Rose Garden at Sissinghurst, Kent, June 2025. Photo: The author.
A disturbance of memory at Sissinghurst
It was 10:45 on a Saturday morning in June, sunny and 80 degrees. Harriet and I were standing near the front of the queue for admission to the gardens at Sissinghurst. Behind us were chatty German tourists – mostly my age or older. One carried a white parasol. “Alles muss welken,” I thought I heard her say. I didn’t know if she was referring to the flowers or the visitors. My wife Harriet, British-born and raised, was beginning to droop. I was fine. Decades of heat and sun in Los Angeles and Florida have made me resistant to British heat waves.
When the gates opened, I took Harriet’s hand and towed her in the direction of the “garden rooms” that are Sissinghurst’s glory. We made a sharp right just before the tower where Vita-Sackville West did most of her writing and entered the Rose Garden. We were alone. That’s when I began to feel dizzy – my wonky photograph is evidence. A few weeks before, the scales had literally fallen from my eyes (cataract surgery) allowing me to experience light and color as I hadn’t for decades. I was drunk from the scene before me.
However, it wasn’t only the vividness of the delphiniums, foxgloves, irises, and roses that intoxicated me; it was the sudden awakening of a memory or maybe a deja-vu. I sensed I wasn’t or shouldn’t be there, or else had been there before but couldn’t remember when. After completing our circuit of the Rose Garden, we moved on to the Cottage Garden, Herb Garden, Orchard, Nuttery, and White Garden. That last is one of the glories of Sissinghurst. It was established by Vita and her husband, Harold Nicolson in the early 1950s and feels a bit Jackson Pollock (White Light, 1954): white irises, white hydrangea, white roses, white gladioli, white Japanese anemones, white dahlias, Queen Anne’s lace, and giant thistles with silvery leaves and rosy-purple flowers. Baby’s breath with white petals and yellow ovaries lurked between the bleached stone pavers. My disorientation returned.
White Garden at Sissinghurst, Kent, June 2025. Photo: The Author.
Now nearly 1 p.m., we surrendered to the heat and followed the tourists – the same group as before – to the shade of the National Trust tea house. They ordered kaffee und kuchen. We had Diet Cokes and vegan banana bread. While nibbling, I began to understand the nature of my deja-vu. Almost half a century before, when I first visited some of the great European art museums, I felt the same way. Standing before Bruegels in Vienna, Rubenses in Munich, Rembrandts in Amsterdam, Goyas in Madrid, and Delacroixs in Paris, I also had the sense I didn’t belong there – that my experience was impossible or a mistake.
Readers conversant in psychoanalysis will by now recognize the experience described above. Freud wrote about it in a short essay published late in life, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1937). Freud’s “de-realization” on the Acropolis, as he called it, and mine at Sissinghurst had a similar expression but different basis. Freud’s was “filial piety” while mine was class consciousness.
In 1904, Sigmund and his brother Alexander decided to go on holiday to Corfu in the Aegean. On the way, they met up with an acquaintance who persuaded them that the island was too hot that time of year, and they should go instead to Athens and see the Acropolis. At first, they hesitated, erecting all sorts of barriers to the plan. But at the last minute, they went ahead and bought train tickets, eager to visit a place they had never been. Gazing at last at the temple of the Parthenon, the 48-year-old clinician and theorist, reflected on how far he had come and what he’d achieved in his life. It must have been a lot, he reasoned, to allow him the privilege of visiting a monument he longed to see since childhood. His father, Jacob, who died almost a decade before, was too poor to have taken such a trip, and too uneducated to have wanted to. Sigmund felt shame that he could conduct a journey his father could not. That was why he and his brother hesitated. That was the source of his “disturbance of memory.”
Instead of filial piety, I experienced political and class resentment in the Rose and White gardens, and in those museums, decades earlier. At Sissinghurst, my upset was not directed at Lady and Lord Nicolson; in the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna and other European museums, I felt no animosity toward the popes, emperors, bankers and industrialists who commissioned, bought or stole the artworks on view, much as they deserved it. Instead, I resented the agents of a global, economic and social order that denied my parents, Bert and Grace, and others like them – intelligent, curious, informed, and hardworking people – the same chance I had to look, think, read, write, and travel.
