STATE OF CRITICISM
33
of this, is that that very form precludes development. So what you
have is something in which the same thing is being repeated over
and over and over again and that then leads to a set of questions
about what is being repressed.
I
mean, what sort of thing this
structure, the grid, allows to be suspended in the aesthetic process,
what set of incompatible feelings can be suspended there but not
integrated, not reconciled. Those sorts of questions are absolutely
out of the ball game of what was always understood as the task of
practical criticism.
I
am not interested in whether this particular
Mondrian of 1921 is better or worse than the other one of 1921.
I
am
really interested in the structure of this set of irreconcilable and
incompatible terms which seem to me to be enlightened, for in–
stance, by Levi-Strauss 's discussion of the structure of myth .
MORRIS DICKSTEIN:
I
would call that interpretation, though, Rosalind.
Why is that not interpretation?
ROSALI
D
KRAUSS:
It
is interpretation of a transcultural phenomenon,
of something that really goes on over and over and over again. It
really dissolves the integrity of the individual work.
I
mean
I
know
that, for instance, Clement Greenberg would say that what I'm doing
is not criticism, and he's right. It's not. I'm not saying this is a good
Mondrian, this Mondrian is fabulous because X,
Y,
and Z.
I
am not
addressing myself to that;
I
am not addressing myself to the way in
which it functions formally and succeeds aesthetically. That is not
my set of questions. My point is that in fact people have performed
certain kinds of structuralist analyses, in fact in this case of visual
work.
It
cannot be said that what they're doing when they do that is
criticism.
I
think what they're doing when they're doing that is very
interesting, in fact fascinating, but it's not criticism.
STANLEY CAVELL: Let me specify two things that
I
think would need to
be known in order to make an evaluation of the future of these
theories. First, apart from Derrida and Barthes, one needs to be aware
of the eighteen other writers in contemporary Paris with whom they
are in continuous conversation on every page. Otherwise you don't
know what the cross fire is-that is, quite apart from political
opinions, political commitment, from political fantasy. It's hard
enough
to
articulate just what the vocabulary is doing, apart from
which the texts must seem to us irresponsible. The opening of the
Grammatology
must seem to us like something you would just mark
up with a red pencil, apart from knowing where these particular
words come from. My second point concerns the effect of these
thinkers on our academic institutions. People like Barthes and
Derrida are the writers whom some students one cares about very
