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Prelude

This book deals with the same topic in fourteen scenes. This topic is announced by its very title: Aisthesis. For two centuries in the West, ‘aesthetics’ has been the name for the category designating the sensible fabric and intelligible form of what we call ‘Art’. In my other works, I have already had the opportunity to argue that, even if histories of art begin their narratives with cave paintings at the dawn of time, Art as a notion designating a form of specific experience has only existed in the West since the end of the eighteenth century. All kinds of arts and practices existed before then, to be sure, among which a small number benefited from a privileged status, due not to their intrinsic excellence but to their place in the division of social conditions. Fine arts were the progeny of the so-called liberal arts. The latter were distinguished from the mechanical arts because they were the pastime of free men, men of leisure whose very quality was meant to deter them from seeking too much perfection in material performances that an artisan or a slave could accomplish. Art as such began to exist in the West when this hierarchy of forms of life began to vacillate. The conditions of this emergence cannot be deduced from a general concept of art or beauty founded on a global theory of man or the world, of the subject or being. Such concepts themselves depend upon a transformation of the forms of sensible experience, of ways of perceiving and being affected. They formulate a mode of intelligibility out of these reconfigurations of experience.

The term Aisthesis has designated the mode of experience according to which, for two centuries, we perceive very diverse things, whether in their techniques of production or their destination, as all belonging to art. This is not a matter of the ‘reception’ of works of art. Rather, it concerns the sensible fabric of experience within which they are produced. These are entirely material conditions – performance and exhibition spaces, forms of circulation and reproduction – but also modes of perception and regimes of emotion, categories that identify them, thought patterns that categorize and interpret them. These conditions make it possible for words, shapes, movements and rhythms to be felt and thought as art. No matter how emphatically some may oppose the event of art and the creative work of artists to this fabric of institutions, practices, affective modes and thought patterns, the latter allow for a form, a burst of colour, an acceleration of rhythm, a pause between words, a movement, or a glimmering surface to be experienced as events and associated with the idea of artistic creation. No matter the insistence with which others oppose the ethereal idealities of art and aesthetics to the very prosaic conditions of their existence, these idealities still provide the markers for the work with which they try to demystify them. Finally, no matter the bitterness others still express at seeing our venerable museums welcome the works of the darlings of the market, this is merely a distant effect of the revolution constituted by the very birth of museums, when the royal galleries open to the public made visible popular scenes that German princes taken with exoticism had bought from dealers in the Netherlands, or when the republican Louvre was stacked with princely portraits and pious paintings looted by the revolutionary armies from Italian palaces or Dutch museums. Art exists as a separate world since anything whatsoever can belong to it. This is precisely one of the arguments of this book. It shows how a regime of perception, sensation and interpretation of art is constituted and transformed by welcoming images, objects and performances that seemed most opposed to the idea of fine art: vulgar figures of genre painting, the exaltation of the most prosaic activities in verse freed from meter, music-hall stunts and gags, industrial buildings and machine rhythms, smoke from trains and ships reproduced mechanically, extravagant inventories of accessories from the lives of the poor. It shows how art, far from foundering upon these intrusions of the prose of the world, ceaselessly redefined itself – exchanging, for example, the idealities of plot, form and painting for those of movement, light and the gaze, building its own domain by blurring the specificities that define the arts and the boundaries that separate them from the prosaic world.

Art is given to us through these transformations of the sensible fabric, at the cost of constantly merging its own reasons with those belonging to other spheres of experience. I have chosen to study these transformations in a certain number of specific scenes. In this sense, a distant model guides Aisthesis. Its title echoes Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which focused on a series of short extracts, from Homer to Virginia Woolf, to study the transformations in the representation of reality in western literature. Mimesis and Aisthesis undoubtedly take on different meanings here, since they no longer designate categories internal to art, but rather regimes of the identification of art. My scenes are not only taken from the art of writing, but also from the visual and performance arts, and those of mechanical reproduction. They do not show the transformations belonging to any given art. Instead, they show the way in which a given artistic appearance requires changes in the paradigms of art. Each one of these scenes thus presents a singular event, and explores the interpretive network that gives it meaning around an emblematic text. The event can be a performance, a lecture, an exhibition, a visit to a museum or to a studio, a book, or a film release. The network built around it shows how a performance or an object is felt and thought not only as art, but also as a singular artistic proposition and a source of artistic emotion, as novelty and revolution in art – even as a means for art to find a way out of itself. Thus it inscribes them into a moving constellation in which modes of perception and affect, and forms of interpretation defining a paradigm of art, take shape. The scene is not the illustration of an idea. It is a little optical machine that shows us thought busy weaving together perceptions, affects, names and ideas, constituting the sensible community that these links create, and the intellectual community that makes such weaving thinkable. The scene captures concepts at work, in their relation to the new objects they seek to appropriate, old objects that they try to reconsider, and the patterns they build or transform to this end. For thinking is always firstly thinking the thinkable – a thinking that modifies what is thinkable by welcoming what was unthinkable. The scenes of thought collected here show how a mutilated statue can become a perfect work, an image of lousy children the representation of the Ideal, somersaulting clowns a flight in the poetic sky, a piece of furniture a temple, a staircase a character, patched overalls a princely garb, the convolutions of a veil a cosmogony, and an accelerated montage of gestures the sensible reality of communism. These metamorphoses are not individual fantasies but the logic of the regime of perception, affection and thought that I have proposed to call the ‘aesthetic regime of art.’

