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November 6, 2013
Particular New Forms of Realism
Draft | By AK Thompson
Dear PPW,
The following paper is something I’ve been working on for a while and that I’ve been
struggling to complete. Through an analysis of two very different postmodern artists—
Mark Lombardi and Cindy Sherman—the paper considers the challenges of producing
transformative movement-based art in the period of late capitalism. Drawing on the
insights of Walter Benjamin, my objective was to learn what could be appropriated—not
so much aesthetically as epistemologically—from their respective (and contradictory)
strategies. I feel like I’m fumbling toward something, but I would appreciate a little push.
Peer review responses thus far have been mixed. Many readers have indicated that they
think I’m on to something but find the material too dense; others have cautioned agaisnt
my inclination to end on a prescriptive note. Since I’m reluctant to abandon prescription,
the challenge seems to be to make it as compelling and actionable as possible.
Ultimate objective: to work up a publishable stand-alone version of this piece (for a
journal in social theory, cultural sociology, social movement studies, or elsewhere—
suggestions welcome) and to include a version as the conclusion to my forthcoming
monograph on Walter Benjamin, social movements, and art.
Comments and feedback most welcome.
Thanks, and see you on November14!
AK Thompson
PS: Some of you may have noticed that this is not the paper I’d promised. Rest assured,
however, that I will be sure to submit “A Time for Leaders” at a later date.
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Particular New Forms of Realism
Draft | By AK Thompson
According to Walter Benjamin, history decayed into images (2003:476). From this
insight, he developed a means of reading images to uncover their historical significance
and a strategy for producing images that might shock others into recognizing the dangers
and opportunities that marked their historical moment. Gathered together in Convolute N
of his uncompleted Arcades Project, Benjamin’s compelling but enigmatic notes on what
he called the “dialectical image” are highly suggestive when imagining how social
movements might take hold of the visual field today.
In Benjamin’s account, dialectical images arose at the point where everyday social
relations crystallized around their point of greatest contradiction. In other words, the
dialectical image wasn’t simply an image of struggle with which viewers could identify
or an image of misery capable of stimulating outrage. For these reasons, it was not
propagandistic in the traditional sense. Instead, the dialectical image condensed all the
unrealized promise of the past and all the practical means that such promise might finally
be realized to a single, illuminating point. “To thinking belongs the movement as well as
the arrest of thoughts,” Benjamin proposed.
Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—
there the dialectal image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its
position is naturally not an arbitrary one. It is to be found, in a word, where the
tension between dialectical opposites is greatest. (2003:475)
As with Marx, who noted in an 1843 letter to his friend Arnold Ruge that “the world has
long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to
possess it in reality,” Benjamin thought that—by exposing the wishful fantasies
embodied in everyday artifacts and revealing the precise manner by which these fantasies
came to be ensnared within the deadening logic of the commodity form—people could be
alerted to the opportunities for revolutionary transformation that lay dormant in every
situation.
Once it became clear that their identification with the existing world corresponded to its
unrealized promise and not to the hard casing within which it had become trapped,
Benjamin imagined that people would embrace forms of action that, in his mind, were the
equivalent of “splitting the atom” (2003:463). The phrase was not intended to be
metaphorical; by breaking the commodity-encrusted shell and reconnecting with the
promise encased therein, Benjamin wagered that could release a tremendous amount of
compressed human energy. When coupled with the profane reckoning provoked by the
dialectical image (a reckoning that enjoined the viewer to consider how—this time—their
dreams of happiness might finally be fulfilled), this energy becomes the motive force for
revolution.
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
To be sure, such an account of the revolutionary process is as enigmatic as it is
compelling. To make matters worse, Benjamin himself remained elusive when it came to
providing concrete examples of what a dialectical image might actually look like. But
while these features of Benjamin’s writing pose challenges to social movement actors
interested in operationalizing his insights, a careful reading of Benjamin’s description of
the dialectical image’s production and of its anticipated effects provides a useful
framework for considering particular cases. Based on this framework, I have argued
elsewhere that Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads (1933) and Pablo Picasso’s
Guernica (1937) can be read as coherent visual approximations of the dialectical image.
Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads (1933)
Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937)
At this point, readers familiar with Benjamin may interject by pointing out that dialectical
images do not have to be “images” in the conventional sense at all. Indeed, as Susan
Buck-Morss has pointed out, such “images” might be extended to include dust, fashion,
expositions, and commodities (1991:221). But while considering any of these objects
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analytically reveals their potentially significant revelatory power, Buck-Morss makes
clear that the dialectical image is itself composed of two discrete but interrelated
moments—one mediated and analytic, and one immediate and revelatory.
As an immediate, quasi-mystical apprehension, the dialectical image was
intuitive. As a philosophical “construction,” it was not. Benjamin’s laborious and
detailed study of past texts, his careful inventory of the fragmentary parts he
gleaned from them, and the planned use of these in deliberately constructed
“constellations” were all sober, self-reflective procedures, which, he believed,
were necessary in order to make visible a picture of truth that the fictions of
conventional history writing covered over. (1991:220)
For this reason, and especially in the context of social movement struggles to develop
effective visual strategies, it’s appropriate to delimit the scope of our investigation in this
case to the realm of deliberately constructed images. And though neither Rivera nor
Picasso produced the “cessation of happening” that Benjamin had hoped for (1968:263),
their analytic proximity to the dialectical image make them important reference points for
those concerned with making effective visual interventions today.
Nevertheless, attempts to mimic these images without taking the significant social,
historical, and epistemological transformations that have taken place since the 1930s into
account are bound to fall short. In order to proceed, it’s therefore necessary to transpose
the dialectical image’s epistemic premises into our own contemporary register.
Specifically, we must consider how our own endless present has transformed people’s
relationship to both images and to history.

In his pioneering analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism, Frederic Jameson
acknowledged that—despite the evident connections between postmodern sensibilities
and those that occasionally found expression in the high modernist (and even the
Romantic) period—we are now divided from these prior moments by a kind of epochal
break. For Jameson, this break arises from the dramatic transformations that
multinational capitalism produced in the relationship between culture and economy
starting in the early 1960s (1991:5). If, in the past, culture—and, in particular, visual
culture—was at least formally distinguishable from the market (and if this position
allowed it to formulate critical responses to dynamics within the economic base), the
same cannot be easily said today.
Coinciding with the integration of culture into the commodity cycle has been a
transposition of history into the register of style.i As Jameson recounts, the relation to the
past fostered by postmodernism becomes increasingly concerned with the “imitation of
dead styles” (1991:18). Here, the past is approached “through stylistic connotation,
conveying ‘pastness’” (1991:19). Consequently, “the past is … itself modified” and “the
retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future”
is reduced to a “multitudinous photographic simulacrum” (1991:18). Written more than
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twenty years ago, contemporary developments suggest that (even as postmodernism falls
into decline as a self-conscious cultural and intellectual project) Jameson’s assessment
has become more—and not less—relevant.
Although culture’s subsumption within the economy did not automatically make every
postmodernist a willing participant in the new order, Jameson cautions that—even at its
most defiant—postmodern culture could not escape the fact that its excesses were now
actively sought by a market desperate to revitalize the waning magic of the commodity
form. Acknowledging the spirit of refusal that sometimes found expression in
postmodern art, Jameson nevertheless concludes that postmodernism’s
own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually explicit material to
psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance,
which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme
moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only
received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become
institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western
society. (1991:4)
Corroborating this perspective, art critic Hal Foster has suggested that today’s critical
artists are best understood as being “as much a subcontractor” to late capitalism as they
are “an antagonist” (1996:60). Social movement actors and radical cultural producers will
recognize this dynamic. In a brave new world partitioned into niche markets, defiance has
become a hot commodity. The music of rebellion becomes top-40 bubblegum, and
renegade street artists like Shepard Fairey help clear a path to the White House.
Although Benjamin had anticipated the subsumption of culture to the commodity form,
he only witnessed the process in its germinal—high modernist—phase.ii Now that the
process is complete (or nearly complete), it’s evident that one of the central premises
upon which the dialectical image relies has become less stable. If, in The Arcades
Project, Benjamin’s goal was to read images to uncover “the expression of the economy
in its culture” (2003:460), the challenge today is reading the “expression” of one sphere
in another when the distinction between them has become—at best—purely formal.

