To Introduce a User's Guide

Author(s): Yve-Alain Bois

Source: October , Autumn, 1996, Vol. 78 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 21-37
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778905

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 Formless: A User's Guide, Excerpts*

To Introduce a User's Guide

YVE-ALAIN BOIS

Perhaps Manet's Olympia is not the "first" modernist painting, this le

title having been customarily reserved for his Dejeuner sur l'herbe. But, as
Bataille writes, it is at least "the first masterpiece before which the crowd fai
all control of itself," and this unprecedented scandal would henceforth gi
impact of a radical break.1
As Fran4oise Cachin points out in the essay she devotes to the Olym
the catalogue of the 1983 Manet retrospective, "two reactions have alway
dominated in the face of this painting: the first-formalist-focuses on t
or pictorial values, on the breakthroughs they imply, on the pleasures th
vide. .... The second-largely shared by the criticism of the time-either i
or derision, is concerned above all with subject-matter."2 The first read
articulated in 1867, by Zola: "For you a painting is a simple pretext for an
requires a nude and you have chosen Olympia, the first comer; it requir
luminous patches and you have positioned a bouquet of flowers; it requi
spots and you have put a negress and a cat in one corner."3 This was not t
time that such a stance had been defended-Zola's argument repeats,
less, Baudelaire's from four years before in relation to Delacroix-but it
first time it was credible. It remained so for a long time and in certain re
still is; it's the reading that makes Manet "the first modernist painter."4 T

* This and the following group of texts are excerpted from Informe: mode d'emploi (Pari
Georges Pompidou, 1996), to be published in its entirety by Zone Books, as Formless: A User's
1. Georges Bataille, Manet (New York: Skira, 1955; New York: Rizzoli, 1983), p. 16. (Pag
are to the Rizzoli edition.) In Documents, the journal edited by Bataille in 1929 and 1930, w
figure greatly in the present discussion, Marie Elbe had published, under the title "Manet
Criticism of His Time," a packet of inanities that had been written about his pictures, parti
Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia (Documents 2 [1930], pp. 84-90). Documents has been reprin
simile by Jean-Michel Place in 1991 (one volume for each of its two years, the pagination o
nal edition, however, being respected).
2. FranCoise Cachin, entry for Olympia in Manet (catalogue of the retrospective held at t
Palais) (Paris: Editions des Musees Nationaux, 1983), p. 176.
3. Emile Zola, "Une nouvelle maniere en peinture, Edouard Manet" (1867), cited by
ibid.
4. Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1960), reprinted in Clement Greenberg, M
with a Vengeance 1957-1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), p

OCTOBER 78, Fall 1996, pp. 21-37. ? 1996 Yve-Alain Bois.

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 22 OCTOBER

reading is i
Greenberg s
declared the
the identity
sources (fro
Whether f
unavoidable
are exceptio
accounting e
There is a w
formalist si
the work." A
phrase abou
noose aroun
girds it by t
itself."6 How
here, but ra
regard to Th
May Third m
adds his own twist:

