Fragments; or, The Ends of Photography

For the world itself has taken on a "photographic face"; it can be photographed because it tries to be absorbed into the spatial continuum which yields to snapshots.

—Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography" (1927) in Mass Ornament, 1995

Years before France would experience the interruption of German occupation during the Second World War and long before the French would be required to come to terms with the shame resulting from the subsequent years of Vichy collaboration; when the French prime minister, Léon Blum, and his Popular Front promised to reform the nation under the hopeful banner of socialist cooperation; and when Algeria seemed a permanent extension of the so-called hexagone française, André Malraux, the French novelist, art theorist, and eventual minister of cultural affairs, diverted his attention from chronicling revolution to embark upon the long process of analyzing what he called then "the psychology of art." His musings about the coordinates of a primary, universal language of artistic practice—first published in the journal Verve in 1937—quickly became something of an obsession for him. The 1937 essay was promptly followed by similarly-themed forays, such as "Psychologie des renaissances," and, in 1938, by "De la représentation en Orient et en Occident." Having only just begun, Malraux proceeded to fuse these articles into a larger work, expanding and redistributing the exposition that would ultimately constitute the three volumes of La psychologie de l'art, published in sequence as Le musée imaginaire (1947), La création artistique (1948), and La monnaie de l'absolu (1949). Still not finished, Malraux again reworked and transformed these volumes, illustrating them with hundreds of new, carefully selected photographic reproductions, and reorganizing them until, with the addition of a fourth volume, Les métamorphoses d'Apollon, they took the shape of the 1951 publication Les voix du silence, translated two years later into English as The Voices of Silence. (Fig. 1.1.)

Taken as a whole, these four volumes contribute little to the analysis of particular art works or particular periods of art production. As such, they barely partake in the category of what has become institutionalized in American universities as the discipline of "art history," although the universalizing accommodations that Malraux provides are finding worrisome new fashion, if not also purchase, as the discipline attempts to rethink itself in the new universalisms attached to the rhetoric of globalizing the university and art worlds that append it. It is instead as a historical document that Les voix du silence is of interest to this study of visual and cultural politics in the era of decolonization. Authored by the man who would become France's first minister of culture and who would accordingly wed the idea of the French nation to its cultural production in unprecedented ways, Les voix represents a tenacious effort to decontextualize the art object from the constraints of any spatio-temporal specificity and liberate it instead as pure form through comparison and stylistic association with other objects. As such, the book provides poignant testimony to the ways in which visual culture, most broadly put, was enlisted as fertile ground on which to stage ideological debates about knowledge of the past and therefore of national belonging in the years following the Second World War and during the ensuing wars fought to preserve France's colonial empire. Indeed, embedded within the historically bracketed aesthetic program we have come to identify with the shorthand catch-all "modernist," Malraux's treatise on the autonomous power that he identifies as "style"—and which he evokes through a juxtaposition of photographic details of cultural objects linked to all periods, places, and purposes—harbors a deep-seated teleology that posits abstracted form, ideally French and almost exclusively dating from before the First World War, as the final, irreducible recipient of meaning. This bias has been repeated to the point of naturalization within canonical formulations of twentieth-century art history that culminate in considerations of the return to these celebrated forms during the so-called post-war period.

Anglophone efforts to discern the potential importance of Malraux's project to its own epoch have focused primarily on the first and most-read of the four volumes, Le musée imaginaire, and on the implications of Malraux's models for contemporaneous developments in museological practice. Translated as "the museum without walls," the meaning of the titular phrase shifts in the English from an emphasis on the imaginary realm of the collective mentality that Malraux meant to designate as grounds for a collective unconscious (in the revived manner of Henri Bergson or even Jean-Paul Sartre) to one focused on a material world of architectural spaces that might actually be configured "without walls." As Rosalind Krauss has noted, this change in focus diverges from the critique that Malraux himself proffered about the museum's responsibility for having shifted the analysis of art from one based on visual singularity to the kind of repeatability more commonly associated with a semiotic regularity that is reinscribed in the museum's emphasis on chronological development and stylistic juxtaposition. Those critics who focus on the museum in Malraux's title or even on the more abstract idea of the collection, to the exclusion of the images on which it might be based, only recapitulate the bias of the English mis-translation and thus continue to obscure a crucial aspect of Malraux's project, which puts at least equal focus on the image that lies at the heart of the French word imaginaire.

In what follows, I want to insist on the significance of this "image" within Malraux's program and to thereby re-open his text to an expanded analysis, one that redirects us toward a reading of French visual culture in the years following the Second World War that not only exceeds, but also historicizes the decontextualized modernist model developed during this time. In so doing, we can...