The fourteen episodes that follow are so many microcosms in which we see the logic of this regime being formed, transformed, incorporating unexplored territories and forming new patterns in order to do so. Their selection might give rise to some surprise; the reader will seek in vain for landmarks that have become unavoidable in the history of artistic modernity: no Olympia, no Suprematist Composition: White on White, no Fountain, nor Igitur or The Painter of Modern Life. Instead there are reviews of Funambules and the Folies Bergère written by poets who have fallen into the purgatory of literary anthologies, talks by thinkers or critics who have fallen from grace, sketchbooks for stagings rarely performed … There are surely reasons for this choice, even if, like all good reasons, they are discovered belatedly. Influential histories and philosophies of artistic modernity identify it with the conquest of autonomy by each art, which is expressed in exemplary works that break with the course of history, separating themselves both from the art of the past and the ‘aesthetic’ forms of prosaic life. Fifteen years of work have brought me to the exact opposite conclusions: the movement belonging to the aesthetic regime, which supported the dream of artistic novelty and fusion between art and life subsumed under the idea of modernity, tends to erase the specificities of the arts and to blur the boundaries that separate them from each other and from ordinary experience. These works only create ruptures by condensing features of regimes of perception and thought that precede them, and are formed elsewhere. The degrees of importance retrospectively granted to artistic events erase the genealogy of forms of perception and thought that were able to make them events in the first place. The scenographic revolutions of the twentieth century are difficult to understand without mentioning the evenings spent at the Funambules or the Folies Bergère by poets that no one reads any more: Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville. One would be hard pressed to perceive the paradoxical ‘spirituality’ of functionalist architecture without referring to Ruskin’s ‘gothic’ reveries – or even write a somewhat precise history of the modernist paradigm while forgetting that Loïe Fuller and Charlie Chaplin contributed to it far more than Mondrian or Kandinsky, or that the legacy of Whitman is as influential as that of Mallarmé.

One could thus consider these episodes, if so inclined, as a counter-history of ‘artistic modernity’. However, this book has no encyclopaedic goals. It is not concerned with surveying the field of the arts during two centuries, but only aims to capture the occurrences of certain displacements in the perception of what art signifies. It does follow chronological order from 1764 to 1941. Its point of departure is the historical moment, in Winckelmann’s Germany, when Art begins to be named as such, not by closing itself off in some celestial autonomy, but on the contrary by giving itself a new subject, the people, and a new place, history. It follows a few adventures of the relations between these terms. But it has not linked these adventures together; instead it develops a number of overlapping points and elaborations. Nor has it sought to lead them towards some apotheosis or end point. It could surely have come closer to our present. It could also include other episodes, and perhaps it will some day. For now, it seemed possible to me to end it at a significant crossroads: a time when, in James Agee’s America, the modernist dream of art, capable of lending its infinite resonance to the most minute instant of the most ordinary life, was shedding its last light, the brightest yet, while this very era had just been declared over by the young Marxist critic Clement Greenberg and the monument of retrospective modernism was raised. Failing to found any important art, the latter would however succeed in imposing the golden legend of the avant-gardes and rewrite the history of a century of artistic upheavals to its advantage.

This book is thus both finished and incomplete. It is open to future development, but also allows for the construction of different narratives, which could link these isolated episodes together. By following the path that leads from the Belvedere Torso, the expression of a free people, to sharecroppers’ barracks in Alabama, stopping by Murillo’s beggar boys, the oil lamps of the Funambules, the urban wanderings of a hungry vagrant, or the nomads filmed by the Kinocs on the frontiers of Soviet Asia, readers will be able to recognize so many short voyages to the land of the people, to which I have devoted another book.¹ From the mutilated Belvedere statue to the broken china rabbit belonging to the sharecropper’s daughter, via the distorted bodies of the Hanlon Lees brothers, Loïe Fuller’s unlocatable body, Rodin’s limbs without bodies and bodies without limbs, and the extreme fragmentation of gestures assembled by Dziga Vertov, they will be able to construct the history of a regime of art like that of a large fragmented body, and of a multiplicity of unknown bodies born from this very fragmentation. They can also follow the multiple metamorphoses of the ancient that the modern feeds upon: how the Olympian gods transform into children of the people, the antique temple into a piece of salon furniture, or into a practicable theatre prop, the painting of a Greek vase becoming a dance celebrating American nature – and still more metamorphoses.

