“Theory,” a generalizing signifier for emergent thought motivated by changing, as-yet-unformalized conditions of actuality, is frequently vulnerable to misrecognition as fashion. All cats are grey in the dark. The tendency to react to theory as a technique by which to probe the world may in part stem from the anxiety that it is a fleeting gloss on a stable reality, a reaction often justified by its frequent abuse as empty jargon by the PR wing of any given cultural endeavor. Just as likely, the insights it renders are destabilizing, turning stable “reality” into a free fall of seeming speculation that is to be recuperated as swiftly as possible. One example among too many to enumerate might be the becoming-signpost of a theorist or philosopher’s name in the absence of any convincing demonstration of the problems or concepts that characterize the theory for which the proper name is to stand like a label or logo on an otherwise empty bottle of perfume. Content is sidelined for a form of marketable efficiency. Grant applications depend on this operation of proper names occluding contents that the grant dispensers might find troubling. And so theory becomes a double-edged sign, or a kind of sliding glass door, an object of mistrust but nonetheless a necessary kind of pivot.
Theory, or more accurately theories in multiple, given the absence of any one particular end or final postulate to rationalize its plural means, are a function of and necessitated by real abstractions wrought by the unconscious dominance of transactional exchange in the socially constituted world that in turn misrecognizes the forms of its constitution. Unlike strict natural science which operates by an internal logic and is systematically applied to an external field already highly organized as a data set, whereby externalities are first reconstituted as data in a given sample, theory affords a cognitive map through an unstable social dynamic. Unlike science, theory’s relation to observation is contingent, not deductive. Science aside, theory and art have emerged in a condition of co-constitutive tension since art cut the cord from myth, effectively swapping its cultic use value for aesthetic circulation that at times exposed it to the seemingly arbitrary vagaries of taste and individual judgement.
Skipping over the complicated period of transition to secular modernity in which art is continually pulled back into magic, from de Brosse’s pale argument for the appropriation of what Dutch settlers thought they saw in the Congo to Aby Warburg’s insistence that the snake dance among the Hopi in the American Southwest could be used to generalize the meaning of art to any given collective, we get to modern art, which bracketed both religion and science within a kind of hermetically sealed fortress of the aesthetic that lent itself to a lot of mystifying speculation. It’s relation to the internal dynamic of capital, and capital’s capacity to dissolve and recompose lifeworlds in the interest of its own self replication, has been a little more tricky to map. If homogenous clock time as a measure of abstract labor became the main form of social domination—the dominant metric through which surplus extraction could be extracted while, at a concomitant ideological level, imposing a kind of universal logic of self-evident metrics onto social existence—sometimes it seems as though art became the form through which to negotiate, internalize, or reject that logic. Enter theory.
Modern and contemporary art have emerged entwined if not mutually constitutive with theory since at least the late nineteenth century when Alphonse Allais and the Incoherents rolled out a meta-level take on contemporary art’s absorption into private exhibits and sales. The Incoherents presented a bunch of monochromes, decades avant la lettre, as a kind of joke, the kind Freud theorized as a means by which to surface an otherwise occluded problem.1 This advanced an interval of humorous reflection on art’s deinstitutionalization from the state apparatus and its ensuing market orientation after the hegemony of the salon. While this kind of turn from state to market had already been thematized in the Dutch context, the French variant posited the art object as a space holder for art as an analysis of its own entry into a field seemingly as aleatory and arbitrary as the whims of the buyer. In other words, the sea change in art’s social import from an impossible kind of use value (church, state) to an equally vexed tendency to exchange value actualized a rupture in which art came to occasion a theory of itself and its role in extending the possibility of meaning in any given set of conditions specific to struggles in the social field.