It’s in the context of this transformation that we can understand Jameson’s contention
that “Benjamin’s account” is today “both singularly relevant and singularly antiquated”
(1991:45). In order to address this challenge, Jameson advances some provisional claims
about what would be required to produce a “cognitive map” suitable to the new terrain.
Similar to the dialectical image, the cognitive map’s purpose is to “enable a situational
representation [of] that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is … society’s
structures as a whole” (1991:51).
Confronted with this challenge, Jameson notes that postmodern cultural products—
though often clearly apologias for global exploitation—can also be read as “particular
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new forms of realism” (1991:49). From this vantage, grasping the depth of an apparently
depthless situation means “becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in
which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra
of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (1991:25). In other words,
while that which is signified can no longer be accessed directly, its dimensions—its
spatial and temporal coordinates—can still be read off of its signifying trace. In this way,
the phenomenal experience of social depthlessness can be impelled to reveal its own
“deep” conditions of possibility.
Practically speaking, the collapse of the distinction between culture and economy
requires that we elaborate epistemic habits and visual strategies that do not rely—as all
previous aesthetic avant-gardes have done—on the critical distance afforded by their
prior separation. In other words, since it’s impossible to “return to aesthetic practices
elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours”
(Jameson, 1991:50), we must find ways of updating—and thus “completing”—our highmodernist strategies of visual critique by tempering them in the crucible of the endless
present.
Jameson does not get much further than calling for such a project. Instead of concrete
propositions, we are given useful but overly-general guidelines: “the new political art (if
it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its
fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital.” But while Jameson is
short on specifics, he does not fail to convey the extent to which such a project is needed.
Since an art capable of holding to the truth of multinational capital would allow us to
“begin to grasp our positioning … and regain a capacity to act and struggle” in a context
that continues to be marked by “confusion” (1991:54), the stakes are very, very high.
How, then, might the dialectical image be transformed to address the cultural logic of late
capitalism? How can Benjamin’s concept—which emphasized “shock” as though it had
self-evident revelatory power—be reconfigured to work at a moment in which shock is
no longer shocking? In what follows, I propose that the dialectical image might be
salvaged by supplementing shock with an aesthetic-epistemological seduction capable of
reconnecting viewers to the now-lost referent. In order to do so, I consider the work of
two contemporary artists—Mark Lombardi and Cindy Sherman—who, in struggling with
the epistemic coordinates of the postmodern scene, produced images that seem to connect
aspects of Benjamin’s conception to novel forms of seduction capable of addressing the
historical lacunae we now confront.

Like Benjamin, New York-based neo-conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was preoccupied
with collecting and organizing information. Between 1994 and his death by suicide in
2000, he developed a novel representational strategy that stands as an intriguing visual
approximation of Jameson’s aesthetic of cognitive mapping. After a career that saw him
shuffle between stints as a reference librarian, a curator, and a researcher (Hertney,
2006:85), Lombardi began producing works in which data collection and the analysis of
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social relations congeal into flow charts, maps, or “narrative structures.” Taking financial
scandals, business deals, and shady connections between corporate and political interests
as his starting point, he produced “delicate filigree drawings that map … the flow of
global capital” (Hertney, 2006:83).
Mark Lombardi, Oliver North, Lake Resources of Panama, and the Iran-Contra Operation, ca. 1984-86 (4th Version)
(1999)
In an artist statement released in 1997, Lombardi described how he assembled his
“narrative structures” by using “a network of lines and notations which are meant to
convey a story, typically about a recent event … like the collapse of a large international
bank, trading company, or investment house.” Motivated by the desire to “explore the
interaction of political, social and economic forces in contemporary affairs,” Lombardi
adopted an approach strongly reminiscent of Benjamin’s own method:
Working from syndicated news items and other published accounts, I begin each
drawing by compiling large amounts of information about a specific bank,
financial group or set of individuals. After a careful review of the literature I then
condense the essential points into an assortment of notations and other brief
statements of fact, out of which an image begins to emerge.
