Interview with Rosalind Krauss
Yve-Alain Bois: I also remember that late in life, in one of the last interviews he gave, Foucault was asked about “poststructuralism,” and he said, “Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was not even a structuralist and now you’re telling me I’m poststructuralist?” In the same interview (that was published in English in Telos, I remember), Foucault came in the defense of formalism, and he repeated that often during the last three to four years of his life, even more strongly than during the structuralist years. Barthes had done the same in the late ’70s, actually, saying something like “the enemies of formalism are our enemies.”
Krauss: Oh, really?
Bois: All these people who were branded as attacking formalism kept saying not to dismiss it so fast. Well, that’s where we came from.
Krauss: With Foucault, there’s the wonderful essay called “Fantasia of the Library,” which is the celebration of a kind of network of quotations and of course Walter Benjamin talks about wanting to make a book that is nothing but quotations. This network of quotation we could say has to do with this formalist sense of the structure of the book, and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet comes to mind as the great book of quotation. Foucault, obviously in that, is willing to think through a formal idea.
Bois: I think that’s a long debate we always had, that the notion of formalism as it has been discussed in America was only encaptured by Greenberg, who in a way ossified formalism. As I often wrote, there are many different kinds of formalist options. For me it was Russian Formalism that was important, and the Russian Formalists would not recognize themselves in Greenberg whatsoever. They would not articulate the work of art that way—but that’s another story, that’s not part of the book.
Krauss: Well, part of my whole concept of derivation, my whole concept of technical support, relates to Shklovsky’s concept of “laying bare the device” And the last chapter of the book, which is called “The Knights Move,” starts with Shklovsky.
Bois: To wrap up, the whole book—and right from the start with the account of your aneurysm—concerns the issue of memory, and so you have this articulation including a so-called Klein diagram about memory and forgetting. As you know, I am completely incapable of understanding diagrams, so I struggled with it for a while and said forget it. But nevertheless, as you present your Knights of the Medium, it seems that the mission they are to take on is to deal with the memory of the medium. But on the other hand, their task is to invent a new medium. How does that combine?
Krauss: That’s the notion of both remembering and forgetting. Remembering the importance of the medium, remembering Modernism, but then forgetting these specific, traditional supports …
