H O M E E X H I B I T I O N S G A L L E R Y M A N I F E S T O A R T  T H E O R Y L I N K S

ARMANDO ALEMDAR - A DIALECTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF ART THE GRAND NARRATIVE Poststructuralist theory evolving parallel to postmodernism has challenged western metaphysics and the accepted premise that historical interpretation has something to do with truth has been shaken by the deconstruction theory expounded by Jacques Derrida. The theories of J.F.Lyotard aggravate the challenge. Habermas puts it to us like this: “ to Derrida by way of running from Bataille through Foucault.”47 Often enough these theories are thought as Nietzsche's offspring.48 Post-structuralism's gauntlet is a question about the validity of language and the meaning of the meaning. Saussure's theory of the sign is the cornerstone of Post-structuralism. For Saussure language is a chain of signs that consists of signifiers (words) and the signified (meaning). The word's and the meaning's position within the sign is variable and there may be no real connection between a word and its meaning. If structuralism demonstrates that we are able to see a truth beyond the text or image, Post-structuralism goes further by pointing out that meaning is not fixed or static but active and moving. The interaction of text and reader is a meaning in itself that necessarily accentuates our awareness of the fact that language invests historical narratives with present values. A medieval or Renaissance artist or spectator would have thought that just as the sacred scriptures are made up of words and meanings so are pictures made up of colours and meanings. If we take words as they are and not understand their meaning it would be useless to read them. Likewise, if we just look at the colours of a painting and ignore the the meaning which could be expressed in the colours and forms we would not benefit.49 If we accept that a text, even a sacred text like a work of art must have more than one interpretation, its truth is ambivalent. This means that one plausible interpretation offers us part of a truth; a second plausible interpretation another part of a truth and a third plausible interpretation...and so on ad infinitium. If this multitude of interpretations becomes dogmatic or if these poststructuralist interpretations oppose one another diametrically, the meaning depends on language and is within its structure and eloquence. If the sum of all the possible interpretations is linked to the time and place in which it is produced, we must ask who and what determines which interpretation as most valid. That facts speak for themselves is refuted by Post-structuralism. Focault categorically insists that history is different with every new interpretation and that mutability brings a truer and better understanding of the subject. When all is said and done Foucault reminds us that history is written by the victorious. The positivist historian believes that objectivity is fixed and attainable and that interpretation depends for the most part on empirical evidence contrary to Post-structuralist historians who emphasise the fact that historical narratives owe more to language than has been traditionally accepted. “It now seems possible to hold that (a historical) explanation need not be assigned unilaterally to the category of the literally truthful on the one hand or the purely imaginative on the other, but can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation...Then we should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past "correspond" to some pre-existent body of "raw facts". Ones very understanding of the text is mediated by it. The historian should not only 'read the text but enter into a dialogue with it...just as the historian questions the text, says LaCapra, so the text questions the historian”50 Hayden White thinks that language has autonomous power “as a constitutive agent in the production of historical narratives” and it is the only key to understanding history. Only by means of language can history be encountered. The question is where are these raw facts? Keith Moxley in The Practise of Theory notes that according to Dominick LaCapra, there are no real events and experiences for the historian to encounter when dealing with a text because understanding of the text is a matter of personal perception. The historian should not only “read the text but enter into a dialogue with it...just as the historian questions the text, says LaCapra, so the text questions the historian”. Although historical narrative and knowledge are embedded and interrelated to the social circumstances in which they are produced, for Moxley this awareness should not impose our political values on our understanding of the past: "A persuasive historical argument would be one that made every effort to grapple with the strangeness or "otherness" of the historical horizon it sought to understand. It is only through radical alterity of the past that we can become aware of the particular qualities of the cultural and intellectual environment in which we ourselves operate... Those interpretations that flatten the texture of the historical horizon through the imposition of a reductive political agenda do violence to the complexity of what is to be interpreted and blind us to the way in which the past can effectively illuminate the values that have determined the interpreter's own point of view."51 Moxley calls for acknowledgement that the narratives we construct are products of our own time and values, infused with a committed form of art historical interpretation. This view of ahistorical historicity Moxley identifies in Derrida's theory a way for new interpretations that refuse to be static in definition. The answer is rather in the dialogue between the spectator and the object examined. Logocentricism does not discredit the historical narrative. After all “Every narrative, including deconstructionist one, is invested with transcendental values whose claims exceed the signifying power of language”52. Post-structuralism is just another grand narrative, critical of grand - narratives but this line of thought could backfire if the Poststructuralist theory is seen from a Marxist viewpoint. Post-structuralism is part of a dialectic process which encompasses the: Art for Art's sake (thesis); Modernism (anti-thesis); and Post-modernism / Post-structuralism (synthesis). The unfortunate poststructuralist hunter that knows that his prey, an idea, cannot be caught, and that he could become the Grand Narrative’s target. Perhaps Post - structuralism is a celebration of a Tower of Babel that can never be built.53 In 1992 the American post-historian Francis Fukuyama has announced the death of history and the grand narrative.54 “Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an “end of history”: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was communist society” Hegel and Marx could have responded to Fukuyama’s naiveté paradoxically - because the two German philosophers were sure that the end was the beginning. For Marx life began only when one was a happy Marxist in the communist state. If our thoughts and ideas interrelate to the circumstances from which they arise, they will assume a different form in circumstances that have had satisfied mankind’s deepest longings. For Hegel philosophy becomes “serious” when it no longer loses itself in the object and its subjective reflection, but concerns itself with the activity of absolute knowledge. As a Marxist we would ask how is this possible. If absolute knowledge is absolute, it is incomprehensible to subjective thinking. Contact with the Absolute automatically means the annulment of philosophy or rather, its metamorphoses into actuality. However, philosophy’s fulfilment is not its end. BACK   FORWARD