Communities Of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics

B E TH HI N DERL I T ER, W I LL I AM KAI Z E N , V E R E D MAIMO N , JAL. EH MAN SOOR, A N D S E TH MCCORMI CK,

editors

Communities

of Sense

RETHINKING AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

Duke University Press Durham e'::r London 2009

©

2009 Duke University Press

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper co Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Arno with Magma Compact display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents Acknowledgments vii INTRO DUCTI O N 1 PART 0 N E Rethinking Aesthetics

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics 31 JACQUES RANCIERE The Romantic Work of Art 51 ALEXANDER P OTTS From Classical to Postclassical Beauty: Institutional Critique and Aesthetic Enigma in Louise Lawler's Photography 79 TONI ROSS Technologies of Belonging: Sensus Communis, Disidentification 111 RANJANA KHANNA PART TWO Partitioning the Sensible

Dada's Event: Paris, 1921 135 T. J. DEMOS Citizen Cursor 153 DAVID JOSELIT

Mass Customization: Corporate Architecture and the "End" of Politics 172 REINHOLD MARTIN PART THR E E The Limits of Community

Experimental Communities 197 CARLOS BASUALD O AND REINALDO LADDAGA Precarite, Auto rite, Autonomie 215 RACHEL HAIDU Neo-Dada 1951-54: Between the Aesthetics of Persecution and the Politics of Identity 238 SETH MCCORMICK Post-Communist Notes on Some Vertov Stills 267 YATES MCKEE Thinking Red: Ethical Militance and the Group Subject 294 EMILY APTER I N TERV I E W

Bibliography 337 Contributors 355 Index 359

with Etienne Balibar 317

Acknowledgments This volume has its origins in a conference of the same name presented at Columbia University in April 2003. The editors would like to thank the participants in this conference: Susan Buck-Morss, T. J. Demos, Tom Gunning, Branden Joseph, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Pamela Lee, Reinhold Martin, Stephen Melville, Molly Nesbit, Alexander Potts, Arvind Rajaga­ pol, and ken y ote sors, John Rajchman, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, and Jonathan Crary. We would also like to thank Barry Bergdoll and Hillary Ballon and the Department ofArt History and Archaeology, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University for supporting the conference. Thanks go to Ken Wissoker and Mandy Earley at Duke University Press for their editorial help. Finally, we would like to give a special thanks to John Rajchman for bringing our editorial group together and for providing crucial encouragement during the early stages of this project.

B E TH HI N DERLIT ER, WILLIAM KAIZ E N , V ER ED MAIMO N , JAL EH MA N SOOR, A N D S E TH MCCORMICK

Introduction COMMU N ITI E S OF S E N S E

The essays collected in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics are grounded in recent theoretical thinking on aesthetics, poli­ tics, and the problem of community within globalization. Over the last several decades, cultural production has often been described using terms such as postcritical and postideological. These terms suggest that the ways in which the relationship between aesthetics and politics has been formulated since the 1960S are no longer viable in the current political climate. At the same time, they foreclose the investigation of the immanence of aesthetics and politics to each other. Following Jacques Ranciere's theorization of democratic politics, the contributors here argue for a new understanding of the relations between politics and aesthetics by suggesting that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the "science of the sensible;' is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but a factor of a specific historical organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to poli­ tics, the essays that follow show that aesthetics and politics are im­ bricated in the constitution of specific orders of visibility and sense through which the political division into assigned roles and defined parts manifests itself. This collection seeks to locate Ranciere's relevance to contemporary art theory and practice in what might be called the hidden vanishing point of both avant-garde art and Ranciere's political philosophy:

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INTR O D UCTI O N

namely, the problem of community and collectivism. In particular, the continuing dependence of avant-garde artistic practice and theory on collectivist models is more problematic than ever today, as the collapse of socialist politics and the violent recrudescence of various nationalist or fundamentalist forms of communitarian politics require that these models be critiqued and actively challenged. For this reason, we place Ranciere's contributions to contemporary debates on politics and aes­ thetics into dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy's analysis of the concept of community. Against the backdrop of other post-Marxist accounts of community, Nancy's work supplies a notion of contingent being­ together that complements Ranciere's description of temporary soli­ darities that are constantly renegotiated through disagreement. By proposing the term communities of sense, the contributors to this volume seek to open the possibility of a politics of collectivity beyond collectivism or identity politics, on the one hand, and postcritical plural­ ism, on the other. To use the term community of sense is thus to par­ ticularize the meaning of community, to envision what community might mean after the fall of communism and the rethinking of democ­ racy. It is to recognize a contingent and nonessential manner of being­ together in a community whose coherence is no more than a fiction or a potentiality. Such a concept of community acknowledges politics to contain a sensuous or aesthetic aspect that is irreducible to ideology and idealization. This is the paradoxical core of the community of sense: that it works toward being-together only through a consistent disman­ tling of any idealized common ground, form, or figure. This paradox forms historical, political, and aesthetic conditions within which a crit­ ical engagement with contemporary cultural and artistic production needs to take place. While the stimulus for this project comes from Ranciere's reconsideration of the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics, which opposes the concept of "the people" to all forms of collective belonging based on common characteristics or values (social, ethnic, religious), the authors here seek to dismantle the typical post-Marxian opposition between "the people" and "community:' That is, they aim to reconsider and reopen the problem of community and collectivity as a crucial aporia of the historical avant-garde that has reemerged today, as contemporary artistic practices engage with the realities of global­ ization. Therefore, we must also acknowledge that a community of sense can

I NTRO DUCTI O N

3

be a reactionary formation that seeks to overcome politics by recourse to the shared experience of an organic communitJj like the nostalgic community of Walter Benjamin's storyteller or the "aesthetic state" of political romanticism. In the place of a dissensual politics of community, these formations substitute a mythic or pseudoScientific notion of com­ mon sense. Examples of this common sense include eugenics, the ro­ mantic populism of agrarian and third-world communism, or the statis­ tical fiction of consensus. Such formations haunt every conceptual or practical proposition of a community of sense. Yet rather than un­ critically adopting or rejecting concepts and practices of community in toto, the authors here aim to open them up to renegotiation and produc­ tive debate.

The Aesthetic Turn

Throughout much of the twentieth century, aesthetic theory was dis­ missed by artists and critics alike as a relic of bourgeoiS ideology and Western metaphysics. The significance of artistic and cultural produc­ tion was increasingly located in its relationship to structures of repre­ sentation and its dismantling of aesthetic conventions. The anti-art strategies of the historical avant-garde, from Soviet constructivism to Dada and surrealism, scandalized traditional artistic norms and institu­ tions. These strategies were taken up again by the postwar avant-garde, whose anti�art practices became associated with forms of critical theory exemplified by the 1983 anthology edited by Hal Foster, The Anti­ Aesthetic.l Such postmodernist art criticism of the 1980s, influenced by the reception of deconstruction and Frankfurt school critical theory, attacked post-Kantian aesthetics as the hidden link connecting the sup­ posed autonomy of modernist formalism with capitalist ideology.2 Aes­ thetics then became a code word for the elitist ideology of high versus low taste. Classical aesthetic standards of beauty were equally subject to skepticism. Beauty was exposed as an ideological construction whose norms varied historically and across cultures. However, with the Internet boom ( and concomitant stock-market bubble ) of the 1990S, popular art criticism rode the wave of "irrational exuberance:' This period witnessed the revival of the traditional termi­ nology of normative aesthetics, particularly in the celebratory use of the

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I NTROD UCTI O N

term beauty. The critic Dave Hickey was among the first of those who began to proselytize for a recovery of an aesthetics of beauty in the early 3 1990S. Hickey defines beauty simply as the visual pleasure found in the affect of images, but to this he adds a certain ethical tone, itself mobi­ lized against right-wing moralizers. Discussing the work of Robert Map­ plethorpe, he notes that it was so threatening to religious conservatives and their ilk because it made gay subcultural practices appear beautiful, by which he means that they somehow were "good" to behold because they were aestheticized. While bracketing the programmatic or norma­ tive implications of the term good, Hickey nevertheless suggests a uni­ versally understood value linking the good to the beautiful, which is inherent in the viewer's apprehension of the work.4 More recently, Arthur Danto and Elaine Scarry have radicalized Hickey's argument by absolutizing the connection between beauty and ethics. For Danto and Scarry the case is clear-cut: that which is beautiful is that which is morally good. Danto states that while beauty may not be part of art's essence and accordingly does not have to belong to an object for it to be considered art, those works that possess beauty generate a sense of well­ being in the viewer, who automatically registers this beauty as morally good. Danto argues that judgments of beauty are universal, in fact. "There are;' he writes, "descriptions of states of affairs that would be acceptable as beautiful and as ugly by pretty much anyone:'s Rather than regarding them as separate but related spheres of influence, Scarry goes even further than Danto by defining beauty as the condition of possibility for ethics. For Scarry, the beautiful automatically produces a feeling of "lateral regard" in which the beholder comes to care for non­ beautiful things because they also care for those that are beautifuL The unbeautiful is cared for only because of the proximate contagion of the beautifuL6 Danto also famously argues that the "end of art" has arrived, insofar as aesthetics itself has been made to accord completely with everyday life. Nothing remains of art except the conceptual force of its propositions, and therefore the modern aesthetic project is brought to an end through its dissolution into philosophy. Despite the seemingly wide divergence between the critical positions represented by "the return to beauty;' on the one hand, and the "anti­ aesthetic;' on the other, both perspectives share a reductive definition of aesthetics as normative and apoliticaL Aesthetics is thus celebrated as the basis for a new cosmopolitan universalism by the exponents of

I NTRO D UCTI O N

5

"beauty;' or condemned as a bourgeois mystification by the adherents of the "anti-aesthetic:' Aesthetics is here defined in two opposing ways, yet with the same conclusions as to its critical viability. In both cases, the immediately political aspects of aesthetics are denied. In opposition to these formulations, Ranciere points out in the open­ ing essay of this collection that aesthetics encompasses both a histor­ ically specific mode of identification of art and the forms of visibility and speech in which politics is necessarily staged. That is, for Ranciere, aesthetics participates in the historical configuration of social and per­ ceptual experience. At the same time, aesthetics does not simply repli­ cate or structure political systems of power, but reconfigures them in ways that suggest a different division of social roles and forms of subjec­ tivization. Looking back over the trajectory of the arts in the West, Ranciere finds three major regimes of identification of art, each of which has passed on, imperfectly and over the course of time, into the next. The arts of the modern era belong to what he calls the "aesthetic regime;' which he differentiates from the "ethical regime" that originated with Plato and the "poetiC regime" allied with Aristotle and his legacy. Under the ethical regime, there was no Art as such, because the arts had not been designated as separate spheres with their own linked competen­ cies. In the subsequent poetic regime, the fine arts were separated from other means of making at the same time that they were differentiated among themselves according to social hierarchies of medium, genre, and style. Within this genealogy, "aesthetics" marks a specific regime of art in which the identification of art is no longer based on an academic hier­ archy of genres, subjects, and mediums but on the recognition of a sensible mode of being that gives art its specificity. With the advent of the Enlightenment, the fine arts became Art in general as philosophers such as Baumgarten and Kant sought to grasp the character of all the arts by linking them to problems associated with the production of sense. Yet Ranciere points out that by asserting its autonomy from imitation and the hierarchies it implies, art also demolished its indepen­ dence from other ways of doing and making. This exposes an underlin­ ing paradox in the aesthetic regime of art: at the same time in which sensibility constitutes the singularity of art, it also destroys any criteria upon which this Singularity can be delimited.7

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I NTR O D UCTI O N

This paradox indicates, for Ranciere, the way in which the philosophi­ cal problem of sense is always also a political problem. The effort to isolate a specific realm of experience and a mode of thought that is inherently foreign to thought, namely "sense;' not only subverts the autonomy of reason: it also undermines the social distribution of roles and political forms of authority. Ranciere bases this argument on his reading of Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.S For Schiller, the autonomy of aesthetic experience consists precisely in the freedom the mind acquires from the dictates of reason. Aesthetic experi­ ence allows for "free play;' that is, for the suspension of oppositions between sensation and meaning, form and matter, activity and passivity. This means that aesthetic experience is grounded not in the reversal of the hierarchical opposition between "active" understanding and "pas­ sive" sensibility, but in a new division of sense, one that is based on equality rather than on domination. Aesthetics thus delimits a space in which thought and sense coexist in a way that points to new ways of sharing. By conceptualizing aesthetics in this manner, Schiller exposed the political potential of aesthetics as a site of harmony and at the same time as a site of disagreement that challenges the hierarchical and exclu­ sive distribution of roles between those that rule and those that are ruled. For Schiller, aesthetic exp erience opens the possibility to envision a new form of universality and a new kind of emancipated humanity.9 Following Schiller, Ranciere argues that the autonomy of the aesthetic was constituted through the identification of an inherently hetero­ geneous sensory experience and not through the opposition between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of ethics, as for Lyotard, or between art's autonomy and the heteronomous conditions of its social production, as formulated by Adorno. By the same token, for Ranciere the aesthetic regime does not manifest an exclusive opposition between the avant-garde's demand for the integration of art into life and the modernist insistence on formal autonomy. Instead, it offers a paradox: neither autonomy nor heteronomy, but rather the politically effective negotiation of this opposition. By describing the historical breaks and self-contradictions that con­ stituted the aesthetic regime, Ranciere counters the tendency to essen­ tialize Art ( or "art as such" ) by historicizing aesthetics as a specifically modern project. At the same time, he corrects for the distortions of historicism by stressing the contingency of the historical forms of organi-

IN TRO D UCTI O N

7

zation and identification of art, including the aesthetic regime of the arts. This grasp of the contingency and self-contradictions of modern aes­ thetics enables Ranciere to critique the false historical distinction be­ tween modern and so-called postmodern art. Such periodization, as he shows, is governed by terms that can be assigned with equal justification to either side of an ostensible postmodern break: political versus non­ political, aesthetic versus anti-aesthetic. The concept of the aesthetic regime also furnishes the basis for Ranciere's critique of teleological nar­ ratives of the end of art or end of politics. Since art is already circum­ scribed by its chiasmatic relation with life and non-art at the moment of its historical inception as a concept and a practice, its sublation has the character of an advent rather than a goal-oriented process: not the end of art, but rather its continuous restarting or false start.

Politics and the Appearance of the People

For Ranciere, the instantiation of politics is an exceptional occurrence. 10 Politics is fundamentally the particularized, and particularizing, enact­ ment of a drive toward equality. The political therefore lies in the endless renegotiation of the terms in which politics is staged and its subjects are determined. As Ranciere writes, the question of who is aSSigned a place in a given order of policy is determined through a specific partitioning of the sensible as the commonly given, as "an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and of the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise:'l l Politics exists when this order is disrupted by those who have no part: for example when workers, who take no part in the community of knowledge be­ cause they are defined as those who have no time for anything other than work, invalidate this order of time and its divisions into work and rest, labor, and leisure.I2 It is an act of repartitioning defined parts and assigned roles, disputing the inscription of equality within a space that is defined as common, of staging a clash between politics as usual ("pol­ icy" or "the police" for Ranciere) and a truly egalitarian politics (a defi­ nition that bears comparison with Etienne Balibar's concept of "equa-

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I NTROD UCTI O N

liberty") . 13 Politics is aesthetic in principle because it reconfigures the common field of what is seeable and sayable. Ranciere's notion of the partitioning of the sensible suggests a possi­ ble redefinition of what constitutes political artistic practice under pres­ ent historical conditions. The inseparability of aesthetics from politics necessitates a different set of artistic strategies than the ones that were instrumental to political artistic practices in the seventies and eighties. By identifying artistic strategies through which new identities and com­ munities are formed, and developing a framework in which these strat­ egies can be productively discussed, Communities of Sense aims to show that aesthetics is not antinomic to politics. One such framework is offered by Ranciere's redefinition of "ap­ pearance:' In Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, he shows that poli­ tics is a stage on which the people appear as divided and where equality is enacted as both present and absent. Politics designates subjects that do not coincide with the parties of the state of society: it is therefore a site of disidentification, of a miscount in which the sum of parts never equals the whole. Rather than identification, politics enables processes of subjectivization. Political subjectivization consists in the enactment of equality-or the handling of; a wrong-by people who have no part in the social whole. Politics, for Ranciere, has a theatrical aspect in that it is always a matter of fictions, of a "poetic framing" of specific appearances. In this conceptualization of politics, "appearance is not an illusion that is opposed to the real. It is the introduction of a visible into the field of experience, which then modifies the regime of the visible . . . . It splits reality and reconfigures it as double:'14 Ranciere thus differentiates his concept of politics from the one pre­ sented within Marxist discourse, in which politics is criticized as that which conceals the reality of the social. This discourse locates the truth of politics precisely in what politics is meant to conceal. Thus the main function of this discourse, designated by Ranciere as metapolitics, is always to detect signs of untruth in every political practice by pointing to a gap between names and things, or between appearances and real­ ities. Metapolitics constitutes itself as a "symptomology;' since it can only demonstrate that the truth of any phenomenon consists precisely in its falseness. In this regard, the term ideology is not only a new word for illusion but a term that marks a new status for the true: "the true as the truth of the false."ls Within this new epistemology, the political

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9

appearance of the people in democracy is also interpreted as an illusion concealing the reality of a conflict between man and citizen, the labor­ ing people and the sovereign people. Yet what if the fact that people are divided is not a "scandal to be deplored;' but the very condition for politics? For Ranciere, this is precisely the case, since "there is politics from the moment there exists the sphere of appearance of a subject, 'the people; whose particular attribute is to be different from itself, internally divided:'16 Thus, con­ trary to the claims of ideology critique, proclamations of equality like the Declaration of the Rights of Man are not "appearances" that conceal reality, but rather an effective mode for the appearance of the people. The problem in politics is thus not to contradict appearances but to confirm them, to maximize the powers of faint inscriptions and the spheres of their materialization.17 What happens in our contemporary age of consensus is the erasure of divisions among the people. Consensus eliminates the splintering mech­ anism of appearance in favor of an approach that erases internal differ­ ence. The removal of the people's sphere of appearance means that the "people are always both totally present and totally absent at once. They are entirely caught in a structure of the visible where everything is on show and where there is thus no longer any place for appearance:'lS According to Ranciere, the problem in our age is not the "loss of the real;' but the loss of appearance as mechanism for producing difference. This enables the political constitution of nonidentary subjects who disturb a specific division of the perceptible by linking together separate worlds and organizing spaces where new communities can be formed. What are the stakes for artistic practices in the face of the loss of appearance? What are the implications of Ranciere's almost counterin­ tuitive emphasis on the importance of appearance to our understanding of the political viability of contemporary artistic practices? How does his unique conceptualization of politics offer a way to rethink the historical shift from what are often described as the politicized art practices of the sixties, seventies, and eighties to the apolitical and conciliatory artistic projects of the nineties and the new millennium, whether beauty-based or community-based? Ranciere's reconsideration of appearance suggests that the difference between current artistic production and earlier, ostensibly more political artistic practices lies in the models of criticality they invoke. Models of

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seventies institutional critique, for example, were embedded in a Marxian discourse of politics and therefore conceived themselves in terms of a critical negation of institutional and art-world politics. For artists such as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, and Michael Asher, the focus of critique was most often the museum, which was criticized for its presentation of artworks as universal and autonomous objects devoid of any social, political, and economic values. By presenting itself as the guardian of a separate realm of aesthetic experience, a neutral space for the disin­ terested contemplation of art, the museum supposedly conceals its status as a political institution whose main function is to reproduce a repressive organization of power and an unjust distribution of capital. The seventies strategy of exposing contradictions was thus not only meant to uncover appearances but also to bring back "the real" in the form of facts. In the eighties, in response to the influential work of Jean Baudrillard, saving the real in political art through "communicative action" and "external referents" became as urgent as dismantling ap­ pearances.19 Yet in our contemporary information age, opacity is often not the outcome of a gap between political appearances and social realities, but the result of the ceaseless proliferation of information. It is the persistent emphasis on information and the "facticity" of knowledge that leads to a particular economy of power and visibility in which, as Etienne Balibar argues, the dominant powers do not practice "secrecy" any longer, since the "crucial determinants of6ur own action remain invisible in the very forms of (tele )visibility:'20 Factographicstrategies of institutional critique become complicit in the elimination of dispute by substituting the objectification of problems for the enactment of equal­ ity and the manifestation of wrong. The demarcation of "real" facts simply replicates the same forms of partition that enable the identifica­ tion of parts and the distribution of roles, a division of the population into sociologically defined groups (capitalists and workers, oppressors and oppressed) whose conflicting interests can be resolved through laws and bureaucratic expertise. If politics is a form of aesthetics, then the problem is not how to uncover appearances and bring back the "real;' but how to create a sphere in which equality is enacted by the divided subject of the people. Disagreement is not simply the confrontation between interests, but the opening of forms of subjectivization for those who are in between names, groups, and classes. The goal of this type of politics is to stage a

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gap that does not reveal a secret by exposing contradictions, but that repartitions a particular order of the sensible through the splintering mechanism of appearance. The task of art today is not to make the invisible visible through the recontextualization of given information, but to reconfigure the visible and its spectacular economies in a way that reconfigures society's current division into parties and disrupts the distribution of social roles. This form of operation necessitates a dif.­ ferent model of criticality, one that is not based on symptomology and a negative form of critique. Such a model of criticality produces difference from within and enables processes of disidentification. For many con­ temporary artists, the museum is no longer merely an institution but a form of organization for possible social and cultural operations. The main challenge facing contemporary artistic practices today is thus not the critique of institutions, but the creation of what Balibar calls "places of fiction" and describes in terms of "the production of the real on the basis of experience itself'21 This concern is inseparable from the ques­ ' tion of how to create a stage upon which the people can appear, and furthermore, appear as inherently multiple.

Communities of Sense

Historically, artistic practices have addressed the issue of community through problems of address, reception, and distribution. The avant­ gardes of the twenties, for instance, founded their formal practices on the hopes of speaking to a collective audience, and in turn transforming that audience in the service of new structures of social and political organization. These avant-gardes attempted to imagine new modes of address in order to articulate a newly understood spectatorship in re­ sponse to the changing conditions of modernity. The realization that traditional forms of viewing based on individual experience were no longer relevant made the question of collectivity urgent. Yet, it could be argued that the people, as an expression of community, are precisely who or what is overlooked in the utopian practices of the early twentieth century, even though these practices claimed to speak to and mobilize a collective. The question of "the people" must be related to, and differentiated from, the avant-garde's conceptualization of this collective in terms of

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"the masses:' The avant-garde repeatedly confronted, yet never man­ aged to theorize, the problem of the constitution of a mass audience. Walter Benjamin developed the phase "simultaneous collective recep­ tion" to address the possibility of cultural production that could activate collective spectatorship, a possibility that Benjamin Buchloh has ad­ dressed with reference to the work of EI Lissitzky and the Soviet avant­ garde.22 The concept of simultaneous collective reception fails by pre­ supposing that there exists a body capable of some form of common sense or commonality in the act of reception. To the extent that the utopian projects of the avant-garde were compromised by their mobili­ zation under fascist and totalitarian regimes, those compromises hinged not on the fact of the work's politicization, but rather on the assumption of a shared and common reception by a collective. This assumption neglects to conceptualize what this collective is, or, more significantly, could be. The historical avant-gardes aspired to create the conditions for a shared reception of cultural production through practices that would transform viewers' cognitive and perceptual outlook and mobilize them as a political force. Yet while the avant-gardes experimented with ways to transform perception in the interest of an ultimate transformation of everyday life, they frequently took their audiences to be an already constituted unity. They did not attempt to find ways to approach the addressee as a member of multiple and disparate populations, or of an audience that was itself internally differentiated. As a result, their aspira­ tions were neutralized by the enforced identifications that this concept of a pregiven commonality or collectivity necessarily entailed. The co­ optation of avant-garde art practices by totalitarian modes of identifica­ tion followed directly from their problematic embrace of the concept of the common as a form of identity. This need not be understood as a failure of the avant-garde project of "art into life:' Rather, it opens the possibility of rethinking the avant-garde project in terms of an internally plural collectivity.23 After the decline of utopian thinking characteristic of cultural and theoretical production in the first half of the twentieth century, critics in the postwar period voiced skepticism concerning not only the viability of collectivity, but even its deSirability. Communities of Sense is motivated, in part, by the debates over community and a politics of the people that

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have emerged in the waning decades of state socialism. Together with Ranciere's work, other theorists, including Etienne Balibar and Jean-Luc Nancy, have proposed new ways to address the problem of community beyond identitarian politics.24 In the eighties, a new wave of discourses on community gained mo­ mentum and relevance by critiquing definitions of community built around identity. Benedict Anderson's well known Imagined Communities asserted that all communities based on the concept of identity are productive fictions mobilized to the service of ideological power in the form of nationalism. As an imaginary formation, community lacks any natural basis in geographical territory, language, culture, or ethnicity. The principal problem that Anderson sets out to address is the seeming paradox of nationalism and socialism. The centrality of this issue, in turn, reflects the limits of Marxist critical thinking. The questions An­ derson asks are, in part, the product of his ideological premise that socialism entailed the dissolution of atavistic forms of collectivity, as well as the preemption of community based on imagined identities. He puzzles over the fact that the fall of the Soviet republics, still an embodi­ ment of twentieth-century Marxism, left nothing in its wake but re­ publics, each at war over territory and sovereignty.24 Within the Marxist logic of Imagined Communities, the critique of community and the cri­ tique of ideology appear to be antithetical. Despite the crucial questions it raised, Anderson's book offered no positive or prescriptive strategy for socialist politics. Instead, it marked a disillusionment with leftist models of collectivity that had become widespread by the eighties. From the other side of the spectrum, the concept of community came under duress from situationist critiques of the commodity form. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord claimed that the spectacle tends to foreclose the possibility of community in its colonization of every aspect of everyday life. Under capitalism, which divides and arbitrates all sense, "the Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images:'25 Yet Debord wavered between his description of the total banishment of community from modern life and his faith in the capacities of small groups to reroute or reverse the effects of spectacle through play tactics that opposed the reification and commodification of everyday life. Like Anderson and Debord, Jean-Luc Nancy addresses the possible

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sense of the term community after the collapse of the utopian ideals of socialism and the historical avant-gardes. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy begins with Sartre's assertion that "communism is the unsurpass­ able horizon of our time" to demonstrate the limits of the thinking against which community had come to be defined. These limits were bound by the regulative concepts of individuality and totality, a para­ digm that depended on the acceptance of modernity as a process of atomization. Moreover, these regulative concepts rested on a set of presuppositions, among them the traditional philosophical category of the self, which not only establishes a related notion of community as a collection of identified selves, but also determines it a priori as a form of totality. This is to say that the metaphysical concept of the self as absolute subject makes thinking the plurality of community impossible. At the same time, paradoxically, it sets community up as a problem, as another kind of self mimetically linked to the individual self in the form of a unified body politic. Historicall)lj this was expressed by the figure of a leader, such as a king, who metonymically stood in for the people. For Nancy, the absolutist logic of metaphysics casts itself into relation with its other, with that which undoes absoluteness, precisely because as absolutes, both individuality and totality exclude the possibility of their mediation. In this sense, to the degree that community is permitted to exist, to be thought, it is represented to thought as nothing other than that which dissolves what Nancy calls "the autarchy of absolute imma­ nence;' the irrational fixity of absolutes.26 In other words, community could be rethought, insofar as it can be expressed as a single phenome­ non, as a form of relation rather than as self or being. Relationality is a function of the distribution and organization of sense, what Nancy calls "spacing:' This approach to the issue of collec­ tivity posits it as internally multiple and dynamic. Being is constituted only in relation to others: one's being is a function of the way in which sense is distributed, or rather, spaced. This spacing not only sets the condition of relationality among beings but also of each singular being's relation to itself. Instead of an alterity founded on the originary aliena­ tion of the individual, spacing makes singular beings other, both for one another and for themselves, just as it conditions the possibility of con­ nection and exchange among beings. Spacing introduces an interrup­ tion, an element of disjunction such that community itself becomes the enactment of a dislocation.27

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15

In this way, Nancy redefines community as the being-in-common of sociality. The potentiality of both cultural and political activity is predi­ cated upon a new understanding of the way in which community is not a grouping of individuals already consumed in the reproduction of a static totality based on identityj rather, community is enacted through contingent modalities of spacing. Nancy thus forecloses the possibility that his idea of the "being-in-common of sociality" could be understood as a form of essentialism. In "Of Being-ln··Common," he argues that­ because of the internally plural nature of being, which is always a func­ tion of process and enactment-there is no such thing as a common being, and therefore no such thing as fixed communion. By contrast, there is being-in-common. In other words, while being is not common, being-in-common is the condition for the possibility of meaning. Exis­ tence is only materialized through being partitioned and shared.28 While there is no essence of being, the relationships, however dissonant, among singularities form the foundations of communication, which in turn produces community. An implication of this logic is that the sense of community is born of neither morality nor the institution of a tran­ scendental law. Rather, this sense precedes those categories. It is sense produced in common, through the division and distribution of sensa­ tion and Signification. Nancy takes care to differentiate his concept of community from formulations of collectivity and community developed by the historical avant-garde. As a point of departure for his argument, he critiques Georges Bataille's understanding of community as the alternative to social atomism. For Bataille, Nancy claims, community was based on, and ultimately could not supersede, the "community of lovers:'29 Ac­ cordingly, Bataille despaired of any possible political form of commu­ nity. Unlike Bataille, Nancy Signals his investment in community as a problem of social and political vicissitudes, rather than a question of the collectivization of private experience. 30 In fact, private experience is a category made impossible by Nancy's thinking, wherein sense is under­ stood as the spacing of relationships among a plurality of terms. Critical as he is of Bataille's emphasis on eros and eroticism as a privileged site of opposition to the empty atomism of modernity, Nancy shares Bataille's drive to situate community as a form of resistance. The word communism, for Nancy, articulates the desire to recover commu­ nity from identitarian politics, on the one hand, and from what Nancy

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terms the "techno-political dominion" of rational secular capitalism} on the other.31 VVhile socialist utopias faltered in part because of their eventual subordination to technocratic theocracies and totalitarian ide­ ologies} the desire that once motivated those utopias remains relevant to the present. Moreover} as Nancy's analysis suggests} the extent to which they became compromised through historical events also partially re­ sults from the way that collectivity was conceptualized as a form of social unity, a shared identity founded on a plurality of subjects made one through the very concept of identity. This logic led} circularly, back to atomism: the many composing the one in the absence of shared} enacted relationships. The forging of relationships between groupings that are contingent} rather than rigidly composed by either a formalist logic or a unified ideological program} emerges as a central question of the essays col­ lected here. Our redefinition of aesthetics and politics addresses the complexity of new social formations wrought by globalization and is founded on an understanding of sociality and community as historically contingent forms of organization and distribution. This becomes all the more urgent in the face of the many turbulent outbreaks of ethnic violence} racism} and religious fundamentalism since 1989} in reaction against the increasing grip of globalization and its forms of enforced consensus. In responding to these developments} many contemporary art practices attempt to articulate new relations between the social and the common. The recent rethinking of issues of community in art projects that consider themselves community based or community ori­ ented has had to negotiate the ambiguous legacy of the historical avant­ garde's utopian projects} as well as the ways in which these projects tend to fail under the foreclosure of social bonds by capitalism.

