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So - sometimes I worry that these arguments I make in a process of being cautious and questioning may be ultimately antithetical to the survival or subsistence of the discourse of art as it is currently. Sometimes I wonder if all critical, cautious thinking in regards to a discourse of art and art history has a similar effect. Or rather -- that a method of critical thought in which foundations are examined and structures are questioned is antithetical in such a discourse as art/art history in which there is no foundation 'justified' or defined using the language of objective rationality. Camera Lucida works precisely for this reason -- because the subjective, phenomenological approach to viewing art seems to offer no pretenses about the subjectivity of its argument.

Here's arrogance on my part, to assert that a discourse are endangered by this awareness. No matter; arrogance and incorrectness don't necessarily correlate..

And the next step might be to say that art itself is inherently a subjectively determined discourse -- which is okay, but then the subsequent questions are -- what does it mean to have a history of a discourse that is subjective? Is this then purely descriptive, just wandering along the riverbanks of a discourse, charting the river's path and chalking the twists and turns to nature's mysterious workings? Or if I do figure out the inner workings of erosion, movement, oxbow-lake-creations -- if I plot these out accurately, then is that it? Utterly descriptive, hands-off, proclaiming to be completely neutral from the events itself?

I guess this is the advantage of history -- an analysis achieved with clean hands, supposedly. Assumption of the existence of a definite event separate from a now that can be analyzed, viewed in a different light. Critical distance attempted through temporal and causal distance.

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