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Rancière is firstly a
philosopher of politics whose work draws upon the framework of Critical Theory
and who has increasingly taken an interest in the role of art in social change.
Aisthesis consists of fourteen
studies across the arts, fine and applied, from 1764 to 1941, covering much of
the sociological period called modernity or modernism, more or less tracing the
course of the Industrial Revolution. Each study considers the prevailing taste for
a time and place surrounding a given work or works. This context is here curiously
termed aisthesis, a usage somewhat narrower than the word’s Aristotelian origin.
Two themes in particular are pursued. The first is the tendency to blur or
condense differences between branches of the arts, indeed, between high and low
art, ultimately between art and life. This is proposed as a radical revision or
‘counter history’ for the period of Modernism (as period style) or modernism as
sociological concept. The second theme
is the inspiration for broader social change anticipated by changes within the
arts. For Ranciere, ‘Social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution’
(p. XVI).
The studies fall
into brief chapters, ranging from around ten to twenty pages and include cabaret
and music hall performance, cinema and decorative arts as well as literature,
theatre and the plastic arts, This breadth of interest and the extensive
research displayed in most chapters help to explain why it has taken fifteen
years to complete the book, even as the author contemplates expansions to
subsequent editions, in the preface. Some of the territory obviously overlaps
with art history, particularly the sociologically directed research of say, T.
J. Clark or Francis Haskell (Haskell is cited in the first chapter) and Aisthesis extends this kind of analysis
to literary criticism, the performing arts and indeed beyond. But the aim is
for something more comprehensive, for a delineation of the development of
aesthetics in general and this overstretches the project and invites a
fundamental objection. The problem is firstly whether aesthetics is properly
served by such an analysis and secondly whether fourteen scattered examples can
adequately deliver such a history.
The emergence of
aesthetics as a branch of philosophy does not hold the wider importance Rancière claims, and even if it did,
the argument for a guiding concept of art in general would still be
unconvincing, given the subsequent history of the arts and aesthetics. His
claim, in part as rationale for the scope of Aisthesis, is that the emergence of aesthetics (implicitly taken as
the publication of Kant’s Critique of
Judgment in 1790) lays the foundation for our notion of ‘Art’.
For two centuries in the
West, aesthetics has been the name of 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. (p. IX)
More accurately,
Kant’s aesthetics deal in the judgement of beauty, natural and cultural, and in
accordance with an idealist epistemology, assert that the appreciation of
beauty depends upon a particular frame of mind, a certain disinterested
attitude. Aesthetics since has been pursued under other epistemologies and art
(as a sub-section to aesthetics) need not be taken as designating a specific
experience or ‘sensible fabric’. Kant contemplates the fine arts as examples of
cultivated beauty, but the fine arts as a category is available from as early
as 1648, with the foundation of The Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. Fine arts initially
groups painting, sculpture, drawing, printing and architecture but subsequently
they are expanded to include poetry, music , dance and even landscape gardening
under various theories and practices. For example, Baumgarten first uses the
term aesthetics to denote the discernment of beauty as the object of taste in
his Reflections on Poetry (1735). Novels
were initially excluded from the fine arts, since they were not seen as being
embodied in a ‘sensuous medium’. But
this hardly impedes change to the novel nor deters readers and advocates. Artists
in all branches find inspiration at a more substantive or specific level. As
the painter Barnett Newman allegedly replied to noted philosopher of
aesthetics, Suzanne Langer, “Aesthetics is to artists what ornithology is to
birds.”
Moreover, a
general history of art commencing with prehistoric cave paintings, such as E.
H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950),
simply accepts the evolution of the concept of art, its etymology and synonyms
for picturing and excellence, happily dispensing with it in the famous opening
lines “There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists”. A
consistent, unitary definition of Art has henceforth tended to accept a
continuous historical development that offers no special distinction to 1790. The
subsequent profusion of new kinds of painting (such as full abstraction) and
three-dimensional work (such as installations) as well as temporary or temporal
works (such as site-specific installations and performances) not to mention
motion pictures and audio recording, all expand the notion of fine art or Art
well beyond anything the eighteenth century accepted. ’Art’ is only as good as
its objects.
Rancière acknowledges
the prior existence of fine arts but dismisses it as merely social privilege.
