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Art Journal
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Editor's Statement: The Political Unconscious in

Nineteenth-Century Art
Linda Nochlin
Published online: 02 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Linda Nochlin (1987) Editor's Statement: The Political Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Art, Art Journal,
46:4, 259-260, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.1987.10792371
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1987.10792371

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Editor's Statement:
The Political Unconscious
in Nineteenth-Century Art

By Linda Nochlin
he session on the Political UnconT
scious in Nineteenth-Century Art
at the 1986 Annual Meeting of the
College Art Association,which served as
the basis of this issue of Art Journal,
owed its genesis to two rather different
sources. First, the notion of an unconscious as opposed to a conscious inscription of the political in the work of art or
in artistic institutions or within the processes of art making seemed to me to
provide a necessary antithesis to those
consciously formulated political programs or commissions which had been
considered in the volume Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, edited
by Henry Millon and myself in 1978
(Cambridge, Mass., M.LT Press). Second, I had been inspired by a reading of
Fredric Jameson's magisterial text, The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1981).
It was not my intention to attempt a
wholesale translation of Jameson's complex work into the realm of the visual
arts-a project that would have been
impossible in any case-but rather to
see what would happen if one made the
attempt to articulate such a problematic
venture for the field of art history. In the
case of art consciously designed to serve
a political cause-for example, Repin's
They Didn't Expect Him, representing
the return of a Siberian exile, or Rude's
heroic statue of Napoleon-the politics
in question were often made manifest in
the terms of iconographic, rather than
formal analysis. It seemed to me that in
the case of the presence of unconscious
political presuppositions a different sort
of methodology would be necessary, one
that avoided displacing the political onto
the realm of subject matter and, indeed,
one that avoided the stereotypical oppo-

sit ion between iconographic and formal

analysis entirely.
The original call for papers for the
session on the Political Unconscious
stipulated proposals dealing in novel or
innovative ways with the intersection of
art and politics, particularly cases in
which concrete historical relations of
class, sex, nationality, or race were
veiled, transformed, or even erased, thus
functioning as an unconscious grounding for the production under consideration. By "art," I meant to imply the
discourses of art, modes of art production, and art institutions such as
museums and academies, as well as
works of art per se. Investigations of
photography, print-making, and anonymous visual production, as well as the
more conventional painting and sculpture, were invited. More than fifty proposals were submitted for consideration,
many of them excellent and provocative.
For purposes of consistency, papers
dealing with French art were given
priority, with the exception of Douglas
Crimp's piece on the Altes Museum,
which seemed to set the stage-both
theoretical and material-for the whole
undertaking, despite the fact that the
museum in question was a German
rather than a French one. An additional
piece, by Michael Orwicz, which
seemed entirely appropriate to the generally French tenor of the issue, was
added to the papers presented by Douglas Crimp, Leila W. Kinney, Stephen F.
Eisenman, Christopher J. Robinson,
Jane Kromm, and Jeffrey J. Rosen at
the 1986 session.
I see now that my conception of the
political unconscious was in fact rather
naive and too all-embracing. Yet it
seemed to me to serve a real purpose in
generating the methodologically various

and often provocative texts that it did.

redric Jameson, who served as our
F
respondent in absentia, pointed out
in his response that he had "intended
The Political Unconscious, or at least its
first chapter, not to be a systematic
presentation of my thoughts on the
structure of the work of art, or on the
proper methods for analyzing artistic
texts; but rather as a way of sorting out
the claims of competing arguments and
methods in this area. I did not want to
propose a system," he continued,
but rather to demonstrate that a
certain number of polemics on the
left and between radical methods
and approaches were not productive ones, because in reality they
were based on different objects of
study. I wanted to show how certain approaches to the text-some
in terms of social class, some in
terms of immediate political
events, some in terms of tendencies of capitalism itself as a mode
of production---constituted their
objects of study distinctly and
therefore did not in that sense
overlap. You cannot fight over
findings which are drawn from
radically distinct objects of study;
you can certainly eventually go on
to discuss the political choices
reflected in constituting the aesthetic text in this way or that-but
in might be better to become more
self-conscious about how those
objects of study were first constituted, before we go on to the more
immediately political considerations, which clearly depend on
our assessment of American
culture today and its "current
situation."

Winter 1987

259

Downloaded by [University of Toronto Libraries] at 11:57 03 December 2014

What Jameson was insisting on was a

certain clarity, indeed a self-consciousness about method, which, although
fairly common in literary criticism or, to
some degree, in history, is notably lacking in the practices of mainstream art
history. Such an awareness is, I believe,
present to a greater or lesser degree in
all the papers in this Art Journal issue,
and as such constitutes an important
part of their value. The interpretation of
the "political unconscious" in each text
is invariably different, having to do with
the difference in the subject under investigation, how that subject is constructed,
and, perhaps most important, how the
very notion of unconsciousness in relation to the political is to be construed.
Jameson in his response made an important distinction between the search for
political meanings that have in some
sense been "lost" to the contemporary
viewer and that therefore have to be
recuperated through careful examination of the historical situation in question, as opposed to that area of study
which he stipulated as involving contradictions, and where it seemed to him
that "something on the order of Freud's
model of the unconscious" might be
extremely pertinent. Some of the texts in
this issue belong on one side of this
distinction, some on the other; for some,
the distinction is itself of little relevance:
all of them, I believe, are interesting not
merely in what they come out with, but
in how they go about this task of exploration, recuperation, or the setting forth
of contradictions.
inally, I should like to point out that
F
almost all the contributors to this
volume are what might be called
"younger art historians," a term that
has something to do with physical age,
of course, but also with the fact that
most of them are at or near the beginning of their careers, a fact that gives me
hope for our discipline. And I should
also like to give my heartfelt thanks to
Fredric Jameson, whose work provided
the inspiration for the session as well as
the critique of its accomplishment.

260

Art Journal

Linda Nochlin is Professor in the Art

History Ph.D. Program at the City
University of New York Graduate
Center.