critique of Greenberg's position, Leo Steinberg refers to The Work and Life of Eugine Delacroix, where
Baudelaire stigmatizes as "executioner" or "rake"-according to whether it's a question of the "limbs of
a flayed martyr" or of the "body of a swooning nymph"-all viewers who would invest in the subject
matter of his pictures ("a well drawn figure fills you with a pleasure that is quite alien to the theme.
Voluptuous or terrible, this figure only owes its charm solely to the arabesque that it describes in
space"). See Leo Steinberg, "Other Criteria," in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art
(London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 64.
5. Three notable exceptions: the long essay by Michael Fried, "Manet's Sources: Aspects of His Art,
1859-1865," which takes up an entire issue of Artforum (March 1969), reprinted in Michael Fried,
Manet's Modernism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 23-135, notes pp. 467-508;
the study by Jean Clay published in the catalogue of the exhibition "Bonjour Monsieur Manet" held at
the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1983, "Onguents, Fard, Pollens," translated by John Shepley as
"Ointments, Makeup, Pollen," October 27 (Winter 1983), pp. 3-44; and the book by T. J. Clark, The
Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985), which
contains a long chapter on Olympia. Clay, very attentive to all the perversions and ruptures of tone in
Manet's work, clearly (and often) declares his debt to Bataille. Clark makes only one reference, in a
footnote added somewhat late, since it occurs at the bottom of the page while the rest of the critical
apparatus is placed at the end of the work (pp. 137-39): he notes that Bataille's position hasn't much
to do with the traditional modernist interpretation and implies that in certain ways (notably in the
sense that Olympia doesn't share in any of the established stereotypes) it is rather close to his own. As
for Fried, he elaborates a thesis according to which Manet is the first modernist painter in a much
more fundamental way than Greenberg's: according to him, Manet combines different sources
(Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and French Schools) and different genres (in the case of the Dijeuner, land-
scape, still life, nude, genre scene) in a single painting in order to invent a new category synthesizing all
these divisions, a category that would be Painting itself (see, particularly, n. 224, p. 505). Fried's Manet
is the founder of an ontological unity, i.e., he is the polar opposite of Bataille's.
6. Bataille, Manet, p. 48.
7. Ibid., p. 45.

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 To Introduce a User's Guide 23

On the face of it, death, coldl

squad, precludes an indifferent
not charged with meaning for
with an almost callous indiffe
enough, shares to the full. Max
by novocaine. .... Manet posed
dying, some in the attitude of
they were about to "buy a bunc

The "tooth deadened by novoc

more trivial. Bataille conceives o
simple absence than as a violence
doesn't mention the disgust wit
time, often expressed by Manet
comes before that of Olympia, to
is already established: Manet's in
tower of "purely formal experimen
"Olympia is the negation of...
it's not only because Manet flou
should moreover note, along with
unnoticed at the time), nor beca
of the courtesan, even naked, Cla
painting).10 Moreover, Bataille i
phrases about "the ultimate in
nudity" that make the character
tive of an established genre. If t
means of it Manet refused the v
depiction of the nude, whether
one (Courbet didn't like it). Mane
"neither in the drab world of na
of absurd academic fictions"; a
cliches, that its particularity is
indecipherable, quality of its sex
For Bataille, it is this uprooting
"secret": the true goal of his art
well in The Execution of Maximilian
Tuileries: "In each, instead of the

8. Ibid., p. 48.
9. Ibid., p. 66.
10. On these points, see Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, pp. 94 and 111ff.
11. Bataille, Manet, pp. 62-63. In a very similar way, Clark analyzes the scandal that would envelop
Olympia: the figure doesn't correctly support her role as courtesan, doesn't obey the conventions of the
nude, even the erotic type: she isn't submissive, her hand is not a fig leaf (she is phallic). See The Painting
of Modern Life, pp. 131-46.

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Jean Dubuffet. Olympia. 1950.

*Ai

up the starkness of 'what we see.' And each time it so happened that the public's
frustrated expectation only redoubled the effect of shocked surprise produced by
the picture." Whence, finally, Bataille's suspicion with regard to the modernist
reading: "Malraux is perhaps open to blame for not having stressed the magic
workings of the strange, half-hidden operation to which I refer. He grasped the
decisive steps taken by Manet, with whom modern painting and its indifference
to the subject begin, but he fails to bring out the basic contrast between Manet's
attitude and the indifference of the Impressionists towards the subject. He fails to
define what gives Olympia ... its value as an operation."12 So it is neither the "form"
nor the "content" that interests Bataille, but the operation that ensures that neither
one is any longer in its place.

12. Bataille, Manet, pp. 76-78. We note moreover that in the review of a series of works on
Impressionism that he published in Critique in 1956 (one year after the Manet book) Bataille returns to
this question, no doubt in order to avoid a possible misunderstanding: "Manet would certainly have
protested if one had seen in his picture the trace of an intellectual preoccupation. However [it is] in a
slighter indifference to subject matter [than that of the Impressionists], or rather in an opening to
these unexpected interests, generating a disruption in the conventional system, that he excels"
("L'impressionnisme," reprinted in his Oeuvres Compltes, vol. 12 [Paris: Gallimard, 1988], p. 375
[hereafter cited as OC]).
Finally, the operation of slippage that's in question here has disfiguring powers: with regard to
the Portrait of Georges Moore of 1882-83, Bataille writes, "Perhaps never has the human face been treated
as a still life more convincingly than here" (Manet, p. 113). In the same vein, Clay speaks of the
"Gorgon" aspect of certain portraits of Berthe Morisot, painted as if "after death" ("Ointments,
Makeup, Pollen," p. 24).