Among these stories, one always imposed itself with greater insistence as the book progressed: the history of the paradoxical links between the aesthetic paradigm and political community. By making the mutilated statue of Hercules the highest expression of the liberty of the Greek people, Winckelmann established an original link between political freedom, the withdrawal of action, and defection from the communitarian body. The aesthetic paradigm was constructed against the representative order, which defined discourse as a body with well-articulated parts, the poem as a plot, and a plot as an order of actions. This order clearly situated the poem – and the artistic productions for which it functioned as a norm – on a hierarchical model: a well-ordered body where the upper part commands the lower, the privilege of action, that is to say of the free man, capable of acting according to ends, over the repetitive lives of men without quality. The aesthetic revolution developed as an unending break with the hierarchical model of the body, the story, and action. The free people, says Schiller, is the people that plays, the people embodied in this activity that suspends the very opposition between active and passive; the little Sevillian beggars are the embodiment of the ideal, says Hegel, because they do nothing; the novel dethroned drama as the exemplary art of speech, bearing witness to the capacity of men and women without quality to feel all kinds of ideal aspirations and sensual frenzies. But it did so at the cost of ruining the model of the story with causes and effects, and of action with means and ends. The theatre itself, the ancient stage of ‘active men’, in order to draw itself closer to art and life, comes to repudiate action and its agents by considering itself a choir, a pictorial fresco, or architecture in movement. Photography consecrates the triumph of the gaze over the hand, and the exemplary cinematic body turns out to be the one that is constantly bombarded by events, none of which are the result of its intentions. The aesthetic paradigm of the new community, of men free and equal in their sensible life itself, tends to cut this community off from all the paths that are normally used to reach a goal. No doubt this tendency towards suspended action is constantly resisted. But this very struggle incessantly reproduces the inertia against which it rises up. In their search for an active theatre or ballet, Diderot and Noverre had to find models in pictorial composition. The same Rousseau who opposed the activity of the civic celebration to the passivity of the spectator in the theatre celebrated the farniente of reverie, and with The New Heloise inaugurated the long series of novels without action, devoted to what Borges later called the ‘insipid and idle everyday’. Wagner wanted a living poem that acted instead of describing, but this living poem, made to welcome the figure of the free hero, instead gave way to the figure of the god who turns away from action. The renovators of dance and theatre freed bodily movements from the shackles of a plot, but the emancipation of movement also distanced it from rational, intentional action directed towards an end. Vertov’s film, which sought to replace the plots and characters of yesterday with the living links of activities that formed the sensible fabric of communism, begins and ends in a cinema where the evening’s spectators seem to play with images that present them to themselves as the daytime actors of communism. Emancipated movement does not succeed in reintegrating the strategic patterns of causes and effects, ends and means.

Hasty minds will undoubtedly see this as the sign of an irremediable breach between aesthetic utopia and real political and revolutionary action. Instead, I recognized the same paradox in it as the one I encountered in the practices and theories of social emancipation. Emancipated workers could not repudiate the hierarchical model governing the distribution of activities without taking distance from the capacity to act that subjected them to it, and from the action plans of the engineers of the future. All these workers could easily have opposed the militants of the Saint-Simonian religion reinstating work, who came to recruit soldiers for the new industrial army, with the ingenuous words spoken by one of them: ‘When I think of the beauties of Saint-Simonism, my hand stops.’ The fullest expression of the fighting workers’ collective was called the general strike, an exemplary equivalence of strategic action and radical inaction. The scientific Marxist revolution certainly wanted to put an end to the workers’ reveries, along with utopian programmes. But by opposing them to the effects of real social development, it kept subordinating the end and means of action to the movement of life, at the risk of discovering that this movement does not want anything and does not allow any strategy to lay claim to it. Soviet critics responded to the filmmaker, who presented them with a vision of communism realized as the symphony of linked movements, that his so-called communism was doomed to an endless oscillation between pantheistic adoration of the irrational flux of things and pure formalist voluntarism. But what else could they oppose to this double defect except the return of artists to the old functions of moral illustration, whose inanity Rousseau and Schiller had exposed a century and a half earlier? Was the filmmaker effectively doing anything other than giving his judges a mirror in which they could recognize the dilemma of their science? Social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution, and was only able to deny this relation by transforming a strategic will that had lost its world into a policy of exception.

1 Jacques Rancière, Courts voyages au pays du peuple (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990), transl. James B. Swenson as Short Voyages to the Land of the People (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).