In Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss critique a certain history of modernism. They take Georges Bataille at his word that informe, or formless, is "a term that serves to bring things down in the world" and describe its “operation” for undoing the formalisations of twentieth century art.[1] As James Elkins notes in "The Very Theory of Transgression: Bataille, Lingchi, and Surrealism," the effect of Formless has been to inspire artists to practice along the lines it set out, so that it has become a user's guide not for deconstruction but for its own positive appropriation.[2] In the final pages of the book Krauss proposes that informe has “its own legacy to fulfil, its own destiny,” words that tacitly sanction its development in art.[3] What was for Bataille a way of negating the impulse to classify turns, then, into a history of modern art that is still playing itself out.
Contesting this theory of transgressive art put forward in Formless, Elkins turns to Bataille's publication of photographs of lingchi, or the death by a hundred cuts.[4] Elkins argues that these devastating photographs, which were published in Bataille’s The Tears of Eros (1961) but not in Bois and Krauss’ Formless, out-transgress Bois and Krauss's transgressive ideas about modern art. The reason Bois and Krauss did not reproduce the lingchi photographs is that their extremity would “ruin” the art in Formless, undoing artifice with an unbearable reality.[5] Yet as we shall see, informe is not necessarily transgression, nor can transgression be considered apart from Bataille's philosophy of eroticism that is outlined in The Tears of Eros and his earlier text Eroticism (1957).[6] While transgression played a formative role in the development of poststructuralism and subsequently critical theory itself, its appropriation from Bataille has all too often neglected this eroticism. For Bataille did not distinguish the real from artifice, the movement of transgression from its representations in art and literature. While Elkins wants to argue that the power of lingchi is to exceed the power of any art, and so to negate the idea of an art of transgression, this argument makes a partition between art and lingchi, art and reality, that is not consistent with a philosophy of eroticism in which such classifications spill into each other.
When faced with images of lingchi it is difficult not to share Elkins' revulsion. He explains their effect with the idea that they trap death, a death that lies somewhere between the victim's moments of suffering and demise, captured over a sequence of camera shots.[7] What Elkins does not say, but is implicit in his argument, is that this aspect of the photographs is connected to the precise method of death at work here.[8] What may be unique to these images is the sheer extent of suffering that the victims are visibly enduring, and their documentation of other human beings who are imposing this suffering. Elkins’ attention to the shock that the photographs contain, and his concomitant reluctance to interpret them, is a refusal to converse about the pain and cruelty so evident within them.
In an earlier book, The Object Stares Back (1997), Elkins narrated the photographs, seeing the victim as a woman among male executioners and witnesses. Thinking of the execution as symptomatic of gender relations, including the possibility that this was an adulteress being put to death, was what made these images "difficult to come to terms with."[9] Here the difficulty of the image did not prevent its interpretation, but was rather dependent upon an investigation of that image’s content. In his 2004 article “The Very Theory of Transgression,” Elkins discusses the accounts of physicians and penal theorists who have looked extensively at the photographs. The methods of these scholars have to do with a certain kind of looking, one immersed in the particular reason of this or that specialisation, reasoning away the horror of the images. To this approach we can contrast a certain refusal to look in Elkins' descriptions of the victim as being of "indeterminate sex." This shift from specific to indeterminate gender in Elkins' work here is part of his withdrawal from the very possibility of interpreting the images.[10]
Bataille suggested another way of looking at lingchi photographs in The Tears of Eros that is not entirely repulsed by their cruelty. Following on from his earlier text Eroticism in which he argued that death and sex collapse into each other at moments of orgasm, in ritual or in sacrifice, The Tears of Eros juxtaposes Bataille's own writing with images of prehistoric objects, modern paintings and photography. What unifies these images is their relation to the author’s philosophy of eroticism. In eroticism, achieved at moments when terms such as "divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror" blur together and become interchangeable, one may experience the continuity of life beyond oneself, relieving the physical tension of discontinuity to which we are bound by death.[11] It is by such a dissolution that the images reproduced in The Tears of Eros, including those of lingchi, may be understood as a series of contemplations on that continuity. Through this idea of eroticism we can make more sense of the crowds of onlookers that surround lingchi executions, of the attraction of looking at extreme suffering.
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