Saturday, July 24, 2021

Ambiguous Praise of the Contract

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Street with Red Streetwalker
ca. 1914-25
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Carington Bowles (publisher)
Wantonness Mask'd
1771
hand-colored mezzotint
British Museum

Carington Bowles (publisher)
A Foolish Woman
1780
hand-colored mezzotint
British Museum

For she sitteth at the door of her house on a seat, in the high places of the city. To call passengers, who go right on their ways.  – Proverbs, Ch. IX, verses 14 & 15

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Mike Miller, 24 years old, Allentown, Pennsylvania, $25
1990-92
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Tim
1990
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Eugène Atget
Versailles Brothel
1921
albumen print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Eugène Atget
La Villette, Rue Asselin
Prostitute waiting in front of her door
1921
albumen print
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Eugène Atget
Rue Asselin
1924-25
albumen print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Édouard Manet
Olympia
1867
etching and aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Mark Morrisroe
I, Mark Morrisroe
1999
posthumous book jacket, designed by Jack Woody
Twin Palms Publishers, Los Angeles

Mark Morrisroe
Self Portrait - To Brent
1980
Polaroid
private collection

Nan Goldin
Yogo in the Mirror, Bangkok, Second Tip Bar
1992
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Nan Goldin
Yogo putting on Powder
1992
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The Sofa
1894-96
oil on cardboard
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Woman with Black Boa
1892
oil on board
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Éloge ambigu du contrat  – Ambiguous praise of the contract

     His first image of the contract (the pact) is more or less objective: sign, language, narrative, society function by contract, but since the contract is generally masked, the critical operation consists in deciphering the confusion of reasons, alibis, appearances, in short, the whole of the social natural, in order to make manifest the controlled exchange on which the semantic process and collective life are based.  Yet, at another level, the contract is a bad object: a bourgeois value which merely legalizes a kind of economic talion: making for nothing, says the bourgeois contract: under the praise of bookkeeping, of profit-making, we must therefore read the Base, the Paltry.  At the same time, and at yet another level, the contract is ceaselessly desired, as the justice of a world finally "regular": the preference for the contract in human relations, the security once a contract can be interposed between them, the reluctance to receive without giving, etc.  At this point – since the body intervenes directly here, the model of the good contract is the contract of Prostitution.  For this contract, declared immoral by all societies and by all systems (except the most archaic), liberates in fact from what might be called the imaginary embarrassments of the exchange: what am I to count on in the other's desire, in what I am for him?  The contract eliminates this confusion: it is in fact the only position which the subject can assume without falling into two inverse but equally abhorred images: that of the "egoist" (who demands without caring that he has nothing to give) and that of the "saint" (who gives but forbids himself ever to demand): thus the discourse of the contract eludes two plenitudes; it permits observing the golden rule of any habitation, discerned in the Shikidai* passageway: no will-to-seize and yet no oblation.

* a low, broad step or platform of timber at the threshold of a traditional Japanese house

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (Hill & Wang, 1977)