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 To Introduce a User's Guide 25

In this operation of slippage

informe. Not with the idea, of
it's not a matter of indiffere
corpse, characterized Olymp
genealogy of the term as one m
because it is a question of an op
stance, nor a concept) and t
movement of Bataille's though
which the informe historicall
writings. Perhaps Bataille kne
pancake, slid under a steamr
slippage (a slide toward lowne
Olympia-even more imperat
1957 (two years after the appe
death), and had he known it, he would doubtless not have had the means to
appreciate the force of its outrage: the surface of the picture scarred with graffiti,
the body surfacing under the blow of an obscenity. Yet what difference does this
make? Bataille's tastes in art are not in question here. Rather, with regard to the
informe, it is a matter instead of locating a certain number of operations that
brush modernism against the grain, and of doing so without, as is the case with
all the iconologies concerned with this art, countering modernism's formal cer-
tainties by means of the more reassuring and naive ones of meaning. To the
contrary, these operations split off from modernism, insulting the very opposition
of form and content, declaring this-which is itself formal due to its own binary
logic-null and void.

Georges Bataille devoted an article to the informe in the "Critical Dictionary"

in Documents, the journal he edited in 1929 and 1930: fifteen lines immediately
following two longer entries on "spittle" ("crachat-ame" by Marcel Griaule and
"l'eau it la bouche" by Michel Leiris), and one on "debacle" (Leiris once again).
The contrast between the effect of this simple paragraph, so notorious today, and
its apparent modesty (at the end of the column, toward the end of the last issue of
the first year of the journal, in no way highlighted) makes its context worth
exploring a bit.
Documents' "dictionary" remains one of the most effective of Bataille's acts of
sabotage against the academic world and the spirit of system. This effectiveness is
based on the contrast between the formal ruse-the very employment of the

13. See Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, pp. 92, 97. And when the painting, in an effort to lessen
the scandal, was dispatched to the top of the wall by the Salon officials, critics began to see it as a
"spider on the ceiling" (ibid., p. 85).

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 26 OCTOBER

"dictionary f
realization,
Bataille's wri
or "quacks,"
heartburn). "
these rude b
accumulates t
stirs up Bata
"mathematica
This "diction
when one be
not because B
it was never t
appear in alp
"eye" or for
The most me
two consecut
the first, an
calculations
what man is made of and what is his chemical value"; the second, from a fanatical
vegetarian, a certain Sir William Earnshaw Cooper, entirely caught up in an
arithmetical compulsion as he tries to quantify the "blood guilt of Christendom"

:: ::I:, .f
:?:i? ::'!i,?::::: i:All,,
v nx -171 rl

La Seine during Winter 1

Documents 7, 1929, p. 383

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 To Introduce a User's Guide 27

by adding up the daily massacr

useful if it drivels.

