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Dancing Patterns.

Article Excerpt
David Joselit has written a programmatic book that strives to reclaim a tactical advantage for art history on the contemporary battleground of images. Drawing its case studies from a vast reservoir of televisual images, events, and performances, Feedback ranges across what the author defines as an integrated "image ecology," in which artistic, activist, and commercial subsystems of image production, manipulation, and circulation feed into each other, creating unexpected disturbances and opening deviant trajectories within the "closed circuits" of a privatized public sphere dominated by broadcast television

Joselit raises the stakes high. Whereas the ostensible subject of Feedback is the precarious forms of counterpublicity that emerged within the United States during the nascent age of broadcast television, Joselit casts the relevance of his study to the present in urgent terms. The reader only has to turn to the brief "Manifesto" at the end to read that "this book was written in a period of stunning reversals for democracy, sold to Media-America in the name of fear and patriotism" (171). Declaring his impatience with much current scholarship in art history, which resigns itself to inventing "new" moves within a familiar "game of aesthetics," Joselit further presents Feedback as an ambitious opening gambit--"a challenge to artists and art historians alike, including myself"--in a game of media strategies still rarely played by art historians. Hence, Joselit seeks not only to remedy what he perceives as a state of methodical exhaustion within the field of art history, but to take art history to task for its faltering ability to reposition itself within a mediascape that has seen the blossoming of a specious "politics of the image."

What should recommend this pioneering effort to students of art history and media studies alike is not only that there is much to be learned from Joselit's genealogical mode of reasoning, which often makes surprising connections between differentpositions within the cultural field of media production. Feedback also succeeds in opening up several methodological questions that were prematurely closed off by the disciplinary feud between art history and visual culture during the previous decade.(1) Although I subscribe to the necessity of recasting art history in terms of a media critique rather continuing to write a history of mediums, I am less inclined to travel as far as Joselit in the direction of a politics of image. Feedback, however, knows no such restraints, and in the burst of excitement that comes with a discovery of a new field of research, it moves along at such a breakneck speed, while scanning "the patterns traced by objects in the course of their 'social lives,'" that the transitions between successive frameworks of analysis sometimes become difficult to follow (83). Typical of his approach is how Joselit presses into critical service certain period tropes, such as "ecology" or "feedback," there by creating a highly useful toolbox of analytical concepts on the one hand, but reducing the complex historicity of the very terms he puts in play on the other hand. I shall return to such concerns below, but first the main objectives and methodological procedures of Feedback need to be introduced.

The introduction clearly defines the three main goals of Feedback: (1) the pursuit of an "apparatical analysis of the television system during its initial or 'network' era," a period extending from the 1950s into the late 1970s (xii); (2) a definition of the "problems and opportunities involved in conducting politics through images as opposed to the persistent if misguided conviction that public discourse consists primarily of rational linguistic debate" (xiii); and (3) a refashioning of art-historical methodology as "a kind of eco-formalism whose object is interrelated image ecologies rather than individual art works" (xii). What requires "formalist" analysis is not the object, but the circuits by which objectivity (and subjectivity) becomes distributed within the contemporary networks of information and exchange. Indeed, "one might argue," Joselit claims, "the whole history of modernism has been a response to the short-circuiting of humans and objects in which bodies and things have grown into one another as cyborgs and fetishes" (28). Thus, as Joselit explains, the electronic mechanisms of scanningand feedback are not only to be isolated as the constitutive elements of television's reproductive and broadcast technology, but also employed as formal methodologies of critique. Television is to provide both the object of study and the interpretive framework (31).

The first goal is perhaps not...

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