My purpose throughout is to interpret the material by juxtaposing and assembling
the notations into a unified, coherent whole… Hierarchical relationships, the flow
of money and other key details are then indicated by a system of radiating arrows,
broken lines and so forth… Every statement of fact and connection depicted in the
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work is true and based on information culled entirely from the public record.
(1997)
Like Benjamin, Lombardi strove to make the scattered fragments of daily life intelligible
through the process of assemblage. After his death, his holdings were found to include
“14,500 index cards with information on the subjects of his investigations, all drawn from
publicly available sources” (Heartney 2006:85). This compulsive collecting echoed
Benjamin’s own habits while struggling to illuminate the Paris arcades.
But while there are many intriguing biographical connections between Lombardi and
Benjamin (connections that culminate in their respective deaths by suicide), their
methodological connection is still more significant. To give but one example: in his
unpublished manuscript about the history of panoramic painting (a Benjamin favorite),
Lombardi recounts how, in struggling to give an account of the world, “the historian is
reduced to random glimmerings obtained via shards, scraps and bits of ephemera to begin
the reconstruction” (Bigge, 2005:133). Although Lombardi does not cite Benjamin
directly in this context, his sentiment clearly echoes Benjamin’s note in The Arcades
Project in which he proposed to allow the “rags, the refuse” of everyday life “to come
into their own … by making use of them” (2003:460)
Lombardi curator Robert Hobbs was also prone to describing the artist’s work in
Benjaminian terms. According to Hertney, Hobbs was “immediately impressed” with the
“sheer beauty” of Lombardi’s work, which used “the delicacy of the curving lines” to
delineate “abstract force fields created by the global movement of money.” Hobbs
described these works “variously as webs, rhizomes, and constellations” But alongside
these revealing characterizations, he also declared Lombardi’s creations to be nothing
short of a “mental and visual seduction” (2006:84).
For his part, cultural journalist Ryan Bigge also became intrigued by the simultaneity of
analytic clarity and seduction in Lombardi’s work. For Bigge, the artist’s curved lines
recalled “the simple yet seductive contours of latitude and longitude” even as they
revealed the “self-described vicious circles” of global capitalism (2005:128). In these
formulations, it’s possible to see how seduction might pave the way for the shock of
recognition.
For Bigge, Lombardi’s genius owed to his ability to “make abstract movements of capital
concrete and comprehensible” (2005:128). However, because of the manner in which
they are assembled, the narrative structures ensure that comprehensibility does not arise
all at once. Instead, it must be pieced together by oscillating between critical distance and
engaged proximity. Seduced, the viewer thus sways back and forth. As Bigge recounts,
“the density of text” in Lombardi’s images “necessitates the viewer take a number of
steps backward, since the facts can easily overwhelm the piece’s beauty.” Indeed, “only
from a distance can the work be seen, rather than read” (2005:128-129). But this textual
density is also seductive; and as soon as the viewer has retreated to the point from which
it’s possible to perceive the whole, she is confronted with the urge to dive back in.
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Because its particular content can only be dimly grasped when contemplated from a
distance that allows the viewer to consider the beauty of the image as a whole,
Lombardi’s creations encourage a process of analytic engagement that compels the
viewer—now seduced by the whole—to once again fixate upon individual, constellated
components. Like falling from heaven and breaking the cloud cover, the viewer is thus
drawn through aesthetics before confronting the shocking implications of the depicted
scene; however, even here, the beauty and conceptual coherence of the totality is not
eclipsed. To reactivate it, the viewer is simply required to step back in order to begin the
process anew. By prompting alternation between these two vantage points, Lombardi
does for epistemology what stereoscopy does for vision.
Along with holding true “to the world space of multinational capital,” Lombardi’s
stereoscopy also corresponds to Benjamin’s efforts to crystallize historical fragments into
illuminating three-dimensional constellations. However, with Benjamin’s dialectical
image, stereoscopy is achieved through the montage of historical citations themselves and
not through modulations in the epistemic position of the viewer; however, this doesn’t
mean that montage plays no role in Lombardi’s oeuvre (though his works are certainly
not montage in the conventional sense). Drawn in pencil on one surface, they stand in
sharp contrast to those works of the early twentieth century that were assembled from
multiple sources in the interest of yielding generative discord.
