``By contrast, French Theory pays attention to how their work connected up with artists, musicians, writers, and sundry denizens of various countercultures. Cusset notes the affinity of “pioneers of the technological revolution” for certain concepts from the pomo toolkit: “Many among them, whether marginal academics or self-taught technicians...''
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Cusset is the book I think snagg said I would love. I wrote down the title and author and then proceeded to get distracted by some thread on Badiou that night. I ordered Badiou and Cusset slipped my mind, so I ordered it tonight.
Getting back to the subject. What James and others might not realize is the French theory crowd going back to Sartre and the existentialists and included the structuralists and post-structuralists all hit the US within a brief period when most of their translations into English arrived from about 1960 to 1970s. The importance of that was not to Anglo-American schools of philosophy but to art and literary criticism circles and more general cultural studies both the formal kind in anthropology and sociology, and the less formal kind in English, foreign language departments, and art criticism. At that particular moment, US art was undergoing a real explosion from the last generation of the AE New York School, to Pop Art, to Minimalism to Conceptual, Earthworks, etc. Some of the conceptual work were precursors to Mark Tansey's wheel which I thought was funny as hell.
Well the point is that within that time frame in the US, literary criticism was stuck with new criticism, art history and criticism was mired in some strangely empty approach. Meanwhile the art and writing was exploding way beyond their critical audience to understand their subjects (subjects of study). The older Freudian and Jungian take on images and symbols had pretty much died out really because everybody knew you could always see a standing figure as a penis or a vulva in the flowers.
The whole art world was ready for these french guys and sucked them up like chocolate malts. In a way they reminded me of Marcel Duchamp. I played around with visual metaphorical games--it's fun to dream these things up. You should be able to trace some of their influence in critics like Rosealind Krauss, Lucy Lippard and others who wrote for Art Forum in those days. I remember Krauss was pretty good on the Minimal, Post-Minimal divide, and then later developments. Here is a good wiki on her contributions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_E._Krauss
Michaels in his interview said he was working on a project micro-history of 1985-95. That's pretty much too late to see the effects I am sketching in the visual arts. Maybe poetry, critical writing, and some developments in photography were absorbing and or transforming these ideas.
Anyway Michaels is going to run head-on into Rosalind Krauss, since she turned into a real powerhouse. It will be interesting to see what he does about her. She has at least if not better command of the French schools and uses them with a really adroit touch. About the worst thing you can say about Krauss is she has an immaculate taste. Had I been a rich collector, I would have hired her as a curator for my modernist-postmodernist collection. Here is a wiki on her:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_E._Krauss
I've still got my Art Forums from the mid-60s through 1980, the classic period. It's like collecting comic books. The silver fish have probably ingested more French theory than I have. The magazines are under my bed in boxes. Last time I checked, the silver fish looked pretty fat on theory. Remember if text is an object on paper, it can and will be eaten.
CG