I happened to have been born on the cusp of the boom in American higher education. That was the time – roughly between about 1955 and 1975 – when colleges and universities grew exponentially, and when a kid with ambition and half-a brain could get a good education for free or cheap. (It helped to be white, attend a well-resourced high school, and receive guidance from counselors and family members who themselves attended college.) I finished four years of college and about six years of graduate school with just $20,000 of debt. When I left Princeton in 1984, I applied for 21 teaching jobs in my subfield– 19th Century European Art– and got one offer. That meant that 20 other job candidates – probably all the unemployed 19th C. art specialists in the country – also got jobs. Six years later I was a tenured professor at Occidental College with the freedom to teach, say and write pretty much whatever I wanted. I retired from Northwestern University in 2022 with a pension sufficient to let me travel (frugally) to Sissinghurst and the great European museums and write columns like this one for no money.
Those opportunities didn’t exist for my parents during the Depression because they had to support their families with whatever work they could find. And they don’t exist now, when the cost of education has skyrocketed, state support has diminished, tenure-track positions are few, and freedom of inquiry is increasingly circumscribed. It isn’t all the fault of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the Chicago-School economists who decided: 1) that universities should be run like corporations, generating intellectual property that can be rented or sold for profit; 2) that professors are means of production; and 3) that students are mere throughputs. There are plenty of faculty and administrators complicit in the system, some by accident, and others by design. And things are getting worse. If American universities survive the age of Trump with even a modicum of their already damaged integrity intact, it will be a miracle. That’s what intermittently disturbed my thoughts as Harriet and I sauntered through the many, splendid garden rooms at Sissinghurst.
Gardens may be considered a limiting case for the politics of art. Flower beds have no content apart from their seasonality, color, shape, scent and arrangement. Nobody goes to the great gardens of the world, including Sissinghurst, Great Dixter, Kedleston Hall, and the Huntington Gardens, to name a few I’ve seen, to learn about politics and the latest wars. Nobody would think it plausible to create a garden that protested the genocide in Gaza, or that upheld a woman’s right to choose. The point in going to them is partly to evade those and other unpleasant topics; not so much “cultivate our garden,” as Candide says, but surrender to it. Generations of aesthetes have agreed:
“From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying… Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs.” (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
Class consciousness interfered with my optical sublime at Sissinghurst. Has it also occluded apprehension of artworks by Bruegel, Delacroix and the dozens of other artists I’ve studied, read, and written about? Am I blinded by class and politics?
Art and labor
Among my most acute, youthful memories are two summers, 1977 and ’78, spent in the sales and marketing offices of Eagle Electric Manufacturing Company, in Long Island City, New York, where my father worked as a purchasing agent. I edited the company’s catalogue of plugs, sockets, extension cords, light switches, and high intensity lamps. (In the late 1980s, Eagle cornered the market in surge protectors but dropped that line after determining that computers were a fad.) I also sometimes wrote ad copy.
Bulb and plug adapter, Eagle Electric Manufacturing Company, n.d. Photo: Jud McCrainie, Wikimedia Commons.
The company had as its slogan, emblazoned on the side of its factory and on their packaging, “Perfection is Not an Accident” (always italicized). The phrase recalled to me William Paley’s Natural Theology, and the teleological explanation for the existence of God, the best-known example of which is the “watchmaker analogy.” If you come across a watch lying in the heath, Paley said, you would have no doubt it was created by an intelligent being. But the works of nature – pebbles on a beach, flowers in a meadow, etc – when seen properly, are equally wondrous, proving the existence of an intelligent maker. (Charles Darwin substituted natural selection for God.) I allowed myself, back then, to imagine an ad campaign featuring somebody strolling down Queens Boulevard and finding on the sidewalk an Eagle Electric bulb and plug adapter. All at once, words would appear emblazoned in the sky: “Perfection is Not an Accident.”
I hated my job. Not because of the boring and repetitive work; it was tolerable because I knew it was just for summers while I was at college. And not because I had to act busy when I finished any assigned task; I’d slip my copy of Crime and Punishment between the pages of Advertising Age and pretend to be catching up on the latest promotional strategies. What disturbed me most was seeing my father interact with his boss, Jerrold Ludwig, Vice-President of Sales. Ludwig was supposedly Jewish, but there was nothing haimish about him. He was tall, erect, and imperious, with slicked, grey-black hair and a precise gait. At home, my father railed at “Jerry’s” arbitrariness and sour disposition – he was “der farbissiner.” But in the office, he addressed his boss with just three words, “Yes, Mr. Ludwig.”
