Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America. - book reviews

Eric M. Rosenberg

DAVID M. LUBIN New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 584 pp., 50 color ills., 140 b/w $45.00

The most ambitious and rigorous studies of 19th-century American ar t have of late donned a coat of many theoretica, methodological colors. This garment often speaks itself rendering myriad claims for interest and foundation in recent debates in critical theory and for empathy with the "new" art history. Rarely, though, does it reveal the substance and materiality of those practical draperies of process and comprehension covering the body below.(1) David Lubin's project in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America is as much to heighten our awareness of the fashioning of the outer garment as to enrich the revelation of the inner. In short, Lubin wishes to make questions of process and approach mundane, to externalize theory in practice by allowing it to take its place in the quotidian narration of history.

Do human beings, however, knowingly, willingly take the burden of history as practice on their shoulders? We excavate history, chronicle it, narrate it, write it, read it, imagine it, perhaps believe in it from highly self-conscious, temporal vantage points. But we almost never take it, in its myriad forms and as formal entity, into conscious account as part of the baggage of daily life; we rarely if ever construct history as a space through which we must pass in order to transact the everyday--those minimal or maximal definitions of materiality necessary to maintaining the rationality, identity, and embodiment that insure the continued and continuous balance of sameness and difference that we call reality or the present. Why then do we as art historians increasingly demand that our inanimate objects of study, our historical material, do so? Can such phenomena more easily carry the weight of history superimposed? Is there something in their inanimacy that is tailored to resisting the pressure of anxiety and strain that eludes the living subject in his or her encounter with the materials and forms of the past?

The question must be asked: To what extent can objects designed to absorb and impart knowledge through the conduit of vision bear this weight? How can such objects be made to stand in for our own inability to do the same? These are the demands of "context" as it continues to inform the field of art history with both successful and unsuccessful results. These are the questions embedded in Picturing a Nation, a handsome, challenging volume that makes large, socially and politically sensitive claims for a seemingly self-critical scholarly sensibility.

Lubin's interests are served by an expansiveness of inquiry that is admirable and perhaps best bracketed by the terms multicultural and empathetic. This leads him to organize his book around case studies designed to expose a wide range of contemporary concerns. Race, class, gender, environment domesticism, and colonialism all have their day in chapters called, in order, "The Politics of Method," "Labyrinths of Meaning in Vanderlyn's Ariadne," "Bingham's Boone," "Reconstructing Duncanson," Lily Martin Spencer's "Domestic Genre Painting in Antebellum America," "Guys and Dolls: Framing Femininity in Post-Civil War America," and "Masculinity, Nostalgia, and the Trompe l'Oeil Still-Life Paintings of William Michael Harnett." The titles alone offer a certain amount of insight into the author's commitment to some very timely issues. Phrases and words such as "Labyrinths of Meaning," "Reconstructing," "Domestic," "Framing Femininity," and "Masculinity" all foreground the author's sympathy with a host of relevant matters born of poststructural conceptions of history, theory, social relations, and identity politics.

Lubin makes no claims for inclusive topicality. His desire to demonstrate facility is methodological, thematic as much as iconographic. While the book has the appearance of a survey--it covers material from 1800 to 1900--it is a survey of approaches and vantage points. It proceeds chronologically but also revels in its attention to subjects marginalized until now. The reader will not find here material on Cole, Church, Bierstadt, Homer, Eakins, Inness, Ryder, or Cassatt. Picturing a Nation demonstrates something of the way in which the quotidian is made historical. To this end, Lubin coins an approach he calls:

try-what-works art history, cultural history,

and social history all wrapped into one. But

this thoroughgoing eclecticism is guided

throughout by what I hope the reader will

find to be consistent principles of socially

critical inquiry and an aspiration toward

multicultural equality In the pages ahead I

try everything I can think of--everything

that might work--to elucidate, with these

goals in mind, a handful of

nineteenth-century American paintings and

the varied society that produced them. (p.

vii)

As stimulating as it can be--and it most certainly is--Lubin's way is fraught with conceptual and practical obstacles. The contradictions and paradoxes inherent in such a formulation require careful mediation.

How, for instance, do we measure the distance between the seemingly innovative politics of "try-what-works" and the surviving desire to mark significant distinctions between art history, cultural history, and social history? Why, at this point, are they not all one, collapsing along the way the barriers and articulations of difference necessarily attending the distinctions implicit in the phrase "try-what-works"? What do we do with the syntactic problems of the term itself? Trying what works seems to imply that there is inherent in the first part of the phrase--"try"--an a priori knowledge of just precisely what works. How else could the notion, the implementation of what works be determined, facilitated?

