Jacques Derrida
         Given Time: The Time of the King
         One could accuse me here of making a big deal and a whole history
            out of words and gestures that remain very clear. When Madame de
            Mainternon says that the King takes her time, it is because she is
            glad to give it to him and takes pleasure from it: the King takes
            nothing from her and gives her as much as he takes. And when she
            says, "I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to
            give all," she is confiding in her correspondent about a
            daily economy concerning the leisures and charities, the works and
            days of a "grande dame" somewhat overwhelmed by her
            obligations. None of the words she writes has the sense of the
            unthinkable and the impossible toward which my reading would have
            pulled them, in the direction of giving-taking, of time and the
            rest. She did not mean to say that, you will say.
            What if … yes she did [Et si].
            And if what she wrote meant to say that, then what would that
            suppose? How, where, on the basis of what and when can we read this
            letter fragment as I have done? How could we even hijack it as I
            have done, while still respecting its literality and its language?
            End of the epigraph.
             
             
            Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes
            Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and professor of French,
            University of California, Irvine. In the past year, he has
            published Le Problème de la genèse chez Husserl (1990), Mémoires
            d'aveugle, l'autoportrait et autres ruines(1990),
            L'Autre Cap (1991), and Circonfessionin Jacques Derrida,with
            Geoffrey Bennington (1991). Peggy Kamufis professor of French at
            the University of Southern California and Directeur de Programme,
            Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She is the author of
            Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988) and most
            recently has edited A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (1991).
Naomi Schor
         "Cartes Postales": Representing Paris 1900
         Two widely shared but diametrically opposed views inform what
            theories we have on the everyday: one, which we might call the
            feminine or feminist, though it is not necessarily held by women or
            self-described feminists, links the everyday with the daily rituals
            of private life carried out within the domestic sphere
            traditionally presided over by women; the other, the masculine or
            masculinist, sites the everyday in the public spaces and spheres
            dominated especially, but not exclusively, in modern Western
            bourgeois societies by men. According to the one, the everyday is
            made up of the countless repetitive gestures and small practices
            that fall under the heading of what the existentialists called the
            contingent. According to the other, the everyday is made up of the
            chance encounters of the streets; its hero is not the housewife but
            the flâneur.In the word of Maurice Blanchot:
            The everyday is human. The earth, the sea, forest, light, night, do
            not represent everydayness, which belongs first of all to the dense
            presence of great urban centers. We need these admirable deserts
            that are the world's cities for the experience of the
            everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday is not at home in
            our dwelling-places, it is not in offices or churches, any more
            than in libraries or museums. It is in the street if it is
            anywhere.1
             
            1. Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," trans. Susan
            Hanson, in "Everyday Life," ed. Alice Kaplan and
            Kristin Ross, special issue of Yale French Studies,no. 73 (1987):
            17.
             
            Naomi Schor is the William Hanes Wannamaker Professor Romance
            Studies at Duke University and coeditor of differences: A Journal
            of Feminist Cultural Studies. Her most recent book is Reading in
            Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987). She is currently
            completing a book entitled George Sand and Idealism.
Kofi Agawn
         Representing African Music
         Among the fields of music study, ethnomusicology has wrestled most
            self-consciously with matters of representation. Since its
            inception in the late nineteenth century as vergleischende
            Musikwissenschaft [comparative musicology] and throughout its
            turbulent history, ethnomusicology has been centrally and vitally
            concerned with at least three basic issues and their numerous
            ramifications. First is the problem of locating disciplinary
            boundaries: is ethnomusicology a subfield of musicology, does it
            belong under anthropology or ethnology, or is it an autonomous
            discipline?1 Second is the problem of translation: what factors
            influence the attempt to translate the reality of other musical
            cultures into audio and visual recordings, verbal accounts, and
            transcriptions in musical notation? Is there a viable "theory
            of translatability"?2 Third is a network of political and
            ideological matters: what sorts of ethical issues constrain the
            practical effort to understand another culture? What is the
            relation between empire and ethnomusicological representation? Can
            we that is, is it a good thing to study any music
            without taking note of the social, economic, political, and
            technological circumstances of its producers?
             