All kinds of arts and
practices existed before then (1790) to be sure, among which a small number
benefitted 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’. (p. IX)
But this appeal
to Roman or classical standards ignores developments throughout the medieval
and Renaissance periods, when the liberal arts were replaced with the humanities
and as artists increasingly gain prestige beyond mere artisans. The careers of
Giotto in the fourteenth century, of Lippi, Michelangelo, Leonardo or Titian in
the fifteenth century all attest to a surprising social mobility for painters,
irrespective of breeding or education, to recognition of a more powerful and
versatile role for painting. The art of painting acquires its own respectable
theories and commentaries long before any co-ordinating category of sister arts,
and if these do not disclose an ‘intrinsic excellence’ for Rancière, this is rather a matter of
philosophy. Similarly, the premiss that the
formulation of fine art coincides with social uncertainty or upheaval simply ignores
myriad ongoing changes within society and art long before and after 1790 and is
also rejected.
The fourteen
case studies obviously inherit this problem but also present additional ones.
The aim of Aisthesis is not just to
demonstrate underlying regimes of taste but to pick out overlooked or
peripheral works with which to reshape the sample of Modernism. But method and
material here are ultimately at cross purposes. We learn something of the
particulars of slapstick comedy for example, in Chapter Five, but not really
much about its place in theatre, beyond the music hall or circus, or indeed the
exchange between high and low culture at this time. The author can retrieve
forgotten figures like the Hanlon Lees brothers, but an underlying regime needs
a great deal more background, many more familiar landmarks. On the one hand,
regimes must account for broad sweeps across the arts, but this would then
stretch the project to unmanageable lengths or detail, while on the other hand,
the author is anxious to direct our attention to obscure corners that hardly
afford a persuasive perspective on a larger regime. Fourteen studies no more
than suggest regimes, often omit more than they include.
There is, for
example, the conspicuous absence of music. Passing reference to Wagner in
Chapter Seven only reminds us of the range of distinguished composers and
musical innovations to the period. Perhaps the author remains in awe of Theodor
Adorno’s extensive writings on the topic. In any case, a regime without music
is an intolerably muted affair. Similarly, painting is dealt with only in
Hegel’s brief remarks on Murillo and Raphael in Chapter Two, and while this
serves as an opportunity to trace Napoleon’s aggressive intervention in the
market for Spanish painting and Hegel’s predictable preference for restraint
and reverie in temperament, it hardly discloses a regime also welcoming a
Delacroix or Ingres, the sublime of Turner, Constable or Goya. Indeed, absence
of discussion of Romanticism seems especially unfortunate given its influence
across the arts and priority for Hegel. However the R word (not to mention
Realism) spells difficulties for a book intent upon aligning Modernism with
modernity, with taking as its starting point the end of the eighteenth century.
The consequence again is a weakened grasp of regime and regime scarcely worthy
of the name. An equally grave omission
concerns the lack of illustrations, not just for Chapter Two, with its cascade
of references to Murillo, Raphael, Teniers, Dou, David, Delacroix – even
Bresson’s Mouchette –all of which beg
the reader’s familiarity if not scrutiny, but the topics of photography, dance,
stage design, cinema and sculpture would all have benefited from reproductions.
Omission here looks either niggardly or contemptuous.
The preface
assures us that Aisthesis is ‘not a matter of the reception of works of art.
Rather it concerns the sensible fabric of experience within which they are
produced.’ (p. X) yet twelve of the
chapters commence with contemporary reviews of works, within which mostly
Hegelian themes are discerned, tortured dynamics or dialectics elaborated while
the artist’s particular agenda, the nuts and bolts of production are rarely considered.
For example, Chapter Nine on Rodin provides little of his influences or methods,
their relation to sculpting contemporaries or rivals, apart from a general nod
to Impressionism. The regime in this case is entirely one of critics and poets.
Chapter Thirteen on the early films of Dziga Vertov commences with a
description from 1926 by Ismael Urogov, not strictly a review or critique, but
leads predictably to a discussion of the use and meaning of montage, the
revolutionary aims of Constructivism, the rationale of formalism and the
familiar controversy between Einsenstein and Vertov, Kino Fist versus Kino Eye.
Of course they now look equally arty or formalist, but at the time they accused
each other of being too arty, too bourgeois. The chapter traces Vertov’s
stylistic adjustments to inter-titles and structuring from A Sixth Part of The World (1926) to The Eleventh Year (1928) to Man
With a Movie Camera (1929) and Enthusiasm
(1930) but whether we truly grasp a regime under which, for example, Kuleshov,
Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Protazanov and even Barnet also worked, is doubtful.
