HE THEORETICAL PARAMETERS of much of the social history of art currently being written in the Anglo-American world have largely been defined by the work of T. J. Clark. In two important books, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution and The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Clark provides both a theory and a practice for an art history that transcends its traditional preoccupations with style on the one hand and iconography on the other.' Clark's books not only served to bring out the political implications of the work of Courbet and Manet within the historical horizons in which they were produced, but they suggested that the paintings of these artists may have served an active role in the creation of social and political attitudes. There are, however, aspects of Clark's theory that betray a continuing adherence to some of the metaphysical values that have characterized both formalist and iconographic histories of art, values that compromise our capacity to fully historicize our understanding of the work of art. I should like here to question these values in order to propose a semiotic theory of representation as the basis for a social history of art. It is clear from both his theory and his criticism that Clark subscribes to a notion of immanent aesthetic value, one which serves to distinguish works of art from the rest of the cultural artifacts belonging to the culture of which they are a part. He shares this attitude with a long history of Marxist culture criticism, one which can be traced back to the Frankfurt School as well as in the AngloAmerican tradition constituted by Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Clark, however, inherits this most directly from the French Althusserian literary critic Pierre Macherey.2 In the opening chapter of the Courbet book, entitled "On the Social History of Art," Clark