Peter Galison
         Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism
         On 15 October 1959, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently
            founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau,
            southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The
            Logical Construction of the World,a book that immediately became
            the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical
            positivists. From a small group in Vienna, the movement soon
            expanded to include an international following, and in the sixty
            years since has exerted a powerful sway over the conduct of the
            philosophy of science as well as over wide branches of philosophy,
            economics, psychology, and physics. The site of Carnap's
            lecture that day, the Dessau Bauhaus, was a stunning building
            designed by Walter Gropius and dedicated just three years earlier.
            Protected by its flat roof and glass walls, the artists,
            architects, weavers, and furniture designers had made the school a
            citadel of high modernism. It was here that Carnap addressed an
            enthusiastic audience on "Science and Life." "I
            work in science," he began, "and you in visible forms;
            the two are only different sides of a single life."1 In this
            paper I will explore this "single life" of which the
            new philosophy and the new art were to be different facets; in the
            process, I hope to cast light on the shared modernist impulses that
            drove both disciplines in the interwar years.
             
            1. Rudolf Carnap, lecture notes for his Bauhaus lecture,
            "Wissenschaft und Leben," prepared 1 Oct. 1929 and
            delivered 15 Oct. 1929, transcription from shorthand by Gerald
            Heverly, Carnap Papers in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy,
            University of Pittsburgh Libraries, University of Pittsburgh
            (hereafter abbreviated CP, PASP), document RC 110-07-49. Quoted by
            permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved.
            Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
             
            Peter Galison is associate professor in the departments of
            philosophy and physics at Stanford University, where he co-chairs
            the program in the history of science. His primary interest is in
            the history and philosophy of experimentation, the subject of his
            How Experiments End (1987) and Big Science: The Growth of Large-
            Scale Research,edited with Bruce Hevly (forthcoming). His current
            project is entitled Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Modern
            Physics.
Johannes Fabian
         Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing
         Taken as a philosophical issue, the idea of representation implies
            the prior assumption of a differencebetween reality and its
            "doubles." Things are paired with images, concepts, or
            symbols, acts with rules and norms, events with structures.
            Traditionally, the problem with representations has been their
            "accuracy," the degree of fit between reality and its
            reproductions in the mind. When philosophers lost the hope of ever
            determining accuracy (and thus attaining Truth), they found
            consolation in the test of usefulness: a good representation is one
            that works. The proof of its working is that it enables us to act
            on the world together.1 In such a frame, science, including
            anthropology, is conceived as the pursuit of privileged
            representations, privileged in that, by their nature of by their
            combination, they establish knowledge of a special kind. In the
            case of anthropology, "culture" has served as a sort of
            umbrella concept for representations. The strcuturalists have been
            most explicit about the need to think of representation in the
            plural, but their position is shared, in varying degrees, by all
            those who conceive of (cultural) knowledge as the selection and
            combination of signs in systems, patterns, or structures, in short,
            as some kind of conceptual order ruling perceptual chaos.
             
            1. Remember the connection between the Kantian quest for synthetic
            forms and Émile Durkheim's idea of collective representations
            sustained by the moral authority of a society. Durkheim certainly
            was one to look for the "ethic" in the
            "ethnic" primitive, and it makes me wonder whether
            Stephen A. Tyler's characterization of postmodern ethnography
            as a return to "an earlier and more powerful notion of the
            ethical character of all discourse, as captured in the ancient
            significance of the family of terms &lsquo;ethos,'
            &lsquo;ethnos,' &lsquo;ethics'" might not signal
            a return to the Durkheimian fold (Tyler, "Post-Modern
            Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document,"
            in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed.
            James Clifford and George E. Marcus [Berkeley and Los Angeles,
            1986], p. 126).
             