Vertov’s commitment to documentary material, yet experimental treatment is
unusual and broaches interesting issues for a criterion of motion pictures, but
we never learn much about its reception in Soviet cinemas, apart from
Eisenstein’s well-publicised complaints and again, the verdict of poets, here
Brik and Shklovsky, nor the intended or actual audience for this regime, in the
USSR and elsewhere.
Aisthesis in the
Aristotelian sense, concerns simply objects of perception and is divided into
special, common and incidental ‘sensibles’, depending upon whether perception
uses only one or more senses and is available ‘directly’. Why Rancière adopts this terminology is
puzzling, since nothing about the arrangement is exclusively or especially concerned
with beauty or art and no qualification is offered. Although it does alert the
reader to an implicit concern with sensory rather than intellectual input, a
distinction under rationalist thinking held to serve feeling, a key attribute
of beauty. But none of this is explained and ‘sensible’ is used indifferently
to identify ‘equality’ (p. 46) ‘moment’ (p. 47) ‘world’ (p. 59) ‘wealth’ (p.
63) ‘things’ (p. 64) ‘forms’ (p. 64) ‘reality’ (p. 71) ‘milieu’ (p. 97) ‘elements’
(p. 114) ‘effect’ (p. 116) ‘thought’ (p. 116) ‘texture’ (p. 138) ‘universe’ (p.
157) ‘presence’ (p. 174) ‘fabric’ (p. 193) ‘fact (of Soviet life)’ (p. 227) ‘correction’
(p. 229) among other things. At best we gloss sensible here to mean just received
or apparent content, but such laxity is clearly not sensible. Nor does such a
framework strictly constitute a Kantian or Hegelian approach, as a kind of
historical reconstruction for the material perhaps, for ‘sensibles’ distinguish
between perception according to senses employed and concepts like thought or
wealth are hardly the stuff of sense data, much less declare a distinct sensory
passage. Aisthesis here is not strictly coherent, much less a suitable name for
a regime of taste.
Moreover, in
seeking to project an Hegelian aesthetic over much of nineteenth century painting,
the author sacrifices not just the sensory but guiding ideals.
‘Painting in effect is the
art that does not merely describe things, as poets do, but makes them visible.
But it is also the art that no longer concerns itself with filling space with
volume, analogous to the bodies of figures, as sculpture does. Rather it uses
its surface as the means to repudiate them: to mock their consistent solidity
by making things appear through artificial means but also illuminating their
most evanescent aspect, closest to their shining and glittering surfaces, to
the passing instant and changing light… It is thus what we look at for the pure
disinterested pleasure of enjoying appearances. And it is this play of
appearances that is the very realisation of freedom of mind’ (p. 31-2)
This is not so
much a summary of Hegel’s application of disinterestedness as an attempt to
show how the concept accommodates Realism and Impressionism (developments long
after the death of Hegel). So the argument is open to comment from the vantage
point of the twenty-first century. It is worth pointing out firstly that the
much-prized volume in this passage is only to be viewed or painted in the
presence of light, unless we wish to restrict our world to darkness. Since we
accept light as a condition of seeing, it makes no sense to then deny colour,
even though we allow that colour is relative to light frequency and
reflectance. And since we concede colour is also then part of our reliable world
we can hardly object to movement of light or light source, its impedance and
variation further add to our picture. All these things steadily allow greater
discernment of objects, new properties and relations, greater understanding.
This is surely a more convincing source of pleasure than some pretence at
disinterest before pictorial adventure. Even games have goals; teach us things
we may apply elsewhere. Freedom lies in gaining options, not retreating from
the world. Whether for a better mind or a bigger world; a more discriminating
view of light, colour and volume need not be repudiation or mockery.
Appearances, while variable, need not be deceptive.
For Rancière, freedom is associated with
leisure and disinterest is seen as initially the privilege of the leisured
classes. To extend leisure to the lower classes is seen as a provocative,
egalitarian gesture. But leisure as pictured by the Realists and Impressionists
is mostly of socialising, of conversation, flirtation, gossip, dining and
shopping. There is nothing idle or disinterested about these activities. They
are vital. The same applies to literature of the period that details social
mores and manoeuvring. The myth of some suitable level of detachment or
disinterest ultimately renders the subject of no interest. In truth, there is
no way to isolate the immediately given of sense from memory and consequences,
feeling from thought and its posture, an object from any possible enterprise. The
aesthetic attitude postulates an impossible psychology, an implausible
ontology. The quest for a specific aesthetic pleasure or emotion, like the
end-in-itself or ideal autonomy, is quixotic folly.