Nevertheless, when considered from an epistemological and not a purely formal
perspective, it’s evident that Lombardi does bring discrete fragments into combination in
new and illuminating ways. The constellating line of his narrative structures gives shape
to fragmented and otherwise imperceptible social relationships and—in the process—
forges a new socio-spatial proximity (a new cognitive map) that amplifies the viewer’s
apprehension of the “world space of multinational capital.” If, in the past, montage
enabled artists to materialize meaning by assembling objects in new and illuminating
ways, Lombardi effectively revitalizes this strategy by conceptually distilling it to its
most basic premise.
But rather than generating the kind of shock that such constructions yielded in the early
twentieth century, the slow seduction enacted by Lombardi’s narrative structures
revitalizes shock’s epistemological promise by subverting its contemporary
aestheticization. By making the abstract concrete, and by showing how the trans-local
organization of capitalist social relations is made possible through concrete and localized
points of relay, Lombardi helps us to think in terms that take history itself to be the object
of a collective, transformative labor process. For these reasons, and as a prefiguration of
Jameson’s new “political art,” Lombardi should be considered an important reference
point for anyone working to develop a dialectical image today. However, when measured
against the epistemological demands that Benjamin associated with the concept, his work
ultimately falls short.
In order to understand why, it’s necessary to consider how Lombardi’s narrative
structures depict an objectified world of relations in which the viewer is never directly
implicated. In other words, if they provoke forms of analytic reckoning consistent with
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the requirements of the dialectical image, they do not yet lead to the forms of decisive
action that such images also require. And, because the composition’s constellated
references do not pass through the viewer in any clear sense, there is little for the viewer
to do but engage in passive contemplation.
According to Hobbs, “Lombardi wanted … to pry people loose from habitual ways of
thinking, so that they would look anew at their world and find far-ranging connections
where none were thought to exist” (2003:41). And there’s no doubt that this happens. But
while Lombardi’s viewer can look on with amazement or gnawing disgust as the translocal relations of capitalist exploitation take on a concrete form, the images themselves
organize no space from which to engage in anything beyond interpretation. Since the
narrative recounted by Lombardi’s structures is already whole (since there is, in fact, no
contradiction to address), “completing” the scene through decisive action is superfluous.
At best, Lombardi’s representational strategy fosters outrage at capitalist impunity. At
worst, it becomes a machine yielding smug satisfaction. For while Lombardi’s formalconceptual objectifications make the world visible in its trans-local, constellated totality,
the price of that objectification is that—like a weather pattern—the world itself ends up
appearing in a pre-social, natural, or reified form. Standing outside the depicted scene,
the viewer is thus implicitly exonerated. Worse still, because the viewer is not inducted
into the depicted drama, the drama itself remains a fundamentally distorted representation
of the social. For this reason—and along with Brecht, who made the same observation in
a different but parallel context—we must consider why “the present-day world can only
be described to present-day people if it’s described as capable of transformation”
(1992:274).


How might the political-epistemological lacunae at the heart of Lombardi’s oeuvre be
addressed? Although there are likely many ways to answer this question, I would like
here to reconsider the work of Cindy Sherman, an artist whose images are probably the
perfect antithesis to Lombardi’s neo-conceptualist experiments. Creating self-portraits
since the 1970s, Sherman’s work has been heralded for its uncanny ability to illuminate
the precise means by which narrative fictions come to organize perception. In so doing, it
also illuminates important aspects of the social overlooked in Lombardi’s narrative
structures. Because Sherman was among those artists who—from the 1970s onward—
began to actively explore embodiment and site-specificity, this corrective function should
be considered deliberate. As art historian Hannah Westley attests, the “move to reground
art” during the period in which Sherman’s work first appeared was considered “urgent”
by many artists working in a context overrun by “the serial objects of minimalism,
simulacral images of Pop and demonstrations of conceptual work” (2008:179).