That Bataille chose to treat the heading "man" by means of this ridiculous
hiccup tells a lot about his strategy to undermine: it's humanism above all that he
is after, and thus all system (it's because of revolt that he loves revolution, not
because of the utopia of its realization). The very choice of terms for the articles
of this "dictionary" plays on absurdity, as if some belated Dadaist had pulled
words from a hat by chance (in the fifth issue of 1929, we read the entries on
"camel," "cults," "man," "unhappiness," "dust," "reptiles," "talkie"; in the following
issues, "slaughterhouse," "factory chimney," "shellfish," "metamorphosis").
Alphabetical arbitrariness is replaced by a mess that nothing seems to justify. Of
course, that's only a feint, and the jumble of fragments is nothing if not very
calculating; it is not chance, as Denis Hollier has shown, that the first article of
the "dictionary" should be devoted to architecture ("expression of the true
nature of societies," symbol of authority, privileged metaphor of metaphysics).
For "an attack on architecture," Bataille writes in it, "is necessarily, as it were, an
attack on man."15 Neither is it an accident that this should be followed by an
article (by Carl Einstein) on the nightingale, this "sign of eternal optimism," this
cliche of the animal-turned-pet and of bourgeois sentimentality. Einstein starts
by stating the law that regulates all dictionaries ("Words are, for the most part,
petrifications that elicit mechanical reactions in us"), after which he both
demonstrates and deconstructs this mechanism by listing the banalities woven
around the nightingale. But it's not the nightingale as such that matters; it's the
repression at work in the allegories in which it is forced to participate:
"Nightingale can be replaced: (a) by rose, (b) by breasts, but never by legs,
because the nightingale's role is precisely to avoid designating this aspect. The
nightingale belongs to the inventory of bourgeois diversions, by which we try to

14. The first entry on man appears in the fourth issue of the first volume of Documents (1929, p. 215),
an issue that also contains the important text by Bataille on "the human face." The second entry
appears in the following issue (p. 275). Here, according to the Journal des Dibats, are the results of Dr.
Maye's calculations: "The bodily fat in a normally constituted man would suffice to manufacture seven
cakes of toilet-soap. Enough iron is found in the organism to make a medium-sized nail, and sugar
to sweeten a cup of coffee. The phosphorous would provide 2,200 matches. The magnesium would
furnish the light needed to take a photograph. In addition, a little potassium and sulphur but in an
unusable quantity. These different raw materials, costed at current prices, represent an approximate
sum of 25 francs." As for the quotation from Sir William, which should be read in its entirety and not
in the following small extract, it participates in the same delirium of accountancy: "A calculation based
on very modest figures shows the quantity of blood shed each year in the slaughterhouses of Chicago is
more than sufficient to float five transatlantic liners" (Encyclopaedia Acephalia, trans. lain White, ed.
Alastair Brotchie [London: Atlas Press, 1995], pp. 56-58 [hereafter cited as EA]).
15. Bataille, "Architecture," Documents 2 (1929) ("Critical Dictionary"), p. 117; reprinted in OC,
vol. 1, p. 172; trans. Dominic Faccini, October 60 (Spring 1992); reprinted in EA, pp. 35-36. See Denis
Hollier, Against Architecture, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), particularly the two first
parts, "Hegelian Edifice" and "Architectural Metaphor," pp. 3-56. Pp. 45-56 are devoted to the
Documents article "Architecture."

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 28 OCTOBER

suggest the in
aim, the Doc
of any alleg
opened to all
In fact, the
the dictionar
of beauty an
function of
from this, L
which is th
organs": "Giv
discourse can
orator." To t
tive impreci
informe, of
stretches th
ends:18 he gi
value (which
launched.19

At the bottom of the same page and echoing it ("affirming that the univ
resembles nothing and is only informe amounts to saying that the univers
something like a spider or spit"), Bataille's famously economical paragraph con
with Leiris's hyperbole. As Hollier remarks, within the Documents "dictionary
entry "informe" is "given the job generally granted the article 'Dictionary' it
(one thinks here of the article "Encyclopedia" in Diderot's Encyclopedia), nam
that it has a programmatic function (the program here being to scuttle the
idea of program, of the self-assurance of reason).20 And it's in the "inform
article that Bataille quite specifically states the task that he is assigning
"dictionary" (not to give "the meaning but the jobs of words"). Thus he refu
define informe: "It's not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term

