The term “critique” has two main uses in current academic writing. Following from Kant and the liberal arts comes the understanding of critique as reflection on the structure of a claim outside of its content, the search for limits to the claims of reason being a search for a moment of concord among dissonant positions. If, for example, someone were to aver, “There is no metaphysics,” that would be to make a metaphysical claim, in which case it would be useful to revisit this particular characterization of the world, thereby to discover what can be stated coherently. The second usage, more a product of the social sciences, resembles Kant in that it, too, takes the architecture of thought as its point of entry. Unlike Kant, however, it seeks resolution outside of the mind and self. The conclusion reached resolves a particular manifestation of culture and consciousness into a prior, more generalized, simplified state. (In this it aspires to the status of science—or a certain understanding of science.) Coming upon a fork in the road, with one path narrowing downward to necessary and sufficient cause, the other opening upward to ever-expanding reason, this type of post-Kantian thinker chooses the subterranean path, working down to the power relations governing an inherently antagonistic social world, to the primitive impulses that tyrannize the psyche, to the economic or material machinery that turns below without concern for private and social aspirations above. Art, when viewed in this manner, does not mean so much as manipulate, and the only way to lift its spell is to reduce its utterances to mechanisms, codes, or discourses.

The main task of this chapter is to show how art-historical critiques in this second, post-Kantian sense fail as critiques in the first one.

For an example of what this failure might look like and how to take stock of it, I turn to one of the seminal representatives of this second mode, Michel Foucault, and his essay “What Is an Author?” It starts with an assertion all the more breathtaking for its surface objectivity: “The coming into being of the notion of ‘author,’” he states matter-of-factly, “constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas.”