In the Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning Jonathan Tagg refers to returning to the vague topography that came to be so confidently colonized as “the New Art History.” In the mid-1970s in Britain, however, this uneven terrain seemed less like a consolidated territorythan a scattering of would-be no-go areas signposted by the names of often mutually hostile journals and places: Screen, Screen Education,Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Block, Old Compton Street, Birmingham,Leeds, and so on. He adds:

At the time, those moving in these disjointed spaces, far from art history’s marbled halls, also sought to rally themselves with their own thoughts of affirmative return: to Karl Marx and to Sigmund Freud, certainly, but also to Antonio Gramsci, to Bertolt Brecht, to the Russian formalists, to Ferdinand de Saussure, and sometimes to Melanie Klein or to Simone de Beauvoir. These were returns for which the tours all departed from Paris, where the tour guides of choice were Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and, only much later in Britain, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray. There was no shortage of divergent and sometimes misdirected paths. Yet what is striking in the case of the dissenting art history of this period is that, whether for tactical reasons or not, all these different tracks came to be represented as converging somehow on the road of return to a singular site with a singular name: the social history of art.

Tagg adds that:

What was evident from the beginning, however, was that this place of return was far from a comfortably settled landscape and its occupation would bring its own conflicts. On the one hand, the social history of art constituted a wary return to the territory of Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser, Francis Klingender, the young Meyer Schapiro, and, less familiarly, Max Raphael, since this proving ground of early Marxist art history was seen by many as offering the only available space of resistance in the history of the discipline to formalist criticism and art historical connoisseurship. On the other hand, the social history of art as reconceived in 1973 also marked a belated attempt to encompass what were still seen in Britain as new developments in Continental theory. Conflict erupted because what came through the door with this term “theory” led to an undermining of the intellectual framework and humanist commitment of the older formation of the social history of art and even, in the end, to the erosion of any notion of a unifying oppositional problematic.

My position in this is that the problem of how to give an account of cultural meaning that would counter “formalism” by opening the process of signification beyond itself to a sense both of its constraints and of its effects, without, however, falling into the snares of earlier functionalist and deterministic sociologies of art. This was the context for the making of common cause under the temporary banner of the social history of art.