            1. A concise introduction to the field of ethnomusicology, its
            history, personalities, and method may be found in Barbara Krader,
            "Ethnomusicology," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music
            and Musicians,ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London, 1980), 6:275-82.
            The most comprehensive recent discussion of key issues in
            ethnomusicological research is Bruno Nettl, The Study of
            Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, Ill.,
            1983).
            2. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes
            Its Object (New York, 1983), p. 43.
             
            Kofi Agawu teaches at Cornell University and is the author of
            Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music
            (1991).
James E. Young
         The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today
         One of the contemporary results of Germany's memorial
            conundrum is the rise of its "counter-monuments":
            brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to
            challenge the very premises of their being. On the former site of
            Hamburg's greatest synagogue, at Bornplatz, Margrit Kahl has
            assembled an intricate mosaic tracing the complex lines of the
            synagogue's roof construction: a palimpsest for a building
            and community that no longer exist. Norbert Radermacher bathes a
            guilty landscape in Berlin's Neukölln neighborhood with the
            inscribed light of its past. Alfred Hrdlicka began (but never
            finished) a monument in Hamburg to counter and thereby
            neutralize an indestructible Nazi monument nearby. In a
            suburb of Hamburg, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz have erected
            a black pillar against fascism and for peace designed to disappear
            altogether over time. The very heart of Berlin, former site of the
            gestapo headquarters, remains a great, gaping wound as politicians,
            artists, and various committees forever debate the most appropriate
            memorial for this site.4
             
            4. The long-burning debate surrounding projected memorials, to the
            Gestapo-Gelånde in particular, continues to exemplify both the
            German memorial conundrum and the state's painstaking
            attempts to articulate it. For an excellent documentation of the
            process, see Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und
            Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem "Prinz-Albrecht-
            Gelånde," ed. Reinhard Rürup (Berlin, 1987). For a shorter
            account, see James E. Young, "The Topography of German
            Memory," The Journal of Art 1 (Mar. 1991): 30.
             
            James E. Young is assistant professor of English and Judaic studies
            at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of
            Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences
            of Interpretation(1988) and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust
            Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America(forthcoming),
            from which this essay is drawn. He is also the curator of
            "The Art of Memory," an exhibition at the Jewish Museum
            of New York (forthcoming).
Pierre Vidal-Naquet
         Atlantis and the Nations
         I will not dwell overlong on the "meaning" of this
            story. But let me make two essential points. Plato tells us this
            story as though it were true: it is "a tale which, though
            passing strange, is yet wholly true." Those words were to be
            translated into every language in the world and used to justify the
            most realistic fantasies. That is quite understandable, for
            Plato's story started something new. With a perversity that
            was to ensure him great success, Plato had laid the foundations for
            the historical novel, that is to say, the novel set in a particular
            place and a particular time. We are now quite accustomed to
            historical novels, and we also know that in every detective story
            there comes a moment when the detective declares that real life is
            not much like what happens in detective stories; it is far more
            complicated. But that was not the case in the fourth century B.C.
            Plat's words were taken seriously, not by everyone, but by
            many, down through the centuries. And it is not too hard to see
            that some people continue to take them seriously today.
            As for the "meaning," following others and together
            with others, I have tried elsewhere to show that essentially it is
            quite clear: the Athens and Atlantis of ancient lore represent the
            two faces of Plato's own Athens. The former, the old
            primordial Athens, is what Plato would have liked the city of which
            he was a citizen to be; the latter is what Athens was in the age of
            Pericles and Cleon, an imperialistic power whose very existence
            constituted a threat to other Greek cities.
             
