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

POSTRUCTURALISM AND THE VISUAL CULTURE AHISTORICAL HISTORCISM (THE POPULIST CULTURE) Post-structuralism refutes that ‘facts speak for themselves’. Foucault denies the ‘development’ of history according to which every new interpretation brings us to a ‘truer’ and ‘better’ understanding of the subject. The positivist historians believe that objectivity is attainable. It follows that the interpretation will depend mainly on relying on empirical evidence. Post-structuralism emphasises the fact that historical narratives owe more to language then it has been traditionally accepted. According to Hayden White language has the autonomous power ‘as a constitutive agent in the production of historical narratives’: 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”. For we should recognise that what constitutes the facts themselves is the problem that the historian, like the artist, has tried to solve in the choice of the metaphor by which he orders his world, past, present and future.”16 History can be encountered only by means of language. So the question is where does are these “raw facts”? Keith Moxley in his “The practice of Theory” notes that according to Dominick LaCapra, there are no real events and experiences that the historian is encountering when dealing with text because his/her 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.’17 All though the historical narrative ‘situated’ and knowledge embedded and interrelated with the social circumstances in which it is produced, for Moxley this should not propagate a straightforward imposition of 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.”18 Moxley calls for acknowledgement that the narratives we construct are a product of our own times and values but that this has to be infused with a ‘committed form of art historical interpretation. This view of ‘Ahistorical historicity’ sees in Derrida’s theory a way for a new construction of interpretation that refuses to locate its hermeneutic conclusions in its subject matter. The answer is rather in the dialogic process of the interpreter and the object of study. However this should not be used to discredit the historical narrative just because it has become a subject of logocentrism. For, after all ‘Every narrative, including deconstructionist one, is invested with transcendental values whose claims exceed the signifying power of language’19. Post-structuralism can be seen as just another meta - narrative that is a critique of meta - narratives. This has a backfiring potential, for if this whole discourse is seen from a - for instance-Marxist view, it could be proposed that Post-structuralism is part of a dialectic process which encompasses the: death of ‘Art for Art’s sake’(thesis), ‘Modernity’(anti-thesis), and Postmodernity / Post-structuralism (synthesis). The (poststructuralist) hunter that knows that the pray (meaning) cannot be caught, thus becomes the hunted. Perhaps Post - structuralism is a celebration that the Tower of Babel can never be built.20 Copyright@Armando Bayraktari, London 2000 BACK   FORWARD