In contrast to the conceptual artists that had been Lombardi’s genealogical precursors,
Sherman produced works that highlighted how the postmodern subject came to be
marked by a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between representation as an allconsuming social-indexical system on the one hand and those nebulous aspects of Being
that refused encapsulation on the other. For this reason, Sherman’s work became
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inseparable from the “return to the body and the social, to the abject and the site-specific”
that marked the art of that era (Westley, 2008:179).
In her Untitled Film Stills shot between 1977 and 1980, Sherman produced self-portraits
that—through changes in composition, costume, lighting, and tone—effectively
demonstrated that “subjectivity” seemed increasingly to be a representational
accomplishment. By mining the archive of established film genres and personae while
maintaining a consistent presence at the center of each image, she helped to reveal the
degree to which the cultural logic of late capitalism had subordinated the ontological
question of Being to the more malleable register of stylistic signifiers. From this
standpoint, Sherman’s works should seem whimsical; however, viewers and critics alike
have agreed that their actual effect has been far more unsettling. Why is this so?
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21 (1978)
Considered as a series so that both the range of Sherman’s deliberate filmic citations at
her constant presence at the center of each image become explicit, the Untitled Film Stills
begin to appear dialectical. By mobilizing representational norms unmoored by concrete
referents while—at the same time—maintaining a consistent presence in each image,
Sherman intensifies the tension between the simulacrum and the self-portrait. In her
images, two discrete ontological premises (one “new,” one “old”) come into direct
conflict. Occupying each image in a way that suggested a “more,” a beneath or beyond
that exceeds representational capture, Sherman discovered that she could make
representation confront Being itself.
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According to art critic Peter Schjeldahl, by taking “the movie fiction of a character
observed in vulnerable solitude as the departure point for an exploration, in depth, of
vulnerability itself,” Sherman seduces her viewers into confronting the “shock of deep
recognition”—an experience that is “not altogether agreeable.” On this basis, Schjeldahl
locates “the drama” in Sherman’s work “in the abyss between matter and mind, object
and subject” (2003:35). Imperceptible in the first instance, this point—this “abyss”—is
brought into focus through the staged antagonism of antithetical ontological premises.
Initially, representation subsumes (or seems even to constitute) Being. But if this is true,
then what is this indescribable and unsettling Thing, this remainder that refuses
symbolization?
On first blush, the Untitled Film Stills seem inseparable from the feminist desire to
interrogate the representational norms that organize and maintain feminine status. By
citing works of low-culture and transposing them into the realm of fine art (as Duchamp
and Warhol had done before her), Sherman exposes them to a scrutiny they may not
otherwise have received. But alongside these citations, Sherman herself remains the clear
object of her work. By downplaying her status as creator,iii Sherman found a means by
which to make her images speak for, and thus condemn, themselves. In this way—and
like Benjamin before her—Sherman reaffirmed that effective social criticism “needn’t
say anything. Merely show.” (2003:460).
But while Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills proved to be exceptionally compelling as a
critique of representational norms, they did not yet constitute an explicit critique of
representation as such. If, as art critic Norman Bryson has argued, the postmodern
moment is characterized by “the absorption of reality within representation,” then the
challenge for those aiming to change the world is to first highlight the means by which
representation has come to seem like an “apparently enclosed order” with “no fire
escape” (1993:222). Only after this knowledge is secured does a jailbreak from the prison
house of signs even become conceivable. The Untitled Film Stills point to this challenge;
however, they do not resolve it.

It’s in this context that we can understand Sherman’s gradual move toward producing
images explicitly concerned with the point at which representation itself begins to fail—
the very point at which the “fire escape” becomes evident. In her centerfold images of the
1980s, this search led her (still the subject-object of her work) to depict women posed in
accordance with the representational norms of the pornographic pinup. But while these
works—like the Untitled Film Stills before them—engaged representational norms by
actively objectifying them, Sherman also heightened her mastery of “the look” of
distracted focus to suggest either an enormous inside or an enormous outside that
stubbornly refused subordination to the symbolic register invoked by the image.
Significantly, what Sherman “sees” in these images also remains inaccessible to the
viewer who is thus forced to confront her own scopophilic prying (now fully activated
through the works’ citation of pornographic representational norms).