            Pierre Vidal-Naquet is director of the Centre Louis Gernet de
            Recherches Comparées sure les Sociétés Anciennes at the École des
            Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His most recent
            publications are the second volume of Les Juifs, la mémoire et le
            present (1991), La Grèce ancienne 1: Du mythe à la raison,with
            Jean-Pierre Vernant (1990), and La Démocratie grecque vue
            d'ailleurs (1990). Among his works to have appeared in
            English are Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,with Jean-Pierre
            Vernant (1988), and The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of
            Society in the Greek World (1986). Janet Lloyd is a supervisor for
            a number of colleges in Cambridge University, where she gives
            classes in French language and literature. Among her more recent
            translations are Yves Mény's Government and Politics in
            Western Europe: Britain, France, Italy, West Germany (1990) and
            Marie-Claire Bergère's Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie,
            1911-1937 (1989). In progress are translations of works on
            Shakespeare, Pericles' Athens, and a historical geography of
            France.
Simon Schaffer
         Self Evidence
         There seems to be an important historical connexion between changes
            in the concept of evidence and that of the person capable of giving
            evidence. Michel Foucault urged that during the classical age the
            relationship between evidence and the person was reversed:
            scholasticism derived statements' authority from that of
            their authors, while scientists now hold that matters of fact are
            the most impersonal of statements.1 In a similar vein, Ian Hacking
            defines a kind of evidence which &lsquo;consists in one thing
            pointing beyond itself', and claims that until the early
            modern period &lsquo;testimony and authority were primary, and
            things could count as evidence only insofar as they resembled the
            witness of observers and the authority of books'.2 This
            captures a rather familiar theme of the ideology of early modern
            natural philosophy. Nullius in verba was the Royal Society of
            London's motto. Robert Boyle, doyen of the Society's
            experimental philosophers, tried to build up the credit of
            laboratory objects at the expense of untrustworthy humans. He
            reckoned that &lsquo;inanimate bodies … are not capable of
            prepossessions, or giving us partial informations', while
            vulgar men may be influenced by predispositions, and so many other
            circumstances, that they may easily give occasion to
            mistakes'. So an inanimate body's deeds could function
            as signs of some other state of affairs in a way that the stories
            of vulgar humans could not.3
             
            1. See Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale
            au Collêge de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris, 1971).
            2. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study
            of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical
            Inference(Cambridge, 1975), pp. 34, 33.
            3. Quoted in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the
            Air Pump (Princeton, N.J., 1985), p. 218. See also Peter Dear,
            &lsquo;Totius in verba:' Rhetoric and Authority in the Early
            Royal Society', Isis 76 (June 1985): 145-61.
             
            Simon Schaffer lectures in history and philosophy at the University
            of Cambridge. He is the coauthor (with Steven Shapin) of Leviathan
            and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life(1985)
            and coauthors (with David Gooding and Trevor Pinch) of The Uses of
            Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (1989).
Donald Preziosi
         The Question of Art History
         Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and
            others in these debates has been paid to differences among the
            partisans of various disciplinary methodologies, or to the
            differential benefits of one or another school of thought or
            theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social
            sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art
            historical practice.1 Yet there has also come about among art
            historians a renewed interest in the historical origins of the
            academic discipline itself, and in the relationships of its
            institutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing
            of other historical and critical disciplines in the latter part of
            the nineteenth century. These interests have led increasingly to
            wider discussion by art historians of the particular nature of
            disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic
            practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern
            discourse on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism,
            aesthetic philosophy, the art market, exhibitions, and musicology.2
            What follows does not aim to summarize or characterize these
            developments but is more simply an attempt to delineate some of the
            principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary
            institution in the light of the material conditions of academic
            practice that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century in
            relation to the history of mueological display. In brief, this
            essay is concerned with the circumstances of art history's
            foundations as a systematic and "scientific" practice,
            and its focus is limited to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American
            example.
             