More debatable are the claims made and aspirations held for such methodologies. What is multicultural equality? It sounds good and laudable, but how? Unless grounds are given on which equality might be the right or inevitable goal, it is impossible to get a handle on what might result from it. The more obvious conclusion under the circumstances is to expect anarchy: multiple cultural formations, modes of representation, linguistic dialects and idioms; structures of social, commercial, economic exchange warring for dominance. Moreover, how do we close the gulf between "a handful of nineteenth-century American paintings" and "the varied society that produced them?" The expectation of continual cultural contradiction, as opposed to equality, is forecast, not eviscerated, by the method as stated. If a varied society produced the handful of American paintings under scrutiny, could an examination of this handful stem the tide of hermeneutic instability suggested by the overwhelming variable constituted in the term "varied"?

In short, to what extent could a "handful of nineteenth-century American paintings" be produced by or even describe a "varied society"? It is this premise that ought to incite the most fervent discussion, and produce the most useful argument. For no matter how we might work to concentrate on the words "handful," "paintings, " "nineteenth-century," the stress of the phrase is inevitably carried by the adjective "American." The designation as it is applied to any cultural product of the 19th century is simultaneously so large and so small that its coupling with, indeed the suggestion of its production by, its contextual adjective, "varied," serves virtually to cancel out its force, to render it anything and everything that does or does not work, and thus virtually intractable. This hardly bodes well for a virtually classical formulation such as multicultural equality, clean and ordered in its design, seeking an equilibrium and balance as rooted in an Americanism born of the Declaration of Independence as in postmodernism.

Yet Lubin is precise about the preparations necessary to "try-what-works art history":

paintings cannot possess inherent,

historically transcendent, acontextual

meanings but are instead blank screens onto

which various not necessarily compatible

meanings have been and can be projected

by viewers situated in specific viewing

situations (whether that of the painter in

the studio, the nineteenth-century

spectator, or the present-day author or

reader of an art-historical account such as

this). (p. xv)

Lubin calls this a "social-constructionist view of art" and declares that adherence to such a system opens a path to "textual presentism (interpreting a work from the past in terms of whatever the interpreter finds relevant to our present historical situation)" (p. xv). But how can we determine any space of value from which to practice what Lubin calls "presentism" if it is purchased at the cost of historical specificity? Can "presentism" even exist without the assumption of a foundation--history---on which it is performed? To work as Lubin wants it to, the method must emerge not simply by wiping clean the screen of the painting, but by denying the very consciousness available to the "presentist" writer, historian, or cultural critic.

Lubin's shifting foundations of methodology are most tellingly illuminated by linguistic choice and stress. Words and phrases such as "whatever," "from the past," "finds relevant," and "present historical situation" are imprecise and loaded with contradiction. They have roots in assumptions that are utterly wedded to the care and nurture of a status quo. No multicultural equality will result from a vantage point dedicated to resisting the measure of distance between the "whatever" and the "relevant," or between "from the past" and "present historical situation." Nor will the problem be eradicated in the following way:

I have tried to empathize with the artists I

write about, tried to understand what made

them live and paint as they did. I have tried

also to empathize with their

contemporaries, even when their politics or

aesthetics run counter to my own. And I

have tried to empathize with my reader. (p. xiv)

There is something commendable in the author's affirmation of the possibility of the eradication of difference. But there is also something, as he himself admits, "insidious" about it. Lubin's constant attempt to see all points of view, even if only as a double agent working for the efficacy of his text as opposed to theirs, cannot help but be read as a strategy of appropriation rather than of illumination, of reconfiguration rather than of reconstruction.