Unquestionably
Hegel’s philosophy enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the nineteenth
century. How much this is reflected in the production and reception of the arts
however, is another matter. To attempt to salvage notions like disinterest, even
as historical anecdote, to parcel out the sensory in the service of grand
ideals, to subordinate art to the interests of the social sciences - which is
essentially what statements like ‘Art exists when one can make a people, a
society, an age, taken at a certain moment in the development of its collective
life, its subject’ (p. 14) or ‘a style is an expression of a life of a people
in a time’ (p. 143) - all of these things resort to a deplorably retrograde aesthetics
and undermine a viable platform from which to reconstrue Modernism. Method is thus
further flawed.
Additionally, extending
an idealist aesthetic for the sake of argument is one thing, misinterpretation
another. Rancière’s use of texts
in building his regimes is occasionally a little too free in its paraphrase and
interpretation. In this respect the first and last chapters are particularly
troubling. Chapter One opens with a brief passage by Winckelmann, describing
the famous classical sculpture The
Belvedere Torso, supposedly of Hercules. The text explains that while the
sculpture is now only a fragment, having lost its head, arms and lower legs,
the pose can to some extent be inferred from the arched and twisted torso and
the superb rendering of the anatomy gives the figure a compelling fluidity or
life. Rancière however makes not
only extravagant but quite contrary claims for this account. For Rancière, the passage denies the
figure engages in heroic action, although Winckelmann has imagined Hercules
looking up, smiling in a reflective way upon his many triumphs (is triumph not
also heroic?). No suggestion is made for the arms and legs and because of this he
asserts that Winckelmann’s interpretation is radically one of ‘pure thought’ or
reflection for a classical God. But all Winckelmann has suggested is a facial
expression and an appropriate mythic context.
The choice of
quote is either inconvenient to Ranciere’s purposes or he is simply blind to
Winckelmann’s modest claim that even the remains of this figure convince us of
the excellence of the sculpture. The chapter rapidly extends the argument to a
denial of classical principles of the harmony of parts and expressivity of
content on Winckelmann’s part. The claim is then that Winckelmann judges from
just the torso for the whole of the figure and so denies its proper parts and
correct expression to subject matter. But does Winckelmann actually claim that
the torso alone is sufficient to assess this Hercules? While imagining a smirk
on the upturned face may be a little fanciful, his concern is with identifying
the figure and then pose, from which to assess a rendering of the torso -
‘The artist may admire in
the outlines of this body the perpetual flowing of one form into another, and
the undulating lines which rise and fall like waves, and become swallowed up in
one another. No copyist can be sure of correctness since the undulating
movement which he thinks he is following turns imperceptibly away…. And no
statue can be found that shows so well balanced a plumpness (to midriff)’ (p. 1-2)
Nothing in Rancière’s choice of passage suggests
that the torso alone is sufficient as a rendering of Hercules, at any point in
his myth. Winckelmann is impressed with how ‘the bones appear to be covered
with fatty skin and the muscles are full without superfluity’. It is not just
the technique but the judgement of proportion or balance to muscle tone and
body fat to the torso that leads him
to suppose it belongs to a golden age of Greek sculpture. Classical harmony is
still available to parts of even a torso. But Rancière is intent upon tracing the wider controversy over
classical expression, best known in the dispute between Lessing and Winckelmann
over the Laocoon, in which Winckelmann argues for a stoic decorum to classical
expression while Lessing proposes limits to sculpture’s subject matter. One
says Laocoon is too noble to scream, the other that sculpture is better for not
attempting screams. Against classical restraint to expression is the romantic advocacy
for full and natural feeling, and Rancière
interestingly traces much of this through theatre and dance, although again, rather
skating around the R word, even if it is Rococo. Winckelmann anticipates Neo
Classicism and for Rancière then
provokes Romanticism and German idealism but is redeemed by an implicit metonym
to the famous torso, that suggests to Hegelians
at least, the shared tastes of a Greek people, although rather glossing over
gross differences between the respective city states. In passing, the chapter
also applauds the title of the book from which the Winckelmann excerpt is drawn
- The History of Ancient Art (1764) for its use of art in the singular rather
than fine art or arts or just the arts, but such abbreviation and synonym
especially in conjunction with alternative senses for art as depiction or excellence
owe as much to standard usage and generalisation as idealist philosophy. Rancière clutches at straws. In
addition, the date is obviously then at odds with the claims of the preface.