I felt sorry for my father – an otherwise proud man – who loved nothing more than to read. In his youth, he even dreamed of becoming a writer, and fragments of short stories survive. So, it was a joy to me when in 1978, Jerrold Ludwig and several associates were convicted of price fixing, fined tens of thousands of dollars, and sentenced to three months in prison. The executive who emerged from incarceration was grey and stooped– a broken man. My wise father used to say to me, his protester son, “the only place you’ll find justice is in the dictionary.” But in this case, he was wrong.
60% or more of the U.S. population is working-class. Their bank accounts contain the equivalent a month or two’s wages, so if they are unhappy at work (most people are) they can look for another job but can’t opt-out of the system for long. That fact is fundamental to the capitalist economy, because it ensures that enterprises always have a steady supply of labor at a price that allows profits for managers or shareholders, and enables investment to expand the business. American workers have sometimes been called “wage slaves,” not because they experience the violence of once enslaved Black Americans, but because they are bound to an economic and social order they cannot escape.
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx argued that since the beginning, humans have manifested their sensual capacity through creative work (music, dance, visual art, etc) and passed it down to succeeding generations: “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” However, in circumstances of poverty, sensual development and art appreciation are almost impossible: “The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man,” Marx observed, “has no sense for the finest play.” Under capitalism, the same is generally true even for those who escape poverty: “All the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the single estrangement – the sense of having.” In a society dominated by the production and sale of commodities, in which everything is interchangeable through the abstract medium of money, the desire for ownership – “the sense of having” – must dominate all other human senses.
It might at first seem that an exaggerated “sense of having” would lead to tremendous patronage of the arts – everybody going out and indulging their “sense of having.” But that’s not really the case, because the acquisitive individual may at the same time be infected by a disabling frugality and even asceticism:
Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is [capitalism’s] principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.
Prodigality and thrift, asceticism and promiscuity, spending and saving are the Sylla and Charybdis that threaten creativity and social being under capitalism. They also undermine our capacity to appreciate the sensuous world around us. That risk has grown more acute with the rise of monopoly capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The new “image-world”
Neither politics nor cataracts are responsible for my sometimes occluded, aesthetic vision; I blame the political economy. To see something clearly – an artwork, a garden, a bird in flight, a starry sky, my wife’s loving regard – requires me to hold at bay the hegemonic “image-world.”
The phrase was first used, so far as I can tell, by Susan Sontag in her book, On Photography (1977). In an essay ostensibly about Chinese film and photography, she distinguished between the “real world” of presence and contingency, and the photographic “image-world” of abstraction and engagement. (Sontag had her limitations: She predicted that compared to the U.S. and Europe, there is “a more limited future in [Chinese] society for the camera as a means of surveillance.”)
Recently, the term was deployed by the art historian T.J. Clark in an essay called “The End of the Image-World” from his book, Those Passions – On Art and Politics (2025). There, he describes a contemporary cultural order in which “any and every negation could be neutralized – put to use in the game of consumption – by becoming a picture.” The sentence merits unpacking.
“Negation” is a word in the lexicon of historic Marxism that refers to the process whereby capitalism “negates” feudal (or other pre-capitalist) private property and is then itself negated by socialist property; thus, “the negation of the negation.” The latter, catchy term was subsequently misused to suggest that an historical dialectic would inevitably lead to communism: thesis, antithesis, synthesis! Marx was optimistic, but he wasn’t crazy. He understood that revolutions don’t happen by themselves.
Negation is also a key word in 20th Century Marxist philosophy and aesthetics. There, it denotes the necessity of denying or canceling broad systems of thought as well as individual false ideas. Whereas Hegel wrote, “the truth is the whole,” Adorno wrote (in Minima Moralia, 1944) “the whole is the false,” meaning that entire political and philosophical systems are prone to error and must be negated. In fact, he believed, if a system presents itself as a comprehensive totality, it must be wrong. (Adorno also had his faults. The aphorism preceding “the whole is the false”, reads: “The first and only principle of sexual ethics: The accuser is always in the wrong.”)
Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt School colleague of Adorno, and darling of the ‘60s New Left, published in 1965 a collection of essays called Negations. In the chapter titled “The Affirmative Character of Culture” that first appeared in 1937, Marcuse argued that a great deal of art and culture, by segregating and protecting itself from the “everyday world” affirmed the value of the soul but allowed politics – with its violence and injustice – to proceed without much protest or interference. In his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse reversed course, arguing (in general agreement with Adorno) that there exists a domain of “autonomous” art that possesses “a truth, an experience, [and] a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis,” is nevertheless an “essential component of revolution.”