Another point of entry by way of narrow periodization may be Paul Signac hosting a reading group in his studio on the work of Peter Kropotkin, or on the latest studies in physiological optics as a way to try to understand the late Seurat’s technique, its social as much as its scientific mode of inquiry. For an interval in time, theory was thought to be an attribute of Frenchness, owing to a growing tendency of which these are just a couple of examples. But by the time Barnett Newman wrote the introduction to Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, theory had long liberated itself from the limits of identity, national or otherwise.2 Along the way, instances of the resulting alloy between praxis and theory in the arts are too many to catalog and categorize. In one of the several generations of artists coming to pass between Signac and Newman, Picasso’s debt to Gertrude Stein’s analysis and praxis of realizing the capacities of the material signifier in estranged yet concrete and performative ways (in advance of Austin’s How to Do Things with Words) sealed the relationship between art and rethinking the degree zeros of perception and intelligibility for the twentieth century. The adventures of the signifier thereafter, whether in the facture of paint on a plane or isolated as a series of phonemes in symbolic language, brought us to our twenty-first-century juncture where the saturation of conditions wrought by the open secret of real abstraction ratchet the situation as much as respond to it.3
In The Post Card, Jacques Derrida draws out the extent to which psychoanalysis might constitute the first discursive space that no other term could qualify, thereby becoming theory’s first formally circumscribed terrain. Far from an empirical science or a systematically derived philosophy, Freud’s speculative analysis of invisible behavioral etiologies carved a third path which is now generally accepted to be a discourse as legitimate as any careful analytical method—one that in turn influenced numerous art movements, primary among them surrealism.4 Andre Breton’s project sets in motion a quixotic aspiration to merge Marxism—itself a detournement of the Hegelian dialectic to materialize a critique of everything existing and an end to philosophy’s interpretation of the world now in order to change it—with Freud’s interpretation of behavioral rather than forensically verified symptoms. This amalgamate forged the matrix from which Lacan’s rereading of Freud issued, generating a framework for perception as much as for cognition as clinical practice.
The resultant Freud-Breton-Bataille-Lacan nexus alone demonstrates the inextricability of cultural praxis and theory by 1936, when Lacan gave his paper “Mirror State as Formative of the Function of the I” in Marienbad. Since then, there have been numerous instances of a co-constitutive, feedback loop–like dynamic, whereby writers like Michel Foucault look at aesthetic production such as that of Renee Magritte, or even classical masters like Diego Velazquez, as though they were analytical propositions, postulates through which to understand the fragile yet proscriptive and prescriptive circuitry linking words to things, things to thought, and thought to action just as art practices draw on advancements in theoretical and discursive experiments, such as Daniel Buren’s study of Louis Althusser’s notion of subjugation and subject-formation in Limites Critiques.5 These are just a few examples. Mary Kelly’s Postpartum Document is another paradigmatic example.
Within just a decade of Lacan’s revision to the “mirror stage” paper in 1949, which inspired Kelly’s feminist investigation of the gendered division of creative in/capacity mediated by language and the Big Other or Symbolic enabled by it as well as subsequent generations of art limning identity and its limits, the medium of painting, which had long stood as a site to query the edges of a self-reflexive consciousness, supposedly reached its apotheosis—but only to be dissolved into theory. As Achim Hochdorfer noted in Artforum in 2009, having traced a decades-long tendency, art’s primary medium, painting, hegemonic since roughly 1510, was declared dead again and again, but only to then become the primary object of thinking the subject, of thinking itself. “And how could advanced art criticism declare painting dead (yet again),” he writes, “while the very philosophers and theorists it cited had frequently focused on the medium in their own writings?”6
As that narrative would have it, art came to be sublimated into theoretical discourse twice over: one as muse to theory and again to philosophy. Hochdorfer notes that Adorno, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida all elaborate thought from philosophy. We could add Giorgio Agamben, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, and Hortense Spillers, whose thought is reticulated through Torkwase Dyson’s Black abstraction. And even were it not philosophy’s muse, art died again in its own autochthonous turn to theory. Here, any number of artists, collective and individual, are theorists and writers as much as object producers. Claire Fontaine, Hito Steyerl, Thomas Hirschhorn, Josh Kline, and Aria Dean come to mind. In John Cage’s exploration of chance and aleatory operations, Hochdorfer locates the shift in the dissolution of art through deference to explorations of meta-conditions outside the frame. And then, Donald Judd’s Specific Objects dissolved the frame and pedestal for real, setting the conditions for artists as diverse as Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, Adrian Piper, and others to turn to social space. This sealed the deal. Hochdorfer writes:
In the late 1950s, painting celebrated some of the greatest triumphs in its history, grandly ordained as a universal language of subjective and historical experience in major shows and touring exhibitions. But only a short while later, its very right to exist was fundamentally questioned. Already substantially weakened by the rise of Happenings and Pop art, painting was shoved aside by art critics during the embattled ascendancy of Minimalism in the mid-’60s. Since then, painters and their champions alike have tirelessly pondered the reasons for their chosen medium’s downfall, its abandonment by advanced theoretical discourse.7
The way in which responses to minimalism opened the work of art to an expanded social field where it would become art’s task to address subjectivity and social relationality almost seems ancillary to a more entrenched current that had begun with surrealism: art-as-theory awaiting a praxis to come. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord notes that surrealism realized art without negating it, and that Dada negated art without realizing it, leaving the moment of overcoming both limits (negations) and spurs (realizations against limit) in an encompassing practice of de/sublimations to the Situationist International. He provides another genealogy bearing another kind of practice, one uninterrupted by Lacan and the ponderance of the sign.8
With or without a given artwork as the condition for its elaboration, theory insinuates itself in the triangulated interstice among life, philosophy, and art. Unlike a sensuous presentation of a potential utopian practice on the one hand, or formally systematic thought on the other, theory entered the cultural field to describe the new realisms of everyday life, an ontology abstracted by capital. And in this sense, the Duchampian ready-made found its place as the consummate “theoretical object” not only for pointing to the institutional and discursive frameworks of a supposedly precious object, but for penetrating the circuitry of value at the heart of reification crossing all objects, even those supposedly free of anonymous abstract labor (i.e., craft). Regardless of its making, the modern market necessitates a cataloging that places craft and art in relation to it. Above all the ready-made’s initial appearance of recalcitrant opacity indicated the way that most objects no longer bore any transparent relationship to the conditions of their making; it signaled a new regime of anonymous abstract labor in which the object was a function of socially necessary time, rather than specific auratic presence or authenticity, however mythologized. And it dropped this hard and difficult lesson unceremoniously into the center of the bourgeois temple of beauty: the white-walled art gallery. Bearing the stamp of alienated and opaque social relations, this particular ready-made object presented a new kind of map or key into new ontologies and relations among them. In such a context, these relations were reticulated through the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of the commodity,” perceptual tricks presenting people as things and things now as honorific as people.9 A number of riffs on the ready-made have continued to negotiate the totalizing fetish power of the commodity as it advanced, perhaps none as humorously and mercilessly as Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista (1961), an object that has recently generated its own fair share of theory.10
Claire Fontaine, Palestinians, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
All of this is to say that theory, until very recently, functioned far from anything like an imposition onto objects. A cognitive map through the abstractions of everyday life, objects like the ready-made that defied any remaining transparency about the phenomenology of their making, or their social provenance, generated their own theory, not unlike the way in which the commodity form motivated Marx’s labor theory of value. All of modern life had come to revolve, causally, around the unseen: hidden labor abstracted twice over, the second time in realization in the non-site of the market. The ready-made, which after all had signaled this social opacity in a nexus of metabolic transformations and circuits, ignited the turn to art as theory, resurfacing throughout the century in others work as they too grappled with the relationship between labor and agency, from Jasper Johns’s template-based surfaces to Cindy Sherman’s probing of identity as a function of external circumstances and Claire Fontaine’s understanding of the artist in the twenty-first century as a ready-made subject. Far from projection, imposition, or even a study of language games and operations, as art came increasingly to be subsumed within real abstraction and its capitalist ontologies, so too did it gift its viewer a theory of itself in supplement to its immediate presentation.
