hand that Proudhon's view of

society as a mere continuation of nature implies not only a vulgar, deterministicmaterialism in the guise of biological evolutionism. This view also leads to thedefinition of the artistic faculty as one of perceiving pre-existing beauty and a

predeterminedmission, whereas a dialecticalapproachwould recognizethedynamic

interchange between perceiver and perceived. In addition, Raphael shows thatProudhon'sevocation of a uniform,abstracthistoricalconsciousness is hardlyplau-

sible, becausethere is no significanthistoricalconsciousnesswithout classconscious-ness. To achieve the historicalgroundingProudhonsought invain,we must,Raphaelobserves, firstof all studythe relationshipbetweenideologicaland materialproduc-tion, with reference to various social groupings. In the last analysis, Proudhon'seclectic fusion is what Raphael terms historicalsyncretism. Not surprisingly, his

approach resultedin what he considered Proudhon's most basic error,namely, theelimination of human needs as a cause of both material and spiritualproduction.Instead of understandingart as a means of self-realizationthrough historical re-

sponses, Proudhon reified art as something to which human realization was itself

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subordinated.In makingthis criticism,Raphael parallelsMarx'scritiqueof Proud-

hon'svulgarsocialism,that is, hisfetishization of equaldistributionat theexpense ofreclaiming the modes of production for greater human realization prior to the

distribution of any products.

The art to which Raphael's critique most applies, however, is not the utopianmodernismhe had in mind,butZhdanovism,the official Stalinistaestheticfrom 1935to 1956, which was codified only two years after Proudhon, Marx, Picasso was

published in 1933. Contrary to what was said about it, the socialist realism of

Zhdanovist doctrine had no real connection to Marxism, as MaynardSoloman has

noted. The traits of this aesthetic - its crudetendentiousness,its rejectionof formal

complexity, its iron-handedcensorship, its revolutionary myths - are as close toProudhon's idealisttheory, with its imposed social message,as they are distantfrom

Marx'sstatements(in TheEconomic and PhilosophicalManuscriptsof 1844)about

art, especially his emphasis on developing the subjectivehuman sensibility. Both

Zhdanovand Proudhon reifiedartin the nameof objective ocial edificationand at

the expense of anydialecticalinterchangebetweenhistoryandart,art and audience-

all of which assumea one-dimensionalpostureof passivetransmissionor receptivitywithin these two theories. Proudhon's theory of art is analogous to his reductive

distributionism, whileZhdanovist art is related o what Paul Sweezyhastermedthe

reductive economism ofStalinist society.

The second essayin Raphael'sbook isdevoted to The MarxistTheory of Art. With

two epigraphs romEngels' etters on whythe historical materialistmethod should be

a guiding principle,not a ready-madepattern, Raphael seems preparedto avoid a

reductivistapproach. As a basis for his interpretation, Raphael takes what he calls

Marx's most importantstatement on the subject, namely,the discussionof art in the

Introduction to a Critiqueof Political Economy (1857). He notes that in this passageMarx disavows any unilateralprogressionof art and economic productivity- a view

which posits the relativeautonomy of things in the ideological domain. Raphael

then adds that when we are content to assigna givenartist to a particular deology ora class, we fall into mechanicalsterility.

Unfortunately, Raphael does not heed his own advice in otherpartsof the essay. His

statement hatthefundamental ask of aMarxistpositionis to illuminate theconcrete

manifestations of the most general laws of dialectical materialism n the domain in

question is unacceptable. As used by Marx, a dialectical method is a way of

understanding historical developments; it is not an immanent set of laws within

history awaiting recognition. Here Raphael's position is flawed by an essentialism

which is firmlyin the tradition of classical Europeanrationalism.This essentialism,

whereby the dialectic becomes something to discover rather than something with

whichto discover,underminesRaphael'sstudyin severalplaces.Whendiscussing he

issue of ruling class ideas, he adopts the untenable view - similar to the Lasallian

position - of a pure,monolithic class ideology, except where theperverseneedto be

stimulated eads to influences from otherclass ideologies. WhendealingwithGreek

art, he implies that it has a normative value and that it is anti-dogmatic in an

absolutelyradical sense. Yet the Fascists'preference or Greco-Romanart disallows

the assignment of normative value to theforms of Greek art. As Adolfo Sanchez

Vazquezhascontended,a Marxist concern with a normativeaesthetics s self-contra-

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dictory. The result would only be a Gotha program for the arts. Certainly Marxaddressedthis issue

directlyin a letter

(November 26, 1885),which

Raphaeldoes not

cite, when he said the artist should not be concerned with showing the futurehistorical solution of the social conflicts, but should be concerned instead with

calling into question the eternalvalidity of the existing order.