Constructing empathy on such insecure ground--as the result of claim rather than demonstration--will lead inevitably to indictments as dangerous as those that Lubin returns against "antihumanists" such as Althusser, Barthes, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan.(2) In chapter 1, for instance, he takes "a recent commentator on Vanderlyn" to task for asserting that the painter's Ariadne, Lubin's subject, "makes no overt reference to the American or French political climate," delimiting discussion of the painting to "formal sources, artistic styles, ancient myths, and timeless symbols," and historicizing the painting "not only as a neoclassical idealization, but also as an essentially romantic investigation that is at once universal and intensely individual" (p. 1).(3)

In his turn Lubin wants:

to show that the painting's subject ... style

... and theme ... coincide in such a way as

to be keenly relevant to some of the most

pressing issues of the artist's time. It is

almost as if the various aesthetic choices

the painting embodies were themselves

responses to a whole network of social

choices confronting the new nation and its

citizens at home and abroad. (p. 1)

What, however, are the forms of neoclassical idealization, romantic investigation, the dichotomy of the universal and the individual if not "responses to a whole network of social choices"? How is Lubin's assertion of aesthetic choices as responses to the social, indeed as masking the social, any different from his nemesis's desire to argue for "no overt reference to ... political climate" and to foreground the neoclassical and the romantic? Does not the identification of a tension between the two in a single painting in and of itself give voice to some awareness of the extent to which formal choices might be ideological?

Such forced polemics, in theory admirable and useful if adequately grounded, give rise to argument when insensitive to the history embedded within the work of other scholars. In this case, more than one mode of historical accounting has been shown to be up to the task of essentializing meaning, demonstrating the extent to which ideology informs and is informed by cultural work. At other times, the use of tropistic arguments in Picturing a Nation to produce historical meaning seems to undermine the healthy comprehension of difference and distinction as signs of history. At the beginning of chapter 2, by way of transition, the text argues that Ariadne is "the foundation of nineteenth-century American landscape painting ... the trope of bountiful America ready for the taking ... availability [being] the essential theme, intended or otherwise, of every major U.S. landscape painter of the middle two quarters of the nineteenth century" (p. 55). Whether or not it is in keeping with dominant scholarly belief this assertion perpetuates a fundamental misconception. The ideology of Manifest Destiny-made-image, what Lubin is after all discussing, had little to do with availability. And the consistency with which the work of American landscape painters from this period avoided the imaging of struggle for propriety does not afford access to a thematic of availability signified by the "aesthetic choices" made in the production of such work. If American landscape painting between 1825 and 1875 can be said to be about any one thing, a dubious notion in and of itself it might in fact be unavailability. This makes Ariadne no kind of prototype, and it explains why American landscape painting during the period in question looked the way it did--redolent of absence and the sublimity/anxiety of denial rather than radiating presence and the comfort of access--and decidedly not like Vanderlyn's painting.

Furthermore, Lubin's faith in the myth of availability leads him to read gingham's Emigration of Boone of 1851-52 as the picture of a trip into the wilderness afforded entry by way of representation. But the fact is that Boone and his entourage approach the viewer. They appear to be almost in retreat from the wilderness, addressing the civilized spectator at the American Art-Union, for which the painting was executed. It is virtually impossible to measure availability, except by way of context, which Lubin negotiates superbly. His account of the traversal of the wilderness and the creation of a politics of the frontier surrounding gingham's practice is rich and varied in ways that inform our sense of the historical material and relation to visual representation. The paintings themselves, however, remain problematic. Given the difficulties that obtain in trying to construct a satisfying reading of the Boone picture, it seems unwise to describe gingham's river scenes in this way: "Seductively, such paintings purvey a dream of leisure, communal togetherness, and amiable accord with nature. Perhaps there's a sandbar here on the left and a snag on the right, not concealed. Besides, such threats occur at the margins; they do not obstruct the mainstream" (pp. 58-59). It should offer no criticism here to argue for the "presentism" of such an interpretation.

Adherence to a politics of unavailability, to a belief in the historical production of certain types of representation as a result of, or in dialogue with, the pressures and obstacles surrounding the work involved in appropriating something, might argue for the image of "communal togetherness" as deliberately antithetical, produced as corrective to the dangers perceived as immanent in such surroundings. In the case of the Emigration of Boone. Lubin argues that slaves, an integral part of Boone's entourage, are absent from the painting because of gingham s ambivalence on this issue (his increasingly enlightened position). But isn't it just as likely that they are assumed to be in the background. unavailable to the eye trained on that part of the wilderness experience reserved for dominance, patriarchy, the subject Might not their absence signify their very presence Cannot "communal togetherness be as much a protective, defensive move as a sign of triumph?