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Community

In contemporary practices} the debate about community-based art fo­ cuses on the larger question of what a community is and whether it of­ fers a desirable model for art or for politics. VVhile advocates of commu­ nity-based art such as Grant Kester have proposed consensual models of "politically coherent" community building practices} Miwon Kwon} in turn} has critiqued the ideal of community because it assumes the

I N T RO D U C T I O N

17

transparency of unified concepts of subjectivity and identity and re­ duces differences to homogeneous collectives. In her book One Place After Another: Site-Spec�fic Art and Locational Identity, Kwon warns against the dangers of art falling into the trap of offering essentialist representations of group identity. Instead, following Jean-Luc Nancy, she affirms the possibility of a collective artistic praxis that can "un­ work" community and thereby render it "inoperable:' For Kester however, community-based art has transformative potential in its ability to provide a consensual ground for public acts of political speech and resistance. Here, consensus and collectivity are valued posi­ tively as instantiations of democratic relations between the artist, the viewer, and the artwork. Collaborative strategies are deemed to resist the authority of a single artist's voice and instead create "politically coherent communities:'32 Kester is interested in collaborative works such as those by the Austrian collective WochenKlauser (whose projects facilitate dialogues among unlikely constituents and create "interventions in com­ munity development"), which he holds up as facilitating ethical projects building solidarit)'j consensus, and binding intersubjective relations.33 Such an approach comes out of identity politics' location of race and class solidarity as a precondition for collective consciousness formation and political action, an approach that extrapolates the coherence of the individ­ ual political subject and projects it onto the agency of a community. This contest of community versus being-in-common rehearses earlier struggles to negotiate the viability of critique under the onslaught of the administered world. If Marxist art criticism in the fifties and sixties seemed to have come to rest on strategies of negative critique, there was, on the other hand, a tendency to outright celebration and affirmation of design culture and its homogenizing of difference throughout the eigh­ ties and nineties. This reaction against Marxist models of critique has lead to a contemporary situation in which criticalit)'j narrowly defined as an increasingly isolated and divisive irritant, is contrasted to the social, which is heralded as the real world out there beyond ideology. From this point of view, Nicolas Bourriaud has advocated the project of contemporary art as a struggle to make new social connections in the present, rather than an avant-gardist striving to prepare for an imminent future. His Relational Aesthetics, published after he curated a number of exhibitions in the nineties, such as Traffic at cAPc-Bordeaux (1996), proposed the replacement of the subversive and critical function of art

18

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by moments of sociability and areas of conviviality. However in this contrast of the critical to the social, the social is first collapsed to sociability, and finally and foremost to conviviality. Bourriaud asks, in Relational Aesthetics, if it is still possible to generate relationships and not just spectacular representations. He asserts that in a world of increasing mass-media saturation, communications now di­ vide the social sphere, whereas art strives to achieve connections among viewers. Art thus becomes a kind of social agent whose employment is all the more necessary as social governmental policies were dismantled across the board by Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and the authoritarian liberalism of post-Soviet countries. There is a danger, here, of tenden­ cies to present art as a compensatory activity, as "communitarian" art practices increase proportionately to the decline in leftist governmental agendas after the fall of Communism. This is the model of art as public service put forward in an exhibi­ tion like Public Service, shown at Sparwasser HQgallery in Berlin in the summer of 2006. VVhile curator Tadej Pogacar's claims for "new public service models based on participation, exchange, solidarity" can and should be distinguished from the works presented there, a question nonetheless presents itself regarding how collaborative practices con­ stitute a public and avoid cooptation or commodification by a global service-based lifestyle economy. As Miwon Kwon has argued, art that considers itself in the service of the public interest unproblematically assumes community as a whole and the public good as a transparent ideal, and it leads to situations in which the artist may inadvertently aid in the colonization of difference. Art in the public interest often presents the public good as consensus and replaces the disagreement of politics with a conciliatory and unproblematic approach to ideas of the public. VVhile Bourriaud has claimed that relational art is political art, his approach has been criticized for its monolithic approach to commonal­ ity. Claire Bishop has objected to the ways in which the relationships set up in "relational" works rest on an ideal of subjectivity as a whole and community as immanent togetherness, rather than allowing the antag­ onistic confrontations that she sees as provocative of a democratic pub­ lic sphere.34 While Bishop's antagonistic model challenges the convivial bonhomie of Bourriaud's approach, her model of critique attempts to

I N T RO D U C T I O N

19

reclaim art from the indistinction of social praxis by asserting the spheres of the aesthetic and the social to be "mutually exclusive:' Aesthetics, in this case, remains caught between the rock of "political formalism;' as Claire Bishop charges, and the hard place of convivial sociality and compensatory public-service activity. Far from being a fundamentally apolitical smoke screen or distraction ( spectacle or sim­ ulacrum, as Baudrillard and Debord argued) or a coded form of ideol­ ogy ( the role that it served throughout much of the history of social art) , aesthetics can be taken as the space in which the limits of the political itself are susceptible of being retraced or redrawn. It is within this space that the decision on what counts as politics can itself be submitted to political contestation and debate. Art borrows or contests the authority to determine where, or in what, politics begins and ends, but only insofar as it also redefines the limits, quite simply, of art "itself'

Overview of Contributors

The essays included in this collection pose challenging but necessary questions, while avoiding the temptation to provide definitive, program­ matic answers. The first section, "Rethinking Aesthetics;' includes au­ thors who are engaged in a reconsideration of aesthetics since the Enlightenment by examining its links with social and political experi­ ence. They insist on rethinking the link between aesthetics and politics today, both for a historical understanding of modern art, as well as for the continuing production of viable critical art practices. They explore the ways in which aesthetics frames the sensible and possibilities for being-in-common. Aesthetics is not taken as grounds for, but as a means to construct the possibility of, shared meaning. Jacques Ranciere examines the seemingly opposed but historically intertwined logics of aesthetic autonomy and "art into life;' from the Enlightenment to the present day. Building on his previous work on disagreement in politics, this essay posits art as a key locus where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. He proposes the possibility of a positive/ constructive strategy, one that exchanges the negative/ critical dimension of sixties leftist poli­ tics for the staging of new subjectivities and communities. In the move

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from denunciation to staging, the contingency of the political-as­ enacted confronts traditional notions of politics-and of community and subjectiVity-that were entirely predetermined. Undermining the separation, in theories of modernism, between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy, he offers new possibilities for understanding the dilemmas inherent in both the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics. To this end, Ranciere analyzes contemporary artistic strat­ egies such as the joke, the collection, the invitation, and mystery in order to challenge the ways in which recent work is or is not effectively politicaL Alexander Potts places theoretical arguments for the "end of art" in context, showing how the aporias and anti-aesthetic tendencies com­ monly associated with postmodernism's supposed break with modern­ ism can be traced back to romantic aesthetic theories and practices of the nineteenth century. Through a close analysiS of individual works of art, Potts extends Ranciere's historical critique of the concept of post­ modernism and Agamben's anti-historicist critique of modern concepts of the artwork to a critical examination of anti-aesthetic qualities in the paintings of Turner and Delacroix, from the use of irony and textual supplements to strategies of narrative fragmentation. yet unlike Agam­ ben, Potts stresses the critical and ethical significance of the "negative dialectics" of romantic aesthetics, suggesting that whether elitist or democratic, a modern "community of sense;' unlike the classical ideal represented by Hegel's ancient Greece, "can only be substantiated by way of a conceptual, discursive supplement" to the contingency and subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Anti-aesthetic strategies were there­ fore fundamental to the politics of the romantic aesthetic project from its historical inception. By locating the origins of Ranciere's "aesthetic regime" in Hegel rather than in the revolutionary republicanism of Schiller, moreover, Potts suggests that a certain model of the anti-aes­ thetic may have been historically mobilized against democratic forms of politics. Toni Ross argues that the postmodernist or anti-aesthetic reception of conceptual art and institutional critique represses the ethical and politi­ cal implications of these practices' adherence to a specifically aesthetic model of critical autonomy. Contrary to recent claims that have been made for relational aesthetics and for the ethical and social value of classical norms of beauty, however, Ross shows that the substitution of

I N T RO D U C T I O N

21

idealized forms of democratic sociality for modernist aesthetic princi­ ples actually subordinates politics to a model of harmony and symmetry that serves to stifle dissent and difference. In place of the sterile oppo si­ tion between anti-aesthetic criticism and postcritical celebrations of a "return to beauty," Ro ss propo ses a psychoanalytic ethics o f aesthetics in which Kantian aesthetic autonomy is understood as the ungovernable excess and alterity of sensate experience within the symbolic order of pregiven subjective and institutional identities. She considers the rele­ vance of this model o f aesthetics to institutional critique, developing a reading of Louise Lawler's photographic work that complicates the pro grammatic assumptions o f postmodernist art criticism while dif­ ferentiating the enigmatic beauty of Lawler's work from classical models of artistic and communal harmony. Ranjana Khanna reexamines a differing history of "common sense" than its well-known metaphorical definition stemming from Kant's third Critique. Looking back to the Earl of Shaftesbury and to Vico, Khanna suggests that their usage o f sensus communis presents disidentification formulated in demetaphorization. Commonality can o nly be sensed as coming undone through nonidentification, demetaphorization, un­ working, and the sense of the liminal. Disidentification furthermore points to a means of understanding the altered conditions of contempo­ rary art production that is no longer framed through the modernist logic o f exile, but rather through a concept of asylum. Khanna sees Mona Hatoum's work as emblematic o f such a shift, using the senses to break down concepts of wholeness and metaphors of unity in order to formulate different notions of the subject, community, and the human. Hatoum's works resist thinking diaspora and displacement in terms o f a metaphysics of presence, identity, identification, o r even ontology. Rather, presence is constantly fractured and broken down, presenting instead a sensual labor o f non-belonging and disidentification. The second section, "Partitioning the Sensible," investigates the ways in which sense has been constructed in the historical avant-garde, as well as mobilized in today's global visual and political culture. The authors in this section analyze the evocation of SOCiality in terms of the economies o f visibility and patterns o f intelligibility that structure sen­ sorial experience. While models of subjectivity and community often contribute to homogenizing agendas of social control and ritualized forms of violence, they also open po ssibilities of a politics of dissent.

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J. Demos locates the Dada event, including the infamous Barf(�s trial, as a site of disagreement in which the relationship between politics and aesthetics is negotiated anew. The event, in the context of Dada, is understood as a model of the "heterogeneous sensible;' or what Ran­ ci(:�re claims to be art's irreducible state as a form of aesthetics and politics. Demos thus positions the Dada event as an opportunity to redefine autonomy as "an autonomous form of social experience" rather than as an ideal realm of contemplation separated from the social and political. Dada practices, as Demos situates them, become a significant model for rethinking the relationship between aesthetics and politics today, in ways critical of the conciliatory aspects of " relational aes­ thetics:' David Joselit examines the role of community formation in contem­ porary social spaces that include screen-based images as an integral part of their construction. He contrasts two examples of suburban spaces whose residents have become caught in a mediated public sphere that turns them into what he calls "citizen cursors:' The first is a house designed by Bill Gates that surrounds the viewer with images, turning them into a living cursor that navigates its . way through a half-actual, half-virtual living environment. The second is an installation by Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies, which uses video to frame temporary but vital connections between the members of a suburban community. He discusses both proj ects in an exploration of how spaces, turned into hypermedia, apportion the senses through the adaptation to a virtual world where one can jump continuously from one picture to another. He considers the kinds of resistance possible in these spaces and the kinds of complicity they demand. Reinhold Martin relates technologies of mass customization to histor­ ical developments within corporate architecture. He traces the geneal­ ogy of this architecture and its recent emphasis on "people;' as opposed to "human resources;' through a critical case study of architecture de­ signed for Union Carbide. By comparing two headquarters designed for the company twenty-five years apart, he finds continuity in the rhetoric of mass customization, as it papers over the contempt it has for the people it proclaims to support and brazenly reduces those it doesn't support to a state of what Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life:' The third section, "The Limits of Community," considers the viability of modern and contemporary models of artistic and political critique in T.

.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

23

the context of globalization. The essays in this section suggest a shift from utopianism toward an investigation of processes of identification and disidentification. Community is taken as a continual process of negotiation, one that can open up to new social relations but is often troubled by conflict, both internally and externally. Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga analyze current artistic proj­ ects that focus on social change through the formation of temporary experimental communities. These communities are defined in their es­ say as "boundary organizations" that allow for collaboration between individuals and groups with different professional backgrounds and skills (artists, architects, environmentalists, political activists) and often incompatible interests. Artists such as Marjetica Potre and art collec­ tives like Sarai pursue projects that facilitate the creation of communica­ tion networks between these groups in order to actively intervene in the ecological, cultural, and social reformation of urban spaces, while at the same time developing new representational forms to display these proj­ ects in art institutions. Basualdo and Laddaga differentiate these proj­ ects from the historical project of the avant-garde and artistic practices of the seventies, as well as from the homogeneous communities that came to be formed under recent community-based projects. They point to the need to develop an interdisciplinary critical model that will address the complex nature of these projects, in which artistic actions are inseparable from, among others, urban planning, media studies, and social activism. Rachel Haidu addresses Thomas Hirschhorn's Musee Precaire Albinet (2004) to question the viabilities of the political and art historical category of "institutional critique" in the contemporary context of the contingenc.:y and impermanence of identity resulting from capitalism's enforced migrations. Haidu argues that Hirschhorn's strategy rests on imitation, rather than the critical methods characteristic of the institu­ tional critique of the sixties and seventies. This imitative approach, in turn, both participates in dominant forms of institutional subjectiviza­ tion and simultaneously produces different relations of exchange and interaction, in resistance to traditional forms of institutional dominance. Haidu thus suggests that artists engaging with the problem of institutions and the frame of the museum have more to do than simply expose the hidden dynamics of institutional power. They also may choose to at­ tempt to reconfigure the social relations governed by the frame.

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Seth McCormick's essay, "Neo-Dada 1951-54: Between the Aesthetics of Persecution and the Politics of Identity," analyzes aesthetic factors o f identification and political subj ectivizatio n in a work whose significance has been universally repressed in histories of the postwar period: the 1954 painting Star, commissio ned by the artist Rachel Rosenthal from Jasper Johns and inspired, in part, by the early monochrome paintings of Robert Rauschenberg. Against the asso ciation of the latter two artists with a neo-Dada aesthetic o f political indifference or homosexual si­ lence, McCormick argues for a more complex interpretation of the politics of homosexual identity under McCarthyism. Examining the stakes of homo sexual activism in the early fifties, when a political iden­ tity for homo sexuals could be established solely through their identifica­ tio n with what Agamben calls the "bare life" of Jews under Nazism, McCormick locates a parallel in the influence of the Nazi-persecuted artist Kurt Schwitters o n Rauschenberg, Rosenthal, andJohns during this period. Although the model o f Schwitters's "degenerate art" enabled artists to give form to the total expropriation and politicization of homo­ sexuality under McCarthyism, Star reveals how a politics of subjectiviza­ tion and an aesthetics of bare life remain inextricably linked. In "Post Communist Notes on Some Vertov Stills;' Yates McKee performs a close structural and historical reading of key stills from Verto v's Man with a Movie Camera according to the Benj aminian model of a "dialectics of standstill;' which renegotiates the sense of continuity between historical past and present. McKee situates those stills as inter­ ruptions of the "operative" time ofVerto v's productivist project. By locat­ ing the limitations o f Vertov's progressive politics in his films' inability to come to terms with the Islamic other, McKee provokes a reflection not only o n Russian constructivism and its legacy, but on the present-day fallout of global communism. Through performative historical readings, the essay attempts to enact a political intervention in this field. Emily Apter's essay "Thinking Red: Ethical Militance and the Group Subj ect" aims to disentangle responsible and necessary militance fro m the discourse of terror and militarization that has eclipsed rigorous political activism since the late seventies. As denunciations of terrorism have veered into dismissals of leftist ideo logy and, worse still, authoriza­ tions of imperialist war, it is crucial now to revisit the origins of radical thought and its formulations of subj ectivity. In order to reveal the disturbingly clo se tension between militance and militarization, Apter

I N T RO D U C T I O N

2S

focuses on key moments of art and politics of the last thirty years. Through critical analyses of Gorin's and Godard's film lci et ailleurs, Guyotat's novel Eden, Eden, Eden, Richter's October 18, 1977 painting series, as well as such political groups as the Red Brigade and the Weather Underground, Apter evokes a dangerous slide of "this becomes that;' as vigilant civic activism freefalls into paramilitary terror. The collection concludes with a speCial interview with Etienne Balibar, who, like Ranciere, was a student of Louis Althusser and is one of the main representatives of "the political turn" in Marxist thought. His recent work asks whether the globalization of politics also means a politics of globalization. By formulating this question he points to the ways in which politics today is defined less as a practice of emancipation or transformation and more as a contingent set of actions and forces that counteract the cycle of violence and counterviolence that underlies political conflicts under globalization. For Balibar, violence is now intro­ duced as an integral part of the concept and practice of politics, and the politics of violence can only be compromised, but never negated, by what he terms the "politics of civility:' Political transformation, he writes, is now "a question of the art of politics-and perhaps simply of art, since the only means civility has at its disposal are statements, signs, and roles:' One of the central projects of the art of politics, he argues, is the invention of transnational models of citizenship that will recognize the complex and dynamic processes through which cultural, national, and ethnic identities are constituted today. These models are necessary for the construction of a global public sphere in which translation, Balibar suggests, becomes a crucial social and institutional instrument for the regulation of conflicts that are not only about borders and territories, but also about modes of communication and representation. In the inter­ view, we asked Balibar to elaborate on the possibilities of a politics of civility and community, and specifically on the role of cultural and artistic practices in the creation of political spaces and institutions that work against consensus and exclusion.

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Notes 1. Foster, Anti-Aesthetic. 2. Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, a materialist cri­ tique of the Hegelian aesthetics of the symbol, was translated into English in 1978. This work exercised a decisive impact on the theorization of postmodern­ ism by many scholars, including Craig Owens, Benj amin Buchloh, and Douglas Crimp. See Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse;' and Buchloh, "Marcel Brood­ thaers:' Douglas Crimp's definition of postmodernism in "On the Museum's Ruins;' was framed in similar terms.

3. At the time, he suggested that beauty would be the most important issue of the nineties. He went on to raise the topic ofbeauty repeatedly, throughout the decade, at any given opportunity. Hickey, The Invisible Dragon, 11-12.

4. Ibid., 22-23· S. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 29, 32. 6. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 80- 81. What she really seems to describe is love, not beauty. 7. Ranciere, The Politics ofAesthetics, 23.

8. See Ranciere's "The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller:' 9. Ibid., 12-13· 10. This position came to define itself, in part, against the Platonizing con­ ception of "the political" espoused by the Paris Centre de Recherches Phi­ losophiques sur la Politique, opened by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean­ Luc Nancy in 1980. Their inaugural address spoke of a "re-treating" of the political in terms of its essencej for them, the questioning of the essence of politics also marked a "retreat" from the radical contingency of the formulation "everything is political:' Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, "Opening Address to the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political:' On the activities of the center, see also Frazer, "The French Derrideans;' and Critchley, "Lacoue­ Labarthe and Nancy:'

11. Ranciere, Dis-agreement, 29. 12. This is the subject of Ranciere's book The Nights of Labor. 13. Balibar, "What Is a Politics of the Rights of Man?" in Masses, Classes, Ideas. 14· Ranciere, Dis-agreement, 99. 15. Ibid., 85. 16. Ibid., 87, emphasis in original. 17. Ibid., 88. 18. Ibid., 103. As we argue in the next section, this understanding of "the people" as a problem, rather than as the "always already there;' has important implications for a reconsideration of the historical artistic practices of the

I N T RO D U C T I O N

27

avant-garde, which erred by identifying "the people" with the pregiven form of "the collective:' 19. Ibid., 220.

20. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, xii-xiii. 21. Balibar, preface to Droit de cite, 4, translation by Kristin Ross. 22. Benjamin, "The Work ofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction;' 211. See also Benjamin Buchloh's essay "From Faktura to Factography:'

23. In this regard, the present analysis of rethinking community does not support the thesis of Boris Groys, who claims, in The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, that the avant-garde was com­ plicit in the eventual totalitarian logic of Soviet Communism. Groys insists on a will to totalitarian power on the part of the constructivists. The present text, by contrast, does not intend to suggest a chain of causal inevitability between avant-garde activity and totalitarian politics. Our claim is that the avant-garde was characterized by the utopian desire for collectivity that is no longer tenable and has given way to thinking about plurality and difference.

24. Anderson, Imagined Communities, xi. 25. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 2. 26. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 4. 27. Ibid., 25. 28. Nancy, "Of Being-In-Common;' s. 29. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 36. 30. In this regard, Nancy differs significantly from Maurice Blanchot, who responded to Nancy's text with Unavowable Community, in which he departs from Nancy's inquiry into the organization of human sense. Instead, through a defense of his friend Georges Bataille, whom he believes to be misunderstood Nancy's account, he focuses on the communities that emerge through liter­ ary modes of production and reception of text, through writing and reading.

in

He uses this examination of the community of text to consider the ways in which those communities confront and question, if not inscribe themselves within and thereby redefine, the very possibility of community understood as a social and political category.

31. Nancy, Inoperative Community, !. 32. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 150-51. 33. Arguing against a recent "ethical turn" in contemporary art criticism, Claire Bishop demands the reimplementation of artistic standards and values such that all collaborative practices are not leveled as equally important artistic gestures of resistance. Thus, while she describes the mutual imbrication of politics and aesthetics as an important aspect of some contemporary practices ("The best art will show the contradictory pull between autonomy and social

28

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intervention"), she nonetheless reverts to formalist traditions of value judg­ ments, elevating the name of art to the modernist project of disinterested autonomy. Some artists, she laments, wear the mantle of activism as if it were a veritable hair shirt, flagellating themselves in a destructive tradition of Chris­ tian self�effacement. If Bishop here seems to offer a Kleinian strategy of ego strengthening as a cultural therapeutic, Kester responds to her criticism with similar psychologization, attacking her version of negative critique as paranoia. Bishop, "The Social Turn;' 178, and Kester, ''Another Turn." 34. In her essay ''Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics;' Bishop contrasts artworks that she sees as affirmative and nonpolitical to the art of Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra, which she describes as productive of the kinds of antagonistic conflict that Mouffe and Laclau have invoked as the motor of radical democracy. Liam Gillick has opposed the ways in which the artists included in Bourriaud's exhibitions have not been differentiated from Bour­ riaud's own project, and has objected to what he sees as Bishop's facile imple­ mentation of the concept of antagonism: "Just because Hirschhorn and Sierra upset more people than Tiravanija and I do, doesn't mean that they are closer to Mouffe's notion of antagonism:' Gillick, "Contingent Factors;' 102. In other words, the question is whether antagonism alone is sufficient to create political intervals of dissensus.

PA RT O N E

Rethinking Aesthetics

J AC QU E S RA N C I E R E

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics I do not take the phrase "community of sense" to mean a collectivity shaped by some common feeling. I understand it as a frame of visibility and intelligibility that puts things or practices together under the same meaning, which shapes thereby a certain sense of community. A com­ munity of sense is a certain cutting out of space and time that binds together practices, forms of visibilityj and patterns of intelligibility. I call this cutting out and this linkage a partition of the sensible. There is art insofar as the products of a number of techniques, such as painting, performing, dancing, playing music, and so on are grasped in a specific form of visibility that puts them in common and frames, out of their linkage, a specific sense of community. Humanity has known sculptors, dancers, or musicians for thousands of years. It has only known Art as such-in the singular and with a capital-for two cen­ turies. It has known it as a certain partitioning of space. First off, Art is not made of paintings, poems, or melodies. Above all, it is made of some spatial setting, such as the theater, the monument, or the museum. Discussions on contemporary art are not about the comparative value of works. They are all about matters of spatialization: about having video monitors standing in for sculptures or motley collections of items scattered on the floor instead of having paintings hanging on the wall. They are about the sense of presence conveyed by the pictorial frame and the sense of absence conveyed by the screen that takes its place.