            Johannes Fabianis professor of cultural anthropology at the
            University of Amsterdam. His publications include Jamaa: A
            Charismatic Movement in Katanga (1971), Time and the Other: How
            Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), and Language and Colonial
            Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo,
            1880-1938 (1986). Two books will appear in 1990: History from
            Below: The Vocabulary of Elisabethville by André Yav,a commented
            edition-translation of a colonial history written in Swahili by the
            colonized for the colonized, and Power and Performance,a study of
            conceptions of power through popular wisdom and theater in Shaba/
            Zaire.
Annabel Patterson
         Couples, Canons, and the Uncouth: Spenser-and-Milton in Educational
            Theory
         Among the processes of canon-formation is the habit of coupling
            writers; and among the most powerful of couples in the traditional
            English literary canon is Spenser-and-Milton. Much of my own
            professional life has probably been determined by my first teaching
            assignment of 1963, which included "Spenser-and-
            Milton," in those days at Toronto a famous cornerstone course
            carrying the tamp of the stamp of the formidable Renaissance
            scholar A. S. P. Woodhouse, known affectionately if disrespectfully
            to his students as Professor Nature-and-Grace. For several years I
            labored mightily, though neither naturally nor, I suspect,
            gracefully, on Spenser-and-Milton, sensing all the time that the
            connections I made, the doctrines I was conveying, lacked
            persuasion; and no doubt the seed of this essay was sown in those
            days, although its angle of sight was not then available, obscured
            on all sides by institutional pillars.
            When we couple writers we usually imply a criterion of fit or at
            least explicable mating. While there is nothing to prohibit a
            merely comparativist curiosity, or coupling in the service of some
            other agenda, we presumably give greater authority to relationships
            that imply causality, even, or especially, if causality is defined
            as the influence of the one writer on the other. Most of such
            relationships are unidirectional, from the earlier to the later
            dead, and a plausible coupling requires either the
            successor's own testimony that the influence-relation
            existed, or other evidence that the influence-relation was strong
            enough to be formative; or, preferably, both.
             
            Annabel Patterson,professor of literature and English at Duke
            University, is the author of Hermogenes and the Renaissance (1970),
            Marvell and the Civic Crown (1978), Censorship and Interpretation
            (1984), Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (1987), and
            Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989).
Yves Bonnefoy
         Lifting Our Eyes from the Page
         For the past thirty years or so we have witnessed the greatest
            period at least for France in the history of thinking
            about literature; I want first of all to stress this point, adding,
            however, that despite this fact problems of fundamental
            significance still seem to me to have been poorly raised.
            Among these is the problem of how to read a work. And yet, it is
            not as though reading has not been the object of continual
            attention, from the American fascination after the war with
            "close reading" to the work of the deconstructionists:
            a revolution has taken place that has made reading the very center
            of its concern. Indeed, today, we think we can recognize in the
            structure of a text, in the relation between its words, a reality
            that is much more reliable and tangible than the meaning that runs
            along the surface, or than the author's intention, or even
            than the author's very being, the idea of which has been
            rendered problematical to the point of dissolution by the
            ambiguities inherent in his simplest utterances. It is not the
            writer who is real, it is his language which is neither true
            nor false, signifying only itself. What is more, it is infinite;
            its forms and effects are disseminated everywhere in a book without
            ever being able to be totalized: and because of this, reading has a
            more clearly creative function than ever before that is, of
            course, if readers make themselves attentive to all the levels in
            the depths of the text and bring them as much as they can into the
            various networks of their analyses. Reading has become a
            responsibility, a contribution, equal in its way to writing, and
            moreover it has now become an end in itself, since those who read
            need not judge themselves more real, more present in their relation
            to themselves, than the writer. And so, from this point of view, it
            would seem difficult to say that the problem of reading has been
            neglected by contemporary criticism.
             
            Yves Bonnefoy is professor of comparative poetics at the Collège de
            France in Paris. He is the author of five books of poetry,
            including the recent Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987). Bonnefoy is
            also a distinguished translator of English poets, such as Donne and
            Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats. His books of criticism include
            Rimbaud par lui-même(1961); Rome 1630: l'horizon du premier
            baroque (1970); Le Nuage rouge (1977); L'Improbable et autres
            essays (1980); La Verité de parole (1988). He is the editor of the
            Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des Religions des sociétés
            traditionelles et du monde antique (1981) and of the forthcoming
            Dictionnaire des poétiques.He received the French Prix Goncourt for
            poetry in 1987 and the Bennett Award in 1988. John Naughton is
            associate professor of romance literatures at Colgate University.
            He is the author of a critical study of Yves Bonnefoy called The
            Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (1984) and the editor of a volume of
            Bonnefoy's essays in translation entitled The Act and the
            Place of Poetry (1989). His translation of Bonnefoy's Ce qui
            fut sons lumière and his book on Louis-René des Forêts will appear
            in 1991.
Calvin Bedient
         Kristeva and Poetry as Shattered Signification
         We had thought that poetry was a grace beyond biology, except for
            the biomovements of dancers, athletes, or those we love most. We
            had thought it a contradictory "organic" perfection in
            the relatively staying realm of the symbolical. But, no, according
            to Kristeva's theory, poetry is essentially
            antiformal in fact, so profoundly antiaesthetic that the
            proper words for describing it are not beauty, inspiration, form,
            instinctive rightness, inevitability,or delicacy (to leave aside
            unaesthetic terms such as perception and truth,which the theory
            also renders inappropriate). Instead, it attracts terms drawn from
            politics and war: corruption, infiltration, disruption,
            shatterings, negation, supplantation,and murder. Poetry is the
            chora'sguerrilla war against culture.
            According to Kristeva, poetry reverses the ritualistic theological
            sacrifice of the soma, a sacrifice subsequently exacted, like a
            sales tax, through the "thetic" element of discourse,
            its determinate articulations. For Kristeva, the
            "theologization of the thetic" is what culture is
            (RPL,p. 78) and as such it has no fundamental right to be,
            since what is fundamental is the chora and not God. I refer here as
            throughout to the revolutionary Kristeva of the late sixties and
            early seventies, the Kristeva whose "we," as she says
            in "My Memory's Hyperbole," was a putatively
            communist Parisian party for "permanent revolution."4
            Revolution in Poetic Language is a monumental, late end product of
            this phase of Kristeva's thinking; indeed, there are signs
            that she had already surpassed it by the time the book was
            published.
             