16. Carl Einstein, "Rossignol," Documents 2 (1929) ("Critical Dictionary"), pp. 117-18;
Dominic Faccini, October 60; reprinted in EA, p. 66.
17. Michel Leiris, "Crachat: l'eau A la bouche," Documents 7 (1929) ("Critical Dictionary"), pp. 3
trans. Dominic Faccini, October 60; reprinted in EA, p. 80.
18. Leiris's essay continues and ends as follows: "It is the limp and sticky stumbling block shat
more efficiently than any stone all undertakings that presuppose man to be something--something
than a flabby, bald animal, something other than the spittle of a raving demiurge, roaring with la
at having expectorated such a larva: a comical tadpole puffing itself up into meat insufflated
demigod" (Documents 7 [1929], p. 382, EA, p. 80).
19. The word in fact appears in the first issue of Documents, and under Bataille's pen, in the
"Le cheval acad6mique"-a manifesto disguised as a comparative study of the antique coins of G
and Gaul (Documents 1 [1929], p. 31)-and, as Georges Didi-Huberman notes, in the caption of o
the illustrations accompanying this text. See Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe ou le gai
visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995), p. 199.
20. Hollier, Against Architecture, pp. 29-30.

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To Introduce a User's Guide 29

serves to bring things down

motif to which we can refer,
allowing one to operate a decl
taxonomic disorder. Nothing i
existence: it's a performative,
much a question of what they
informe is an operation.

Thus it will not be a matter, h

substantive. Of course, the tra
coats to what is" (we will hard
our dictionary will respect th
to put the informe to work: n
slippages, but in whatever small
Pollock's Full Fathom Five ca
Oldenburg), or that a work by
to its professed expressionism
the snakeskin shoes the artist
the sparkles on a Fontana Fin
modernism's cards-not of bu
which, for many years now, a
but of seeing to it that the u
through the opposition of for
that certain works can no lon
the fried egg when faced wit
"To break up the subject and
the subject; so it is in a sacrif
kills it, but cannot be said to n
both to describe and to attem
with the morphological or s
rather with the interpretive
assimilate them. Still speaking
invested the subject, not with
more significant than meaning."

21. We owe the information on Fau

written the day after the opening o
"Fautrier's paintings are such a perfe
shoes were very noticed yesterday; his
in Jean Fautrier, exhibition catalogue
22. Bataille, Manet, p. 95.
23. Ibid., p. 96.

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30 OCTOBER

-A

Sl/st'

Jackson Pollock. Fu
1947.

Claes Oldenburg. Sculpture in the Fo

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 To Introduce a User's Guide 31

,Xyy,

A":
4mi

fe, No

,A :::

Lucio Fontana. Concetto Spaziale,

di Dio. 1963.

Jean Fautrier Femme douce. 1946.

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 32 OCTOBER

To practice s
(no one was
recover, and,
camouflaged
this text fun
within it, are
cover, startin
purposes of b
"entropy") th
porous (the "
Robert Smith
same artist,
Moreover, th
unities that ar
oeuvre as the

The four opera

debasement of o
verticality of it
(low); pulse again
and totality. Th
the book consis
groups. What fo

All
14 - - -------- - ljww

Av

..... .... ..
ge"',

om P
All,

1110 /167
A

A r
zT

Robert Smithson. Asphalt Rundown, Rome. 1969.

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 To Introduce a User's Guide 33

The concept of entropy (mean

of energy in every system, a de
state of disorder and of nondif
Bataille's own vocabulary. (He w
which doesn't cover the same f
most common example of entro
nineteenth century, the inevit
Bataille against the grain: the s
production and waste in order
negative movement: it presupp
order, while, to the contrary,
excess, never successful becau
unleashed-of an initial disord
Documents was basically antie
cliches, which Carl Einstein stig
is precisely what information t
word has in thermodynamics, d
with rot and waste, with the d
every one of his texts, show
wanted to keep it at bay in his
the more violent in that it was
on no one's will. In a crossed-ou
a text published in Documents,

.$:"I:::-:, i :j::::::~i?_::,iiZ:
:::

::.::ir

Robert Smithson. Glue Pour. 1969.

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 Richard Serra. Thirty Five Feet of
Lead Rolled Up. 1968.