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This discussion deals with distributions of things on a wall or on a floor, in a frame or on a screen. It deals with the sense of the common that is at stake in those shifts between one spatial setting and another, or between presence and absence. A material partition is always at the same time a symbolic partition. The theater or the museum shapes forms of coexistence and com­ patibility between something that is given and something that is not given. They shape forms of community between the visible and the intelligible or between presences and absences that are also forms of community, between the inside and the outside, and also between the sense of community built in their space and other senses of community framed in other spheres of experience. The relationship between art and politics is a relationship between two communities of sense. This means that art and politics are not two permanent realities about which we would have to discuss whether they must be interconnected or not. Art and politics, in fact, are contingent configurations of the common that may or may not exist. Just as there is not always art (though there is always music, sculpture, dance, and so on), there is not always politics (though there are always forms of power and consent). Politics exists in specific communities of sense. It exists as a dissensual supplement to the other forms of human gathering, as a polemical redistribution of objects and subjects, places and identities, spaces and times, visibilities and meanings. In this respect we can call it an "aesthetic activity" in a sense that has nothing to do with that incorporation of state power into a collective work of art, which Walter Benjamin named the aestheticiza­ tion of politics. Therefore, a relation between art and politics is a relation between two partitions of the sensible. It supposes that both terms are identified as such. In order to exist as such, art must be identified within a specific regime of identification binding together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intelligibility. The regime of identification under which art exists for us has a name. For two centuries it has been called aesthetics. The relationship between art and politics is more precisely a relationship between the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. How can we understand this notion of the politics of aesthetics? This question hinges on a previous one: what do we understand by the name aesthetics? What kind of community of sense does this term define? There is a well-known master narrative on this topic. According to

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that master narrative, known as the modernist paradigm, aesthetics means the constitution of a sphere of autonomy. It means that works of art are isolated in a world of their own, heterogeneous to the other spheres of experience. In this world, they are evaluated by inner norms of validity: through criteria of form, beauty, or truth to medium. From this, various conclusions could be drawn about the politicalness of art. First, artworks shape a world of pure beauty, which has no political relevance. Second, they frame a kind of ideal community, fostering fanciful dreams of communities of sense posited beyond political con­ flict. Third, they achieve in their own sphere the same autonomy that is at the core of the modern project and is pursued in democratic or revolutionary politics. According to this narrative, the identification between art, autonomy, and modernity collapsed in the last decades of the twentieth century. It collapsed because new forms of social life and commodity culture, alpng with new techniques of production, reproduction, and communication, made it impossible to maintain the boundary between artistic produc­ tion and technological reproduction, autonomous artworks and forms of commodity culture, high art and low art. Such a blurring of the boundaries should have amounted to the "end of aesthetics:' That end was strongly argued in the eighties, for instance, in a book edited by Hal Foster and called The Anti-Aesthetic. Among the most significant essays collected in that book was an essay written by Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins:' The ruined "museum" was Andre Malraux's "museum without walls:' Crimp's demonstration rested on the analysis of the double use of photography in Malraux's museum. On the one hand, the "museum without walls" was made possible only by photographic re­ production. Photography alone allowed a cameo to take up residence on the page next to a painted tondo and a sculpted relief, or allowed Malraux to compare a detail of a Rubens in Antwerp to a detail of a Michelangelo in Rome. It enabled the author to replace the empirical­ ness of the works by the presence of the "spirit of art:' Unfortunately, Crimp argued, Malraux made a fatal error. At the end of his volume, he admitted photographs no longer as reproductions of artworks but as artworks themselves. By so doing, he threw the homogenizing device that constituted the homogeneity of the museum back to its hetero­ geneity. Heterogeneity was reestablished at the core of the museum. Thereby, the hidden secret of the museum could be displayed in the

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open. This is what Robert Rauschenberg would do a few years later by silk-screening Diego Velazquez's Rokeby Venus onto the surface of a canvas containing pictures of mosquitoes and a tnlck, or in the company of helicopters or water towers, or even atop a statue of George Wash­ ington and a car key. Through photography, the museum was spread across the surface of every work by Rauschenberg. Malraux's dream had become Rauschenberg's joke. Just a bit disturbing was the fact that Rauschenberg himself apparently did not get the joke and affirmed, in turn, Malraux's old-fashioned faith in the treasury of the conscience of Man. I think that we can make more of the disturbance if we ask the question: what did the demonstration demonstrate, exactly? If Mal­ raux's dream could become Rauschenberg's joke, why not the reverse: could Rauschenberg's joke become Malraux's dream in turn? Indeed, this turnaround would appear a few years later: at the end of the eigh­ ties, the celebrated iconoclast filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, praised as the archetype of postmodern practice, mixed everything with anything as he implemented his Histoire(s) du cinema, the exact equivalent of Malraux's paper museum. Let us make the point: there is a contradiction in the "imaginary museum;' and that contradiction is testimony to a postmodern break only if you assume first that the museum equals homogeneity, that it is the temple devoted to the uniqueness of the work of artj second, that photography, on the contrary, means heterogeneity, that it means the triviality of infinite reproductionj third, that it is photography alone which allows us both to put cameos, Scythian plaques, and Michelangelo on the same pages and to put the Rokeby Venus on a canvas along with a car key or a water tower. If those three statements are proven true, you can conclude that the realization of the imaginary museum through the photographic means the collapse of the museum as well, that it marks the triumph of a heterogeneity that shatters aesthetic homogeneity. But how do we know that these pOints are all true? How do we know, first, that the museum means homogeneity and that it is devoted to the uniqueness and auratic solitude of the work of art? How do we know that this auratic solitude was fostered in nineteenth- and twentieth­ century views of art? Let us trace the issue back to the time of the highest celebration of high Art, around 1830. At that time, G. W. F. Hegel's disciples published his Lessons on Aesthetics. At the same time,

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popular magazines such as the Magasin Pittoresque in France began to use lithographic reproductions in order to offer the treasures of world art to a broad readership. It is also at the same time that Honore de Balzac published the first novel that he signed with his name, The Wild Ass's Skin. At the beginning of the novel, Raphael, the hero, enters the showrooms of a curiosity shop, and this is what he sees: Crocodiles, apes and stuffed boas grinned at stained glass-windows, seemed to be about to snap at carved busts, to be running after lacquer-ware or to be clambering up chandeliers. A Sevres vase on which Madame Jaquetot had painted Napoleon was standing next to a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris . . . . Madame du Barry painted by Latour, with a star on her head, nude and enveloped in cloud, seemed to be concupiscently contemplating an Indian chibouk. . . . A pneumatic machine was poking out the eye of the Emperor Augustus, who remained majestic and unmoved. Several portraits of alder­ men and Dutch burgomasters, insensible now as during their life-time, rose above this chaos of antiques and cast a cold and disapproving glance at them.1

The description looks like a perfect anticipation of Rauschenberg's Combine paintings. It frames a space of indistinction between the shop and the museum, the ethnographic museum and the art museum, works of art and everyday materials. No postmodern break is necessary in order to blur all those boundaries. Far from being shattered by it, aesthetics means precisely this blurring. If photography could help liter­ ature to achieve the imaginary museum, it is because literature had already blended on its pages what photography would later blend on canvas. It is this "literary past" of photography that appears when the combination of photography and painting turns the canvas into a "print:' This is the second point: how do we know that photography equals heterogeneity, infinite reproducibility, and the loss of the aura? The same year that Crimp published his essay, a significant essay on pho­ tography was published: Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. In that essay, Barthes openly overturned the mainstream argument on photography. He made photography a testimony to uniqueness. And in the following years, photography, after having been taken as the artifact best fitted for postmodern collage, would be viewed as a sort of symbol of Saint Veronica, an icon of pure and unique presence.

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This means that the argument could be overturned. The museum means homogeneity and heterogeneity at once. Photography means reproducibility and uniqueness as well. Photographic reproducibility does not make for a new community of sense by its own power. It has to be grasped within a wider form of visibility and a wider plot of intel­ ligibility. It has to lend its possibilities to the enhancement or debase­ ment of a form of presence, or a procedure of meaning. Rauschenberg's use of photography does not open a new age of art. It only gives additional evidence against the modernist identification of "flatness" with autonomous art and the self-containment of painting. It highlights what a reader of Stephane Mallarme's "pure" poetry already knows: flatness does not mean the specificity of a medium; it means a surface of exchange; exchange between the time of the poem and the drawing of a line in the space; between act and form; text and drawing or dance; pure art and decorative art; works of art and objects or performances belong­ ing to individual or collective life. Ifthe production of new evidence against the Greenbergian paradigm of flatness could be viewed as the closure of an era, it is obviously for another reason. It is because there was a definite politics of aesthetics at work in that "formal" paradigm: that politics entrusted the autonomous work with a promise of political freedom and equality, compromised by another politics of aesthetics, the one which gave to art the task of suppressing itself in the creation of new forms of collective life. The point is that the radicality of "artistic autonomy" is part of a wider plot linking aesthetic autonomy with some sort of political-or rather metapolitical-implementation of community. Aesthetics-I mean the aesthetic regime of the identification of Art-entails a politics of its own. But that politics divides itself into two competing possi­ bilities, two politics of aesthetics, which also means two communities of sense. As is well known, aesthetics was born at the time of the French Revolution, and it was bound up with equality from the very beginning. But the point is that it was bound up with two competing forms of equality. On the one hand, aesthetics meant the collapse of the system of constraints and hierarchies that constituted the representational re­ gime of art. It meant the dismissal of the hierarchies of subject matters, genres, and forms of expression separating objects worthy or unworthy of entering in the realm of art or of separating high genres and low

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genres. It implied the infinite openness of the field of art, which ul­ timately meant the erasure of the frontier between art and non-art, between artistic creation and anonymous life. The aesthetic regime of art did not begin-as many theorists still have it-with the glorification of the unique genius producing the unique work of art. On the contrary, it began, in the eighteenth century, with the assertion that the arche­ typal poet, Homer, had never existed, that his poems were not a work of art, not the fulflllment of any artistic canon, but a patchwork of collected tales that expressed the way of feeling and thinking of a still-infant people. On the one hand, therefore, aesthetics meant that kind of equality that went along with the beheading of the King of France and the sovereignty of the people. Now, that kind of equality ultimately meant the indiscernibility of art and life. On the other hand, aesthetics meant that works of art were grasped, as such, in a specific sphere of experience where-in Kantian terms-they were free from the forms of sensory connection proper either to the objects of knowledge or to the objects of desire. They were merely "free appearance" responding to a free play, meaning a nonhierarchical relation between the intellectual and the sensory faculties. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Frie­ drich Schiller drew the political consequence of that dehierarchization. The "aesthetic state" defined a sphere of sensory equality where the supremacy of active understanding over passive sensibility was no longer valid. This meant that it dismissed the partition of the sensible that traditionally gave its legitimacy to domination by separating two humanities. The power of the high classes was supposed to be the power of activity over passivity, of understanding over sensation, of the edu­ cated senses over the raw senses, and so on. By relinquishing that power, aesthetic experience framed an equality that would be a reversal of domination. Schiller opposed that sensory revolution to political revolu­ tion as implemented in the French Revolution. The latter had failed precisely because the revolutionary power had played the traditional part of the understanding-.meaning the state-imposing its law upon the matter of sensations-meaning the masses. The only true revolution would be a revolution overthrowing the power of active understanding over passive sensibility, the power of a class of intelligence and activity over a class of passivity and inchoateness. So aesthetics meant equality because it meant the suppression of the

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boundaries of art. And it meant equality because it meant the constitu­ tion ofArt as a separate form Ofll1;lman experience. These two equalities are opposed, but they are also tied together. In Schiller's Letters, the statue of the Greek goddess promises a future of emancipation because the goddess is "idle" and "self contained:' It promises this owing to its very separateness and unavailability to our knowledge and desires. But at the same time, the statue promises this because its "freedom" -or "indifference" -embodies another freedom or indifference, the freedom of the Greek people who created it.2 Now, this freedom means the opposite of the first one. It is the freedom of a life that, according to Schiller, does not rend itself into separate, differentiated forms of exis­ tence, the freedom of a people for whom art is the same as religion, which is the same as politics, which is the same as ethics: a way of being together. As a consequence, artwork's separateness promises the op­ posite: a life that will not know art as a separate practice and field of experience. The politics of aesthetics rests on this originary paradox. That paradoxical linkage of two opposite equalities could make, and did historically make, for two main forms of politics. The first form aims at connecting the two equalities. "Community of sense" thus means that the kind of equality and freedom that is experi­ enced in aesthetic experience has to be turned into the community's very form of existence: a form of a collective existence that will no longer be a matter of form and appearance but will rather be embodied in living attitudes, in the materiality of everyday sensory experience. The common of the community will thus be woven into the fabric of the lived world. This means that the separateness of aesthetic equality and freedom has to be achieved by its self-suppression. It has to be achieved in an inseparate form of common life where art and politics, work and leisure, public and private life are the same. Such is the program of the aesthetic revolution, achieving in real life what both political dissensus and aesthetic enjoyment can only achieve in appearance. This program was first stated two centuries ago in "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism;' proposing to replace the dead mechanism of state power with the living body of a people animated by a philosophy turned into mythology. It was continuously revived, in the projects of both a revolution conceived as a "human revolution" (meaning the self-sup­ pression of politics) and an art suppressing itself as a separate practice, identifying itself with the elaboration of new forms of life. It animated

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the gothic dreams of Arts and Crafts in nineteenth-century England, as well as the technological achievements of the Werkbund or the Bauhaus in twentieth-century Germany, the Mallarmean dream of a poetry "pre­ paring the festivals of the future;' as well as the concrete participation of the suprematist, futurist, and constructivist artists in the Soviet revolu­ tion. It animated the projects of situationist architecture, as well as Guy Debord's derive or Joseph Beuys's "social plastic:' I think that it is still alive in Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's contemporary visions of the Franciscan communism of the multitudes, implemented through the irresistible power of the global network exploding the boundaries of Empire. In all these cases, politics and art must achieve their self-sup­ pression to the benefit of a new form of inseparate life. The second form, on the contrary, disconnects the two equalities. It disconnects the free and equal space of aesthetic experience from the infinite field of equivalence of art and life. It stages the issue of commu­ nities of sense as an irreducible opposition between two communities of sense, both of which are communities of connection and disconnection. On the one side there is the community of lived experience, meaning the community of alienated life. This community is based on the origin­ ary separation of sense ( sensation ) and sense ( meaning) . In Max Hork­ heimer and Theodor Adorno's narrative, this is the separation of Ulys­ ses's reason from both the songs of the sirens and the work of sailing.3 That community of alienated life is achieved in the deceptive appear­ ance of its opposite. It is achieved in the homogeneous appearance of aestheticized life and commodity culture. In contrast to that faked . equality and faked community of sense stands the community framed by the autonomy of aesthetic exp erience, by its heterogeneity to all other forms of experience. The standard modernist paradigm is only a partial and superficial interpretation of that community, forgetful of its political content. The political act of art is to save the heterogeneous sensible that is the heart of the autonomy of art and its power of eman­ cipation. The community of sense at work in that politics of aesthetics is a community based on both the connection and disconnection of sense and sense. Its separateness "makes sense" to the extent that it is not the refuge of pure form. Instead, it stages the very relationship of separateness and inseparateness. The autonomous perfection of the work has to disclose its own contradiction, to make the mark of aliena­ tion appear in the appearance of reconciliation. It reconciles the reason

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of Ulysses with the song of the sirens, and it keeps them irreconcilable at the same time. "What is at stake in this politics is not so much preserving the boundary between high art and low or popular art as it is preserving the hetero­ geneity of two worlds of "sense" as such. This is why postmodernist polemicists miss the target if they think that the modernist paradigm of "politicity" collapsed when Rauschenberg put together a copy of Velaz­ quez and a car key on the same canvas. The paradigm is threatened only if the boundary separating the two worlds of sense collapses. Adorno once made the tremendous assertion that we can no more hear-no more stand-some chords of nineteenth-century salon music, unless, he said, everything is trickery. Jean-Fran�oise Lyotard would say, in turn, that you cannot blend figurative and abstract motifs on a canvas; that the taste that feels and appreciates this mix-up is no taste. As we know, it some­ times appears that those chords can still be heard, that you can still see figurative and abstract motifs blended on the same canvas, and even make art by merely borrowing artifacts from everyday life and reexhibit­ ing them. But this marks no radical shift from modernity to postmod­ ernity. The paradigm is not shattered by that revelation. It is led into a kind of headlong flight. It has to reassert the radical heterogeneity of sensory experience, at the cost not only of precluding any political community of sense but also of suppressing the autonomy of art itself, of transforming it into sheer ethical testimony. This shift is most clear in the French aesthetic thought of the eighties. Roland Barthes opposes the uniqueness of the photograph of the dead mother not only to the inter­ pretive practice of the semiologist but also to the artistic pretension of photography itself. Godard emphasizes the iconic power of the image or the rhythm of the phrase at the cost of dismantling not only the old narrative plot but also the autonomy of the artwork itself. In Lyotard, the brush stroke or the timbre becomes sheer testimony to the mind's enslavement by the power of the other. The first name of the other is the aistheton. The second is the law. Ultimately, both politics and aesthetics vanish in ethics. This reversal of the modernist paradigm of the politicity of art is in keeping with a whole trend of thought that dissolves political dissensuality in an archipolitics of exception and terror from which only a Heideggerian God can save us. I quite hastily sketched these two communities of sense in order to remind us ofthe following: the proj ect of politicizing art-for instance, in

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the form of a critical art-is always anticipated by the forms of politicity entailed in the forms ofvisibility and intelligibility that make art identifia­ ble as such. We identify art in the interplay of the two forms of equality attached to its separateness and to its inseparateness. We identify it through the dialectic of its autonomy and its heteronomy. What does it mean, subsequently, to do political or critical art, or to take a political view of art? It means locating its power in a specific negotiation of the relation between the two aesthetical forms of equality. A critical art is, in fact, a sort of third way between the two politics of aesthetics. This negotiation must keep something of the tension that pushes aesthetic experience toward the reconfiguration of collective life and something of the tension that withdraws the power of aesthetic sensori­ ality from the other spheres of experience. From the zones of indistinc­ tion between art and life it must borrow the connections that provoke political intelligibility. And from the separateness of artworks it must borrow the sense of sensory foreignness that enhances political energies. Political art must be some sort of collage of these opposites. Collage, in the widest sense of the term, is the major procedure of critical art, of that "third politics" that has to weave its way between the two politics of aesthetics. Before blending Velazquez and car keys, collage blends alternative politics of aesthetics and offers the product of that negotia­ tion to wavering forms of intelligibility, fostering wavering forms of politicity. It frames little communities of sense, little communities of elements borrowed from heterogeneous spheres. It sets up specific forms of heterogeneity, by taking up elements from different spheres of experience and forms of montage from different arts or techniques. If Brecht remained a kind of archetype for political art in the twentieth century, it was due not so much to his enduring communist commit­ ment as to the way he negotiated the relation between these opposites, blending the scholastic forms of political teaching with the enjoyments of the musical or the cabaret or discussing allegories of Nazi power in verse about cauliflowers. The main procedure of political or critical art consists in setting out the encounter, and possibly the clash, of hetero­ geneous elements. The clash of these heterogeneous elements is sup­ posed to provoke a break in our perception, to disclose some secret connection of things hidden behind everyday reality. This hidden reality may be the absolute power of dream and desire concealed by the prose of bourgeois life, as it is in the surrealist poetics. It may be the violence

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of capitalist power and class war hidden behind great ideals, as it is in the militant practices of John Heartfield's photomontage, showing us for instance the capitalist gold caught in Adolf Hitler's throat. Political art thus means creating those forms of dialectical collision or dissensus that put together not only heterogeneous elements but also two politics of sensoriality. The heterogeneous elements are put to­ gether in order to provoke a clash. Now, the clash is two things at once. On the one hand, it is the flash that enlightens. The connection of the heterogeneous elements speaks out of its legibility. It points to some secret of power and violence. The connection of vegetables and high rhetorics in Brecht's Arturo Vi conveys a political message. But on the other hand, the clash is produced insofar as the heterogeneity of the elements resists the homogeneity of meaning. Cauliflowers remain cau­ liflowers, juxtaposed to high rhetorics. They carry no message. They are supposed to enhance political energy out of their very opaqueness. Ultimately, the mere juxtaposition of heteroclite elements is endowed with a political power. In Godard's film Made in USA the hero says, "I get the impression of being in a film of Walt Disney, played by Hum­ phrey Bogart, therefore in a political film:' The mere relationship of heteroclite elements appears, thus, as a dialectical clash playing witness to a political reality of conflict. Political art is a kind of negotiation, not between politics and art, but between the two politics of aesthetics. This third way is made possible by continuously playing on the boundary and the absence of boundary between art and non-art. The Brechtian identity of allegory and of the debunking of allegory supposes that you can play on the connection and the disconnection between art and cauliflowers, politics and cau­ liflowers. Such a play supposes that vegetables themselves have a double existence: one in which they bear no relation to art and politics and another where they already bear a strong relation to both of them. The relations of polities, art, and vegetables existed before Brecht, not only in impressionist still lifes, reviving the Dutch tradition, but also in literature. One novel by Emile Zola, Le ventre de Paris, had notably used them as both political and artistic symbols. The novel is based on the polarity of two characters. On the one hand, there is the poor old revolutionary who comes back from deportation to the new Paris of Les HaIles, where he is overcome by the flood of cabbages-meaning the flood of consumption. On the other hand, there is the impressionist

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painter, singing the epics of the cabbages, the epic of modernity, the glass and iron architecture of Les HaIles, and the piles of vegetables that allegorized modern beauty in contrast to the old pathetic beauty sym­ bolized by the Gothic church nearby. The political allegory of the cau­ liflowers was possible because the connection of art, politics, and vege­ tables-the connection of art, politics, and consumption-already existed as set of moving borders, enabling artists to both cross the border and make sense of the connection of the heterogeneous ele­ ments and play on the sensory power of their heterogeneity. This means that the mixing of high art and low art, or the mixing of art and commodity, is not a discovery of the sixties, which would have both realized and undermined modern art and its political potential. On the contrary, political art had already been made possible by that mix­ ing, by a continuous process of border crossings between high and low art, art and non-art, art and the commodity. This process reaches back far in the past of the aesthetic regime of art. You cannot oppose an epoch of the celebration of high art to an epoch of the trivialization or parody of high art. As soon as art was constituted as a specific sphere of existence, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, its products began to fall into the triviality of reproduction, commerce, and commodity. But as soon as they did so, commodities themselves began to travel in opposite directions-to enter the realm of art. Their power was directly identified with the overwhelming power and beauty of modern life, as happened in Zola's epics of cabbages. They could also fall into the realm of art by becoming obsolete, unavailable for consumption, and thereby turned into objects of aesthetic-disinterested-pleasure or uncanny excitement. Surrealist poetics, as well as Benjamin's theory of allegory or Brecht's epic theater, thrived on this border crossing. And so too did all the forms of critical art that played on the ambiguous relationship of art and commerce, right through to many contemporary installations. They blend heterogeneous materials borrowed from artistic tradition, politi­ cal rhetoric, commodity culture, commercial ads, and so on, in order to disclose the connections of high art or politics with capitalist domina­ tion. But they could do so owing to the ongoing processes that had already erased these borders. Critical art thrived on this continuous border crossing, this two-way process of prosaicization of the poetical and of poeticization of the prosaic. If this makes sense, it may be possible to reframe, hopefully on a

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firmer footing) the political issues involved in the discussion about mod­ ernism and postmodernism. What is at stake in contemporary art is not the fate of the modernist paradigm. Its validity is neither weaker nor stronger than before. In my view) it always was a very restrictive inter­ pretation of the dialectic of the aesthetic regime of art. What is at stake is the fate of the third politics of aesthetics. The question is not: are we still modern) already postmodern) or even post-postmodern? The ques­ tion is: What exactly happened to the dialectical clash? What happened to the formula of critical art? I shall propose some elements for a possible answer with reference to exhibitions which) in the last few years) offered points of comparison with the art of the sixties or seven­ ties) and thereby some Significant markers of the shift. First example: three years ago) the National Center for Photography in Paris presented an exhibition called Bruit de fond. The exhibition juxtaposed recent works and works from the seventies. Among the latter you could see Martha RosIer's series "Bringing the War Home;' photo­ montages that bring together advertising images of American domestic happiness and images of the war in Vietnam. Nearb)lj there was another work related to American politics) taking the same form of a confronta­ tion of two elements. The work Les temps du monde) made by Wang Du) consisted of two objects. On the left) there was the Clinton couple) represented in the pop manner) as a pair of wax-museum figures. On the right) there was a huge sculpture of Courbet's Origine du monde) which) as is well known) represents a woman's sex. So in both cases an image of American happiness was juxtaposed with its hidden secret: war and economical violence in Martha RosIer) sex and profanity in Wang Du. But in Wang Du's case) both political conflictuality and the sense of strangeness had vanished. What remained was an automatic effect of delegitimization: sexual profanity delegitimizing politics) the wax figure delegitimizing high art. But there was no longer anything to delegiti­ mize. The mechanism spun around itself. It played) in fact) a double play: on the automaticness of the delegitimizing effect and on the awareness of its spinning around itself. Second example: another exhibition shown in Paris three years ago was called Voila: Le monde dans la tete. It proposed to document a century through different installations) among them Christian Boltan­ ski's installation Les abonnes du telephone. The principle of this installa­ tion is Simple: there are two shelves on either side of the gallery with

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phone directories from all over the world, and two tables between them where you can sit down and peruse whatever directory you like. This installation could remind us of another political work of the nineties, Chris Burden's piece The Other Vietnam Memorial. That "other memo­ rial" is, of course, the memorial for the anonymous Vietnamese victims. Chris Burden had chosen the names written on the memorial by ran­ domly picking out Vietnamese names in a phone directory. Boltanski's installation still deals with a matter of anonymity. But that anonymity is not further embedded in a controversial plot. It is no longer a matter of giving names to those that the winners had left unnamed. The names of the anonymous become, as Boltanski puts it, "specimens of humanity:' Third example: in 2003, the Guggenheim Museum in New York pre­ sented an exhibition called Moving Pictures. The purpose was to illus­ trate how the extensive use of reproducible media in contemporary art was rooted in the critical art practices of the sixties and the seventies, questioning both mainstream social or sexual stereotypes and artistic autonomy. Nevertheless, the works exhibited around the rotunda illus­ trated a significant shift away from that straight line. For instance, Vanessa Beecroft's video showing nude women standing in the setting of the museum was still put forward as a critique of feminine stereotypes in art. But obviously those nude and mute bodies followed another direc­ tion, escaping any signification or conflict of significations, evoking Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting much more than any kind of feminist critique. As you climbed up the round ramp of the Guggen­ heim, many videos, photographs, installations, and video installations enhanced, instead of critiqued, a new kind of strangeness, a sense of the mystery entailed in the trivial representation of everyday life. You sensed it in Rineke Dijkstra's photographs of ambiguous teenagers, as well as in Gregory Crewdson's movielike representations of the strangeness of everyday events, or in the Christian Boltanski installation included there, one composed of photographs, electric fixtures, and bulbs, which may symbolize-according to the piece-either the dead of the Holo­ caust or the fleetingness of childhood. At the top of the exhibition there was a kind of backtrack from the dialectical art of the clash to the symbolist art of mystery as it culminated in the video installation made by Bill Viola, Going Forth by Day, composed as a cycle of frescoes, embracing the cycles of birth, life, death, and resurrection, as well as the cycle of fire, air, earth, and water.