            4. See Kristeva, "My Memory's Hyperbole," trans.
            Athena Viscusi, in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of
            Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century,ed. Domna C.
            Stanton (1984; Chicago, 1987), pp. 219-35.
             
            Calvin Bedient is professor of English at the University of
            California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is He Do the Police
            in Different Voices (1986), a study of The Waste Land.
Charles Bernstein
         Optimism and Critical Excess (Process)
         This is not a transcription. More like a reenactment of the
            possibilities of performative poetics as improvisatory, open-ended.
            As a way to engage the relation of poetics to poetry and by
            implication differentiate poetics from literary theory and
            philosophy, although not necessarily from poetry.
            As a way to extend the ideas about closure the rejection of
            closure into the discussion of essays and critical writing.
            To eject, that is, the idea that there is something containable to
            say: completed saying.
            So that poetics becomes an activity that is ongoing, that moves in
            different directions at the same time, and that tries to disrupt or
            make problematic any formulation that seems too final or
            preemptively restrictive.
            Speaking at the Buffalo conference, Linda Reinfeld pointed to the
            wedding that was being enacted (which is really always being
            enacted) between critical theory and poetry as a kind of subtext of
            that gathering. Hearing Rosmarie Waldrop read, in that context,
            from Reproduction of Profilessuggested something very much along
            these lines: Waldrop has created a literary wedding, in the sense
            of wedding together, or fusing, of philosophy and poetry. In this
            work, she has taken phrases from Elizabeth Anscombe's
            translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical
            Investigations and added weaved in phrases of her own
            making. The structure of Reproduction of Profiles provokes a number
            of questions, including the status of Wittgenstein's original
            text, which may itself be taken as a poetic work, and also the
            status of the Reproduction of Profiles what kind of a work is
            that?
             
            Charles Bernstein is the author of a number of books of poetry,
            including Rough Trades, The Nude Formalism, The Lives of the Toll
            Takers, The Sophist,and Controlling Interests.Other books include
            Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 and Artifice of
            Absorption.He coedited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and recently edited The
            Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy.
John Hallmark Neff
         Introduction: Daring to Dream
         In the absence of shared beliefs and even common interests, it
            should not be surprising that so much of the well-intentioned art
            acquired for public spaces has failed failed as art and as
            art for a civic site. The conventional wisdom of simply choosing
            "the best artist" and then turning him or her loose to
            create a work within time and budget guidelines lost much
            credibility with the drama of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc
            commission: the process of selection, erection, litigation,
            rejection, and removal of the sculpture from the Federal Building
            plaza in New York City. The new conventional wisdom? The jury, not
            the artist, was ultimately responsible. For Serra did precisely the
            kind of work for which he is respected worldwide but in a context
            and for a specific public whose requirements, in their view, were
            not met but even abrogated by what Serra had done so well: made a
            Serra.
            The issues raised by this particular controversy as well as by the
            very different response now accorded the once-controversial Vietnam
            Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin, together with firsthand frustration
            with the selection process for public commissions, were some of the
            specific reasons for organizing the day-long symposium held 16
            September 1989 in First Chicago Center under the auspices of
            Sculpture Chicago, a biennial exhibition and educational series.
             