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to the notion
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improbable (Ba
his "Crisis of C
the second law
ing but a statis
"Critical Diction
another, given
hand over the s
buildings and
remain to ward
great bookkeep
Or read Leiris's
just before the p
the frozen Sein

24. Bataille, OC, vo

25. Hans Reichenbac
to this principle, th
to the law of probab
"Rossignol" appear.
26. Bataille, "Poussi
p. 197.

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be calling for a social cataclysm that could crack the glacier in which we ar
locked. But the only result he sees of this future revolt is nihilism: the fate of this
deluge was "having first broken up what was hostile and alien to itself and then
destroyed itself by being changed into ephemeral vapor-that of having annihi
lated absolutely everything."27
Entropy attracted artists well before the 1960s, when Robert Smithson made it
his motto, and many took it up after him. It operates in various ways: by degradation
(Raoul Ubac's or Gordon Matta-Clark's brfilages), by redundancy (the imprints o
Nauman, Arp, Picasso, McCollum), by accumulation, infinite profusion (the trash
cans of Arman, the Ray Guns of Oldenburg, the dinosaur tracks of McCollum), b
inversion (Manzoni's Socle du monde, Smithson's upended trees), by the process o
tearing or clotting (Arp's or Twombly's torn papers, Richard Serra's rolled lead
plates, or Giovanni Anselmo's Torsione, the elasticity of which is progressively
destroyed), by the invasion of "noise" into the message (Dubuffet's Messages,
Raymond Hains's or Villegl9's lacerated posters, Duchamp's Dust Breeding), by wea
and tear (the oil slicks on the vacant parking lots photographed by Ruscha), bu
also by underusage or nonconsumption (the urban no-man's-lands also photo
graphed by Ruscha, or the interstitial spaces bought at auction by Matta-Clark
the buttered-on Vaseline of Mel Bochner's photographs). Entropy is a sinking,
spoiling, but perhaps also an unrecoverable waste. The first entropic artist was

27. Michel Leiris, "Dbbaicle," Documents 7 (1929) ("Critical Dictionary"), p. 382.

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 36 OCTOBER

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Mel Bochner. Transparency: Vaseline

(Clear Light). 1968.

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Mel Bochner Transparency: Vaseline

(Green Light). 1968.

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 To Introduce a User's Guide 37

Piranesi, about whom Henry-

whom Bataille refers in "Base Ma
beginning with him, "Man is defin
by little boundlessly destroys him. The obsessional idea of construction, the
ordering of stones or of machines, these human triumphs! carried to an extreme,
open an infinite vista of nightmares and of multiplied punishments wrought by
the automatic law of the vaults, the pillars, the stairways, a multiplication there is
no reason to stop (totality, form existing only at human scale, man is outstripped
by this very need for representation that has unleashed this crushing force)."28

In the same way that Sade is open to two different uses, and Freud to two as
well, so Bataille never stopped insisting in his polemic with Breton, there are two
possible uses of the informe (there are even, as Hollier has shown with regard to
the divergence of positions between the ethnologists and Bataille in the very
bosom of the Documents groups, two possible uses of use-value-a shoe serves for
walking, but for the fetishist, it serves the satisfaction of his sexual drives).29 We
can consider it as a pure object of historical research, tracing the origin of the
concept in the magazine Documents, noting its occurrences there; this work is
useful, and, like all those interested in Bataille's thought, we have not neglected it.
But that runs the risk of transforming the informe into a figure, of stabilizing it.
This risk is perhaps unavoidable, but, in putting the informe to work, in making
this concept pass through examples that are very distant from its place of origin,
in displacing it in order to sift modernist production by means of its sieve, we have
wanted to start it shaking, which is also to say to shake it up.

28. Henry-Charles Puech, "Les 'Prisons' de Jean-Baptiste Pirandse," Documents 4 (1930), p. 204.
Thinking in particular of his Pianta di ampio magnifico collegio and of the famous plan of the Campo
Marzio dell'antica Roma, Manfredo Tafuri would characterize Piranesi's work as "an architectural
banquet of nausea, an empty dictionary created by an excess of visual noise" (Tafuri, "'The Wicked
Architect': G. B. Piranesi, Heterotopia, and the Voyage," in The Sphere and the Labyrinth [Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1987], p. 35).
29. Denis Hollier, "La valeur d'usage de l'impossible," preface to the reedition of Documents by
Editions Jean-Michel Place, pp. vii-xxxix; translated as "The Use-Value of the Impossible," October 60
(Spring 1992), pp. 3-24.

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