What is at stake is Lubin s notion of the character and performance of ideology. In chapter 2 he maintains in reference to his discussion of the image of women in Emigration of Boon: "By ideology, I have in mind that aggregation of commonly held ideas of the period that scholars have recently taken to calling `republican motherhood' and `the cult of true womanhood'" (pp. 71-72). Is there, however, any way of stabilizing ideology so that it might achieve the quality of a historical fact? A definition of ideology may frame a subject, but the passage's virtually unwitting predicate is its own declension by the "presentist" valorization of flux, what Lubin calls for the moment recently scholarly naming of phenomena such as "republican motherhood" and "the cult of true womanhood."

At the same time, Lubin seems convinced of ideology's stability in individual instances, when enacted or embodied in history. This is what he refers to as the "commonly held ideas" of a particular moment. Such a definition of ideology is opposed to that notion of distance from ideology to ideology that defines areas of experience and identity-formation such as class, race, or gender. Male, female, African American, bourgeois, petit bourgeois, Oriental: these can be ideological formations between which there is room for--indeed, virtually a requirement of--measures of difference. But between the material of "republican motherhood" or "the cult of true womanhood" (concepts that deserve their own parsing) and their history--their historiography--there may be little or great ideological distance. How then do we secure historical distinctions between the image of women in Boone's painting or Boone's painting in and of itself and the extent to which these materials take on and are taken on by ideology in time? What happens in the process to Lubin's argument for an inevitable loss of historical specificity caused by the tension between belief in ideology as historical and always in a state of being made?

The whole issue of ideological study as a tool for historical work has been placed under pressure in recent years, occasioning a redeployment, as Lubin recognizes, along the lines of identity politics. But while much of this interest has proceeded from a healthy concern for the foundations and structures of race and gender, a great deal has also configured itself as alternative to the study of that realm of human transaction and identity construction/sublimation on which much earlier work on ideology was based: class. This reminder is not necessarily to rescue some kind of dream of an unadulterated discourse on class bereft of those ideological interests that divert the general issues of social classification and order from their economic origins. Instead, I would argue that it is the quality of argument, reason, discursive propulsion, contradiction, contingency, sheer density that is in need of resuscitation as applicable to those areas of "class" analysis now more commonly and as justifiably foregrounded. But at the very least it must be admitted that to embrace a conception of ideology and its workings more readily applied to the study of class and class struggle is seriously to jeopardize one's goal of "multicultural equality."

Placed under such stresses, "commonly held ideas of the period" does not form an adequate definition of ideology. The elision of ideology by idea itself is problematic, one area of experience denoting a sometimes incoherent movement between the subconscious and the conscious, the other a more consistently conscious manifestation. Ideas can certainly be "commonly held" but to that extent do they constitute ideology as such?(4) The problem with Lubin's theoretical underpinnings is the result of the author's loyalty to a brand of deconstructive analysis that has emerged in the field of the history of 19th-century American art. Perhaps a certain unfair reductiveness informs my sense of the unity of this phenomenon, but there still circulates within Lubin's work an understanding of deconstruction best described by the term "try-what-works."

Lubin's vantage point owes something to Jules Prown's statement with regard to Winslow Homer:

My contention is that a work of art consists

of intended and unintended statements

and is of interest both in what it intends to

say and in what is conveyed unconsciously

by its deeper structures. So stated, the

problem becomes one of cultural perspective,

the danger of imposing late

twentieth-century values on an object

created in another time and place. I believe

that this problem can to some extent be put

into perspective by adhering to a close

analytical reading of the image, moving

from objective description to deductions

derived from empathetic engagement with

the object, to creative speculation and

interpretation in which our late

twentieth-century perspective can become a

scholarly advantage, permitting insights

without distorting the objective data.(5)

In other words the object is not consciously presented as a blank screen, but rather as an inherence of culturally critical materials meant to be excavated by the analyst and remade in the process. Such assumptions are deeply embedded in the notion of empathy or "empathetic engagement with the object."

Such empathy results for Prown in extraordinary discoveries:

The underlying argument of this essay ... is

that: Winslow Homer is deeply invested in

his art, consciously and unconsciously;

explication of the conscious or intentional

elements in his works leads to an

understanding of his philosophical stance,

the substantial beliefs that inform his art; a

reading of the unconscious elements leads to

an understanding of Homer's psychological

makeup; and, in the end, Homer's

psychological makeup, which contained

elements of which he was almost certainly

not aware, contributed powerfully to the

imagery through which his credo, his

philosophy, was expressed.(6)

These are the imagined, virtually utopian results of a belief in empathy as a motivational methodological tool, and the very terms by which Lubin expects something like multicultural equality to be defined.