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Out of those three examples, chosen among many possible others, we can sketch out an answer to the question of the politics of aesthetics today: what happened to the dissensual forms of critical art? I would say that the dialectical form of the aesthetic dissensus has split up into four main forms. The first one would be the joke. In the joke, the conjunction of the heterogeneous elements is still staged as a tension or polarity, pointing to some secret, but there is no more secret. The dialectical tension is brought back as a game, played on the very indiscernability between procedures that unveil secrets of power, on the one hand, and the ordinary procedures of delegitimization that are parts of the new forms of domination, on the other: the procedures of delegitimization pro­ duced by power itself, by the media, commercial entertainment, or advertising. Such was the case of the work ofWang Du that I mentioned earlier. Many exhibitions today play on the same undecidability. For instance, an exhibition was presented at Minneapolis under the pop­ esque title Let's Entertain before being recycled in Paris under the situationist title Beyond the Spectacle. This exhibition played on three levels: the pop art derision of high art, the critical denunciation of capitalist entertainment, and the Debordian idea of play as the opposite of spectacle. The second one would be the collection. In the collection, hetero­ geneous elements are still lumped together, but they are no longer gathered in order to provoke a critical clash, nor even to play on the undecidability of their critical power. They become a positive attempt at collecting the traces and testimonies of a common world and a common history. The collection is a recollection as well. The equality of all items-works of art, private photographs, objects of use, ads, commer­ cial videos-is thereby made into the equality of the archivistic traces of the life of a community. I mentioned the exhibition Voila: Le monde dans la tete, which sought to recollect a century. When you left Boltan­ ski's room, you could see, for instance, one hundred photographs made by Hans-Peter Feldmann, representing one person of each age from one to one hundred, and many other installations likewise documenting a common history. We could find many other examples of this trend. It is obviously in tune with a motto that increaSingly can be heard today: that we have "lost our world;' that the "social bond" is being broken, and that the artists must take part in the struggle to mend the social bond or

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics

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the social fabric by bringing to the fore all the traces bearing witnessing to a shared humanity. The third form would be the invitation. I mentioned how Les abonnes du telephone invited the visitors to take a directory on a shelf and open it randomly. Elsewhere in the same exhibition they were invited to take a book from a pile and sit down on a carpet, representing some sort of child's fairy island. In other exhibitions, visitors were invited to have some soup and get in touch with each other, to engage in new forms of relationships. Such attempts had previously been systematized through Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of relational aesthetics: an art creating no more works or objects, but rather ephemeral situations prompting new forms of relationships. As he puts it, by giving some small services, the artist contributes to the task of plugging the gaps in the social bonds.4 The fourth form would be mystery. Mystery does not mean enigma, nor does it mean mysticness. Since the age of Mallarme, it means a specific way of putting heterogeneous elements together: for instance, in the case of Mallarme, the thought of the poet, the steps of the dancer, the unfolding of a fan, or the smoke of a cigarette. In opposition to the dialectical clash that stresses the heterogeneity of the elements in order to show a reality framed by antagonisms, mystery sets forth an analogy -a familiarity of the strange, witnessing to a common world-where heterogeneous realities are woven in the same fabric and can always be related to one another by the fraternity of a metaphor. "Mystery" and the "fraternity of metaphors" are two terms used by Jean-Luc Godard in his Histoires du cinema. This work is an interesting case in point because Godard uses collages of heterogeneous elements as he has always done, but he makes them produce exactly the contrary meaning of what they did twenty years before. For instance, in a striking passage in the Histoires du cinema, Godard fuses together three images: first, shots from George Stevens's film A Place in the Sun showing the happiness of the young and rich lover played by Elizabeth Taylor, bath­ ing in the sun, beside her beloved Montgomery Clift; second, images of the dead in Ravensbruck, filmed some years before by the same George Stevens; and third, a Mary Magdalene taken from Giotto's frescoes in Padua. If it had been made twenty years ago, this collage could only have been understood as a dialectical clash, denouncing the secret of death hidden behind both high art and American happiness. But in the Histo­ ires du cinema, the image of denunciation is turned into an image of

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redemption. The conjunction of the images of Nazi extermination, American happiness, and Giotto's "ahistorical" art bears witness to the redeeming power of images, which gives to the living and the dead "a place in the world." The dialectic dash has become a mystery of co­ presence. Mystery was the key concept of symbolism. The return of symbolism is obviously on the agenda. "When I use this term, I am not referring to the spectacular forms of revival of symbolist mythology and the dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as in the work of Matthew Barney. Nor do I refer only to the effective uses of symbolism such as the work by Viola that I mentioned earlier. I am referring to the more modest, almost imperceptible way in which the collections of objects, images, and signs gathered in our museums and galleries are increasingly shift­ ing from the logic of dissensus to the logic of the mystery, to a testimony of co-presence. The shift from dialectics to symbolism is obviously linked to the contemporary shift in what I called the aesthetics of politics, meaning the way politics frames a common stage. This shift has a name. Its name is consensus. Consensus does not simply mean the agreement of the political parties or of social partners on the common interests of the community. It means a reconfiguration of the visibility of the common. It means that the givens of any collective situation are objectified in such a way that they can no longer lend themselves to a dispute, to the polemical framing of a controversial world within the given world. In such a way, consensus properly means the dismissal of the "aesthetics of politics:' Such an erasure or a weakening of the political stage and of the political invention of dissensus has a contradictory effect on the politics of aesthetics. On the one hand, it gives a new visibility to the practices of art as political practices-I mean practices of the redistribution of spaces and times, of forms of visibility of the common, forms of connec­ tions between things, images, and meanings. Artistic performances may appear, and sometimes do appear, thereby as the substitutes of politics in the construction of dissensual stages. But consensus does not merely leave the political place empty. It reframes, in its own way, the field of its objects. It also shapes, in its own wa}'j the space and tasks of artistic practice. For instance, by replacing matters of class conflict with matters of inclusion and exclusion, it puts worries about the "loss of the social

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics

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bond;' concerns with "bare humanity;' or tasks of empowering threat­ ened identities in the place of political concerns. Art is summoned thus to put its political potentials to work in reframing a sense of community and mending the social bond. In my view, the shift from the critical paradigm onto the forms of the joke, the collection, the invitation, and the mystery testify to that reconfiguration of the political in the form of the ethical. Against the substitution, in art, of ethics for politicS, certain projects today do seek a political role for art. These address matters of the distribution of spaces and issues of redescriptions of situations. It is more and more about matters that traditionally belonged to politics. This situation has lead to new attempts to make art directly political. In recent years many artists have set out to revive the project of an art that makes real objects instead of producing or recycling images, or that undertakes real actions in the real world rather than merely "artistic" installations. Political commitment thus is equated with the search for the real. But the political is not the "outside" of a "real" that art would have to reach. The "outward" is always the other side of an "inward:' What produces their difference is the topography in whose frame the relation of in and out is negotiated. The real as such simply does not exist. What does exist is a framing or a fiction of reality. Art does not do politics by reaching the real. It does it by inventing fictions that chal­ lenge the existing distribution of the real and the fictional. Making fictions does not mean telling stories. It means undOing and rearticulating the connections between signs and images, images and times, or signs and space that frame the existing sense of reality. Fiction invents new communities of sense: that is to say, new trajectories be­ tween what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be done. It blurs over the distribution of places and competences, which also means that it blurs over the very borders defining its own activityj doing art means displacing the borders of art, just as doing politics means displacing the borders of what is recognized as the sphere of the political. It is no coincidence that some of the most interesting artworks today engage with matters of territories and borders. What could be the ultimate paradox of the politics of aesthetics is that perhaps by inventing new forms of aesthetic distance or indifference, art today can help frame, against the consensus, new political communities of sense. Art cannot

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merely occupy the space left by the weakening of political conflict. It has to reshape it, at the risk of testing the limits of its own politics.

Notes 1. Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin, 15. 2. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education ofMan, 109. 3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic oj Enlightenment. 4. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics.

A L E XA N D E R P OTTS

The Romantic Work of Art In this article I examine the longer-term history of a dialectical tension between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic characteristic of modern thinking about the arts, with a view to reframing our understanding of the anti-aesthetic imperatives operating in the late modern or postmod­ ern artistic imaginary. I focus on the early nineteenth century, the romantic period, when anxiety about the impossibility of contemporary art ever realizing the aesthetic values associated with the whole or complete work first became a significant issue. This anxiety began to shape the context within which contemporary artists were practicing. In this moment, urgent questions began to be posed about how a signifi­ cant art might be sustained in circumstances where a split seemed be opening up between what art (and the experience of art) promised to deliver and the actual condition of the artwork in the modern world. These questions emerge particularly clearly in Hegel's theories on the aesthetic dating from the 1820S, and his thinking on the subject is particularly pertinent to the present-day context in light of the reaffir­ mation, in the past few decades, of his supposed proclamation of the end of art.l This article, though, does not highlight the Hegel who envisaged art's larger significance in the modern world as superseded by philosophical reflection on the aesthetic. Rather, I focus on the Hegel who speculated, often very suggestively, on the forms in which art actively persisted in his own time. These were forms that he saw as compelling to a modern subjectivity precisely because they represented the antithesis of the ideal forms of art in earlier cultures, most notably

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those of ancient Greece, that had functioned to embody the "eternal, divine, and what is true in and of itself'2 Hegel's diagnosis offers some suggestive insights into how, in the particular context of the early nineteenth century, an anti-classical, or in his terms anti-aesthetic, distinctively modern art might be conceptual­ ized, an art that persisted by negating certain core values of a truly aesthetic art. In his writing we see an emerging idea of an art that was serious not because it embodied an abstract ideal, but because it pro­ jected a modern awareness of the contingent particularities of the mate­ rial world. Hegel's modern work of art was also one in which a split had opened up between the object as perceptible to the senses and its non­ physical or mental significance-in contrast with the classical work of art, which was the very embodiment of the ideas or ideals it sought to represent. If there was a larger significance to which modern art might aspire, in Hegel's view, this was inherently at odds with the idea of a fully realized and whole work of art. Any sense of totality that modern art could convey was like the totality that Adorno identified in Hegel's thinking, existing only as the "quintessence of the partial moments, that always point beyond themselves and are generated from one another:'3 This reexamination of the tensions between aesthetic and anti-aes­ thetic irriperatives operating in Hegelian thinking and in the practices of major romantic artists such as Turner and Delacroix serves to demon­ strate that the postmodern or late modern arudety over, and yet fascina­ tion with, the idea of the "end of art" hardly constitutes a radically new economy of the anti-aesthetic.4 Moreover, the real issue is not the end of art, but rather the persistence of art in circumstances where a negation of the aesthetic becomes the very condition of an art that continues to yield a distinctive kind of truth or awareness. The early nineteenth century casts light on issues raised by the concomitance of art's per­ sistence and negativity in a way that is not necessarily framed by the reactions against the high modernist cult of the autonomous artwork that have dominated thinking about visual art in the late twentieth century, from radical conceptualism to anti-aesthetic postmodernism. If we look to the work of certain artists of the romantic period, such as Turner and Delacroix, we can see that Hegel's conception of a self­ negating modern art takes on two distinctive aspects that have con­ tinued to play an important role to this day. The narrative or allegorical work of these artists, the work that they saw as their most ambitious,

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effected a dispersal of any culminating significance intimated by the scene being represented, through an often pointed negation of the aesthetic of the pregnant moment. Theirs was a narrative that to a large degree fell apart into variegated and almost contingent details of often relatively disparate significance. This dispersal of aesthetic wholeness was sometimes played out in the comic mode, or as humor, a mode Hegel saw as characteristic of modern self-awareness that was always at some level alienated from the realities with which it was engaging and that momentarily fascinated it. Romantic sensibility, as much as the modernist one, is often envisaged as being essentially ironic. However, this misses the extent to which there was also an undercurrent of comic awareness-a sharp sense of the ludicrousness of situations acted out with great seriousness and of the curious seriousness of situations that were at many levels patently ludicrous-that nonetheless did not resolve itself as irony. Several of Turner's works are particularly evocative of such a comic mode of awareness in a way that carries very significant political implications. Further evidence that Hegel's conception of a distinctively modern, nonaesthetic art had a bearing on the practice ofromantic artists such as Turner and Delacroix is their recognition, evident in the way they presented their art to their public, that the aesthetic impact made by their work could not, on its own, carry the larger significance they wished it to convey. The extensive textual supplements they created for their paintings indicates they were aware that in the context of the modern art world, symbolic meaning could not be made to inhere in a painting. A split had opened up between what was aesthetically compel­ ling and what was compelling as idea, between the particularities and contingencies of the material world that fascinated the modern sen­ sibility and a sense of what the larger significance of this world might be. The idea that "beauty is truth, truth beauty" may have been a powerful myth for the romantic imaginary, but it was one that could not be reconciled with the complexities and disparities of modern reality, any more than it could with the politically charged tensions between aliena­ tion and fascination that characterized modern awareness of this reality. Though both Turner and Delacroix were later singled out, in the high moment of optical formalism in the late nineteenth century, as being Singularly visual and painterly, narrative was central to their work-so much so that they would usually exhibit their more ambitious works

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with quite elaborate narrative o r poetic text in an accompanying cata­ logue. A formalist misconception of their painting, based on an exclu­ sively visual orientation, still persists in some of the more sophisticated and critically self-conscious recent discussions of their art. 5 Such anal­ ysis fails to recognize the extent to which these artists' ambitions were realized through narratives and iconographical details that interrupted a purely visual experience of the painterly effects in which they excelled. Turner took this further perhaps than any artist of his time, presenting his art as running in parallel with a larger epic poem he was supposedly writing, "Fallacies of Hope:' Fragments from this were regularly ap­ pended to his exhibited works. Delacroix may have insisted that visual art was different from litera­ ture, in that it could convey its essence and touch the soul of the spectator with an immediacy that the narrative unfolding of a text could never achieve.6 However, he wrote obsessively about this in his journal, as if it were only through the entanglements of language that the pecu­ liar immediacy of visual art could assert itself.7 His project as an artist was based on his negotiating a recurring tension between the aesthetics of the visual and the conceptual resources of language, just as his more ambitious narrative paintings acquired much of their sense, as well as their deeper aesthetic resonance, in reference to a supplementary text that articulated the bare bones of a narrative and meaning that their visual effects could not convey on their own. Turner and Delacroix worked during a historical moment that created the romantic myth of the classic artwork that achieved, in its self-sufficient wholeness, the full visual embodiment of an idea. But it was equally a moment that en­ visaged, in the negation of this ideal, the possibility for creating a truly compelling modern art. 8

The Negative Dialectics of Aesthetic Theory

In the late Enlightenment and early romantic period there emerged a modern understanding of art as embodying a relatively autonomous and self-sustaining engagement between the self and the sensuous quali­ ties of the material world. This ran in parallel with a growing concern that the actual conditions of the modern world tended to block any such freely self-constituting activity and hence made the realization of an

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authentic and significant art deeply problematic. At this point, thinking about art had become a basis for thinking about the post-Enlightenment and postrevolutionary ideal of a truly free subject-both the possibili­ ties open to it and the limitations that circumscribed it.9 While art provided a model for imagining the possibility of a subject's freely sustained self-realization, the present-day condition of art, by contrast, made manifest the actual unfreedom and alienation that afflicted the modern subject. Art could be imagined as figuring a utopian world that would be shaped in accord with a subject's inner convictions and ra­ tional purposes, at the same time that the current practices of art were recognized as caught up in the abstracted and alienated realities of the modern world, and as having to deal with objects that were largely devoid of resonance rather than richly present in their symbolic fullness. Hegel pursued the consequences of this dialectic more fully than any of his contemporaries. This should be understood both in a theoretical sense ( in that his philosophy was centrally concerned with the mind's engagement with reality) and in a more concrete one ( in that his lectures on aesthetics offered an unusually full discussion of the actual forms taken by works of art, both modern and ancient ) . Hegel never claimed that art had literally come to an end, but rather that art on its own, without the supplement of abstract philosophical reflection, could no longer be a vehicle for embodying the central values of modern culture and its highest levels of self-consciousness. A modern subjectivity, in his view, could not be fully realized in artistic form, and a work of art would always be inadequate to the modern subject's drive to comprehend itself and the reality it inhabited. Like most German writ­ ers of his time speculating about the nature of art, Hegel viewed classical Greek art as the ideal of a perfectly realized art, as fully embodying the sense of self and the ethical values realized within ancient Greek culture. Many of his contemporaries envisaged this art as a transhistorical norm, representing the apparently seamless self-constitution achieved in the ideal forms of classical Greek art as a human ideal that modern society's corruption, arid rationality, or constraints on freedom had made impos­ sible. Hegel's view was more interesting and much more complex than this. If Greek art stood, for him, as the model of perfectly achieved symbolic embodiment, an art in which the material form was fully fused with the spiritual or mental content, it did so only as the exception. In all previous art, and in all subsequent art, he detected a split between form

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and significance, between the materiality o f the artwork-materiality here embracing both the literal sensuous form of the work and the cultural materials that made up its first-order content or subject matter -and the self-awareness or higher symbolic meaning it sought to sym­ bolize.lO In postclassical modern art, which bore within it an awareness of its loss of the fully integrated symbolization achieved in classical Greece, this insufficiency of the artistic symbol resulted in a constitutive alienation, occurring both within the work itself and in the subject's apprehension of it. In his writing on aesthetics, Hegel stages something very central to the romantic artistic imaginary: namely, a dialectic in which the image of perfect embodiment achieved by an ideal artwork-set in the past as the ideal of the ancient Greeks unrecoverable in the disenchanted world of the moderns-produces a sense of the actual artwork possible in the present as inadequate, as failing to achieve symbolic fullness. However, this negativity and inner alienation of the modern artwork corresponds, in his view, more fully to a modern sense of self and reality than any ideal artwork. In a way, for Hegel, the true (in the sense of the actually existing) artistic symbol is the one in which there is a disparity between what the artwork is, as phenomenon, and the larger significance it aspires to evoke. Greek art is one notable historical exception that throws into relief the negativities inherent in the constitution of the artistic symbol in both the preclassical and in the medieval and modern world. Hegel made it clear that the dissolution of the classical ideal must be understood not as a fortuitous calamityj to which art was subjected from the outside through the extremities of the times, prosaic mentality, lack of interest, etc., but rather is the effect and the continuation of art itself, which, in so much as it proceeds to make the substance that dwells within it manifest to concrete perception, contributes in this way, with every step it makes, to free itselfofits represented contents. Where art or thought presents an object so fully to our physical or spiritual eyes that its contents are exhausted, that everything is externalized and nothing obscure or inward is left, then absolute interest disappears. For interest only occurs as a result of fresh activity. Spirit or mind will only work away on an object so long as it still contains something hidden, not manifest. I I

When Hegel sought to define the underlying parameters of art in the modern world, the question he posed was as follows. What viable form

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could art take in a situation where subjectivity was no longer at one with objective reality and where, in art's attempts to move beyond the real­ ities it apprehended with the senses, it found these alien to it?12 The logic of his system led him to assert that the mind had to move on from art to find its fullest satisfaction in the realm of pure speculative think­ ing. Nevertheless, he not only devoted considerable effort to an analysis of art and the aestheticj he also speculated at length on the forms taken by art in its present conditions of negativity. He saw painting as having achieved its charac t eristically most modern form in Dutch genre paint­ ing. He highlighted the latter's freewheeling engagement with ordinary, seemingly trivial realities and its genuine humor that registered a de­ tachment-and hence subjective freedom-from the mundane par­ ticularities of everyday existence.13 However, his richest diagnosis of the larger logic of art in the modern world comes in his discussion of modern poetry and drama. Hegel argues that in a situation where subjectivity had become alien­ ated from reality as apprehensible in sensuous form, art became the vehicle for an unstable engagement between the subject and the actu­ alities of the world, which alternated between close and distant. This parallels Adorno's characterization of a mindset he suggested was appro­ priate for coming to terms with Hegel's own writing: "painstaking im­ mersion in detail, amid free detachment:'14 According to Hegel, modern art is split between a focus on free, incessantly active inner subjectivity and a preoccupation with the contingencies and particularities of an essentially alien external reality. The more compelling artworks repre­ sent the subject as ranging freely over this world by virtue of feeling detached from it and then engaging momentarily with certain features of it that strike it as compelling. Central to this process was humor and true comedy. In comedy, art's search to manifest the "true" and the "eternal" in "real appearance and form for outer apprehension" was effected negatively, through the "self-destruction" of any identity be­ tween material actuality and higher truth. I S A passage in the section of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics titled "The End of the Romantic Artwork" (end here being both the coming to an end and the end as destiny or inner logic) is worth quoting at some length to show how these ideas are played out explicitly in his thinking. In the "romantic apprehension of things;' he explains (and here he is referring to the whole postdassical rather than just the modern world),

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ALEXAND ER P O T T S the key point was the rending asunder of inner meaning and outer form, a separation which was partially revoked through the subjective activity of the artist .

. . [iJ

Romantic art was of its very nature the deep splitting of

inwardness taldng satisfaction in itself, which, because the objective world was not in conformity with spirit's inward being, remained broken apart from or indifferent to this world. The contradiction developed over the course of Romantic art to the point where we were compelled to arrive at an exclusive interest in fortuitous externality or a similarly fortuitous subjec­ tivity. But if this pleasure taken in externality as much as in subjective representation in accord with the principle of Romanticism is enhanced to the point of being a deepening of feeling for the object, and if on the other hand humor concerns itself both with the object and to its formation within subjective reflection, then we acquire through this an intimacy with the object and, as it were, an objective humor. Such an intimacy, however, can only be partial and perhaps expresses itself only within the bounds of a song or only as part of a larger whole.l6

Humor, then, was for Hegel the vehicle for a characteristically mod­ ern, contingent engagement with the alien fabric of social existence as this presented itself to a freely active subject. A kind of ironic humor is widely seen as characterizing aspects of romantic literature. In romantic painting, too, one can detect signs of an objective humor, of a distanced but sustained engagement with the world in its negativity that needs to be distinguished from conventional comedy, mostly strikingly perhaps in the work of Turner. In 1841, the year after Napoleon's ashes were brought back to Paris from the Isle of Saint Helena, where Napoleon had been banished after his defeat at battle of Waterloo, Turner ex­ hibited a painting at the Royal Academy that represented Napoleon in exile, titled War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet ( fig. 1). In this, he both dramatized and undercut the traditional romanticizing image of the great general contemplating his isolation and the tragic reversals of his destiny. The picture was able to evoke the complex realities of Napo­ leon's situation in exile-both its larger seriousness and its prosaic indi­ viduality-through juxtaposing an image suggestive of the bloody dev­ astations of the Napoleonic wars with a seemingly ludicrous detail. Napoleon looks out, guarded by an armed soldier standing bolt up .., right a little behind him, surrounded by the blood-red effects of a sunset reflecting on the water. He is contemplating not the wide expanse of the

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1. J. M. W Turner, War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, exhibited in 1842. Oil on canvas, 79.4 X 79.4 cm. Tate Gallery, London. Photo © Tate, London 2008.

sea, nor the momentary intimations of the horrors of war created by the blood-red sunset, but a tiny rock limpet just visible in the pool directly in front of him. The catalogue carried a fragment of verse from Turner's purported epic "Fallacies of Hope;' in which Napoleon gives voice to the eccentric but totally absorbing association that had seized him: Ah!

Thy tent-formed shell is like

A soldier's mighty bivouac, alone Amidst a sea of blood-but you can join your comradesP

The humor here has the effect of giving concrete resonance to the painting and undercuts any overly self-absorbed tragic depth. In a similar way, in

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Rain Steam and Speed (1844) Turner gave an almost comic everyday particularity to his brilliantly atmospheric vision of a steam train, ema­ nating fire and smoke, hurtling toward the viewer through a violent rain storm. Here he included a diminutive hare running flat out in front of the oncoming train. The painting becomes a compelling image of the hetero­ geneous realities of its time by Simultaneously offering up an almost sublime vision of modern technological and natural power and a comic Aesopian tale of the race between the hare and the steam engine.18 According to Hegel, the subjective engagement with the material world elicited by art is distinct from the sensuous desiring of particular things, as well as from philosophical thought. In practice, however, and above all in any consideration of modern art, the aesthetic for him becomes enmeshed in both-a surrender to contingent particularity and an abstract philosophical sense of distance. Indeed, for Hegel, in a modern world where subjectivity sees itself as alienated from the exist­ ing symbolic motifs that might lay claim to carrying a higher value and meaning, a work of art can only gain a shared ethical significance by way of abstract philosophical speculation. Inasmuch as the experience of art is able to constitute a community of sense for Hegel, this is achieved by way of an anti-aesthetic, conceptual consideration of the momentary, aesthetically compelling engagements we might have with works of art. This is clearly an overtly elitist take on the part played by the anti­ aesthetic in any shared significance that might be attributed to the artistic in the modern world. At the same time, Hegel's analYSis, and in particular his point that art cannot, on its own, lay claim to a larger significance, points to something that is central to the broader condition of modern art. The aspiration, implicit in modern conceptions of art, to an un-Hegelian, democratic, openly conceived immediacy can only be substantiated by way of a conceptual, discursive supplement. The lat­ ter's abstraction may be at odds with the vivid particularity of aesthetic experience, but it is also the medium through which such experience is recognized as having any universal value.

D elacroix: "The People . . . Rushed in to See the Corpse"

Hegel's idea of the insufficiency of the modern artwork, its curious anti­ autonomous autonomy, has important implications for our understand-

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ing of the painting of the romantic period-particularly at the moment in the early nineteenth century when a neoclassical, and at times revolu­ tionary, aspiration to revive the integrated wholeness of classical art­ work began to lose credibility as a working ideal. The texts that artists such as Delacroix and Turner appended to their work may often have been poetic rather than philosophical. However, they did introduce an overtly discursive, conceptual dimension to a viewer's apprehension of their work that is no less integral to the significance to which it laid claim, and no less integral to the constitution of any full "aesthetic" engagement with their art, than are the texts in more overtly conceptual twentieth-century works. There is also, in their painting, an evident fascination with seemingly incidental particularity. The apparent con­ tingency of the motifs and situations frustrates any universal sense we might attribute to their work. Their paintings' narratives, which often seem awkward, also negate classical ideas of wholeness and, above all, the integrative logic of the pregnant moment. The viewer's compulsion to see something significant taking place in the painting that will yield a larger social, political, or ethical truth is both blocked and provoked. The traditional, classical understanding of an integrated pictorial nar­ rative, as exemplified in the work of an artist such as Raphael, was one in which a clearly emphasized central incident defined the core meaning of the painted scenario. This would then be elaborated by responses to the main event by figures deployed around it. The idea was given further refinement in Lessing's theory of the pregnant moment, developed in a discussion of how a nonnarrative form such as painting might render narrative, contained in his influential treatise Loacoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) . In Lessing's view, the painter needed to choose a moment in which the action represented not only enabled the viewer to see clearly what was happening at the time but also to infer what took place immediately before and after. This preg­ nant moment would be one prior to the climactic event of a narrative so it could represent the unfolding of an event rather than its completion. The ideal pictorial narrative was thus characterized by both spatial and temporal unity: spatial in that all the figures directed themselves to, and hence were integrated into, the central drama; and temp oral in that the preceding and following moments of the drama were integrated into the moment depicted. A work such as Delacroix's Marino Faliero ( fig. 2 ) , an early painting of

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relatively modest scale dating from 1825-26, very pointedly displaces such integration. At the center of the painting is the blank of a white marble staircase, not a dramatic incident, and around it are dispersed figures or groups of figures who are each acting quite independently of one another.19 The prone corpse of the beheaded doge lies at the bottom of the staircase. To its left, the executioner, standing impassively without his sword, projects a strikingly silhouetted profile that is mirrored by the almost equally striking figure of an armed guard standing to the left of the corpse, facing off the populace we can just see streaming up the stairs that descend to the bottom right. On the upper level, shunted off to one side and behind the balustrade on the top right, a member of the Council of Ten gathered to oversee the execution holds up the sword with which the doge had been beheaded. Mirroring this group of dignitaries is a more SOcially variegated group on the other side of the blank staircase; two of them display the doge's resplendent yellow robe, which had been re­ moved prior to the execution. Sometimes wrongly titled The Execution of Doge Marino Faliero, this painting pOintedly does not represent the execution; indeed, the doge's body, his costume of state, the executioner, and the sword with which the beheading was carried out, as well as the various groups of people witnessing or taking an active part in the event,' have become quite separated from one another. The painting looks a little like a collage made up of several distinct, relatively flattened motifs. These are not integrated pictorially, and the links we make between them have to be constituted in our mind. It would be nigh well impossible to decipher the meaning of this pictorial scenario without the accompanying text printed in the cata­ logue, and even with it, this takes a little time. It does not represent any one moment in the story as told in Byron's drama, which Delacroix cites in the catalogue, but a concatenation of disparate moments. Their tem­ poral succession cannot be inferred from the pictorial linking of the scenes represented in the painting. The drama seems in some way absent, and certainly uncentered; there is a disparity between what the picture foregrounds and one's sense of what the drama of a major public execution might be. This enigmatic inadequacy of the immediately visible pictorial drama to what it purportedly represents means that the painting is not saturated by clearly specifiable meanings. This opens up the possibility for it to evoke, albeit allusively, a number of contempo­ rary political realities that viewers in Restoration France might have had

2. Eugene Delacroix} The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero} 1825-26. Oil on canvas} 145.6 X 113.8 em. By kind permission of the Trustees of The Wallace Collection.