If anything, artists pushed the historically contingent, necessary intimacy between art and theory in order to theorize a social field lost even on the philosophers. Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is a textual demonstration of the way in which gender performativity, that favorite theory of campuses across North America, derives from and contributes to gender-as-commodity. Or, put the other way around, it appreciates how “the subject” performs its objectification to take its part in socially determined circuits, becoming “subject” only in the most abstract sense—subjected to a position on an invisible market as the very conditions for existence in a social field structured by value’s circuits.11
And here, again, theory is the awkward if assertive child of philosophy and art, neither a formally disciplined process of thinking nor a praxis. It is rather a holding zone where a surplus of analysis waits for its moment to act or be acted upon. It marks a form of potential initiated by existing practices, rather than projected onto objects and praxes. Where would Jean Baudrillard’s Mirror of Production, simulacrum, or analysis of America be without Andy Warhol’s work, which the French philosopher only avowed as, you guessed it, his “muse” toward the end of his life with a few exceptional mentions scattered throughout his corpus.12
But like any development coterminous with capital’s own historicity, theory seems to go in and out of vogue in micro-flashes so brief as to ratify and ultimately demonstrate its more consistent inevitability in a rapidly de- and re-compositing social world reticulated through abstract value. More to the point, it is just as regularly set into controversy by each wave of reaction that wants to see us return to the blithe self-evidence and transparent sensuousness of traditional objects, as though objects themselves (and technology above all as a constellation of subjects and objects) could return to some unmediated place in mythical time. Any number of equally contingent phenomena, from the anomic proliferation of identity politics to the artificial empiricism of a new object orientation to a general backlash against theory, might be located within the very conditions that motivate theory, as though theory were to blame for the abstractions of everyday life.
Or maybe this tendency toward passing trends suggests something else: we have reached a tipping point where theory has itself recirculated enough as to have become not only stale but seemingly meaningless, neutralized and petrified. It is impossible lately to read descriptions of exhibits and events at any given museum, or gallery, or well-meaning nonprofit or alternative space and not be presented parcels of language clogged with catchphrases and sound bites that fall flat as empty signposts advertising notions that bear no relation to either the necessary emergence or stakes of the theory under citation. Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra as floating signs in a tight warp and weft of circulation seems in hindsight to describe, rather than critique, the degree to which praxes and projects are reduced to names or words that operate as prices in a market network, indifferent to the lived struggle that actualized their emergence. This widening gap between aesthetic propositions in closed recirculation and dynamism in the social field from which they are first generated as the surplus of lived struggles symptomatizes only that the moment to seize and realize the artistic or theoretical proposition has passed. The remainder, the finished “work,” becomes a mere shell of an evaporated content—outliving, vampire-like, the contingencies from which it sprung. That’s when theory becomes empty projection. Worse, that’s when it’s just another brand.
The way out of this morass of perpetual inventory, a stockpile of language as much as of stuff, is through. Any latent part of that accumulation, now archived by careful administrators and guardians of the state apparatus and its bank of culture capital, could be reactualized at any time; it is an arsenal of suspended capacity that could reinject revolutionary time into the homogenous time of cultural recuperation. Without a theory or a phenomenology to probe its condition, the art museum would fall back—indeed, it has already—into something not unlike a luxury department store. MoMA is already verging on a Bergdorf Goodman or Le Bonne Marche. Worse yet, art has become a heap of data points to be cataloged and classified in pre-constituted Linnean categories. Aesthetics becomes arbitrary factae in the heightened refinements of entertainment and consumption—nothing but momentarily exciting nodes in infinitely looping yet tightening circuits of value.13 If aesthetic praxis—understood in both its critical and clinical (or even descriptive) registers as purposive yet free of immediate application—is to be anything but an entry in a burgeoning catalog of an immense aggregate of luxury stuff, it will generate theory anew, far from the imposition of fads and trends. Or, if the centuries-long history of art as an index of the collective labor of consciousness in rejoinder to capitalist totalization is any clue, it will not be.
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).
Barnett Newman, introduction to Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Grove Press, 1970).
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.”
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1980).
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).
Achim Hochdorfer, “A Hidden Reserve: Painting from 1958 to A965,” Artforum 47, no. 6 (February 2009).
Hochdorfer, “Hidden Reserve.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Zone Books, 1995), thesis 191.
Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” section 4 in Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin, 2013).
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.
Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines (Semiotext(e), 2012).
Jean Baudrillard, La Société de consommation: Ses mythes, ses structures (Gallimard, 1970).
Alexei Penzin, “Facticity Today,” e-flux Notes, January 29, 2025 →.