When Clark writes about “negation,” therefore, he is invoking Marx, but most of all Adorno and Marcuse. Clark’s argument that negation is neutralized by “becoming a picture,” is partly derived Marcuse’s theory of “repressive desublimation.” That’s the idea, found in One Dimensional Man (1964), that commodified (or mass) culture offers pleasures that are superficially emancipating (“desublimating”) but fundamentally repressive because they deny or derail a wider and fuller freedom. In “The End of the Image-World,” Clark similarly argues that apparently liberating rhetorical forms–critique, polemic, irony and satire–are so widely deployed in advertising, popular music, TV, podcasts, and political speech – that they have lost their force. They are simply one more image or trope available to boost consumption and increase corporate profits.
Clark’s phrase about negation “becoming a picture” is not, however, primarily indebted to Marcuse. It’s main source is the Situationist philosopher Guy Debord’s famous aphorism from The Society of the Spectacle (1967): “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” Whereas Marx described how under conditions of industrial capitalism “the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by… the sense of having,” Debord said they were now (under monopoly capitalism) replaced by a state of “appearing.” In a personal correspondence, Clark, who was a member of the Situationist International, told me: “‘Spectacle,’ as I conceive it, is a shorthand for the form taken by late capitalist politics as it came more and more to depend on the active belief of the exploited in the machinery of their exploitation—the infantile glitter of consumer goods, the non-world of celebrity and infotainment, and now the literally incessant self-entry, self-shaping on the techno-feudal small screen.”
That image-world is the “small screen” in your pocket. It’s at once camera, TV, diary, computer, translator, phone (not very good) and instrument of surveillance (excellent). Mostly, it’s a billboard, advertising us to the world’s largest corporations and most corrupt politicians. We willingly offer ourselves to them an average of 150 times a day (4 ½ hours in total) but are in fact on-call 24/7. Even when we use our screens for non-commercial, creative, or critical purposes, we are providing valuable data to our corporate masters. Even when we express disdain for our machine – as I am, right now – I affirm by my actions (typing on my Macbook) my devotion to it.
Some solace may be taken in the newness and contingency of the image-world I describe – it’s less than a generation old. The first time I recognized the power of the small screen was in January 2002. I was in Venice to research an exhibition and catalogue I was planning about Monet. I arrived after dark at my hotel near the Chiesa Parrocchiale di San Moisè. The next morning, I walked on the Calle Largo before turning off to smaller streets to visit the former Grand Hotel Britannia (now a St. Regis) where Monet stayed in 1908. Passing over the crest of a canal bridge, I suddenly saw coming toward me a phalanx of people – young and old, local and tourist – walking and talking on their cellphones. I had seen people with cellphones before – I owned one myself – but never noticed how much they shaped the comportment of crowds. The people I confronted now weren’t looking up, down, or to their sides; they might as well have been in Hackney as Venice!
Phones today are exponentially more powerful and distracting. In galleries, museums and gardens like Sissinghurst, visitors constantly weigh when they should pull them out to snap a picture to demonstrate to themselves and others they were there. They use them to check the time, weather, direction home, stock price, online auction, traffic, and nearby restaurants. They monitor the whereabouts of their kids, parents, spouses, lovers and preferred influencers. During hikes, Harriet takes out her phone to identify bird calls, trees and plants. When waiting – for anything – I take mine out to read The New York Times and The Guardian in the hope that something terrible has happened to the politicians or oligarchs I despise – the eternal optimist.
Clark’s new book, like his career, is internally riven. Some chapters, like “The End of the Image-World” and “For a Left with no Future,” are explicitly political, invoking past socialist revolutions, acknowledging their defeat, and accepting (mourning) the doubtful future. In others, he enacts the kind of close and sustained looking we might all be doing except for the distraction of class, politics and the spectacle. His chapters about Rembrandt, Velazquez, Bosch, David, Delacroix, Picasso, and Pollock examine the form and circuitry of artworks: how a painterly gesture here commands one there; how a line carries the viewer deep into space and across a surface; how scale – the suggested comparison of size – conveys weight and location; and how color causes forms to advance and recede. Close attendance to style and form is for Clark – as it was for Adorno and Marcuse – a kind of politics because it’s a negation of the commodified world, of the society of the spectacle. But whether that kind of politics – even in conjunction with existing social movements – can impact the unfolding crises is unclear. In a third column (after a bit of a break), I’ll look at the prospects for political art now.