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on their minds-such as postrevolutionary anxiety about the possibility of political betrayal and conspiracy against the state, perhaps intensified by uncertainties over the stability of the Bourbon succession after Louis XVIII's death the previous year; vague unease about the crude violence of public executions carried out against those judged to be traitors to the state; and partially suppressed fears about the possibility of an uncontrollable upsurge of activity by the populace threatening the es­ tablished order of things from below. Delacroix's text amplifies the sense of events that have not so much unfolded as have been simply concatenated. In its comparative dryness it also makes clear that the meaning of the picture lies not just in what one can see in it, but in a complex situation that is never made fully present, either by the text or the painting-despite Delacroix's repeated insistence, in his journal, that painting made things "instantaneously accessible to its spectators" and that it was not subject to the disjunc­ tions between successive parts to which one's attention was directed in verbal narrative.20 The prosaic terseness of Delacroix's verbal summary -which would be quite disembodied, and hence lacking in significance, without the painting, just as the vivid and intriguingly undecipherable visual spectacle of the painting would be relatively meaningless without the textual accompaniment-echoes the negation of integrating narra­ tive in the painting. Marino Faliero. The Doge of Venice Marino Faliero, having at more than 80 years of age conspired against the republic, had been condemned to death by the Senate. Conducted to the stone staircase where the doges took their oath upon entering office, he was beheaded, after being stripped of his doge's bonnet and ducal mantle. A member of the Council of Ten took the sword that had served for the execution, and said, holding it on high: Justice had punished the traitor. Immediately following the death of the doge, the doors had opened, and the people had rushed in to contemplate the corpse of the unfortunate Marino Faliero. ( see the tragedy by Byron. ) 21

If we were to pursue the suggestion to "see the tragedy by Byron;' would this mean that we should be able to delve further into the mean­ ing of the painting, as if making sense of it were a never-ending process? But Byron's play presents a rather different kind of drama, and turning to it as a guide would mean locking our understanding of the painted scenario into the more manageable story of the fate of one man, whose

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presence in the painting is almost incidental to the substance of what is b eing represented. By contrast, both the large scale and the destination of Delacroix's later Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople ( fig. 3) might seem to make it into something of a conventional history painting. It was com­ missioned by Louis Philippe for the Galeries Historiques de Versailles in 1838 and exhibited at the 1841 Salon under the title The Taking of Con­ stantinople by the Crusaders-1204. This time the dramatic incident is fairly dearly articulated: a group of crusader leaders, momentarily halted in their marauding progress through the city by three inhabitants imploring mercy, fills the center of the canvas. Pictorially, though, this is a curious scene. Once we attend to it closely, the mounted crusaders are visually displaced by the vividly painted groups of victims and scenes of assault and slaughter around them ( several quite unconnected with the seemingly central incident ) and by the theatrical sweep of the view over the city and the sea behind them. Critics at the time described the composition as "strangled and confused:' They also were distracted by the difficulty of deciphering the precise meaning of the seemingly signif­ icant but subsidiary scene on the far left, in which an old, possibly blind, man, is being violently dragged away by a crusader.22 In this work, the dispersal of narrative is not as immediately evident at a purely pictorial level as it is in Marino Faliero. Such an effect is constituted to a considerable degree through the interplay between the accompanying text and the image, and between what one knows of the historical events informing the scene and what is depicted in the paint­ ing. In 1204, a group of crusaders had been diverted from their supposed mission to the Holy Land by the prospects of the substantial material gains to be had from intervening in a struggle over the succession to the Byzantine throne; they ended up capturing and sacking the Christian city of Constantinople and dividing up the spoils of the Byzantine Empire among themselves. What we see in the painting does not correspond to the events spec­ ified in either of the titles by which the painting is known. It represents neither the entry of the crusaders into Constantinople nor their act of taking the city-both in any case being less-than-glorio�s events on any reckoning. The crusaders clearly have already entered the conquered city some time ago and are well into massacring and looting, while a few have just climbed up to one of the city's higher reaches. The text underlies this

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3 . Eugene Delacroix, The Entty of the Crusaders into Constantinople, 1840. O il on canvas, 410 X 498 cm. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo credit: Reunion des Musees Nationaux/ Art Resource, New York.

decentering of defining dramatic incident even further, partly through a destabilizing shift between past and present tenses that represents the key event of conquest as happening prior to the scene depicted. The text states that "Badouin, count of Flanders;' the mounted crusader in the very center, looking down on the imploring elderly man, "commanded the French who had unleashed their assault by land, while the old Doge Dandolo, at the head of the Venetians, with their fleet, had attacked by sea. The principal leaders overrun the different quarters of the city, and desperate families meet them on their way to beg them for mercy:'23 vVhat we have, then, is not the scene of entry, or a scene of triumph, or some central defining moment in the occupation of the city-but rather a group of crusaders wandering aimlessly through the city, after the efforts

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of their inglorious military assault are over. They just happen momen­ tarily to have been caught short by the sight of a particularly distraught group of victims of their rampaging soldiers. The semiotic and narrative confusion is underlined by the way that the mounted soldiers at the center are presented almost as if they were gathered in some triumphal procession, or taking part in some ceremonially significant event, as if they had just scaled the heights of a fortress at the center of the city, or were dispensing charity to the defeated. But we see no such significant moment. The spectacle has no larger public significance-they are sim­ ply drawn up short aCcidentally by some dim but unfocused awareness.of the effects of the carnage they have unleashed. Their staging at the center of the picture is both brilliant spectacle and sham illusion of command­ ing order, unraveling from within the logic of the pregnant moment that the scene might at first might seem to represent. Represented here is neither the triumphal leader nor the merciful leader, nor even for that matter the barbarically vicious leader, that a traditional history painting might have featured. The dispersal of larger Significance initially suggested by the rich visual spectacle is the real Significance here, the dissolution of any underlying ethical or political sense of purpose-good or evil-that might be expected to permeate and hold together the rich array of vividly portrayed and richly painted incidents that is the substantive reality of the scene. Hegel's conception of a modern art, in which intimate engagement with the contingencies and particularities of a situation is embedded in disengagement and alienation from it, is almost literally enacted here, both in the person of the central figure and in the peculiar interplay between threadbare verbal narrative and vivid visual spectacle.

Turner: "Fair Shines the Morn . . . in Grim Repose"

Turner's famous Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (fig. 4), a relatively large-scale work exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812, would seem by contrast to be a very direct dramatic rend:ring of a significant historical moment-a turning point in ancient history when Hannibal threatened the Roman Empire by unexpectedly leading his army across the Alps into Italy. At first it seems that the larger symbolic resonance of the event is directly amplified by Turner's vivid painterly

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rendering o f a sublimely atmospheric landscape. But what precisely is the event we see? Once we look at all closely, the situation depicted becomes less immediately clear. It certainly is not just the struggles of an army threatened by natural forces-savage mountain conditions exacer­ bated by a dramatic snow storm, even if the latter, as Turner makes clear in his title, is integral to the subject of the painting.24 The center of the canvas is a gaping void; there is no Hannibal to be discerned-the one figure in the army who stands out is the unmounted, slightly threaten­ ing, anonymous standing figure seen from the back holding up a torch on the bottom right. Indeed, Hannibal's army is only dimly present in the lower reaches of the painting, one cluster on the bottom right, and another again in the far distance, below the burst of sunlight. The most visible figures are the local tribesmen on the rocky heights in the fore­ ground, shown helping themselves to the spoils of the Carthaginian soldiers they have slaughtered and trying to push boulders down onto the army in the valley below. That what is presented here is far from being a single integrated pregnant moment, but is rather several quite distinct scenarios spread out over a space and time, is made even more clearly evident in the text Turner supplied in the catalogue. This is the first of his texts he identi­ fied as being from his pseudo-epic, "Fallacies of Hope": Craft, treachery, and fraud-Salassian force, Hung on the fainting rear! Then Plunder seiz'd The victor and the captive,-Saguntum's spoil, Alike, became their preYi still the chief advanc'd, Look'd on the sun with hopei-low, broad, and wani While the fierce archer of the downward year Stain Italy's blanch'd barrier with storms. In vain each pass, ensanguin'd deep with dead, Or rock fragments, wide destruction roll'd. Still on Campania's fertile plans-he thought, But the loud breeze sob'd, "Capua's joys beware:'2s

In the poetic fragment, Saguntum refers to the Roman-controlled city in Spain that Hannibal sacked prior to leading his army into Italy through what is now southern France and over the Alps. "Salassian force" identifies the tribesmen harassing Hannibal's army in the Val d'Aosta, the valley in the Italian Alps that fed into the route over the St.

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4. J. M. W Turner} Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps} exhibited in 1812. Oil on canvas} 146 X 237.5 cm. Tate Gallery} London. Photo © Tate} London 2008.

Bernard Pass that Turner assumed Hannibal took crossing the Alps. The reference to Capua} the city in Campania in southern Italy that Hanni­ bal was to later make his base once he settled into his unsuccessful war of attrition with Rome} points forward to a sunny but uncertain future. Turner's text invites us to see the scene shown in the painting as both looking back to the plundering of Saguntum and forward to the sunny plains of Campania} where Hannibal slowly lost the advantage he gained by his bold assault on the center of Roman power. Its cultural} poetical} and political complexities are very much at odds with the simple sce­ nario of man's struggle against the elements that the painting is often assumed to represent. It can only be interpreted in this way by ignoring not only the poetic fragment through which Turner invites one to envision the larger significance of the scene but also the details within the painting that disturb a purely aesthetic immersion in so �e single} vague} all-encompassing drama. Even at the level of visual spectacle} there is} once one looks closel)lJ a multiplicity of effects. There is both storm and blazing sun} both hostile rocky landscape and spoils of plun-

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der, both the massed phalanx o f a huge army and isolated scenes of pillaging and massacre, and finally a multiplicity of different lights: the white light reflected off the snow, the yellow burst of sunlight, and the duskier orange glow of artificial light emanating from the army's torches. In addition to these details, the painting presents us with a turbulent void against which we can project our changing apprehension of the human dramas and political scenarios being evoked. The geographical particularities of place in which the scene is an­ chored open it up to some very urgent, contemporary political realities. St. Bernard Pass was where Napoleon had crossed into Italy at the outset of his spectacularly successful European conquests, an event commemorated in Jacques-Louis David's much more traditional image of a general's heroic daring-inscribed with a reminder of Hannibal's crossing-that Turner had seen when he visited Paris in 1802. Almost certainly COincidentally, Turner's painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy at a peculiarly opportune historical moment, the summer of 1812, when Napoleon's fatal attack on Russia led to the decimation of his army during the winter of that year under conditions that were every bit as dire as Turner's vision of a snowstorm and a hostile populace assailing Hannibal's army. In the light of Hegel's singling out the importance of the comic mode in modern art, it is appropriate to end with a very different late work by Turner, The Sun of Venice Going to Sea (fig. 5), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843. It is a fairly small scale easel p.ainting, quite divested of the pictOrial rhetoric conventionally associated with the representation of a significant event or natural phenomenon. At first it might seem to be a relatively straightforward, low-key seascape depict­ ing a small sailing boat taking to sea in the morning light, with the skyline of Venice hovering in the distance. It could perhaps be experi­ enced in purely visual terms, whether as a vividly painterly rendering of an illuminating moment of natural beauty or as a more postmodern vision of a world dissolving in sensations oflight and color. However, to do so one has to turn a blind eye to the punning details Turner point­ edly introduced. At one level, the "sun of Venice" in the title is repre­ sented in a relatively conventional aesthetic-pictorial way, as the sun shining on the city, its light reflected back to the viewer from the shimmering white buildings in the distance and from the yellow- and orange-stained clouds in the sky above. However, it is also present in the

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M. W. Turneli The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, exhibited in 1843. Oil on canvas, 61.6 X 92.1 em. Tate Gallery, London. Photo © Tate, London 2008.

picture as a painted sign. In the shaded foreground, the relative absence of real sunlight is compensated by the artificial image of a sun, set in a Venetian cityscape, painted onto the main sail of the central boat. Clearly labeled "Sol de Venezia" ( the "de" is rather ambiguous and should really be "di" ) the motif reads both as a second-order depiction of the sun hovering over Venice and as the name of the boat emblazoned on its sail. Once we become aware of this seemingly trivial play of pictorial and textual detail, it seems vital to turn to the poetic fragment with which Turner accompanied the painting, which he again designated as being from the "Fallacies of Hope:' This is not to find a key to the supposed meaning of the work, but rather to discover some basis on which to speculate about the possible significance of the seemingly unexceptional but curiously labeled scene.26 The entry in the catalogue suggests in no uncertain terms that the work be seen as having a larger poetic meaning, but it does not make it

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clear how such meaning might b e related to the details of the painted scene: Fair shines the morn, and soft the zephyrs blow, Venezia's fisher spreads his painted sail so gay, Nor heeds the demon that in grim repose Expects his evening prey. -Fallacies of Hope, M.SP

Are we to interpret the painting as a relatively trivial poetic medita­ tion on the precarious voyage of the "barque of human life" that cheer­ fully sets out in the morn but is beset on its return by the threat of death lurking in the dark? We might perhaps think so once our attention is directed to a passage from a poem, well known to Turner's contempo­ raries, Thomas Gray's "The Bard: A Pindaric Ode;' on which Turner clearly drew for his poetic fragment. Gray's poem evokes the fate of a succession of medieval English kings whose rule was interrupted by disastrous turns of fate. The following lines refer to Richard II, who was deposed and, according to Gray, starved to death: Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, VVhile proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goesj Youth on the proW} and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.28

The actual scene represented in Turner's work, however, gets in the way of any such easy poetic resolution. There is a disparity between the image of a regal ship setting forth and the mere fisherman's boat we see here. The latter hardly seems an appropriate vehicle for meditating on the transient destiny and reversals suffered by famous rulers and their kingdoms, or on the decline of states such as Venice, if we transfer the allegory from Britain at the beginning of the Wars of the Roses to contemporary Venice. Laments over the decline of Venice and its loss of freedom following its capture by Napoleon were a dime a dozen in British writing of the romantic period. However, if we follow this asso­ ciation, what precise meaning can we assign to Turner's image of a "demon in grim repose" lying in wait for its "evening prey"? It has been suggested by John Gage that Turner's poetic fragment

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makes reference to a passage specifically about Venice in Shelley's fa­ mous poem "Lines Written among the Euganean Hills:'29 In this poem, Shelley conjures up a vision of the distant future when Venice has gone into complete decline and disappeared under the sea. At the end of day, a fisherman hastens by the site of the submerged city "Till he pass the gloomy shore, / Lest thy dead should from their sleep / . . Lead a rapid masque of death / O'er the waters of his path:' Shelley then returns to the present with an image, very suggestive for the one envisioned in Turner's painting, contrasting the distant spectacle presented by Ven­ ice's towers "quivering through the Aeriel gold" and what, in the decline and loss of the city's freedom, its buildings now hold within-"Sepul­ chers, where human forms, / Like pollution-nourished worms, / to the corpse of greatness cling, / Murdered, and now mouldering:'3o Gage argues compellingly that Turner's painting and poetic fragment have much more in common with the complexities of Shelley's romantic political meditation on the state of Venice than with Gray's somewhat banal metaphors about the morning and the dusk of life's voyage. Tur­ ner's poetic fragment directs us to ponder the possible meaning of the muted contrast in the painting between the brilliant, ethereal skyline and shimmering water in the distance, and the green-tinged, oily, possi­ bly polluted water in the foreground, where wavelets suggest the pres­ ence of shallows on which the boat could run aground. The sky, too, has a dual character, with the transparent blue and white light of its lower reaches giving way to patches of red- and yellow-stained cloud above. The boat is a curious combination of modest ordinariness and almost gaudy richness, with its colored banners and painted sail, the effect of which is amplified by the large, patterned sail of a second boat just behind it. The glow on the more clearly visible woman and man seated in the boat makes it doubtful whether they are just fishers (and why would a woman be setting out with a fishing boat at dawn?) or people in more fancy garb. They certainly possess more "splendor" than the faded aristocrat looking at them from the boat on the far right. The painting clearly invites the viewer to engage in a freewheeling pondering of the meaning that might be attributed to the interplay between the rich and iridescent splendor and calm of morning and the darker, more opaque duskiness of the foreground. At the same time, the absence of some Single allegory that would make consistent sense of the scene depicted, the eccentric labeling of a .

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fisherman's boat as the "Sun of Venice;' blocks the viewer from becom­ ing too immersed in poetically resonant visions of the decline of Venice or in conventional melancholy meditations on the fate of a once-glori­ ous city and how this might prefigure a decline of Britain's maritime power.31 There is also a certain detachment inherent in what is, after all, a relatively calm sea scene. The result is a Hegelian splitting that is not found in the poetry to which Turner's work alludes, operating between the vivid particularities of the painting and the unstable array of ready­ made allusions it can evoke for the viewer, which are as banal as they are evocative-the morning and dusk of life, the threat of decline or even destruction lurking behind the precarious splendor of the city and the unreal calm of everyday life taking its ordinary course. The "objective" humor and detachment, combined with a responsive­ ness to the banal yet charged imagery floating around in the period's poetic imaginary, and with a passionate commitment to his artistic project, enabled Turner to give real meaning to the captivating but also baffling and at times nonsensical worlds he conjured up in his painterly­ poetic work. His eclectic engagement with disparate levels and fields of meaning, all jostling with one another and often sowing confusion, was possibly one way in which an art such as his could constitute a provi­ sional community of sense amid the devalued symbols and cliched aesthetic exp eriences current at the time. The latter formed the basic materials of his art, as much as it did for any of his fellow artists and writers. In a Britain where the spectacular but precarious proliferation of wealth proceeded in an uneasy political calm shadowed by indetermi­ nate threat, one appropriate response might well be Turner's incongru­ ous vision of a maritime city where "fair shines the morn . . . in grim repose" even as its "sun" is "going to sea:'32

Notes 1. Hegel's lectures were first published posthumously in IS35, the text based on notes made by his students and surviving notes he prepared for his lectures. While he had begun lecturing on aesthetics before he took up the chair of philosophy in Berlin in ISIS, his ideas on the subject were most fully elaborated in the lectures he gave there in the IS2os-see Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Asthetik, 3:575. In the more philosophically based recent discussions of the

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condition of contemporary art, present-day art is often envisaged as being situated historically "after the end of art." This end is usually located some­ where in the latter part of the previous century and associated with the radical critique of the nature and status of the art object and with the breakup of modernism and a modernist perspective on the history of art that got under­ way in the 1960s. See, for example, Danto's After the End ofArt and Belting's Art

History after Modernism. The end of art became a central preoccupation with the takeoff of postmodern theory in the early eighties, this being the moment when Belting and Danto launched their ideas on the subject. Both D anto's and Belting's discussions of the subject demonstrate how this end of art can as easily be envisioned as a welcome entry into a world of postmodern pluralism as it can as some kind of terminus to the serious pursuit of art. 2. Hegel, Asthetik, 3 :S73. 3. Adorno, Hegel, 4. 4. Jacques Ranciere's critique of postmodern meditations, whether on the demise of art after modernism or on a new era of j oyful artistic license this might allow (Le Partage du Sensible), suggestively indicates how the mindset involved does not represent some major historical rupture but rather is bound into contradictory pressures already operating within earlier thinking about art. In particular, he argues that the postmodern sense of a structural break with modernism, variously envisaged as "the crisis of art" or "the end of art;' repli­ cates, in inverted form, certain ideas central to the modernism against which it was reacting. Its disillusionment, he argues, was shaped by aporias that had been internal to the condition of art for some time; far from marking a radical new departure, postmodern art is best understood within the larger historical context of the "aesthetic regime" of art that established itself in the late eigh­ teenth and early nineteenth centuries. The essay has been translated as The

Politics of Aesthetics-see particularly the section '�tistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity;' 20-30. S. See, for example, D amisch, La peinture en echarpe, llS- 19; and Jonathan Crary, The Techniques of the Observer, 138 -- 43. 6. Hannoosh, Painting and the Journal of Eugene Delacraix, 3S- 4l. 7. D amisch, La peinture en &harpe, 46- 6l. 8. On the romantic understandings of the symbol, see Paul D e Man, "Inten­ tional Structure of the Romantic Image" in The Rhetoric of Romanticism. 9. Discussion of German aesthetic theory in the late Enlightenment and the romantic periods, in particular of how understandings of modern subjectivity were played out in this early speculation about art and the aesthetic theofYj has featured prominently in the marked revival of interest in the aesthetic in recent years. See, for example, Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic; Bowie, Aesthetics

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and SubjectivitYi and J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art. In line with the Anglo­ American philosophical preoccupation with Kantian critique rather than Hegel's dialectics, the latter two books assign a much more central role to Kant than they do to Hegel. The anthology edited by Bernstein, Classical and Roman­ tic German Aesthetics, in fact includes no representation at all ofHegel's writings on the subject. Hegel features rather more prominently in Bowie's study. Bowie, however, takes Hegel's verdict about philosophy superseding art rather at face value and argues that Hegel, in contrast with his romantic contemporaries such as Schelling and S chleiermacher, failed to recognize the significance of art as a medium for attaining forms of critical self-awareness that were unavailable to philosophical analysiS. His critique of Hegel for neglecting to recognize the full significance of art and the aesthetic, however, does not engage Hegel's suggestive analysis of the negativities inherent in the forms of art that perSisted in the modern world, possibly because Bowie is unsympathetic to the powerful anti­ aesthetic current that has sustained much of the radical discussion of art since the romantic period. Ranciere's recent essay on the politics of aesthetics (see note 4) identifies Schiller as the key figure in his very illuminating genealogy of modern and postmodern conceptions of art and the aesthetic. Most directly relevant to the present study's discussion of Hegel is Giorgio Agamben's The Man without Content. In this important analysis of the split that opened up in modern understandings of art between the practice of aesthetic judgment and artistic praxis as the expression of the pure creative principle (3537) Hegel plays a crucial rule. Agamben sees Hegel's aesthetics as highlighting an equivalent split faced by the modern artist between her or his artistic subjec­ tivity and "free" inner creativity and the inert, resistant world of prosaic objec­ tivity, of which an artwork becomes part once it is made into an object of aesthetic judgment. For Agamben, the condition of modern art as envisaged in Hegel's aesthetic theory is one in which pure creative formal principle annihi­ lates and dissolves all content in the effort to transcend and actualize itsel£ with art becoming a "self-annihilating nothing" and the artist the "man without content" (54 ) . For him, the end of art as defined by Hegel is thus not to be understood in the straightforward sense of an ending ( or even of a superseding), but rather as an end, never actually reached, toward which the processes internal to the constitution of art in the modern world are constantly directed. Invalu­ able as a companion to reading Hegel is Adorno's Hegel. Adorno offers a compelling characterization of the Hegelian absolute, the "end" of the Hegelian system toward which all speculative thought strives and in which all nonidentity would be overcome: "As if in a gigantic credit system, every individual piece is to be indebted to the other-nonidentical-and yet the whole is to be free of debt, identical" (147 ) .

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10. This discussion of symbolic embodiment in Hegel is indebted to Paul De Man's "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's 'Aesthetics: " 11. Hegel} Asthetik} 2:234. 12. See particularly ibid.} 2:19S - 97} 220 - 42, 3 : 11- 16, 123 - 33, 569 - 74. 13. Ibid., 2:129. 14. Adorno, Hegel, 95. 15. Hegel, Asthetik, 3 : 573. 16. Ibid., 2:230-40. 17. Butlin and Joll, The Painting of]. M. W. Turner, 249. 18. See Gage, Rain Steam and Speed. Gage ( 19 ) quotes a comment by a contemporary of Turner's indicating that the more perceptive critics of his work were well aware of the artist's liking for humorous, seemingly trivial detail and contingent association: "This hare} and not the train, I have no doubt he intended to represent the 'Speed' of his titlej the word must have been in his mind when he was painting the hare, for close to it, on the plain below the viaduct, he introduced the figure of a man ploughing, 'Speed the plough' ( the name of an old country dance ) probably passing through his brain:' 19. For a discussion of the way blanks of this kind were deployed in French painting of the later nineteenth century} see Kemp, "Death at Work:' 20. Hanoosh, Delacroix, 22, 95. 21. Brooks, History, Painting and Narrative, 25. In his extremely suggestive study, Brooks drew attention to the significance of the texts that Delacroix provided to accompany his more ambitious narrative paintings and showed how his paintings often brought together multiple moments from the stories on which they were based. However, he ended up arguing that Delacroix somehow fused these moments pictorially, striving to render "a privileged situation and make of it a p erfect moment, defined as the moment which perfectly serves a riarrative significance" ( 30 ) . While Delacroix's paintings-in presenting them­ selves as} and adopting some of the pictorial rhetoric of, history paintings-do raise viewer expectations that they will offer up a single} fully present, pregnant moment, they then almost always disperse or negate this expectation. In so dOing, they enable the drama represented to gain a wider, if necessarily provi­ sional and contingent} array of meanings. For a very valuable analysis of how Delacroix's more ambitious narrative paintings, in bringing together several quite separate moments from a drama and often excluding any direct represen­ tation of the key action that defines the situation depicted, radically break with the integrative logic of the pregnant moment that dominated earlier neoclassi­ cal painting, see Allard, Dante et Virgil aux Enfers d'Eugene Delacroix, 53, 61- 64. The translations of the supplementary texts Delacroix prepared for the two paintings discussed here are both taken from Brooks.

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ALEXA N D E R P O T T S 22. Johnson, The Paintings of Eugene Delacroix, 3 :98. 23. Brooks, History, Painting and Narrative, 8. Brooks does comment on the

odd shift of tense in Delacroix's text but nevertheless sees the picture as fusing in one integrated image the larger significance of the different events, past and present, being narrated. 24. This was possibly even more the case with the original title of the painting recorded in the Royal Academy catalogue, which read Snow Storm:

Hannibal and His Army, leaving out Crossing the Alps. The effect of this was to downplay even further the sense of some Single defining narrative event and to suspend the suggestions of narrative flow implicit in the longer title by which the painter was later known. 25. Butlin and Joll, Turner, 89. 26. Here we are brought face to face with what John Gage, in J. M. W. Turner, characterized as Turner's "approach, to introduce by means of verses more than the image could reveal" ( 187 ) . 27. Butlin and Joll, Turner, 251. 28. Quoted from the online Thomas Gray archive, http: //www.thomasgray .org, lines 71-76 . 2 9 . Gage, Colour in Turner, 146. The discussion of Turner developed here owes a great deal to Gage's two groundbreaking studies. 30. Qyoted from http: //www.english.upenn.edu/ Project /knark/ Pshelley / eugeanean.html, lines 135 - 49. 31. To be fair, Shelley does not rest with this meditative vision of Venice in decay but-in line with his radical political convictions--speculates that Venice might, if it were able to shake off its chains, yet again be able to "adorn this sunny land" or could, if spared by nature from sinking into the sea, crumble away to provide the ground from which new, truly free nations might spring. This alternative vision has a nice Turnerian touch, with the sun of truth dissolv­ ing the clouds emanating from the decaying city: "Clouds which stain truth's rising day / By her sun consumed away" (lines 161-62 ) . 32. In Britain, the years leading up to 1843 when Turner's painting was exhibited were marked by severe economic recession, first in 1837, and then again in 1841 -42, the latter being one of the gloomiest years of the century for the British economy. See Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 295.

TO N I ROSS

From Classical to Postclassical Beauty I N STITUTION A L C RITIQUE A N D AESTH ETIC E N IG MA ' IN LOUIS E L AW L ER S PHOTO G RAPHY

In his survey of artistic trends of the eighties and nineties, Hal Foster describes the art of Louise Lawler as questioning modernist "myths of artistic autonomy and aesthetic disinterest:'l These terms, of course, invoke Immanuel Kant's contribution to aesthetic philosophy, the in­ ference being that Lawler's art negates the Kantian legacy, and with it the central values of modernist aesthetics. Lawler's practice is usually located within a counterlineage of artistic production that includes the institutionally focused conceptual art of Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers, as well as postmodern anti-aesthetic tendencies of the eighties. As examples of institutional critique, Lawler's photographic "arrangements" document artworks in a variety of settings, including private collector's homes, galleries, museums, corporations, and art­ wo rld businesses. As many critics have affirmed, the pictures draw atten­ tion to contextual and sociological factors that undermine the idea of "disinterested" aesthetic reception that Kant proposed. Yet despite this emphasis on art's institutional determination, a handful of critics have noted that the photographs also exceed institutional analysis and anti­ aesthetic polemic.

