Structuralism

After reading some Art History books, I was surprised by what seemed to be the general consensus among the theoretically-minded that art history bears a particularly problematic relation to theory. It seemed fairly clear to everyone that the works of art we attempt to discuss are obstructions to our theorizing, roadblocks which force us to detour off the theoretical highway. In most cases the presenters still wanted to engage with an image or two, but …

…where we might want to call for greater precision in de Man's formulation is in his conflation of the rhetorical, the figural, and the tropological, terms which he uses interchangeably. For the purposes of this brief sketch, however, I am leaving this unchallenged. 2. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 9. 3. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.