            1. An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald
            Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New
            Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 80-121. See also The New Art History,ed.
            A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1988).
            2. One important sign off these discussions has been a series of
            "Views and Overviews" of the discipline appearing in
            The Art Bulletin in recent years, of which the most recent has been
            perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive: Mieke Bal and Norman
            Byrson, "Semiotics and Art History," The Art Bulletin
            73 (June 1991): 174-208.
             
            Donald Preziosiis professor of art history at the University of
            California, Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1992, at the École des
            Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of
            Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (1989) and is
            currently completing a book on the history of museums entitled
            Framing Modernity.
Bill Brown
         Writing, Race, and Erasure: Michael Fried and the_Scene_of_Reading
         … [T]o trace the problematic of writing (however various) in the
            Norris canon is foremost to confirm Fried's claims about its
            pervasiveness. Indeed, he now intimates that the problematic
            pervades the fiction of "other important writers of the 1890s
            and early 1900s," work by Jack London, Harold Frederic, and
            Henry James (predictably, the "unresolved borderline
            case" [p. 199]). On the one hand, this pervasiveness muddies
            an already ambivalent use of the term impressionism (emptied of its
            traditional content, yet clung to as a heuristic means of grouping
            writers);10 on the other hand, it augments Fried's sense that
            the thematization of writing attained particular moment in the late
            nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To my eye, nonetheless,
            the moment dissolves once its historical isolationism confronts
            "literary history."
             
            10. Fried explicitly addresses this ambivalence, explaining that
            "I am unpersuaded by the many attempts that have been made to
            define that concept either in relation to French impressionist
            painting or in terms of a fidelity to or evocation of the
            &lsquo;impressions' of one or more characters (including the
            implied narrator), but I see no comparably useful designation for
            the global tendency that Crane, Norris, and Conrad all
            instantiate" (p. 197 n. 6). The term, as I see it however,
            serves precisely to exclude the global tendency as it is
            instantiated elsewhere. And yet, to the degree that
            "impressionism" can now designate a confrontation
            between the sight of writing and the impressionist emphasis on
            sight as traditionally understood, Fried, despite all disclaimers,
            revivifies that tradition (which has had scant attention in the
            last two decades).
             
            Bill Brown,assistant professor of English at the University of
            Chicago, is presently completing a book on the "economy of
            play" in the work of Stephen Crane.
Michael Fried
         Response to Bill Brown
         So there will be no mistake, I don't deny, why would I wish
            to, that a thematic of racial difference is crucial to the overall
            plot of Almayer's Folly.What I claim is that that thematic
            falls short of significantly determining or even, to use
            Brown's word, appreciably "complicating" the
            problematic of erasure that surfaces in the closing chapters.
            It's as though the rest of the novel is there chiefly to
            stage those chapters and their dramatization of erasure; something
            similar takes place in Powell's narrative of spying into
            Captain Anthony's cabin toward the end of Chance and even, to
            a lesser degree, in the climactic encounter between Winnie Verloc
            and her husband in chapter 11 of The Secret Agent. It's worth
            noting, too, that the opening paragraphs of A Personal
            Record,Conrad's autobiographical account of the beginnings
            and origins of his "writing life," describe the
            circumstances under which "the tenth chapterof
            &lsquo;Almayer's Folly' was begun."8 This in
            itself suggests that Conrad has a special stake in the last three
            chapters of his first novel, and one of my aims in
            "Almayer's Face" was to discover (think of the
            neutrino) what that stake may have been.9
             
            8. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (1912; Marlboro, Vt., 1988),
            pp. 72: my emphasis.
            9. Again, so there will be no mistake, I would distinguish
            Almayer's Follysharply in this respect from, for example, The
            Nigger of the "Narcissus," in which effects of erasure
            are disseminated throughout the text and in which the title
            character's blackness is crucial to their production.
             
            Michael Fried,J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at the
            Johns Hopkins University, is currently at work on books on Manet
            and on literary "impressionism." His most recent book
            is Courbet's Realism (1990).