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This excess was registered by a number of contributors to the cata­ logue for the first major retrospective of the artist's work organized by the Kunstmuseum) Basle) in 2004. Each commentator gestures to ele­ ments of "indeterminacy" registered within the institutional framing of artworks made salient by Lawler's photographic documents. Birgit Pel­ zer asserts) "Lawler's oeuvre) however) cannot be reduced to a mere contextual act. There is more to her than just institutional critique. For a touch of indeterminacy remains:'2 The critic George Baker and the artist Andrea Fraser also contribute to the catalogue with a fascinating conversation that ranges across Lawler's work of the last twenty or more years. Their dialogue concludes with Fraser) a member of the latest generation of institutional critics) responding to Lawler's photograph "How Many Pictures" (1989) ( fig. 1 ) . This cibachrome image transforms the graphic precision of a Frank Stella protractor painting into floating colors and forms reflected on the highly polished floorboards of a mu­ seum space. But what catches Fraser's eye is an electrical outlet sta­ tioned at the base of the gallery wall. This prosaic museum fixture obtrudes in an image dominated by the spectacular sweep of wood­ patterned floor and evanescent late-modernist painting. Prompted by Baker to give the electrical socket significance) Fraser replies) eM outlet? An opening? Art? The Aesthetic?"3 As this reply suggests) the aesthetic here) bizarrely signaled by a functional object) suspends the institutional analysis that typically motivates Lawler's art. At once discovered and magnified within art's museum habitat) the electrical outlet operates) to use Baker's term) as a signifier of "redemption" out of step with art's full surrender to institutional mediation. In his recent book On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life) Eric L. Santner describes institutions as "all sites that endow us with social recognition and intelligibility, that produce and regulate symbolic iden­ tities:'4 While Lawler's photographs impart a similar view of art's institu­ tional regulation) they just as perSistently register an outlet) an opening, in excess of institutional captivation. Tracing how this surfeit of institu­ tional recognition emerges within the texture of the works bears directly on their aesthetic salience. Therefore, despite the prominence of Law­ lees practice within anti-aesthetic critical frameworks, I wish to ap­ proach her photographs from the perspective of beauty. Taking this path will effect another view of the artist's oeuvre, one that questions the widely held assumption that the axiom of aesthetic autonomy has been

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1. Louise Lawler} "How Many Pictures;' 1989. Cibachrome (image)} 157.2 X 122.1 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

dispelled in contemporary art. At the same time} bringing Lawler's version of institutional critique in connection with beauty will allow an interrogation of recent efforts in art theory and philosophy to revivify the aesthetic. Those seeking to rehabilitate beauty typically reproach conceptualist and postmodern tendencies for their denigration of aesthetics in favor of art's political or moral utility.s With hindsight, it seems obvious that postmodern anti-aesthetic doctrine simplistically reduced the aesthetic to visually seductive, critically anodyne modes of artistic production. Alexander Alberro has recently reendorsed this argument by casting beauty and critical engagement in art as fundamentally incompatible.6 While rejecting Alberro's contention, I also wish to question the concep­ tion of beauty proposed by its contemporary advocates. Many are guided

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by classical standards! where the beautiful denotes aesthetic unification! as well as objective properties of harmony, symmetry! and proportion. The alternative thinking of beauty I propose draws on the legacy of Kantian aesthetics! while being inflected by the psychoanalytic approach to beauty Santner postulates in On the Psychotheology oj Everyday Life. This text brings Freudian theory alongside the Jewish theology of Franz Rosenzweig in order to amplify the ethical dimension of both thinkers' projects. Santner's primary aim is to reconceive communal bonds and ethical responsibility as answerable to an internal alterity akin to the Freudian unconscious! which functions as an excess pressure or "surplus vitality" within psychic life? Drawing on Rosenzweig's psy­ choanalytically inclined theology! Santner proposes an ethics premised on our responsiveness to others who! like ourselves! are inhabited by an unconscious: "an enigmatic denSity of desire calling for response be­ yond any rule governed reciprocity:'8 The postclassical conception of beauty ventured by Santner is allied to the psychoanalytic ethics of alterity he proposes. As a consequence! beauty is no longer conceived in classical terms as "a harmonization ofparts within an ordered whole but rather as the representation of an interrupted whole! or better! a self interrupting whole! one animated by a 'too much' pressure in its midsf'9 Put simply! I want to make a distinction between two conceptions of beauty interpreted in ethical and political terms. The first has devolved from classical and idealist aesthetic frameworks and has recently resur­ faced in Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Being Just! where beauty is associated with moral justice and democratic communal bonds. The alternative! psychoanalytic account of beauty proposed by Santner takes issue with the classical formula. It questions the applicability of the classical system to the traditions of modernist and avant-garde art! while also challenging the claim that classical beauty offers an appropriate model of community and morality. The following discussion of aesthetics! ethics! and politics divides into three sections. The first presents an extended critical analysis of recent contributions to aesthetic theory by Scarry and critic/ curator Nicolas Bourriaud. I argue that both authors politicize the aesthetic by recourse to a classical formula of beauty. The second section considers the ethical implications of the psychoanalytic thinking of beauty proposed by Sant­ nero The final section addresses Lawler's photographic works by way of a postclassical rubric of beauty.

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The Return of Classical Beauty

Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Being Just seeks to advance beauty's moral and political relevance for contemporary times. In his collection of essays Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud presents another re­ cent rapprochement with aesthetic theory. Coined by Bourriaud to describe an emergent art trend of the nineties, the term relational aes­ thetics has subsequently attained widespread currency in art-world con­ texts. Although Bourriaud makes no explicit link between beauty and relational aesthetics, I shall argue that the analogy he draws between relational art and democratic social bonds echoes key suppositions of Scarry's thesis. On Beauty and Being Just draws an analogy between a classical formula of beauty and a liberal image of democratic social arrangements.lO Here, beauty, whether manifested by natural objects or those of human man­ ufacture, deSignates an organic ensemble where different parts are recon­ ciled within the whole. Invoking the composition of the perfect cube, the four petals of the mother-of-pearl poppy, and the trireme ships of ancient Greece, Scarry describes beauty as the malting visible of a symmetrical, balanced, and harmonious whole, equal in all of its parts. I 1 Moreover, because of their exemplification of figural symmetry, "beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense ofloveliness of aspect but in the sense of the 'symmetry of everyone's relation to one another: "12 Scarry derives this idea of intersubjective symmetry from political theorist John Rawls's liberal conception of democracy, which interprets the democratic ideals of equality and justice in terms of the "symmetry of everyone's relation to each other:'13 Thus, according to Scarry, the figural equipoise of beautiful things acts as a symbolic catalyst that compels us to strive toward the creation of fair and just social arrangements.I4 Beauty here symbolizes a moral ideal, where selfish interests are suspended in favor of a "lateral regard" for others and a social demand for distributional equality among people. Scarry suggests, however, that in a world full of inequities and injustices, this quasi ideal may only be realized through the contingencies of political action. As Joan Copjec has observed, for Scarry, beautiful form does not simply function as a "passive analogy" for political fairness; rather, it requires (political) acts to make good the alliance between aesthetic beauty and moral justice. I S

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The fact that Scarry makes the visual manifestation of proportion and balance the beautiful object's most significant and pleasing attributes prompts Copjec to remark on her "disappointingly conservative notion of the aesthetic object" j significantly few examples of modern art are ref­ erenced in On Beauty and BeingJust. But Copjec also queries the thinking of a just society proffered by liberal political theory) where balance and symmetry reign supreme. The problem with such an image of democ­ racy) reflects Copjec} is that it presupposes a utopian future where political dissent is ultimately dissolved in a state of social equilibrium.I6 Copjec's doubts about the analogy between a beauty of proportional balance and democratic formations might also be directed to Nicolas Bourriaud's account of the relational aesthetic of contemporary art. At first glance Bourriaud's assessment of recent trends in art appears to have little to do with beauty. Indeed} he rejects as regressive Dave Hickey's endorsement of visually seductive art as an antidote to overtly political artistic programs. 17 Bourriaud} on the other hand} stakes a great deal on the ethical and political consequences of the relational aesthetic of contemporary art. His key proposition is that a number of artists who gained notice in the nineties seek to produce alternative "models of sociability" to those mandated by the monological directives and media spectacle of global capitalism. IS For Bourriaud} artists such as Liam Gillick} Felix Gonzalez-Torres} Rirkrit Tiravanija} Angela Bullock} and Dominique Gonzalez� Foerster have no interest in creating refined ob­ jects for individualized aesthetic contemplation. Rather} employing mix­ tures of installation and performance} their art choreographs participa­ tory situations and intersubjective encounters based on a democratic model of reciprocal dialogue and exchange. An obvious question arising from this claim concerns Bourriaud's conception of democratic social relationships. His assessment of the works of now deceased} Cuban­ born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres provides an indication. Bourriaud observes that despite the "tragic and militant content" of Gonzalez-Torres's art} a content arising from the artist's personal preoc­ cupation with AID S deaths and gay activism} its formal repertoire and mode of audience address imparts an insistent "demand for harmony and cohabitation:'19 This "life model" is allegOrized by the "immense delicateness" and formal harmonies of works regularly composed of two identical or "contrastless" figures. Bourriaud lists Gonzalez-Torres's works made of "two clocks with their hands stopped at the same time

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( Untitled [Perfect Lovers], 1991)j two pillows on a crumpled bed, still bearing the signs of a body (24 Posters, 1991) j two bare lightbulbs fixed to the wall with intertwined wires ( Untitled [March 5th] # 2, 1991) j two mirrors set side by side ( Untitled [March 5th] # 1, 1991):'20 A structuring logic of "harmonious parity" also applies, as Bourriaud suggests, to the way art audiences are addressed by Gonzalez-Torres's paper-stack and candy-pour installations. These works reach out generously to gallery visitors, inviting them to take pieces of the work away, while being left with the responsibility of deciding how much of this gift from the artist to appropriate and how much to leave behind for others to enjoy. As Bourriaud puts it, these works speak to "our sense of moderation and the nature of our relationship to the work of art:'21 Accordingly, the social relation enacted by Gonzalez-Torres's art endorses a "criterion of co-existence" or a mutual complementarity between the artist, au­ dience participants who help to "complete" the work, and the work of art itself.22 A subsequent publication by Bourriaud summates the democratic significance of the " criterion of co-existence" purveyed by relational art. In the catalogue Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation, he com­ ments that two central assumptions inform relational aesthetics: first, that "social reality is the production of negotiation" rather than disputa­ tionj and second, that "democracy is a montage of forms:'23 Democracy is thus conceived as a structure where disparate elements are stitched together to form a larger whole, and where social exchanges are based on the consensual negotiation of differences. For Bourriaud, this under­ standing of democracy distinguishes the art he champions from earlier avant-gardes, with their dissenting attitude toward the dominant cul­ ture. He contends that while the "imaginary of modernism was based on conflict, the imaginary of our day and age is concerned with negotia­ tions, bonds and co-existences:'24 In a cogent critical response to this claim, Claire Bishop has observed that relational aesthetics makes an "empathetic connectivity" between people the foundation of demo­ cratic community.25 I shall return to the alternative conception of de­ mocracy that Bishop introduces, but not before addressing the aesthetic plane of Bourriaud's argument. Bourriaud forthrightly distinguishes relational aesthetics from classi­ cal beauty, which he identifies with the coercive and inflexible social relations of totalitarian states. "The forms produced by the art of total-

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itarian regimes are peremptory and closed in on themselves (particu­ larly through their stress on symmetry) . Otherwise put, they do not give the viewer a chance to complement them:'26 Yet despite this assertion, Bourriaud's articulation of the democratic inclination of relational aes­ thetics echoes aspects of Scarry's political interpretation of classical beauty. Recall that for Scarry, the formal concord of beautiful objects symbolizes a utopian faith in distributive justice and social equality, understood as the "symmetry of everyone's relation to each other:' To be sure, Bourriaud downplays the internal formal relationships of art objects, accenting instead the social relations that artworks choreograph with their audiences. These are described as "microtopias" where inter­ subjective hierarchies are dissolved and equality between participants may be momentarily realized. Yet, this shift of focus simply transposes figural equipoise from the internal structure of the work of art to the structure of external relationships that artworks cultivate with behold­ ers. The rhetoric Bourriaud employs to define the quality of these relationships-intersubjective co existences, cohabitation, and harmo­ nious parity-recalls Scarry's account of beautiful form as a balanced distribution of part to whole relationships. Importantly, however, for Scarry, the fulfillment of beauty's purely formal promise of social equal­ ity requires acts of political dissent to complete it. Bourriaud, on the other hand, decants dissent from the adaptive and pragmatic sociability of relational aesthetics. Consequently, rather than offering an especially novel conception of democratic arrangements, relational aesthetics sim­ ply mirrors the assumptions of liberal consensus politics. According to the political theorist Jacques Ranciere, this philosophy has become the dominant discourse on democracy in recent decades.27 Ranciere associates consensus with the democratic state's efforts to minimize or proscribe political dissent. The promise and presupposi­ tion of the consensual paradigm is that different parts of a population, along with their divergent interests and desires can, through negotia­ tion, be incorporated and adjusted to the preexisting political order.28 In a number of publications, including Dis-agreement: Politics and Philoso­ phy, Ranciere questions consensus politics from a neo-Marxist and psy­ choanalytic perspective that differs substantially from the premises of Bourriaud and Scarry. Ranciere relates consensus politics to what he calls archip olitics, a political philosophy traceable to Plato's account of the republic. Dis-

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agreement identifies a dual dimension to the Platonic articulation of political community. On the one hand, it entails an arithmetical ac­ counting of the capabilities, duties, and differing interests of each sector of the community. On the other hand, it speaks of the submission of these different parts of the social body to the common good. Ranciere further observes that archipolitics represents the reign of the common good over and above sectional interests in a highly determined way: ''As the submission of arithmetical equality, which presides over commercial exchanges and over juridical sentences, to that geometric equality re­ sponsible for proportion, for common harmony, submission of the shares of the common held by each party in the community to the share that party brings to the common good:'29 Ranciere takes issue with this conception of politics on at least two fronts. He questions the pretension expressed by liberal and consensual political philosophies to make good a "full count;' or full inclusion of all sectors within the social totality. But he also rejects the dream of a state capable of ordering social subdivisions and frictions according to the "beautiful harmony" of geometrical proportion.3D Despite a difference of attitude toward the socially disruptive gestures of political dissent, Bourriaud and Scarry simply take for granted the guiding principles of archipolitics identified by Ranciere. Unlike Bourriaud, Ranciere views dissent as a constitutive, rather than dischargeable, condition of democratic politics. Attending to the mar­ gins of the founding texts of classical Greek democracy, he focuses on references to the poor and "the people;' those sectors of the Athenian state who had no share in the wealth, power, or governance of that society. Politics emerges, asserts Ranciere, when the people, as "the part that has no part;' identifies itself with the egalitarian idea, but not the fact, of the equality and liberty of all citizens. This means that politics devolves from the ongoing possibility of previously excluded segments of society demanding social recognition and thereby drawing attention to a "miscount" of the parts taken to make up the community as it is currently perceived. Thus, according to Ranciere, "politics exists wher­ ever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscrip­ tion of a part of those who have no part. . . . Politics ceases wherever this gap no longer has any place, wherever the whole of the community is reduced to the sum of its parts with nothing left over:'31 Rather than conceiving political community as a formation able to rationalize, incor-

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porate} and account for each o f its parts} Ranciere speaks of communal identity as constituted by an ongoing potential for internal torsion} a communal whole that never quite coincides with itself. This account of political community as immanently divided} as subject to disruption by societal parts repressed or excluded by prevailing communal arrange­ ments} resonates with aspects of psychoanalytic theory. It recalls} for example} the dynamic of the Freudian unconscious as a force of inter­ ruption secreted within the normal operations of consciousness. More specific ally} Ranciere's contention that "political intervals are created by dividing a condition from itself" suggests an affinity with Jacques Lacan's postulates regarding the subject of psychoanalysis. 32 Since I shall have cause to return to the split subject of psychoanalysis when addressing postclassical beauty, it is worth briefly rehearsing Lacan's formulations on this matter. Lacan describes the subj ect of the unconscious as lacking in being} since it only attains a social identity by way of induction into a pregiven field of language} inherited knowledge} and social custom} a process that divides the subject from its innermost self.33 In Ranciere's writings} this split subject coincides with those parts of society that have no part} that have no symbolic recognition or status until they demand or enact the acquisition of both as speaking beings. But an important counterpart of Lacan's theory of subjectivization also applies to Ranciere's refiguring of political community. For Lacan} the desire of the subject of the unconscious is split between its representa­ tion by identities supplied by the signifying order} and language's in­ ability to articulate being directly or authentically. Conceived in struc­ turalist terms as diacritical} reflexive} and nonreferential} the signifying network is inherently inconsistent} unable to sustain or ground itself as a complete order of truth. Additionally} the subject's induction into the social (the field of castration) introduces a psychic memory of lack} a fantasy of a piece of being (or) a piece of the Real) foreclosed with the subject's entry into the symbolic universe. According to Lacan} the subject's desire is} in turn} caused and haunted by this loss of some portion of the "real" entailed by the symbolic construction of reality.34 Ranciere locates the socially fissuring affects of political dissent in the tension between these two logics} whether located on the terrain of subjectivity or community. He therefore articulates a double sense of communal belonging: an acknowledgement of the subject's interpola­ tion within the part-whole relations of given social properties and iden-

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tities} and a subjective (or communal) receptivity to those political fractures that testify to the impossibility of communal (or subjective) identity ultimately constituting itself as a stable and invariant whole.35 Such formulations diverge from Scarry's proposal that the sensory manifestation of beautiful form prefigures the perfected democratic state} where manifold parts of the social body are incorporated and adjusted to an aesthetic design of harmonious coexistence. As Ranciere infers} the realization of such a goal} which reduces the whole of the community to the sum of its parts} would mark the end of the politics. This is because the potential for societal change suffers diminution rather than enhancement when political dissent is disavowed by a con­ sensual ideology of "negotiations} bonds and co-existences;' to recall the democratic values endorsed by Bourriaud. According to Ranciere's for­ mulation} without the disruptive gestures of political dispute} engen­ dered by the inevitable exclusions and inequities of any social order} the prevailing consensus remains closed to contestation and reorganization. In her essay ''Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics;' Claire Bishop similarly counters the consensual ethos endorsed by Bourriaud with a conception of democratic society as one where "relations of conflict are sustained} not erased:'36 Bishop derives this argument from the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe} who} like Ranciere} interweave neo-Marxist political philosophy with psychoanalytic theory. Following Laclau and Mouffe} Bishop concludes} "The relations set up by rela­ tional aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic} as Bourriaud suggests} since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness:'37 Seeking examples of contemporary art that counteract this consensual ethos} Bishop turns to the art of Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn. She emphasizes that both artists contrive relations with art audiences "marked by sensations of unease and discomfort rather than belonging} because the work acknowledges the impossibility of 'microtopias' and instead sustains tensions} among viewers} participants} and context:'38 While a strong kinship exists between Bishop's exposition and my own regarding the shortcomings of relational aesthetics as a political theory of art} I want to expand on two areas} ethics and aesthetics} that her essay broaches but does not elaborate. In her desire to dislodge the consensual harmonics of Bourriaud's theory} Bishop ultimately pri:v­ ileges the dislocations of social antagonism over subjective inscription

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within the sOcio-symbolic field. VVhile prioritizing what Mouffe and Laclau deem "the constitutive character of social division and antago­ nism" may be apposite to the political sphere, it doesn't translate too well as a guide for ethical relations with others.39 On the matter of aesthetics, Bishop provides an acute insight into Hirschhorn's art that has significance for my account to follow of a postclassical modality of beauty. Bishop notes approvingly that against the current of much contemporary art and criticism, Hirschhorn re­ affirms the modernist value of aesthetic autonomy, insisting on a gap between art and everyday life. Hirschhorn's attribution of a level of independence to the aesthetic sphere also presupposes, according to Bishop, a subject of "independent thought;' as "the essential prerequi­ site for political action:'40 A subject endowed with a desire in excess of prevailing systems of societal reproduction and cultural authority is largely absent from the Platonic formula of beauty directly endorsed by Scarry, and indirectly by Bourriaud. I now wish to turn to a postclassi­ cal, psychoanalytic conception of beauty that addresses this absence.

Beauty as "Remnant"

Kantian aesthetic theory provides one of the most influential philosoph­ ical elaborations of the modernist maxim of aesthetic autonomy, and it may, as Bishop intuits, be making a comeback in some sectors of con­ temporary art and theory. The following remarks amplify a number of overlaps between Kant's aesthetic formulations and the postclassical conception of beauty referenced by Eric Santner. Based on a logic of the "remnant;' postclassical beauty departs from the goal of aesthetic uni­ fication that orients the classical system. For the purposes of the present discussion, I shall address two aspects of Kant's account of aesthetic autonomy. The first concerns the cognitive indeterminacy that Kant affords judgments of beauty, and the second evolves from his remarks about aesthetic ideas. In Kant's Critique ofJudgment, judgments of beauty involve subjective reflection upon the feelings fostered by sensory phenomena, a reflection that brackets determinate judgment and its subsumption of singularities under pregiven concepts or criteria. As Kant puts it, "We regard the beautiful as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the under-

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standing:'41 The "disinterested;' conceptually undetermined attitude to­ ward sensory particulars recommended by Kant forestalls the categor­ izing and schematizing impulses of conceptual reasoning. Aesthetic judgment thus responds to the sensual} material} and prec:onceptual structures of experience that cognitive activity tends to repress in its search for generalizing laws and concepts. Cnlcially} therefore} Kant aligns the autonomy of aesthetic experience with an abrogation of the subject's reasoning power to appropriate and tame the anarchy of sen­ sate experience. Considering my previous remarks concerning the concordant and unifying impetus of classical beauty} it should be acknowledged that Kant's account of the subjective pleasure associated with beauty does contain a conciliatory tenor. He asserts that judgments of beauty re­ spond to a pleasure derived from a harmony or play of sensory forms apprehended as bounded wholes. Furthermore} as numerous commen­ tators have discerned} Kantian beauty ultimately promises an empa­ thetic accommodation between predicative consciousness and the chao, otic manifold of sensory phenomena. Yet} as Jay Bernstein has recently reminded us} Kant's anticipation of modernism lies most notably in how he situates the aesthetic as a corrective to rational thought's repression of a sensate and affective dimension of human experience. Kantian aesthetic experience foregrounds the material and experiential condi­ tions of conceptualizing procedures by disrupting cognition's mastery over the material world. In Bernstein's words} "Most broadly. and with­ out qualifications} we call this disruption 'beauty: "42 Beauty's resistance to the mind's conceptualizing powers is reaffirmed when the third Critique moves from the "free" beauties of the natural world to what Kant describes as the "accessory" beauty of fine art.43 Notably, Kant's reflections on artistic genius and art} unlike those on natural beauty} do not wholly annex aesthetic judgment from concep­ tual operations. Since artworks} for Kant} are manifestations of cultural and intentional production} their making and reception typically pre­ supposes some concept of what the object is meant to be.44 On the other hand} when speaking of fine art as the expression of aesthetic ideas Kant asserts that the inventive fecundity of the imagination overruns the cognitive operations of the understanding. "When the imagination is used for cognition} then it is under the constraint of the understanding and is subject to the restriction of adequacy to the understanding's

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concept. But when the aim is aesthetic, then the imagination is free, so that over and above the harmony with the concept, it [the imagination] may supply, in an unstudied way a wealth of undeveloped material for the understanding, which the latter disregarded in its concept:'4S This passage suggests that aesthetic ideas present a superabundance of sensory, formal, or symbolic material in excess of those determinate conceptual schema that also orient the production and reception of works of art. The aesthetic here denotes not art's unification of material reality and conceptual content but its activation of an overload of sym-, bolization, what Kant calls "supplementary presentations" that exceed conceptual validation. As Robert Kaufman has observed, such formula­ tions may be taken to situate the critical value of the aesthetic in its capacity "to offer the formal means for allowing new perceptions and concepts to come into view:'46 The particular and admittedly partial elements of Kant's aesthetic theory previously summarized echo something of Santner's account of postclassical beauty as the aesthetic figuration of "an interrupted or self­ interrupted whole:' Santner introduces this definition of beauty against the background of Franz Rosenzweig's religious philosophy and the latter's effort to reinterpret the Judeo-Christian tradition in nonmeta­ physical terms. Following Rosenzweig, Santner associates art's social function with its capacity to encourage communities and subjects to remain alive to a "logic of the remnant:'47 A beauty of remnants, re­ mainders, and leftovers applies to works of art whose compositional structure and procedures activate a surplus of symbolic address in ex­ cess of conceptual verification. More broadly, as Slavoj Zizek has sum­ marized it, postdassical beauty pertains to the artwork's indexing of repressed details that a given sociohistorical order of meaning was un­ able to incorporate within its prevailing narratives.48 A beauty of the remnant thus generates elements of conceptual and formal superabun­ dance that prevent the whole of the work from coalescing into a harmo­ nized totality. At the same time, Santner stresses that the commonplace (Kantian) affirmation of the interpretive inexhaustibility of aesthetic artifacts should not be "reduced to the unfolding of the inner logic of the work:'49 A responsibility for energizing the aesthetic remnant also resides on the side of reception, where interpretive acts are required to make visible those details that may shift the work's previous history of reception.

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The internally differentiated structure that Santner makes a feature of postclassical beauty extends his commentary on Rosenzweig's "psycho­ theological" theory of ethics. According to Santner's interpretation, the ethics of psychoanalysis recommends a subjective responsiveness to the claims of others, and to one's communal or social context, which pre­ supposes that both are inhabited by an unconscious vitality or surplus energy.so Santner's project therefore intersects with that of other post­ Lacanian theorists, including Zizek, Copjec, and Jean Laplanche, who understand the unconscious as an enigmatic otherness immanent to the formation of subjective or institutional identities. As a consequence, the theological side of Santner's argument should not be mistak�n for a nostalgic retreat to the certainties of premodern religious doctrine or morality. Rather, Santner approaches Freud and Rosenzweig as avow­ edly post-Nietzschean thinkers. This means that for both, the idea of a "spiritual" or transcendental surplus of human life no longer refers to a place beyond everyday life, a sublime zone outside of life where human happiness and freedom will finally be realized. Rather, as Santner puts it, the "death of God" implies that "the entire problematic of transcen­ dence actually exerts its force in a far more powerful way in the very fabric of everyday life. What is more than life turns out to be, from the post-Nietzschean perspective, immanent to and constitutive of life it­ self'sl Santner therefore contrasts Rosenzweig's ethical philosophy, based on a subjective openness to the "midst or middle of life;' with metaphysical programs that seek either truth or redemption beyond the rituals of meaningful life.s2 . The Nietzschean emphasis on an ethical injunction to speak and act from the "middle of life" carries a double connotation, however. It supposes a subject inducted into the relational networks of symbolic exchanges and social custom, just as Lacan refers to the psychoanalytic subject's being-dividing inscription within symbolic law. Santner de­ scribes the subject's assumption of a socially recognized identity as a process of "relational surrender" to the part-whole linkages that typ­ ically sustain communal bonds. Yet actively inhabiting the middle of life demands something more than relational surrender from the subject. It also requires openness to encounters with others who, like ourselves, are subject to unconscious passions and desires. Following Freud, Santner understands the unconscious dimension of the subject as inveterately out of step with the ordinances of social law

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and rational consciousness. As such, the psychoanalytic subject is not simply known or knowable according to social definitions but is also, as Santner puts it, "a stranger, and not only to me but also to him- or herself" and "is the bearer of an internal alterity, an enigmatic density of desire calling for response beyond any rule-governed reciprocity:'53 The ethical here relates to the degree to which subjects and communities are open to or defend against the pleasures and anxieties that arise from encoun­ ters with the enigmatic (unconscious) dimension of the other's desire. This includes an attitude toward other subjects that does not reduce their singularity to identities supplied by the symbolic order of social intelligibility. 54 Rather, Santner speaks of the unconscious or unknown "part" of subjective and communal identities as surplus to the "very forms of identification that normally sustain the psychic bonds of com­ munity:'55 As he acknowledges, this thinking of community is consonant with Ranciere's account of the interruptive event of politics as an imped­ iment to the reduction of communal identity to a consensual harmoni­ zation of societal parts. On the subjective plane, this leftover of social integration attests to a dimension of the subject's desire not captured by the mechanisms of symbolic law. In Lacanian terms, this surfeit of social inscription designates the subject's psychic attachment to a surplus of the "real" within the symbolic articulation of reality. Importantly, how­ ever, the Lacanian real does not refer to either symbolically constructed reality, or to some extradiscursive ground that lies behind the screen of symbolization. Rather, the real pertains to a failure or dysfunction within the symbolic order that attests to its internal division, its falling short of full ontological consistency. Reflecting something of Lacan's formulations regarding artistic sublimation, a beauty of the remnant invoked by Santner situates art as one means of keeping open the gap ( of the real) that separates symbolically constructed reality from itself. A fidelity to this gap keeps faith with the possibility that something other than the current consensus may emerge in the world. Clearly a beauty attenuated to the real differs from the aesthetic anticipation of an ideal of subjective or communal wholeness that sub­ tends classical beauty. Rather, the object of postclassical beauty ampli­ fies that which disrupts ( compositionally or conceptually) the organic self-enclosure of the work of art, as well as the sociohistorical context that forms its horizon. The immanently differentiated structure of this object is analogous to the subjective principle of the ethics of psycho-

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analysis. This principle acknowledges the subject's inscription within a particular sociohistorical order, while also endorsing a subjective recep­ tivity to the unknown part of the other's desire. As Santner suggests, postclassical beauty implies an "Other dis orientated in the world, di­ vested of an identity that firmly locates it in a delimited context of some sort:'56 This assertion contradicts the certainty regarding art's contex­ tual delimitation central to practices of institutional critique, especially those informed by postmodern anti-aesthetic doctrine. Louise Lawler's photographic works are undoubtedly part of this artistic tendencYj yet, as I shall argue, they also activate a beauty of the remnant that broaches the limits of institutional theories of art.