            John Hallmark Neff,director of the First National Bank of
            Chicago's art program, is a former director of the Museum of
            Contemporary Art, Chicago. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer: Brüch
            und Einung(1988), and he is currently working on a book on Max
            Neuhaus and a catalogue essay for the forthcoming Agnes Denes
            retrospective exhibition.
Michael North
         The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to_Mass_Ornament
         The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty
            years has been the disappearance of the sculpture itself. Ever
            since Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York destroyed itself at
            the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to find new
            ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial, or
            remote. Where the sculpture did have some material presence, it
            often took unexpected forms. As Rosalind Krauss says, "Rather
            surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow
            corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs
            documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in
            ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the
            desert."
            However various these experiments may seem, they began with a
            single motive: to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the
            gallery, and finally of art itself. To prevent this new work from
            becoming just another commodity in the market, artists either
            produced works so intangible or remote they could not be bought and
            sold, or disseminated their ideas in so many reproducible forms
            they could not be monopolized. The political nature of these
            motives also meant that much of this "sculpture" could
            be considered "public." Changing the nature of the art
            meant changing the role of the audience as well, questioning the
            purely contemplative role the observer plays in the conventional
            setting of the museum or gallery. According to Henry Sayre,
            "As the avant-garde work of art denies its own autonomy, it
            implicates the audience in its workings."3 As the aesthetic
            focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the
            relationship of the two goes beyond mere implication: the public
            becomes the sculpture. Artists, like Richard Serra, whose goal is
            to illuminate the material nature of space and the often tenuous
            materiality of the observer's own body, have made "the
            viewer, in effect, the subject of the work," to quote Douglas
            Crimp.
             
            Michael North is associate professor of English at the University
            of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Final
            Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (1985) and is
            currently completing a study of the politics of Yeats, Eliot, and
            Pound.
W. J. T. Mitchell
         The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right_Thing
         The question naturally arises: Is public art inherently violent, or
            is it a provocation to violence? Is violence built into the
            monument in its very conception? Or is violence simply an accident
            that befalls some monuments, a matter of the fortunes of history?
            The historical record suggests that if violence is simply an
            accident that happens to public art, it is one that is always
            waiting to happen. The principal media and materials of public art
            are stone and metal sculpture not so much by choice as by
            necessity. "A public sculpture," says Lawrence Alloway,
            "should be invulnerable or inaccessible. It should have the
            material strength to resist attack or be easily cleanable, but it
            also needs a formal structure that is not wrecked by
            alterations."12 The violence that surrounds public art is
            more, however, than simply the ever-present possibility of an
            accident the natural disaster or random act of vandalism.
            Much of the world's public art memorials, monuments,
            triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, and statues has a rather
            direct reference to violence in the form of war or conquest. From
            Ozymandias to Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler, public art has served
            as a kind of monumentalizing of violence, and never more powerfully
            than when it presents the conqueror as a man of peace, imposing a
            Napoleonic code or a pax Romana on the world. Public sculpture that
            is too frank or explicit about this monumentalizing of violence,
            whether the Assyrian palace reliefs of the ninth century b.c., or
            Morris's bomb sculpture proposal of 1981, is likely to offend
            the sensibilities of a public committed to the repression of its
            own complicity in violence.13 The very notion of public art as we
            receive it is inseparable from what Jürgen Habermas has called
            "the liberal model of the public sphere," a dimension
            distinct from the economic, the private, and the political. This
            ideal realm provides the space in which disinterested citizens may
            contemplate a transparent emblem of their own inclusiveness and
            solidarity, and deliberate on the general good, free of coercion,
            violence, or private interests.14
             
            12. Lawrence Alloway, "The Public Sculpture Problem,"
            Studio International 184 (Oct. 1972): 124.
            13. See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, "The Forms of
            Violence," October,no. 8 (Spring 1979): 17-29, for an
            important critique of the "narrativization" of violence
            in Western art and an examination of the alternative suggested by
            the Assyrian palace reliefs.
            14. Habermas first introduced this concept in The Structural
            Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
            Bourgeois Society,trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence
            (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). First published in 1962, it has since
            become the focus of an extensive literature. See also
            Habermas's short encyclopedia article, "The Public
            Sphere," trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German
            Critique 1 (Fall 1974): 49-55, and the introduction to it by Peter
            Hohendahl in the same issue, pp. 45-48. I owe much to the guidance
            of Miriam Hansen and Lauren Berlant on this complex and crucial
            topic.
             