The notion that through a work of visual representation something as totalized and whole as a philosophy or credo might be excavated is to speak as firmly to the extent to which the archaeologist seeks a priori to construct, find, superimpose a philosophy. And why philosophy? This choice of terminology seems to me a tacit avoidance of, or an almost conscious desire to read away from, an art history that might argue for ideology as the more appropriate term. The distance between philosophy and ideology is as great as the distance between "commonly held ideas" and ideology, or perhaps the chasm between performance and embodiment of empathy and the putative, admirable, yet ambiguous end of something like multicultural equality. This last dichotomy seems, in tract, to imply the administration of a type of governing body with an icleological agenda of its own: the analyst as "presentist" perhaps, the historian as microcostmic model for hegemonic if pluralistic political control, the project at hand a metaphor tot the establishment and facilitation of a state of governance.(7)

A final case in point: in chapter 6, "Masculinity, Nostalgia, and the Trompe l'Oeil Still-Life Paintings of William Harnett," a fascinating explication of commodity fetishism and male identity formation in late 19th-century New York, Lubin makes note of the fact that during the late 1880s and 1890s Harnett's After the Hunt and William-Adolphe Bouguereau's Nymphs and Satyr hung in saloons across town from each other. This piece of "objective data" serves as the foundation, the rationale for a discussion of the appropriateness of such a situation, from a late 20th-century perspective:

In both cases, not only was the subject

matter decidedly masculine (frolicking nudes,

remnants of a hunt), but also both works

thematically played up the stereotypical

notion of the male as hunter. In the

Bouguereau as in the Harnett, the hunt is

over: the satyr is not pursuing the nymphs

but enjoying them.... Both works, moreover,

are predicated upon giving the viewer

generous access to sights not normally

accessible: a bevy of voluptuous naked

maidens in the one instance, inanimate

objects magically detailed and alive in the

other, the one being mythical, the other

being super real. Vision equates with

understanding, and with understanding one

gains control or at least its semblance. Total

vision simulates total mastery. Within the

realm of fantasy, the viewer becomes the

hunter/conqueror, in the one instance of the

nymphs, in the other of the game, but in

both of an optically visible world served up

for sheer delectation. Thus, in a society in

which hunting is culturally encoded as

masculine, both of these paintings define

their viewers, be they men or women, as male.

Of course, as I have argued throughout this

book, viewers may have resisted such

external acts of definition and "misread" the

art in front of them in a manner more

congenial to their own self-interest. (pp.

297-98)

Misreading is, of course, the issue, but whose, and when, and how, and why? Lubin exploits misreading to the same extent that his imagined historical viewers may have and to precisely the ends he ascribes to their parapraxis.

In short, I find it virtually impossible to read the Bouguereau as Lubin does. To whatever end, it is the nymphs whom Bouguereau pictures as dominant, as hunters, as subjugating their game in this painting. They push down on the satyr's head almost painfully, they tug on his horn, they circle him, they summon their fellows from afar to join in the fun and help celebrate their triumph. The nymphs pull the satyr to the water's edge, to their edge, if you will, and if anything determine their viewers as female to the extent that the gaze is identified with the dominant action/narrative of the painting. In turn, the satyr's body is all resistance, braced to refuse the pond, hands outstretched to ward off his attackers. Perhaps this accounts for the difference between the settings in which these paintings hung in the 1880s: the Harnett in a corner saloon, shoring up popular models of maleness, despite the occasional presence of female viewers; the Bouguereau in a bourgeois hotel barroom where the sexes might more frequently mix, again if only to see the painting, but perhaps as a result of everyday female presence in other areas of the hotel, as well. Are we faced here with the extent to which the interpreter means to reread a particular work uncomfortable to his assumptions of mastery and hegemony? Is this why the male, standing in front of the Bouguereau in the lithograph published by Thomas and Wylie, Interior View of the Hoffman House Bar of cat 1890 (p. 302, fig. 72), looks away from the painting, toward the viewer, in search of the reassurance that in fact assumptions about ownership, propriety, and sexism are not overturned by the representation before him?

As Lubin himself maintains:

Of course, as I have argued throughout this

book, viewers may have resisted ...

external acts of definition and "misread" art

in front of them in a manner more

congenial to their own self-interest. Viewers

do not always allow themselves to be

constructed in the way that texts would

construct them. This is not because these

viewers are in the last analysis stronger than

the texts that implore them ... but only

because viewers already embody

multitudinous social texts in varying

combination, making them in any given

instance either more available or less

available to the inducements of yet another.