The Antinomy of Institutional Identity and Aesthetic Enigma in Lawler's Photographs

Although a cluster of critics have noted that Lawler regularly interposes signifiers of indeterminacy within her documentation of art's institu­ tional environments, the aesthetic and ethical consequences of this tendency have received limited elaboration. Following from the atten­ tion that Bourriaud and Bishop devote to the quality of social relation­ ships presupposed by works of art, I want to focus on the paradoxical mode of audience address that characterizes Lawler's photographic ar­ rangements. Bishop contrasts the art of Hirschhorn and Sierra with relational aesthetics by emphasizing their "tougher, more disruptive" strategies of audience engagement and estrangement.57 Lawler brings a different sensibility to the inscription of friction and disturbance within her work's allocution to spectators. The disruptions of identification and recognition registered by the photographs are usually subtle and unassuming, rarely marked by a corrosive critical attitude. Despite these differences of authorial tone, Lawler's photographic works also address a psychoanalytic subject, one divided between being a precipitate of the relational systems of the symbolic order and a libidinal attachment to the unknown or unconscious dimension of symbolic exchanges. But before focusing on this aspect of the works, their theoretical aims con­ toured by institutional critique and anti-aesthetic postmodernism de­ mands acknowledgement. As a form of social or ethnographic research, Lawler's photographs

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document the institutional lives of works o f art, emphasizing the objec­ tive conditions that coordinate aesthetic production and reception. On a rare occasion when she has overcome her usual reticence about giving instructions regarding her work's interpretation, Lawler asserts, in the catalogue for her show, Louise Lawler-A Spot on the Wall, that her pictures "present information about the reception of artworks."s8 This laconic assertion affirms that the photographs chronicle preexisting sit­ uations where artworks are installed, stored, or arranged by parties other than the artist in order to expose how different contexts mediate our responses to works of art. Lawler's professional career began in the late seventies, at a time when many artists were still preoccupied with what had been repressed by the central values of modernism. In di­ alogue with an earlier history of modern art, the photographs offer a sidelong view of artworks that discloses how vested social and institu­ tional interests compromise the autonomy of the aesthetic as an excep­ tion to everyday patterns of experience. Thus, while the Kantian current of modernist aesthetics asserted art's resistance to external determina­ tion, Lawler's photographs accent art's dependence upon institutional systems and structures. One of Lawler's early photographs shows the extent to which she amplifies overlooked presentational devices and supplementary textual materials that support and facilitate art's institutional existence. Pro,. duced in the early eighties, the black-and-white image "Board of Direc­ tors" adopts the style and technique of documentary photography. Whether working with black and white or color, Lawler often uses low­ speed, high-resolution film that enables the precise transcription of details. This ensures that prosaic incidents within the settings actively compete with artworks that would normally take center stage. "Board of Directors" shows an intrusively cropped segment ofJasper Johns's White Flag painting, hung on the heavy-duty carpet of a wall in Christie's New York auction house. Alongside the slice of painting, a shabby, finger­ stained card authenticates the work's provenance and lists its selling points: "previously part of the Tremaine collection, signed, inscribed with title and dated 1955-58. Auction estimate price 'on request: " Be­ cause the camera's focus activates the space between disparate elements, signs of commercial interest and the painting's dense, corrugated sur­ face are interrelated, rather than set apart. In exhibition contexts, an oversized mat printed with the names of Christie's board members

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frames the image. Listed below the picture, these corporate representa­ tives replace the artist's signature as owners of the artwork and the setting photographed. Such devices diminish the artist's creative pre­ rogatives, suggesting that art and artist are functions of the exchange mechanisms of the market. Lawler has produced numerous photographs that, with little sign of outrage or censure, reveal icons of modern art to be as expendable and exchangeable as any other commodity for sale. In the case of "Blue Nail" (1990) a close-up reveals a corner of the tactile blue and white over­ painted surface of a Miro abstraction, framed by the mushroom-colored pile of the carpeted wall. But just as prominent are the auction house lot number stuck to the painting's frame and a metallic blue nail that supports the canvas on the walL Another memorable Lawler photo­ graph, titled '�ligator" (1985), also contracts the gap that modernist aesthetics sought to maintain between art and the commodity. '�liga­ tor" documents a tightly framed corner of a room in a private collector's home, which is suffused in a shadowy blue-green light. The image has been cropped to reveal the upper portions of two domestic chairs, as well as architectural features and home-decorating paraphernalia. One of the chairs, prominently branded with the Lacoste alligator logo, provides the source of the image's caption. Behind the Lacoste chair, two wood-paneled doors appear to have been permanently closed to support a Donald Judd wall sculpture in brass. In the muted light of the room the sculpture seems to float in the space above the furniture, while its polished surface carries anamorphic reflections of window shutters and curtains. Once again, the devices of camera focus and cropping are mobilized to activate linkages between artworks and objects of common culture, a procedure that deflates art's identification with a sublime otherness located outside normal symbolic or economic exchanges. S9 Each of the aforementioned pictures may be situated within the dis­ course of cultural criticism that motivated postmodern anti-aesthetic discourse to cast a disenchanted eye upon the aesthetic. Perhaps the most telling displacement of modernist aesthetics established by this discourse was an insistence on the institutional, symbolic, or conceptual mediation of the nonverbal and affective transmissions of art.60 By dis­ connecting art from the subjective, the singular, and the sensory, post­ modern mannerism tended to imply that all of life was reducible to the generic narratives and identities produced by the symbolic order. Law-

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ler's black-and-white photograph titled "Once there was a little boy and everything turned out Alright. The End" (1985) ( fig. 2) might be broached in these terms. One of many documentations by the artist of private collectors' homes} this image discloses the living room of a casually elegant French apartment with various examples of fifties ab­ straction adorning the walls. Three paintings share space with a pedestal television and a pair of reproduction antique chairs. Not unusually, the artworks are treated as unremarkable incidents within signs of home decoration and human habitation that divert our attention from the paintings. A branch of mistletoe hanging from a ceiling fixture breaks across our view of one of the pictures} and occupying the center of the image are two half-full wine glasses} pieces of china} and a glass jug} all arrayed across a fireplace mantle. This documentation of artworks in the midst of social or institutional contexts suggests that the subjective basis of aesthetic feeling can make no claim to be undetermined or "disinter­ ested;' but invariably passes by way of the rituals of the symbolic field. It has often been noted that Lawler pictures artworks according to structuralist premises} not as entities that contain inherent qualities or significance} but as incidents that only acquire meaning and value within a network of differential signs. Andrea Fraser was perhaps one of the first critics to notice how this aspect of Lawler's art distinguished it from the earlier institutional critique of Daniel Buren and Michael Asher. Recap­ ping an essay she wrote for Art in America ill 1985} Fraser argues that Lawler's work presents the functioning of institutional power: "not in architecture} or in the museum as a building} or even in an elite class} but in a set of structures and systems that are discursive and also relational. I see Louise's work as part of a step from a substantive to a relational understanding of institutions as well as of critical practice:'61 This passage suggests a view of institutions similar to that expressed by Santner} as sites that produce and regulate symbolic identities. Fraser has elsewhere described recent developments in institutional critique as based on the assumption that the museum functions as "a network of social and economic relationships between spaces} places} people and things:'62 The argument that institutions comprise not just physical sites but discursive or symbolic fields has become cornmonplace within ap­ proaches to site-specific and institutionally critical art in recent decades. But the passage from a substantive to a relational conception of art conveyed by Lawler's photographs has been taken up much more widely

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2. Louise Lawler, "Once there was a little boy and everything turned out Alright. The End;' 1985. B /w photo, transfer type on mat (image), 39.4 X 58.4 em. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

in art and criticism of recent decades. Bourriaud's account of relational aesthetics could be viewed as extending the consequences of a struc­ turalist relativization of art's identity, which has been central to the postmodern critique of aesthetic autonomy. This is the idea that the experience of art does not exist outside or before the relational logic of linguistic or semiotic nomination. In privileging the collaborative and reciprocal conception of social bonds, and emphasizing egalitarian, in­ tersubjective exchanges, Bourriaud translates the structuralist account of the dialogical structure of signifying operations into an ethos of social interaction. Fraser's emphaSiS on the discursive mediation of our en­ counters with art, and Bourriaud's displacement of the aesthetic from subjective experience to communal exchanges, are different versions of the same avant-gardist gesture: the negation of aesthetic autonomy in favor of art's submission to the directives and demands of the social field. But to focus solely on art's discursively formed identity and value,

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its coordination and distribution within networks of relational and con­ textually bestowed meaning, represses its aesthetic claims on us. As previously outlined, the, aesthetic-understood in modern terms­ refers to art's disruption of the generalizing impetus of conceptual knowledge in its instrumental appropriation of sensuous materiality. Both Kantian aesthetics and Santner's account of postclassical beauty ally the aesthetic with a subjective receptivity to sensory meaning in excess of conceptual meaning. On the side of the art object, beauty pertains to the work's activation of material details that resist a full discursive or conceptual accounting of the work. This inscription of a certain material heterogeneity within the representational texture of the work also disrupts its harmonious adjustment to the matrix of symbolic meaning that forms its context. While Fraser correctly identifies a relational logic at work in Lawler's practice, the photo arrangements insistently convey something more than art's relational surrender to discursive systems of meaning or the arithmetical logic of commercial transactions. It would therefore be a mistake to accept the language of taxonomic documentation adopted by Lawler at face value, as though this pseudoscientific method could, or would wish to, fully unveil art's various contexts and related anthropo­ logical meanings. For a start, the intrusive framing and cropping of the images only ever offers truncated segments of institutional settings, a stylistic preference that recalls earlier modernist fragmentations of clas ­ sical pictorial space. But more importantly, the works activate textual and sensory signs of enigmatic content that fail to serve the epistemo­ logical aims of art conducted as sociological inquiry. In other words, certain features of the works continue the anti-instrumental commit­ ment of modern art anticipated by Kanhan aesthetic theory. Take, for instance, the title of "Once there was little boy and everything turned out Alright. The End:' Lawler has recounted that her mother gave her the caption, having copied it from the wall of a roadside cafe. The title tells the beginning and the end of a generic narrative, but through the device of ellipsis, the absent center of the story generates an excess of narrative content. As a witticism directed at narrative convention, the scrap of graffiti was not invented by Lawler or her mother, but was happened upon in the world and given another life as the title of an artwork. I have little doubt, however, that what attracted Lawler to this

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found text was that it symbolized a void at the center of narrative meaning, a surfeit of communicated content out of time with the rela­ tional chain of narrative progression. This contradictory expression of transparent photographic transcription and conceptual indeterminacy distinguishes Lawler's pictures from the stated strategies of conceptual art precedents. According to Sol Le Witt's oft-cited formula for maintaining the anti­ aesthetic stance of conceptual art, one way to downplay the artist's creative prerogatives and aesthetic choices was to follow a predeter­ mined plan where "chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome:' He continues, "The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but func­ tions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of the premise:'63 Al­ though Le Witt's works may never have consistently enacted such a premise, it perfectly emblematizes conceptual art's determination to strip art of any subjective or emotional valence by making it over into an objectively determined and impersonal exercise. While Lawler's work emulates a conceptualist acknowledgement of the historically changing effects of objective culture upon aesthetic production, not all traces of the subjective are erased. Yes, the images and their textual supplements adopt the cool, impassive tone of concep­ tual art formats, but Lawler's working method also attests to the "uncon­ scious" outcomes of a practice directed by institutional analysis. The artist elaborates on this process in an interview with Douglas Crimp, which was published in a book collection of her photographs called An Arrangement of Pictures. Here Lawler comments: "VV'hen I'm working, I take lots of pictures. It's a way of working that's fairly flatfooted in that I have a sense that something is worthwhile documenting, but the pic­ tures that work are those that are affecting in some other waY:'64 The "worthwhile documenting" presumably refers to subjects best suited to institutional analysis. But Lawler also describes those few images se­ lected for exhibition from the many, many photographs taken as "affect­ ing in some other way:' One way of illuminating this other level of affectivity ( code for the aesthetic) would be to attend further to how the photographs conduct conceptual enigma in the midst of deeply codified institutional settings. This intensification of conceptual indeterminacy within art's institutional spaces and discursive framing produces works

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both beautiful and mysterious. Or more precisely, their effect of beauty arises from their symbolization of conceptual vacuity, a factor that im­ bues the works with psychic resonance. Lawler's concern to invest the flat lucidity of the photographic docu­ ment with psychic intensity finds salient expression in "Hand on Her Back" (1997- 98) ( fig. 3). As part of a larger series called She Wasn't Always a Statue, this photograph was taken in a Munich museum that stores copies of classical sculptures. "Hand on Her Back" confronts us with the naked back of a crouching nymph from the museum's collec­ tion of faded replicas of classical statuary. Typically, the photograph inflates contextual incidents that draw the eye away from the centrally focused statue. We are alerted to the uneven plastering of the wall above the statue, the cast shadows of other sculptures that encroach on the nymph on either side, and the peeling paint of the trolley that supports the sculpture. Each of these elements points to the relational identity of the work of art, its integration within a diacritical logic of symbolic meaning. Approached from this perspective, the work addresses us as the rational, self-conscious subject supposed by institutional criticism, becoming aware of how context predetermines our responses to works of art. Thus, critic Tory Dent interprets Lawler's photographs as direct­ ing viewers to recognize themselves as socially constructed beings, as "readymades alreadymade:'65 But an additional detail breaks the surface of "Hand on Her Back;' a detail that detracts from Dent's conclusion. Given added weight by the image's caption, a child-sized hand pro­ trudes from the upper back of the nymph, indicating that another figure was once connected to the larger statue. Lawler's eye may have been caught by the nymph because of its deformation as a model of classical beauty, where the symmetry of the sculpture's form is impaired by a grotesque bodily supplement that activates a number of psychic effects. The submissive back of the nude and the tender and inquiring violation of the hand evoke the psychoana­ lytic trope of the primordial mother-child dyad, as well as a basic gesture of human address. As the indexical trace of an unknown other, the hand incarnates an appeal of some kind, though its content remains in sus­ pension. It seems that Lawler has discovered, within a "ready-made" setting, the residual trace of a modernist aesthetic supposedly displaced by conceptual and institutional theories of art. Ossified in plaster, the meeting of hand and back, which significantly occurs out of the nymph's

3. Louise Lawler, "Hand on Her Back;' 1997 - 98. Cibachrome (museum box), 153.7 X 110.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

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line of sight, acts as an afti:ctive signifier of touch, where the pathos of the other's palpation is felt before it is known. As. a prospective inflection of our responsiveness to this photograph, a certain susceptibility to aesthetic feeling in excess of the specular and cognitive operations of consciousness is conjured up. Such a disarming of the reasoning part of subjectivity recalls the disinterested attitude, attuned to the free play of aesthetic experience, that Kant associated with judgments of beauty. However, this scene of intimate corporeal contact does not promise a recovery of the wholeness of some presymbolic (aesthetic) infanc..'Y, of a raw responsiveness to external sensation. Kant, too, detached the reflec­ tiveness of aesthetic judgment from immediate sensation. Rather, for the viewer, the miniature handprint operates as a Signifier of loss or incompletion, because while it patently provokes our attention and identification, it lacks a transparent message to identify with. We there­ fore encounter a sensory sign that resists cognitive processing, forestall­ ing our capacity ( or desire) to appropriate the image in an instrumental manner. As. an allegory of the artwork's address to the spectator, the "hand on her back" indexes something heterogeneous and unpredict­ able within the documentary photograph's objective vision . . A double operation may be attributed to this work. On the one hand, the forensic capacities of the photograph attest to the classical statue's lack of self-sufficiency, offering a reflexive reporting of the cultural (and photographic) frame through which we apprehend it. On the other hand, this same forensic exactitude discovers a sensory sign of obscure origin and significance, which detours the former epistemological aim, permeating the picture with an atmosphere of enigma. This other di­ mension, which cuts across our acquisition of full knowledge of the setting or work before us, (lctivates the affect of beauty as remnant. As. Santner proposes, the psychic excitation occasioned by beauty arises from an encounter with an other inhabited by an "internal alienness" that detaches it from a delimited context of some kind. Yet, the vitaliza­ tion here of a surplus of symbolic address in excess of conceptual verification should not be mistaken as a lure that encourages the search for some deeper truth beyond the appearance before us. The nodal points of visualized enigma that populate many of Lawler's photographs of artworks descended into everyday life do not refer to a transcendent space of exception outside social or symbolic coordinates. Rather, as signifiers of aesthetic alterity they are imbricated with, rather than op-

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posed to, the theoretical enterprise of institutional critique. Considering the context of reception that has formed around Lawler's practice, one based on a postmodern negation of aesthetic autonomy, the excess of her work arises from its creation of an aesthetic space of unprogrammed reception within a narrative of pragmatic strategizing typical of post­ modern anti-aesthetic doctrine.66 In this respect, her art resists recruit­ ment to contemporary art-world claims, including the one Bourriaud makes in Relational Aesthetics that the modernist tradition of aes­ thetics is definitively behind us. George Baker makes a similar point about Lawler's self representation in publications and interviews, observing, "Somehow it is anathema to Lawler to pin her work down, to provide an explanation of her own practice sanctioned by the figure of the artist. That is the space that she needs and that the work needs to continue to claim. In some sense, it is still an aesthetic space, a claim that there is a place for interpretation and reception, and that the artist should do nothing and in fact must do nothing to interfere with this because it would betray the autonomy of the work:'67 Andrea Fraser responds that this seems utterly contradictory, consid­ ering that all of Lawler's work is about the manifold forms of institu­ tional interference that belie the "unfettered" notion of aesthetic recep­ tion described by Baker. I wish to propose, however, that the sustaining of aesthetic autonomy alongside its dissolution comprises a defining and productive feature of Lawler's photographic works.68 This feature has further implications for the ethical relationship with audiences en­ acted by the photo arrangements. A final example extracted from Lawler's photographic archive will facilitate some concluding remarks about the consequences of her prac­ tice for thinking about beauty and ethics. With "Les coordonnees" (1988), Lawler has turned her camera toward an imposing filing cabinet in the Metro Pictures gallery at its previous SoHo location. Here an item of office equipment in aid of gallery management ciphers a number of art historical references. The stolid rectangular bulk of the cabinet framed by the gallery architecture recalls the literal object of minimalist sculpture uninflected by subjectivity or expression. Additionally, "Les coordonnees" refashions a famous work of conceptual art: British Art and Language's Index installation of the seventies. Historically, the Index work is known for aggressively negating aesthetic seduction by malting -

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art out of the tools of bureaucratic administration: specifically, index card files, statistical calculations, photostats, and discursive materials submitted to the Art-Language journal. The French-language title of Lawler's picture echoes these connotations by invoking the accoutre­ ments of business or professional transactions: names, contact details, curriculum vitae, and so on. Each drawer of the cabinet that presumably contains such information is allocated to a named artist within the Metro Pictures stable, including one for "L. Lawler:' But yet again, a signifier of fugitive meaning obtrudes from a scene that attests to art and the artist's institutional regulation. At the top right-hand corner of the cabinet just one label has been left blank, shifting focus from a process of name recognition to the symbolization of nothing in particular. Like the electrical outlet in How Many Pictures, a commonplace, utilitarian ob­ ject is transformed into a locus of an aesthetic latency that loosens the binds of measurable identity. Moreover, because these "supplementary presentations" are laced with a superabundance of meaningful possibili­ ties, they fail to mandate a preordained, undivided response from the spectator. As a result, the viewer, too, is addressed as enigmatic at some level, as a subject whose identity and actions are not entirely contoured by pragmatic calculation. This uncertain, nonequivalent relation be­ tween the work of art and an unknown spectator approaches a psycho­ analytic view of symbolic exchanges, where the other complex cannot ultimately ground a ready-made answer to who we are. The opaque signifiers and remnants of unfixed meaning that Lawler discovers within scenes of art's institutional confinement assert not the symbolic uni­ verse's authority, but its impotence as all knowing. How, then, to re­ spond to an address from the other that fails to represent a set of precedents to be followed, or a plan of action to imitate? One response to such an invitation to step into the picture would be to judge and act without these certainties. Lawler's photo arrangements convey both statements of art's identity as a complex of institutionalized signifieds and signifiers of conceptual superfluity that make no determined directive for judgment to emerge. This bifurcated operation coincides with Santner's account of the effect of beauty as arising from the artistic presentation of a "self-interrupting whole;' one that generates more signifying material than can be con­ tained by the symbolic context within which the work subsists. Thus, the postclassical beauty I have associated with Lawler's practice departs from

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an organic metaphor ofthe work ofart ( or the subject) as a balanced and harmonious whole. This formula of beauty continues to be mobilized as the aesthetic basis of liberal conceptions of communal consensus and moral justice. In such cases, the social field is conceived as a relational totality of coexisting parts that in the best of worlds will subside into a reconciled totality; AB Ranciere observes, in the political realm, such consensual frameworks typically seek to veil over the divided condition of democratic communality and its distance from any order based on natural foundations. He asserts, ''Anyone who wants to cure politics ofits ills has only one available solution: the lie that invents some kind of social nature in order to provide the community with a [stable] foundation:'69 I have argued instead that Lawler's photographs offer no such stable foundation for interpretation. Rather, they operate as internally trun­ cated totalities that register more aesthetic "reality" than can be con­ tained by the institutional contexts photographed. The ethical implica­ tions of this may well be the fostering of a subjective or communal answerability to the unthought, the inconsistent, and the unconscious secreted within the institutionalized realities of everyday life.

Notes 1. Foster, The Return of the Real, 93. 2. Pelzer, "Interpositions;' 27. 3. Baker and Fraser, "Displacement and Condensation;' 142. 4. Santner, · On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 26. 5. See Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublimej Beckley, "Introduction: Generosity and the Black Swan"j Hickey, The Invisible Dragon. 6. Alberro, "Beauty Knows No Pain."

7. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 31. 8. Ibid., 9. 9. Ibid., 136. 10. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 95-96. 11. Ibid., 106 1 3 -

.

12. Ibid., 95. 13· Rawls, A Theory ofJustice, 93. 14. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 115. 15. Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman, 171. 16. Ibid., 171, 175.

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17. Hickey, The Invisible Dragon. 18. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 31. 19· Ibid., 53. 20. Ibid., SO. 21. Ibid., 57. 22. Ibid., 109. 23. Bourriaud, "Berlin Letter about Relational Aesthetics;' 48. 24. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 31. 25. Bishop, ''Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics:' 26. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 109. 27. Ranciere, Dis-agreement, 95. 28. Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, 83. 29. Ranciere, Dis-agreement, 4 - 6. 30. Ibid., 7. 31. Ibid., 123. 32. Ibid., 138. 33. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 11. 34. Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis;' 47. 35. Rancere, Dis-agreement, 137. 36. Bishop, ''Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics;' 66. 37. Ibid., 67. 38. Ibid., 70. 39. Ibid., 75n58. 40. Ibid., 74-77. 41. Kant, Critique ofJudgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, 91. 42. Bernstein, "Modernism as Aesthetics and Art History;' 255. 43. Kant, Critique ofJudgment, 76. 44. Ibid., 189· 45. Ibid., 185. 46. Kaufman, "Red Kant;' 711. 47. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 142. 48. Zizek, On Belie.h 96. 49. Santner, On the Pyschotheology of Everyday Life, 132. So. Ibid., 9. 51. Ibid., 10. 52. Ibid., 10. 53· Ibid., 9. 54. Santner has acknowledged a kinship between this ethical stance and Jacques Derrida's endorsement of aspects of Emmanuel Levinas's ethical phi..

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losophy, which also speaks of the other as irreducible to cultural definitions and social categories supplied by the symbolic order. Ibid., 116n39 . 55. Ibid., 117· 56. Ibid., 82. 57. Bishop, ''Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics;' 77. 58. Lawler, Louise Lawler, 9.

59. In this respect, Lawler's art might be linked to what Margaret Iversen has described as a "deflationary impulse" that motivated various artistic responses in the sixties and seventies to the high modernist tradition. Iversen describes minimalist and conceptual art as inverting the "avant-garde posture of alienated outsiderism" keyed to an aesthetic of the sublime that pervaded the New York art world of the forties and fifties. The deflationary impulse targeted art's identification with social or spiritual transcendence, and a related image of the artist as autonomous subject facing off against the instrumental, commercial, and bureaucratic imperatives of modern life. As Iversen observes, one way in which the generation of artists who came after high modernism "detranscen­ dentalized" artistic creation was to reduce art to "a thing in the world, un­ differentiated from other objects or insufficiently differentiated:' Iversen, "The Deflationary Impulse;' 81. 60. Meyer and Ross, "Aesthetic / Anti-aesthetic;' 21. 61. Baker and Fraser, "Displacement and Condensation;' 112. 6 2. Fraser, "From the Critique of Institutions to an Institutional Critique;' 281. 63. Le Witt, "Serial Project NO. 1 (ABCD ) " (1966). 64. Crimp and Lawler, "Prominence Given, Authority Taken:' 65. Dent, "Alreadymade 'Female; " 24. 66. Despite Andrea Fraser's sensitivity to the nuances of Lawler's institu­ tional critique, her comments on her own practice of institutional criticism indicate a more instrumental attitude toward the potential recipients of her work. On the occasion of an October roundtable discussion on "The Present Conditions of Art Criticism;' Fraser asserts that since art criticism, like art, cannot transcend its context, then critics, like artists, should address their publics in specific and pragmatic terms. For Fraser, this "means not misrecog­ nizing your readership as the other [my emphasis] of your discourse but as the actual people who are probably going to be picking up the magazine and looking through its pages:' Foster and others, "Roundtable;' 223. 67. Baker and Fraser, "Displacement and Condensation;' 117. 68. Jacques Ranciere has proposed that this double effect, the paradoxical co­ implication of opposites and the effort to engage with contradiction, is in fact characteristic of the modern aesthetic tradition. In response to a question

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about the relationship between art and politics, Ranciere asserts, "Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of the political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused conversely, by the uncanny, that which resists signification:' Ran­ ciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, 63.

69. Ranciere, Dis-agreement, 16.

RA N JA N A KHA N N A

Technologies of Belonging S E N S US C O M M U N I S ,

D I S I D E N T I F I CAT I O N

In this article I a m interested i n the relation between the notion of sensus communis, understood variously in the modern era as common sense and sense of community, to visuality and metaphoricity. I seek to understand what happens to the sensus communis when visuality becomes dominated by consciousness ofits own technological makeup and when metaphor is apparent only at the moment of its disintegration into demetaphoriza­ tion. The sensus communis began to be theorized in Europe, from the eighteenth century on, as an idea ( rather than something natural ) and as a form of civic sense. I will address what happened to that civic sense when the perspective on the world changed dramatically from one of colonial enlightenment universalism to one of postcolonial melancholia. This change, seen here through visuality and metaphoricity, highlighted the colonial frameworks of the world in which the knowledge of Shaftes­ bury, Vico, and Kant emerged. Stressing this change raises questions of how colonialism and its aftermath alter the manner in which the com­ munis was conceived and what form of sense would come to dominate the visual culture of postcoloniality. The article, then, elaborates the notion of the sensus communis in Shaftesbury, Vico, and Kant in order to understand the forms of universalism embodied within the concept's imbrications in notions of the visual and metaphoricity that are, in the end, implicitly questioned in the works of installation and video artist Mona Hatoum. The developing visual and metaphoric implications of

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sensus communis are framed b y the importance of that which i s inhu­ manly vast or monstrous in size or strength-what ShaftesbuI:Y refers to as the "immane;' what Vico theorizes in terms of gigantism} and what Mona Hatoum visualizes in her large domestic installations-as well as the idea of communication that we see in epistolary forms} from Shaftesbury to Hatoum. Contemporary discussions of the sensus communis are dominated by the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition} in which questions of justice and the aesthetic were brought together through Kant's critique of aesthetic judgment (Kant's third Critique)} which distinguished itself from the epistemological investigations of the first Critique and the moral thrust of the second Critique. It is} however} worth thinking back through the humanist thrust of the pre-Kantian formulations of the sensus communis} and in particular the status of the idea} the metaphOri­ cal} and the "as if" that circulated before Kant} through formulations of the sensus communis in Shaftesbury and Vico} in spite of the quite distinct meanings of the term for each. In theorizations of the sensus communis} the status of the metaphorical in conjunction with that of the immane} a form of gigantism and machiner)1j helps us to understand how the machine-the wheels and counterpoises} as Shaftesbury put it-came to shape the technology of communication and exchange} and indeed came to shape belonging and unbelonging. Sensus communis has frequently been associated with the metaphorical. The article will sug­ gest that a different form} perhaps an inhuman or diseased form of a sensus communis} presents disidentification formulated in demetaphor­ ization. This is not the absence of metaphor so much as the dwindling of that trope's metaphorical powers. Sometimes the technologies of be­ longing seem to invoke or conjure immane apparitions and specters that are indeed melancholic. Sometimes they will be in letters that fore­ ground the machinery of their potential not to arrive} rather than their ability to communicate in the manner Shaftesbury proposes. The complex machinery of the communis-including} as it does} a teeming multitude described by Shaftesbury-also includes a grotesque and somewhat threatening kind of gigantism. Such gigantism can be the site of productive metaphor} as it is in Vico's work. At other times} demetaphorization highlights instead the palpable sense of loss of such an idea} something we can perceive in Mona Hatoum's installations.

