Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

Conceptual Art 1962-1969 129
come firmly established as the most common and powerful social class of postwar
society, is the one which, as H. G. Helms wrote in his book on Max Stirner,
"deprives itself voluntarily of the rights to intervene within the political decisionmaking
process in order to arrange itself more efficiently with the existing
political conditions."26
This aesthetic of the newly established power of administration found its
first fully developed literary voice in a phenomenon like the nouveau roman of
Robbe-Grillet. It was no accident that such a profoundly positivist literary project
would then serve, in the American context, as a point of departure for Conceptual
Art. But, paradoxically, it was at this very same historical moment that the
social functions of the tautological principle found their most lucid analysis,
through a critical examination launched in France.
In the early writing of Roland Barthes one finds, simultaneously with the
nouveau roman, a discussion of the tautological:
Tautologie. Yes, I know, it's an ugly word. But so is the thing. Tautology
is the verbal device which consists in defining like by like ("Drama
is drama"). . . . One takes refuge in tautology as one does in fear, or
anger, or sadness, when one is at a loss for an explanation. . . . In
tautology, there is a double murder: one kills rationality because it
resists one; one kills language because it betrays one. . . . Now any
refusal of language is a death. Tautology creates a dead, a motionless
world.27
Ten years later, at the same moment that Kosuth was discovering it as the
central aesthetic project of his era, the phenomenon of the tautological was once
again opened to examination in France. But now, rather than being discussed as
a linguistic and rhetorical form, it was analyzed as a general social effect: as both
the inescapable reflex of behavior and, once the requirements of the advanced
culture industry (i.e., advertisement and media) have been put in place in the
formation of spectacle culture, a universal condition of experience. What still
remains open for discussion, of course, is the extent to which Conceptual Art of a
certain type shared these conditions, or even enacted and implemented them in
the sphere of the aesthetic-accounting, perhaps, for its subsequent proximity
and success within a world of advertisement strategists-or, alternatively, the
extent to which it merely inscribed itself into the inescapable logic of a totally
administered world, as Adorno's notorious term identified it. Thus Guy Debord
noted in 1967:
The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the
simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun
26. Hans G. Helms, Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft (Cologne, 1968), p. 3.
27. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 152- 53.