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From the mid-‘80s onward, and as a logical elaboration of her engagement with
representation’s limit, Sherman began to explore the threshold of death and engage
themes similar to those considered by Julia Kristeva in her analysis of abjection in
Powers of Horror. In Kristeva’s account, the abject “draws me toward that space were
meaning collapses” (1982:2). Moreover, “the time of abjection is double” since it’s
marked by a “veiled infinity” even as it pushes those who contemplate it toward “the
moment when revelation bursts forth” (1982:9).
Coinciding with Lacan’s account of the Real (that thing which escapes symbolization and
produces profoundly unsettling effects), Kristeva’s description of the abject also suggests
a structural homology with Benjamin’s dialectical image. Indeed, reading through
Convolute N, it’s difficult to not be struck by Benjamin’s fascination with the moment
when revelation “bursts forth.” As in Kristeva, this moment of revelation obtains when
the “veiled infinity” of empty, homogenous time (the time of mythological histories told
from the standpoint of “progress”)iv is sundered. Consequently, for Benjamin, “the
dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash” (2003:473).
As with Benjamin, who imagined that the desire for redemption was stimulated by
recollections of an existence prior to the fall that has left its traces on all manner of social
ephemera (1978:148), Kristeva proposed that the experience of abjection was akin to that
of a subject to whom “it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural
loss that laid the foundations for its own being” (1982:5). This is politically significant,
since the experience of lack points to that which is lacking. At its logical conclusion, it
can become the basis for a redemptive act capable of surmounting the inaugural loss
that—through abjection—can now be concretely understood.
Although they should not be overstated, these connections between Benjamin and
Kristeva allow us to more fully appreciate the Benjaminian attributes of Sherman’s work.
For instance, while Benjamin highlighted the political significance of the corpse in the
German “mourning plays” of the seventeenth century, Sherman’s images from the mid‘80s revealed how the corpse could be used to illuminate dynamics particular to late
capitalism. Like Charles Baudelaire, Sherman’s work from this period managed to truly
see the corpse, not only from the outside, but also—as Benjamin would say—“from
within” (2006:163).
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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #153 (1985)
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Although these images are shocking, they are also profoundly ambivalent. To understand
why, it’s necessary to consider how the viewer contemplating Sherman’s abjection is
confronted with the shock of recognition (I, too, will be the corpse!) only after passing
through the scopophilic seduction of the abject itself. Which would be fine—or even
politically desirable, as it was in the case of Lombardi’s work—if it weren’t for the fact
that this seduction is itself ambivalent.
On the one hand, it seems to prepare the viewer for a shock from which it’s impossible to
distance one’s self (and here, as with Lombardi, seduction becomes an important factor in
the elaboration of a contemporary dialectical image). On the other hand, Sherman’s
approach seems to turn abjection into an aesthetic experience wholly commensurate with
the cultural logic of late capitalism. Here, in the face of experience’s endless
dissimulation, the promise of one Real thing becomes the ultimate—and ultimately
commodifiable—seduction.
The forms of aestheticization to which Sherman’s works have remained susceptible are
incompatible with the dialectical image. For this very reason, commentators like curator
Magrit Brehm have been able to blithely declare that, in her “Disgust” series, Sherman’s
subject “is not the moldy food but the designed surface” (2002:9). Here, disgust itself
becomes indistinguishable from “an artistic experience” (2002:8). Though seemingly
undone by its encounter with the Real, postmodern epistemology thus reveals itself to be
capable of representationally subsuming abjection itself. And as irreducible Being gets
reduced to the stylistic conceits of the image surface, the ontological stereoscopy that
gave Sherman’s work its depth and dialectical force becomes flat.
Perhaps it was inevitable. After all, Kristeva herself noted that—with the publication of
Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (a Benjamin favorite)—abjection itself
became “fashionable” (1982:20). Channeled into the symbolic register at a moment when
capitalism has robbed experience of all gravity, the abject has become a powerful means
of re-infusing our wasted lives with an affective weight we are no longer able to muster
ourselves.