            W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of ,is Gaylord Donnelly
            Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the
            University of Chicago. His recent book is Iconology: Image, Text,
            Ideology (1986).
Vito Acconci
         Public Space in a Private Time
         2
            Public space is an old habit. The words public space are deceptive;
            when I hear the words, when I say the words, I'm forced to
            have an image of a physical place I can point to and be in. I
            should be thinking only of a condition; but, instead, I imagine an
            architectural type, and I think of a piazza, or a town square, or a
            city commons. Public space, I assume, without thinking about it, is
            a place where the public gathers. The public gathers in two kinds
            of spaces. The first is a space that ispublic, a place where the
            public gathers because it has a right to the place; the second is a
            space that is made public, a place where the public gathers
            precisely because it doesn't have the right a place
            made public by force.
            3
            In the space that is public, the public whose space this is has
            agreed to be a public; these are people "in the form of the
            city," they are public when they act "in the name of
            the city." They "own" the city only in quotes.
            The establishment of certain space in the city as
            "public" is a reminder, a warning, that the rest of the
            city isn't public. New York doesn't belong to us, and
            neither does Paris, and neither does Des Moines. Setting up a
            public space means setting asidea public space. Public space is a
            place in the middle of the city but isolated from the city. Public
            space is the piazza, an open space separated from the closure of
            alleys and dead ends; public space is the piazza, a space in the
            light, away from the plots and conspiracies in dark smokey rooms.
             
            Vit Acconci'slatest show, entitled "Public
            Places," was held in 1988 at the Museum of Modern Art, New
            York. He is currently at work on a park in Detroit, a pedestrian
            mall in Baltimore, and a housing project in Regensburg, Germany.
Agnes Denes
         The Dream
         The issues touched on in my work range between individual creation
            and social consciousness. We have entered an age of alienation
            brought on by specialization, a by-product of the Information Age.
            This is an age of complexity, when knowledge and ideas are coming
            in faster than can be assimilated, while disciplines become
            progressively alienated from each other through specialization. The
            hard-won knowledge that accumulates undigested, blocking meaningful
            communication. Clearly defined direction for mankind is lacking.
            The turn of the century and the next millennium will usher in a
            troubled environment and a troubled psyche.
            Making art today is synonymous with assuming responsibility for our
            fellow man. I am concerned with the fact that we have taken
            evolution into our own hands. We are the first species that has the
            ability to consciously alter its evolution, modify itself at will,
            even put an end to its existence. We have gotten hold of our
            destiny and our impact on earth is astounding. Because of our
            tremendous success we are overrunning the planet, squandering its
            resources. We are young as a species, even younger as a
            civilization, and like reckless children initiate processes we
            cannot control. We tend to overproduce, overuse, and quickly tire
            of things. We also overreact, panic, and self-correct in hindsight.
            The pluralistic nature of things creates too many variables,
            confusing the goals to be achieved. Sustained interest and
            effective action are diminished with the alienation of the
            individual who feels little potential to interact or identify
            effectively with society as a whole. Overview for mankind is
            lacking and as the momentum increases human values tend to decline.
             
            Agnes Denes has had over 250 solo and group exhibitions on four
            continents since 1965. She has participated in such major
            international exhibitions as Project '74, Cologne; the 1976
            Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany; and
            the Venice Biennales of 1978 and 1980. In 1989, she received her
            fourth National Endowment Individual Artist Fellowship. She has
            published four books, including The Book of Dust The
            Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter (1986).
Ben Nicholson
         Urban Poises
         The urban poise is dependent on a particular notion of urban
            planning: a myriad of actions that can adjust civic life in many
            places to provoke it towards greater self-esteem. Urban planning is
            not consecrated by a drawing in the shape of a plan alone, but it
            must respect the elevation of the stance of an urban spectacle as
            seen from the sidewalk. The coercion of civic indicators is
            reappraised by delighting in the figurative stance of the informant
            city. Small things are done in the city within its existing urban
            structure so that an edge is applied to what already exists. City
            blocks might be fractionally altered, holes in the skyline reamed
            out smooth, and points located strategically so that they can carry
            their attendant responsibilities. The method is marginally
            parasitic, for it exists by requiring something else to exist that
            it cannot readily harbor.
            Ten points and places of vulnerability have been chosen in the city
            that poke at its underbelly. Whilst the poises are given names and
            specific sites, their viability could be felt equally in a
            different city using changed names. The Appliance House franchises
            its intention to various matters of civic consequence, ranging from
            the weather to shopping to the monumental respect for the dead.
            Each poise is considered integrally related to the wholeness of the
            city. If any of the Poises becomes disassociated from the city or
            from other Poises, the prime tenet of urban existence will have
            been ignored: the over-exertion of one component of urban life will
            take place at the expense of somebody else.
             
            Ben Nicholson is studio professor of architecture at the Illinois
            Institute of Technology. His Appliance House will be published
            later this year.