(p. 298)

Thus, ironically, the impossibility of empathy but the inevitability of"presentism," the sacrifice of history.

Moreover, the notion that visual texts construct viewers is one with very little substance to it in the first place. If a composite of visual signs does in fact constitute itself as a text, then it is simply one more alongside that made manifest by, around, and in the "viewer." The texts be in agreement or disagreement, wildly similar or wildly different in their utilization of similar and different signs, may even construct themselves as subsidiary or dominant with regard to yet other texts, but rarely if ever would a text represent something that is not a text, that is a viewer. A language is the linguistic embodiment of a body; a body is the physical embodiment of a language.

Numerous other readings throughout the book deserve similar critical pressuring and teasing. Many, in the most positive sense, demand careful attention. This is a challenging and provocative text. It should not and cannot be ignored. It must, however, be read critically, subjected to the same barrage of questions to which it in turn subjects its material. Lubin wouldn't have it any other way; he says as much and we can only take him at his word, a word that is often fascinating but as frequently deserves argument.

In the end we are left where we started. How can objects bear the burden of history if history is determined by the imagined ability to empathize with the inanimate? Is the latter even possible? And why waste empathy, rather than, say, critical scrutiny, on the inanimate after all? Wouldn't empathy be more fruitfully accorded the animate, the discursive, the living? Wouldn't that be a richer and more direct path to equality--multicultural, class, and gender? In turn, wouldn't we be in a better position to produce history--or endure its end, turn it to good use--were we to admit our inevitable, fortunate or unfortunate, apposition to the inanimate, the extent to which it serves as a site of preservation for a body of material signifying history's "hurt" as well as its comfort?(8) We shall never receive empathy from the object, or from history; that is a chimera, if an overwhelmingly powerful one. We might, however, work to deserve empathy back from the subjects that constitute and are constituted by objects and by history.

(1) See Vivien Green Fryd, "The Object in the Age of Theory," American Art, VIII, no. 2, Spring 1994, 2-5. Fryd provides the standard discourse on theory in American art history. See also Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye, Ithaca, N.Y., 1993; David C Miller, ed., American Iconology, New Haven, 1993; and Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday life, New Haven, 1992.

(2.) Lubin (pp. xii-xiii) goes on to maintain that such antihumanism is symptomatic of the preceding or eventual moral downfall of some of these figures, the dissolution of their own lives. This is surely to misconstrue the differences between and within their work, and to deprive such work of its usefulness, its specificity, as well as its own conditions of production.

(3.) Lubin quotes here from the work of William Townsend Oedel, "John Vanderlyn: French Neoclassicism and the Search for an American Art," Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1981, 13, 396.

(4.) One instance of the debate on ideology will have to suffice: Frederic Jameson (The Political Unconscious, Ithaca, N.Y., 1981, 181-82) quotes Althusser on ideology (Lenin and Philosophy, New York, 1971, 162), calling it "the imaginary representation of the subject's relationship to his or her real conditions of existence." To that definition Jameson adds the distinction between imaginary representation and its narrative conditions of possibility ... those conceptual conditions of possibility or narrative presuppositions which one must `believe,' those empirical preconditions which must have been secured, in order for the subject successfully to tell itself this particular daydream." What might be extracted as "commonly held" from such discourse is the impulse to represent imaginatively, the impulse to narrate, the impulse to have faith in "real conditions of existence." But these are structures of representation, not ideas as such; they do not necessarily constitute the phenomenon of "commonly held ideas" as ideology. Moreover, as Jameson maintains, ideology is arguably the province of the individual subject even if it is meant to represent for that subject the boundaries of community.

(5.) J. Prown, "Winslow Homer in His Art," Smithsonian Studies in American Art, I, no. 1, Spring 1987, 31

(6.) Ibid., 31-32.

(7.) See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Chicago, 1992, 258-59, where the origins of the problem are ascribed to differing notions of "good government" and the extent to which such notions are constructed at the behest of a desire for hegemony.

(8.) I use the term "hurt" here as it is employed by Jameson ([as in n. 4], 102: "History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force."

ERIC M. ROSENBERG
Department of Art and Art History
Tuffs University
Medford, Mass. 02155

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