Since the Economic and Philosophical Manuscriptsof 1844werenot publisheduntil1932 (while Proudhon, Marx, Picasso was going to press), Raphael can hardly becensuredfor not usingthe extremelyimportantsections on artin them.Nevertheless,his study would have been enhanced had these thoughts of Marx been assimilated.The emphasis in the 1844Manuscriptson the progressiveemancipationof the senses

and on the development of the subjectivehuman sensibility counteracts the con-strictiveessentialismand the overridingobjectificationof formto whichRaphaelfallsvictim. He definitely avoids the historical relativismto which an exclusive concernwith art as a mode of self-conscious realization could lead, yet he does so only bylimitinghis studyto an antithetical concernwithartas a socially normativeobject- aconcern which is much more a-historical, than trans-historical. For this reason,

Raphael'ssecond essay, on Marx, in Proudhon, Marx, Picasso is by far the weakestof the three. The essentialism which appears only infrequently in the other two

critiques is here the dominant characteristic.Unfortunately, in some of Raphael'slaterwritingsthis tendencybecomeseven more pronounced,so that, in Toward an

EmpiricalTheory of Art (1941) he advocates an artcriticismwhich will someday beformulated in mathematical terms. This position contradicts the emphasis in

Raphael's best studies on criticism as a constitutive act involving synthetic inter-

change, not just neutral description.

A critiqueof Picasso, whom Raphael met in 1911and kept in touch with until 1913,forms the concluding section in this book. This essay about Picasso's work is

probablythe most importantone of the three,because of itscontemporaryrelevanceand its methodological sophistication.The task outlinedby Raphaelis to investigate

the material and ideological conditions that have influenced him and how he hasreacted to them in his art. Not only does he generallyavoid any artas reflection

thesis, he also carefullydifferentiatesfree enterprisecapitalismfrom the monopoly

capital context within which Picasso's art was made.

Raphael uses this contextual frameworkto explain a frequenttrait of Picasso'sworkthat has puzzledmainstreamcritics, namely, the humor whichsurfaces in his other-wise serious art. Normally seen as life-enhancing or connected to anecdotes, this

aspectof Picasso's work has beendownplayedas affectionatemockery byconven-tional historians like Gert Schiff. Raphael, however, contends that this rending

ambivalence n Picasso'sartisdirectlyconnectedto a caricaturaldimensioncentraltomuch modern art. Far from being a topical addition, as is often assumed, thiscaricatural thrust is deeply rooted in a responseto the contradictory way humanityhas been defined in modern western society. The tension in Picasso's art, betweencreative involvement and disengaging irony, is an aesthetic expression of thesecontradictions.Such tensionentailsan internal distance fromthegeneralideologicalcontext out of which the artgrew.Thus, Picasso'sart,in Raphael'sview, is importantto the extent that it expressesequivocation about its own existence.

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ConcerningPicasso's art as a whole, Raphael makes veryperceptiveremarksabout

how Picasso's oeuvre has come to signifyseveralthings in contemporarysociety. HeconsidersPicasso'sextremelymultifariousdevelopmentandcompetingstylesto be a

signifierof the various counter-forcesnecessarilyat work now. He notes that Picas-

so's voracious eclecticism,his continuous use of differenttraditions and contempor-

ary trends, signifies the rapacity of monopoly capitalism(now we should add the

relentlessnesswith which monopoly capitalappropriatesalmost everythingto create

legitimacyfor itself).He furtherargues,in a waythat recalls hisessentialismfrom the

precedingstudy, that Picasso was incapableof creatingan art based on materialist

dialectics. In light of these aspects of meaning in Picasso's art, Raphael concludes

that Picasso is the most important symbol of contemporary bourgeois society.

Raphael's attempt to explain Picasso's unparalleledfame in the history of art still

accountsforagood deal.One of the most frequentlycited andhighly regardedreasons

for Picasso'sposition is, to quoteElizabethMurray,a contemporaryAmericanartist,that He truly says you can do anything. This emphasis on creativityas an end in

itself, coupled with an appreciationof Picasso's subjectiveeclecticism and his multi-

facetedtalent, have made his artextremelyimportantto the cultureof narcissism,with its concomitant pluralism.In this respect,Picasso's oeuvre has come to signifyan absolute ndividualityfreeof any ordering nterchangewith society. His art has

been exaltedfor its freedom, s if this freedom itself werenot related o a self-defeat-

ing groundlessnessor whatDonald Kuspithastermedthe immanentanti-harmonyof

contemporarylife. In a brilliantextension of Raphael's argument, Kuspit has noted

(Parachute: revue d'art contemporain, Winter 1980) that Picasso's art is so imperious

in its creativitythat it has erasedthe rules which formerlypreventedit from ruling

arbitrarily.Consequently, in Picasso's work, as in late capitalism, unending free-

dom has necessarilyresultedin an endless eclecticism- an eclecticismwhich is the

answerto a dissolutionof any totality,a dissipationof allgivens.Whilea legitimationcrisis awaitsthe contradictoryarrangementsof monopoly capital,Picasso'soeuvreis

being legitimatedin the name of an absolute creativitywhose essenceis a supposed

transcendenceof all contradictions.

Many of the other observationsin Raphael'sstudy are far less fecund and penetrat-

ing. His insistence that Picasso should have based his arton dialecticalmaterialism

is an unfortunate apseinto Cartesian laws. Nevertheless,whenRaphaelshiftedthe

discoursefrom dealingwith Picasso's artas a reflection of society to considering t

as being in a complex interchange with society - whereby new signification is

continually accrued- he did something very significantfor art criticism. As John

Bergeronce noted, Raphael shows that the revolutionary meaningof an artworkis

not self-contained,but is a meaningcontinually awaitingdiscoveryand release.

David Craven

SUNY, Cortland

Theoryand Society 12(1983) 681-696

Elsevier Science PublishersB.V., Amsterdam- Printed in The Netherlands

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