Issue #155 W/hither Theory: Notes on the Status of “Theory” in the Arts

W/hither Theory: Notes on the Status of “Theory” in the Arts

Jaleh Mansoor

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Paul Signac, In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Is Not in the Past, It Is in the Future, 1893–95. License: Publice domain.

Issue #155
June 2025










Notes
1

Anatole Jakovsky, Alphonse Allais: Le Tueur a Gags (Le Quatre Jeudis, 1955); Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. James Strachey (W. W. Norton, 1960).

2

Barnett Newman, introduction to Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Grove Press, 1970).

3

Alberto Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism 20, no. 2 (2008). In his French Theory in America, Sylvère Lotringer locates in structuralism—Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology and its debt to Russian formalist linguistics in particular—the origin of the category of real abstraction as a free-floating term in both the academy and in general. Sylvère Lotringer, French Theory in America (Routledge, 2001). See also Alexander Galloway’s work on “new French theory.”

4

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1980).

5

Michel Foucault, Les Mots et Les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Gallimard, 1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences; Daniel Buren, Limites Critiques (Presses Du Reel, 1970).

6

Achim Hochdorfer, “A Hidden Reserve: Painting from 1958 to A965,” Artforum 47, no. 6 (February 2009).

7

Hochdorfer, “Hidden Reserve.”

8

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Zone Books, 1995), thesis 191.

9

Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” section 4 in Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin, 2013).

10

See, for example, Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista: That Scandalous Can, ed. Luca Bochioni (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2025). See also my “Materialist Conceptualism: On the Indivisibility of Intellectual and Manual Labour in Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista” in the same volume.

11

Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines (Semiotext(e), 2012).

12

Jean Baudrillard, La Société de consommation: Ses mythes, ses structures (Gallimard, 1970).

13

Alexei Penzin, “Facticity Today,” e-flux Notes, January 29, 2025 .