The second
misinterpretation concerns Clement Greenberg’s essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch,
cited in the final chapter. Here Rancière
claims that Greenberg announces the end of modernity with the recognition of the
avant-garde (p. 262). But Greenberg’s essay lists Picasso, Braque, Mondrian,
Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Klee, Matisse and Cezanne as so-called avant-garde
artists, clearly not all a vanguard by 1939; the year of the essay. Greenberg
frames a much longer and slower advance, characterised by not much more than an
emphasis on painting’s formal qualities. Modernism commences a great deal
earlier for Greenberg. Nor can industrialisation and modernity be taken to have
peaked by 1939. While Greenberg talks of a decline for capitalism in his
closing paragraph, it is seen to anticipate socialism and there is no reason to
see why this should be opposed to the industrialisation and low culture he has briefly
surveyed. Actually his conclusion only endorses the persistence of an
historicist enterprise for high culture, as progressive or advanced, a claim he
justifies by condemning all else as kitsch. It is not a particularly sophisticated
or persuasive argument. Rancière’s
conclusion: that modernity ends just when Modernism begins, is elegant but
unsupported by Greenberg.
The themes of a
counter history of Modernism and its example for social reform are only
intermittently apparent throughout the book. Regimes are either too lightly
sketched or too technical and specialised to suggest concrete courses of
political action. The theme of artistic inspiration for political activism is
rendered so vague as to be no more than truism or trivial. Modernism considered
beyond fine art is undeniable but does not so much reshape the movement as
sketches a general cultural companion for modernity. For example, the claim
that ‘Loïe Fuller and Charlie Chaplin contributed to it (Modernism) far more
than Mondrian or Kandinsky’ (p. XIII), is never seriously pursued
because the book has no space, no real appetite to discuss pictorial
abstraction. The book loiters at its hinterland, in considering developments in
the decorative and applied arts in Chapter Eight, but fails to grasp the link,
for once, the self-reflexive ‘function’. Ultimately Rancière favours low culture, particularly performance, because it is more popular, more
responsive to sociological currents, but this essentially exchanges art for
social history.
Blurring of
boundaries between branches of the arts occurs regularly throughout history,
but not to the extent that the branches lack sufficient adherents. Boundaries
are acceptably porous. The book’s scattered sample can accent the practice but
as noted, they do not really constitute regimes. Where the author is on
stronger ground is in the adoption of new technology, such as electric lighting
for the stage, the new possibilities this suggests for set and costume design
and performance and its flow-on to the cinema. Similarly, new materials available
to the crafts and mass production inevitably prompt reappraisals in the plastic
arts, to both themes and technique. Here we see boundaries steadily being
adjusted, particularly anticipating the recognition of motion pictures as the
seventh art and granting other branches another point of reference for their
own practices.
Finally, the
author’s prose, particularly on points of metaphysics is often too clumsy, too
overloaded to properly do justice to his arguments. Musings such as – ‘For
thinking is always firstly thinking the thinkable – a thinking that modifies
what is thinkable by welcoming what is unthinkable’ (p. XI). Anglophone readers
especially will not welcome such thinking; will only think the worse of him for
such seeming sophistry. Description also can be regrettably garbled, on Rodin
the author essays -
All bodies, all faces, all
hands is an impossible totality. But this impossible totality is the asymptotic
unity obtained by the active synthesis of a multiplicity of movements, whose
subject is not a finished unity, but an infinite multiplicity, Life.’ (p. 166)
Sometimes it
pays to just break things down a little bit more. On a more positive note, Aisthesis does glimpse some surprising
links between high and low culture, one branch of the arts and another, so that
the slapstick and whimsy of the Hanlon Lees brothers offers new insight into
Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin’s adaptations for motion pictures in turn resonate
with the grotesque and fantasy of Meyerhold and Eisenstein, the metamorphosis
of Fuller with Art Nouveau decoration, decoration with pictorial abstraction,
as noted. A more focussed study or perhaps a realignment of chapters to Aisthesis might profitably expand upon
these themes; discern other currents to public taste. While hardly the landmark
for aesthetics announced by some reviewers, the book rewards with its bold
perspective and painstaking research, with retrieving lost moments in cultural
history and considering them with impressive scholarship.
JACQUES Rancière: AISTHESIS
- 2013, (Tr. Zakir Paul) Verso, London, Brooklyn, NY
A more polemical version of this review appears on Worldwidereview.com
A more polemical version of this review appears on Worldwidereview.com