Harnessed to the logic of the commodity form, abjection marks a beguiling outer limit. At
a moment when many commodities have been deprived of all but the representation of
their use value,v the Real becomes a hot commodity. And the more the encounter with the
Real comes to mark the last reliable verification of Being (and here we need only to think
of those pornographic genres promising “real” tears or successful businesses specializing
in slum tourism), the more likely it is that abject art will degenerate into a provocation
whose ultimate effect is the reaffirmation of the status quo.

If Lombardi’s narrative structures fall short of becoming dialectical images by overobjectifying the social, Sherman’s images fail by allowing abjection to be turned into a
source of narcissistic (and commodifiable) pleasure. Nevertheless, when considered
together, Lombardi and Sherman provide useful reference points for those interested in
16
producing a dialectical image capable of locating the fire escape to our own endless
present.
How, then, might we envision a synthesis? To begin, it’s useful to reiterate how, both
Lombardi and Sherman effectively marshal seduction to stage shocking analytic
confrontations. We can therefore imagine that today’s dialectical image must refuse to
become visible all at once. If, as Buck-Morss proposed, the dialectical image is
comprised of two discrete modes of apprehension (where one is related to its production
and the other to its recognition), the contemporary context demands that the process of
production becomes an aspect of what is finally recognizable. Today, the dialectical
image is processual. It is marked by duration.
But it is not enough to be seduced. Lombardi and Sherman operate on different—and
nearly antithetical—aesthetic and epistemic terrains. How can we constellate them so as
to overcome the shortcomings they confront as stand-alone oeuvres? And more: how
might we use such a constellation to illuminate the moment of danger in which we now
find ourselves? If Lombardi’s narrative structures need to be subjectivized in order to
induct the viewer, how might this be accomplished? And, if Sherman’s corpse needs to
be socialized so that the world to which it is a symptom becomes visible as its profane
condition of possibility, what does this mean, visually-speaking?
Although the answer to these questions is by no means clear, it’s hopeful to note that—in
their artistic productions and pedagogical practices—activists have begun experimenting
with possible reolutions. For instance, at the outset of war in Iraq in 2003, demonstrators
in Toronto could be heard chanting “Bay Street’s covered in Baghdad’s blood!” Although
it was not yet clear what connections existed between Canadian finance capital and
America’s new strategy of accumulation by dispossession, the chant enjoined those who
shouted it (and maybe those who heard it, too) to radically truncate the distance between
cause and effect so that “there” could be made visible “here.” The mock military
checkpoints set up on university campuses by Palestine solidarity activists abide by a
similar logic. By making aspects of Israel’s spatial organization concrete on campuses
where administrators have been complicit with Israeli apartheid, these checkpoints
prefigure a materialist pedagogy of concretion.
But what’s missing from practices such as these is an attempt to forge a coherent
epistemological link between the objective demands of analytic montage and the postempathic subjectivity required to truly learn from abjection. Only here will a
contemporary dialectical image emerge.
i
It is significant to note that—in The Arcades Project—Benjamin actively distinguished the study of images,
which he took to be the substance of historical knowledge, from the study of style (2003:462).
ii
Considering newspapers that included feuilletons on their front page alongside the news of the day, BuckMorss highlights Benjamin’s engagement with the fact that, in the nineteenth century, “the line” between
“political fact and literary fiction” became incredibly thin. But while he anticipated how the “oppositions in
which we have been accustomed to think may lose their relevance” and sought to develop an appropriate
corresponding pedagogical strategy (1991:140), even Benjamin would have been hard pressed to divine the
extent of culture’s current economic subsumption.
17
iii
Sherman has deliberately refused to even inscribe her works with particular titles, which is the artist’s due.
iv
Throughout Convolute N, Benjamin makes several attempts to distinguish his conception of history from
the one pervasive among bourgeois historians seduced by the myth of progress. In one such entry,
Benjamin states: “the concept of progress had to run counter to the critical theory of history from the moment
it ceased to be applied as a criterion to specific historical developments and instead was required to
measure the span between a legendary inception and a legendary end of history. In other words: as soon as
it becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress bespeaks an uncritical
hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation” (2003:478).
v
Slavoj Zizek has explored this theme extensively (e.g. 2008:28).
18
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——. (1968). “Theses On the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. New York:
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Lombardi, Mark (1997). “Artist Statement.”
www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/mlavailable3.html
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