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Shaftesb ury

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, famously wrote in his letter on the sensus communis, "For when the mind is taken up in vision and fixes its view either on any real object or mere spectre of divinity, when it sees, or thinks it sees, anything prodigious and more than human, its horror, delight, confusion, fear, admiration or whatever passion belongs to it or is uppermost on this occasion, will have some­ thing vast, 'immane; and ( as painters say) beyond life. And this is what gave occasion to the name of fanaticism as it was used by the ancients in its original sense, for an apparition transporting the mind:'l This letter followed on his concerns about the nature of "enthusiasm;' or immoder­ ate fanaticism relating to religion. He saw extreme enthusiasm as a mel­ ancholy panic, spread through a community by either "contact" or "sym­ pathy;' reaching "ghastly and terrible" dimensions.2 Just as the source of such passion may be "immane" -monstrous in size or strength or inhu­ manly huge and cruel-so too is the resulting effect in the multitude monstrous and vast. Shaftesbury paints an ugly picture of the multitude so affected, or perhaps more accurately, possessed. In his epistolary philosophizing (his treatises are frequently written in letter form), Shaftesbury is particularly skeptical of an iconic visuality responsible for instigating both a mental "transporting [of] the mind" and a contagion among those fixated: "Their very looks are infectious. The fury flies from face to face, and the disease is no sooner seen than caught:'3 Despite his deep reverence for the Christian faith and Catholicism, his mistrust of the visual, especially in the hands of the multitude, causes him to plea for careful basic moral thought and conversation-the model of the sensus communis-that could temper extreme enthusiasm and the forms of community that arise from and are spread by it. He does not, however, aim to divest man of all feeling. Sentiment was linked to moral thought for him as imaginative force, and linguistic exchange as conversation or, in written form, a letter. Shaftesbury's notion of sensus communis is posited as a counter to immoderate excitability, and it argues its case through the notion of good humor and "raillery" or banter. While there may be sensible affection among family members, clans, or tribes that emerges in the natural expression of filiation, there is also an idea of community that can will peoples together or affiliate those of the same species but without other commonalities. Shaftesbury

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i s attentive t o the problems o f either o fthese forms o f attachment alone . .As he describes the dominance of the idea, he is wary of the degradation of the "state of nature" he sees in Hobbes's political philosophy, which he suggests emerges from an egoistic social contract theory. He does not accept the amoral selfishness that characterizes the humans in Hobbes's version of the state of nature, in which, he writes, "Civili1:yj Hospitality, Humanity towards Strangers or people in distress" is understood only as "a deliberate Selfishness;' or where "The Love of Kindred, Children and Posterity is purely Love of Se?t and of one's own immediate Blood: .As if, by this Reckoning, all mankind were not included; All being of one Blood, and join'd by Inter-marriages and Alliances; as they have been trans­ planted in Colonys, and mix'd one with another:'4 Shaftesbury goes to some length in describing his departure from Hobbes, in particular the problem of imagining a complete divide between the idea of the state of culture entered into through contract, on the one hand, and the base nature of mankind described as the state of nature. Rather, Shaftesbury sees a basic virtue that will teleologically stretch from love of self and family to love of community, one that merges the sensual and the rational or, perhaps more accurately, denies the break between them, stressing instead a teleology from one to the other. Similarly, the senses represented in Hobbes's state of nature seem to counter the idea in the state of culture. For Shaftesbury, this risks an intense attachment to an idea of community that is typical of "the spirit of faction" one typically sees in states.s The emblem that forms the frontispiece of the essay refers to Hobbes's philosophy and Shaftesbury's counter philosophy, which tempers skepticism with burlesque (fig. 1). The triptych also includes a central image of an African arriving in Europe and witnessing Europeans for the first time. From Horace, Shaftesbury takes his epigraph, "hac urget lupus, hac canis" ( on the one side a wolf presses, on the other a dog) as if to cast doubt on the dictum of Hobbes's description of the state of nature as homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man) . Shaftesbury suggests, rather, that the human lies neither on the side of the state of nature ( as wolf) nor on the side of the state of culture ( as dog). Equally, in a long footnote he draws a distinction between Greek and Roman notions of sensus communis between the line of thinking from Aristotle (the sense through which we perceive) to Thomas Aquinas (in which this becomes reason) I on the one hand, and, on the other, from Cicero (where sensus -

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1 . Frontispiece from "Sensus

59

Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend;' in Shaftesbury)

Characteristicks) sixth edition) London) 1737- 38.

© British Library A N

Board. All Rights Reserved

E S S A Y, &c. P A R T S E C T.

I. r.

H A V E been confidering (my Friend !) what your Fancy was, to cxprefs fuch a ftuprize as you did the other day, when I happen'd to fpeak to

Was you in commendation of Rai!te't�y. it pomble you jhould fuppoie me fo grave a Man, as to diflike ttll COllV�rfltion of

Yo!.

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this

communis seems to carry the idea of an ethos, a society's norms as understood by its inhabitants, edging on humanitas) to Juvenal, Marcus Aurelius, Horace, and also Seneca, "a just sense of common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among the same species:'6 His "Sensus Communis, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Hu­ mour in a Letter to a Friend" is careful to explain that the form of ridicule referred to in the title should remain good humored and should reflect gentlemanly good breeding and paideia: through education and upbringing, which is the physical and intellectual achievement to which society aspires. It should not manifest itself, therefore, in cruel condem­ nation or laughing in the face of the enthusiastic multitude, which

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would amount to silencing them. This would be "a breach of the har­ mony of public Conversation" and therefore "contrary to Liberty:'7 Shaftesbury does not explicitly condemn the visuaL In fact, he devotes much thought to it in his Second Characters) or The Language of Forms. He does, however, articulate that a paideia will involve a kind of educa­ tion of the senses into moral groundedness. If this involves the visual, it will be through conversation about the meaning and moral uplift associ­ ated with a reading of, for example, emblems.8 We see here how he merges the Aristotelian concern with the manner in which people per­ ceive objects, on the one hand, and the sense of public weal, on the other. Shaftesbury included, for each of his essays as well as for volumes as a whole, a visual image, as if these essays were part of an emblem book. He also wrote about his choices of the images, which were engrav­ ings by Gribelin, who was given detailed instructions on their appear­ ance. Shaftesbury writes, too, of the important pleasures of the allegori­ cal interpretation, and he was also particular about communicating the rhetorical qualities of the prose through capitalization.9 The importance of conversational exchange or dialogue is stressed in many ways in the writing, not least in the forms it takes: advice) letters, conversations, and even soliloquies assume the presence of another to whom something is being directly communicated. The metaphors of visuality-and therefore also the emphasis on the face as spectacle and, through contagion, as spectator-are particularly striking. Even as his own aesthetic theory is well developed-albeit as a branch of ethics ( the branch of philosophy known as aesthetics did not exist in the Anglo-Saxon context ) -his insistence on the danger of the uneducated and inappropriate look provides the paradigm for an under­ standing of the senses more broadly. The senses are to be educated, and indeed the affective response must be tempered with the measure that will necessarily have a beneficial impact on love of the community and that will promote natural equality among the same species. In fact, the faces of the multitude almost cast doubt on the species and the human­ itas into which they must be formed. Like an artwork, they must be molded with harmonious design to become beautiful, and the produc­ tion of such beauty will, in turn, assist in the production of an educated public.lO Rather than melancholy panic, then, a sense of tasteful human­ itas can be created and all can begin to behave like artists, as if in harmonious design, while working toward that idea. It is this idea

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rooted in feeling, rather than feeling alone, that ultimately must work toward willing the sensus communis into existence. It is the case, undoubtedly, that Shaftesbury's sensus communis must develop through conversation and exchange among those who under­ stand the same language, as they draw in those who are not yet able to adhere to the sensus communis. And yet there is an insistent visuality that governs his writing on the topic, in which he situates the gentleman as the artist or architect of harmonious design. And it is the gentleman, too, who will be able to distinguish faces in a crowd, so the community is not a monstrous multitude but rather a group of individuated figures who are composed together through design. The machinery of the world as community has, then, its basis in a humanitas that must be educated into willing harmony, rather than dwelling in the infectious, ghastly, terrible, and immane features of the misguided multitude. Ultimately, the interest of everyone (all human­ itas) is to limit self-interest in favor of the interests of the public weal; this will oil the machinery of community spirit. The educated eye, when observing such machiner)lj will see that it functions not only for self­ interest but also for the common good. "Whoever looks narrowly into the affairs of it, will find that passion, humor, caprice, zeal, faction, and a thousand other springs which are counter to self-interest, have a consid­ erable part in the movement of this machine. There are more wheels and counterpoises in this engine than are easily imagined:'ll The careful architectural and artistic design of the world as machine is the counter­ weight to the uneducated, grotesque faces of the infectious multitude, whose humor is melancholic. In addition, the foreigner who arrives from afar-the African in Shaftesbury's imagination--who may arrive at the Venice Carnival and, recognizing some primitive ritual, may find the masks amusing. But also ultimately, he may push the jest too far when everyday European appearance also seems amusing, at least until he is educated into the fashion. He will face the possibility of mistaking what is deemed "nature" for "art:' The frontispiece-which, like most of the emblems, supplies an allegorical key for the essays-includes this "Ethi­ opian" arriving. Shaftesbury's humanism-which emerges here as prejudice even as it affirms the commonality among humans-fails to recognize the amus­ ing nature of fashion as modern ritual. Even as at times he acknowledges the artifice of fashion, at others it would seem as ifhe thought there were

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no art involved in the creation of the European, either in terms of fashion or in terms of education. His influence on Vico, and Kant's departures from him, have been famously elaborated by Gadamer in Truth and Method, especially with respect to the concept of a sensus communis.12 The focus of Gadamer's claim is the way in which humanis­ tic thought works with and against the fields of philosophy, science, and aesthetics and how Kant was responsible for divorcing an understanding of the aesthetic from the political and the moral. "The concept of sensus communis;' Gadamer writes, "was taken over, but in being emptied of all political content it lost its genuine critical significance:'13 It is cer­ tainly the case that both Shaftesbury and Vico worked with a more integrated relation between the aesthetic and the ethical, and yet Gada­ mer's critique of Kant perhaps overstates the case, because the strong investment in communicability makes the aesthetic experience, and judgment of it, the site of some suspicion. Conversation and moral community were indeed important to Shaftesbury ( Gadamer stresses the importance of wit and humor as something limited to "social intercourse among friends" in Shaftes­ bury) . 14 The visual emphasis, and indeed the distrust of visual con­ tagion, is striking, because it is suggestive of a lack of control when the humors are melancholic, in spite of the doubts he casts over Hobbes's version of the state of nature. Indeed, it seems to undermine the faith in the idea of the sensus communis that Shaftesbury foregrounds and also the idea of the human that he sets forth. It is unclear whether the common weal can reach toward those who are ostensibly members of the same species, grotesque and immane as they sometimes are, and beyond life. Even if the humors can be changed through wit and raillery, the complexity of human nature, as he understands it through the humors, surely casts some doubt on the natural origin of harmonious design, even if he believes that the human is well designed when the humors are in balance.

Vico

John Schaeffer has shown, in his work Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism, that Shaftesbury lived some time in Italy and that he could well have met Vico, whose work seems to have been

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influenced by him. What interests me is less the question of whether they met, and more whether Vico's merging of the Greek and Roman traditions of the sensus communis shares or departs from Shaftesbury's version. Just as Shaftesbury thought that "melancholy panic" could be rectified by the lifting of the humors through conversation rather than visual exchange, Vico foregrounded the importance of the rhetorical and also associated this with the grotesque. Attempting to find some notion of common humanity, Vico located this in primitive forms of culture. If he was interested in the manner in which rhetoric functioned to sustain sensus communis in contemporary life, it was because of his understanding of rhetoric's relation to the visual and the oral, and ultimately to the arts. Attempting to understand the origin of sensus communis, he looked at early forms of communication that expressed "imaginative universals:' While these were ultimately to be sought in language, Vico saw the origins of this in pictures. Once again, the importance of the visual in the sensus communis had been foregrounded. For Vico, visuality had the advantage oflarge ideas that were not depen­ dent on an ability to abstract. Visual images would simply present themselves and would sometimes combine unlikely objects, without having to conceptualize complexity or synchronicity. He described these objects from the imagination as "poetic monsters:' Eventually these were lost to the alphabet and subsequently other forms of repre­ sentation that were no longer directly, or bodily, present to themselves. The remainders of these can be seen, as in Shaftesbury, in emblems. And yet, there we see them lurking in the midst of other representational fields, even though they are not out of synch with them. IS Vico's stages of language share something with Shaftesbury's sketches as seen in the incomplete and posthumously published "Plastics;' in Second Characters, which Similarly plots a movement of language from the pictorial, metaphor to metonymy and so on. And yet Vico is clearly staging a notion of history that is not shaped by religious time, and in that sense it is "secular" in the etymological sense ( "of the centuries or generation" ) . It produces three major historical moments: the time of the Gods, dominated by pictures and images; the time of heroes, when gentiles became giants dominated by metaphorical language; and the time of men, shaped by epistolary language, in which there is agreement about the meanings of words. In turn, the first had a system of law governed by mysticism, the second by heroic jurisprudence, and the

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third by a sense of equity. These historical cycles, or rico rs i, do not interfere with each other. But when men become caught in "false elo­ quence" and use it for the purposes of factionalism, strife, and civil war, there is a recoil to earlier cycles, to primitive simplicity, and to the justice of the Gods. So out of base despair is produced something large, and perhaps immane, that leads to a different relation to justice through the pictorial and the metaphorical. If Shaftesbury balanced the relation between sense and idea in order to maintain the teleology of mankind so the community could function as if in consistent human spirit with the familial context, Vico returns us to the pictorial and metaphorical "as if" of communication. It is, of course, somewhat akin to the "as if" of Kant, which proposes the power to judge also in aesthetic terms, in order to make the leap from personal taste to universally valid judgment.

Kant

The metaphorical nature of the process of judgment in Kant's work has been attributed to the manner in which judgment of taste functions as a way of imagining community, as if both the subject and the community communicate sense or affect in ways that come to constitute them as such, and through means other than those that are a priori or can be communicated directly. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant wrote, "The judgment of taste . . . depends on our presupposing the existence of a common sense. (But this is not to be taken to mean some external sense, but the effect arising from the free play of our powers of cognition.) Only under the presupposition, I repeat, of such a common sense, are we to lay down a judgment oftaste:'16 Judging is to be carried out not by empirical research, but by imagining the possible judgment of others "and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else:'17 The tenor and vehicle of judgment has to shuttle back and forth between self and community so that it can seal the relationship between the two and confirm the existence of each in the process. Both self and the sense of the other come into existence through disinterested judgment of a third, emerging from the pleasure or pain felt in relation to it. Taste is, in this context, yet to be determined as law. Imaginative speculation has to occur as if one judged in the manner of the common, without prior

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implementation of rules of cultivated taste and in full knowledge of the unverifiable and absent taste of the other. The possibility of judgment comes from the ability to identify, and identify with, the absent other in full knowledge of this absence. It is not contagious in the way of Shaftes­ bury's melancholic panic, nor is it cultivated as is his sense of the communis. Neither are there archetypes of an early collective that fore­ shadow a sensus communis. Identification, for Kant, becomes metaphori­ cal in structure, as if there is a possibility of interjecting the absent other as oneself-without, as it were, experiencing an unpleasant or contra­ dictory taste. Given that there is no possibility of persuasion into agree­ ment in judgment, they have to be produced as examplesj the theory of sensus communis is effectively also one of exemplarity. Examples exhibit, and are vehicles of� potential connections, even though nothing can be confirmed through deduction. Once again, the tenor and the vehicle of metaphor become the source of potential community through the senses. There is a universalism that is not normative within the theoret­ ical framework and can in no way be argued through a set of already­ existing parameters of communicability. It is underscored by difference, and indeed the sensation of this difference. IS Tamar Japaridze has underscored a psychoanalytic reading of this metaphorical process, which looks to the act of judgment in terms of the ability to communicate through the affect ofloss. Reading the absent and yet imaginable other as a lost object of community, the process of judgment comes to form community once again through the imaginative relation, language, and metaphor as freedom from loss. He gives his reading a gloss from psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, who discuss the process of successful mourning as an interjection that produces figurative language and recognize language as an attempt to reconstitute the loss of oral exchange (the loss of the breast is metaphorized as language) .19 The exilic framework of their midcentury theorization gives the possibility of community through successful mourning as metaphor.20 Japaridze introduces the oral metaphorics of psychoanalytical theor­ ization of loss, and specifically of mourning and melancholia. The inter­ jected lost object is effectively absorbed into the self, whereas the lost object that cannot be successfully mourned is swallowed whole and introduced into the body as an alien entity, bringing about a split or critical relation to the self. The process of mourning and melancholia, then, become metaphorized as the introduction into the borders of the

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body and tells a story of hospitality and civil war that cannot necessarily be put to rest by the sovereign.

Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum's work raises fascinating questions today about the sen­ sory, its relation to community, the world, and to the question of meta­ phor and the "as if:' To place all these philosophical figures in their historical contexts of the production of philosophy would raise questions about their ideas of sovereignty, civil war, colonialism, and the interna­ tional, all of which have implications for amity lines (friendly relations across terrestrial or other borders) and the question of the human, individually and collectively, in such species-oriented humanism. In the moment in which Hatoum produces her work, notions of the international, and the sensus communis understood through that frame­ work, have shifted from the concept of exile that characterized literary and artistic modernism to the concept of asylum. In that sense, ques­ tions of hospitality and of the human are highlighted once again, just as they were for Shaftesbury ( in his discussion and visualization of the Ethiopian and in his critique of the political theory of Hobbes, which develops out of the context of civil war), Vico (in his discussion and visualization of the importance of the wretched and impious seeking refuge in the lands of the prosperous, seen in both his frontispiece and in the opening ofNew Science), and Kant (in his discussion of hospitality in Perpetual Peace). Today, once again, we cannot adequately think any notion of belong­ ing or community without thinking through the concept of asylum or refuge into the site of hospitality and potential hostility. Asylum be­ comes the concept through which we can understand the emergence of different notions of the sensory subject, of community, of the human, and of the limit. Its walls and borders force an understanding not only of what must be expunged but also of the difficult negotiations over what might be drawn in for refuge, where refuge itself becomes a welcome threat to both host and guest. Questions of identity and disidentifica­ tion are brought to the fore, as are the limits of the human, the processes of institutionalization, the manifestations of sovereignty, and the conse-

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quences this may have for both a sense of community and a community of the senses. Her works emphaSize extraordinary fear of "domestic" space writ large, which suggests a foreboding sense of institutional and state con­ trol associated with objects. It also suggests relations associated with the domestic, with home, with the very concepts of belonging and commu­ nity, and as a result, the constitution of the human. The affective rela­ tion to belonging at work demonstrates a profound distrust of any kind of comfort with the concept of belonging, the spatial demarcations frequently associated with it, and the workings of propriety that accom­ pany it. It also questions the assumptions of reproducibility and legacy and a misguided sense of familial or contractual security. Even though Edward Said was attentive to the sense of threat embodied in Hatoum's works, and particularly those that are domestic objects, he nonetheless offers an analysis that always gestures toward the prior moment of loss as the root of the doubtful comfort of the domestic setting, as if home will always be a lasting memory once dispossession has occurred.21 But the senses Hatoum works with do not seem to thematize possession and dispossession in quite such a teleological manner, and they are as much forward looking as they are backward. Her works consistently attract and repulse simultaneously, and the spectator is both sensually drawn into involvement and repulsed by it, in both senses of that word. One of the ways in which Hatoum suggests these doubts about be­ longing is through the foregrounding of technologyi almost as a way of disabusing the spectator of the sensory immediacy of the visuaL An­ other is through challenging the borders of homes, states, and bodies in her work. Each of these demonstrates what I want to call a loss of metaphor in the visual, because her works first build on metaphors. For example, household objects are turned into instruments of harm by making them immane, giant, and grotesque (fig. 2). The presence of the stranger within borders is elaborated not by brealdng down the lost or present other, and therefore the loss of self, but by introducing a camera into the body's borders. Turning the metaphor inside out, Hatoum works as if to show that the foreigner whose right to hospitality is questioned can now tell us something about the humanist sense of community that excludes or assumes to know a species. If Shaftesbury insisted on writing his philosophy in the form of letters, insistently

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RANJAN A KHANNA 2 . Mona Hatoum,

Mouli-Juliel1l1e X 21, 2000. Steel. Courtesy of the artist.

interpellating "My Friend! " to stress community through conversation, the technology of language and letters is thrown into doubt in Mona Hatoum's work. For example in Measures of Distance ( fig. 3), words become images, and yet they are entirely emptied of metaphorical or abstracted possibility alone; more than one language is spoken, and suddenly they all become foreign and arbitrary. The loss of metaphor, or demetaphorization, has been theorized as a symptom of melancholy by the psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, who write that melancholic patients sometimes take that which is meant figuratively, and indeed makes sense only figuratively, and interpret it literally. It is obviously problematic to make a straight­ forward association between Shaftesbury's melancholy multitude and Torok and Abraham's. After all, Shaftesbury was thinking literally about a bodily imbalance of the humors and a contagious sympathy often

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3. Mona Hatoum, video still from Measures of Distance, 1988. A "Women Make Movies" release.

aggravated by irrational responses to visual objects, whereas the psycho­ analysts considered an individuated inability to accept the loss of some­ thing) leading to unsuccessful mourning. However) if we can consider that asylum foregrounds not only the loss of one's sense of belonging to a homeland (exile) but) in fact, also the loss of belief in the possibility of an idea of community, then perhaps there is a commonality. It may be, however, that wit and raillery will be insufficient to relieve it or to move teleologically toward a solution. There is no sense of comfort offered that could make home a desirable site, with no threat attached to it. Hatoum's works body forth a resistance to thinking diaspora and displacement-the inverse of community-in terms of a metaphysics of presence, of identity) of identification, or even of ontology. Rather than thinking of diaspora and community in terms of bodies emerging into different spaces, they show the technologies and institutions through which life itself is defined or enframed through the violence of meta­ phor. The earth, the body, the familial, and the domestic are inscribed. An example is Present Tense) in which the temporality of the presence is framed by the terrestrial trials of the Oslo Accords) shown here as the

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map presented to the Palestinians plotted out with red beads inserted into bricks of Nablus soap. In other images, like Traffic, in which two suitcases made out of beeswax, cardboard, and hair draw a sensual and affective response and serve as an uncanny reminder of human lives and deaths whose traces are left on the technologies and instruments of travel, diaspora, or displacement. In spite of the insistent presence of these traces, Hatoum's art draws on the literary and visual, the sonic and tactile, and works within a relation of belonging other than a metaphys­ ical one. Presence, indeed, seems constantly questioned, and life is revealed as technologized and formally and sensibly enframed. The technologization of life is usefully explored by Martin Heidegger, who allows for an important understanding of the relationship between technology and belonging-indeed, of a sense of community. In the lectures in History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger discussed the concept of hearing through the German word horen, the root of which is "to attend / notice / hear / see:' Horen now means to hear, to listen, to attend, or to obey and is distinct from, if related to, horchen, which suggests listening in terms of hearken-in other words, listening without understanding. He writes, "Even listening is phenomenally more origi­ nal than the mere sensing of tones and the perceiving of sounds. Even listening is hearing with understanding, i.e., 'originally and at first' one hears not noises and sound-complexes, but the creaking wagon, the electric tram, the motor-cycle, the column on the march, the North wind. It takes a very artificial and complicated attitude to 'hear' such a thing as a 'pure noise: "22 Heidegger goes on to discuss the compound words and related words developed out of horen·-iiberhoren ( to ignore ) , horig ( in bondage or enslaved ) , and most importantly for him, gehoren ( to belong to ) . Hear­ ing involves a moment of the "with"-an enslavement of sorts-and belonging is togetherness. He also suggests that we hear not only others but also language itself: "We do not just speak language, we speak out of it. We can do this only by having always already listened to language. What do we hear there? We hear the speaking of language:'23 Through this, language opens up the world for us-thus belonging and together­ neSs are related to hearing. Language, for Heidegger, suffers from tech­ nology even though it is posited by him as "an original poetry in which a people poeticizes being:'24 Hatoum draws attention to language as technology, where technology

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is not only a technique or a skill, as in techne, and is not only a begetting or production. It emerges, as with Heidegger, as a form of knowing that guides and shapes our emergence in the world. Technology, in Hatoum's hands, becomes not only a mode of malting things or of knowing how to, but precisely a mode of revealing the process of making. A technol­ ogy, then, is a stand or a frame, or a rack ( Gestell), and in someone's hands, it is an enframing of the world's resources that stand in reserve. Anything we may consider authentic to essence or being is already enframed through the fore grounding of the process of making. And in a sense, in the process of revealing we begin to see how there is no part of the earth that has not been constituted as hearing, belonging, and enframed as the world. Adding a more Marxist reading, life becomes enframed by global capital's technology. Whether one's sense of origin is diasporic, indigenous, or autochthonous, the focus then is on the earth that has changed into world rather than on identity or humanity. The emphasis, then, is not on being identified or disidentified, on identity or ontology, but on epistemology and revealing the mechaniza­ tion of life itself, partly through the instruments of listening. In this context, Hatoum's video Measures of Distance (1988) foregrounds the machinery of belonging and separation, and the manner in which life is technologized and voice functions. Whereas voice may allow us to as­ sume a metaphysical presence, in Hatoum's work voice does not grant or endow with an authenticity or, indeed, a metaphysical presence, but rather the machinery and technology of belonging is what we come to notice, and what it means to communicate and exchange within the rubric of technological living. If the video is ostensibly about letters between mother and daughter, one in Beirut, one in London, it fore­ grounds the singularity of that intimate relationship and every utter­ ance. It also performs, on the level of both content and technique, the workings of mechanical reproduction and the impossibility of full com­ munication. And yet, while the video tells the story of a relation be­ tween mother and daughter with a rather intrusive threat of the father and of borders, it also foregrounds the technology of the letter and of language. The letter has arrived from somewhere, and the technology of its vocabulary does not begin with the mother. In fact, the video asks us to hear voices before we understand a letter, to listen to language itself and not just what it denotes as we switch from Arabic to English, highlighting language as translation-as more than a transparent mech-

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anism of communication. The letter also seems to have reached its destination with the daughter, but then it moves on to us and travels even further. The letter is both a static object, fixed in time for a short moment, and also on the move again. It's both intimate and singular to the situation, and part of a larger technology of belonging. In Hatoum's video, video itself is denaturalized as a technology of movement and as, in a sense, a technology of diaspora. Video stills hold moments as if they were letters before the technology of mobility starts over.2S The letters form more than a spoken narrative. Drawing on the use of calligraphy and the veil, Hatoum uses Arabic script over the shower curtain that hides her mother's body, as if words, too, become the veil of modesty and function already as a concealing and restrictive fabric that nonethe­ less is simultaneously revealing and sensuous. The letters, then, are simultaneously a fabric of desire and intimacy, and a resistance to the possibility of unmediated access to the words of another. The letter is literalized as handwriting, the veil is produced as a curtain of restricted access, the listening is already inscribed into a technology of belonging and unbelonging, and identity in this scenario becomes of secondary importance to the technologies of existencE'. For Heidegger, as much as for Hatoum, the nonconceptual sound of language is where communi­ cation seems to occur, and it is this nonconceptual and sensual level in which the human as communicator paradoxically comes undone. If technology shows how we speak out oflanguage, as much as it makes us human, it also shows the way in which hearing functions to question the limit between human and animaP6 It does not become the basis of a sensus communis; rather, it becomes insight into the very difficulty of that concept. It is through technology, then, that the artwork stands in a critical relation to the forms of exchange and communication that can­ not encompass the affective resistance to these forms. Hatoum's journey into gigantism similarly works on showing the processes of technologization and the relationship this process has to language. Measures of Distance went some way to show the problems of understanding conversation and the letter as direct communication rather than sensory stimulation demanding a different form of judg­ ment. La grande broyeuse (Mouli-julienne x 21), an installation piece, was inspired by Franz Kafka's short story "In the Penal Settlement" ( some­ times translated as "In the Penal Colony" ) . In Kafka's story, a huge machine, existing in a colonial time lag in a penal colony, tortures

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prisoners before killing them by literally inscribing them with the words of a death sentence, thereby supposedly performing justice. "It's a re­ markable piece of apparatus;' says the officer in the story's opening, explaining to an "explorer" that this is the machine employed to deliver justice in the penal colony. The officer resides in what appears to be a time warp in a penal colony:, and he admires the machine, describing it carefully and lovingly. He wears a uniform that, as the explorer points out, is "too heavy for the tropiCS" but that signifies home for those on the colony. "Now just have a look at this machine;' says the officer. The exact precision of the apparatus, which is known as "the DeSigner" (though "things sometimes go wrong, of course") is seen by the officer as a direct communication of the incontrovertible judgment and sen­ tenceP His pride in this contraption of torture appears to the explorer outdated and horrifying, as if the pronouncement of mechanized justice belonged to some past era or to a dreaded future. The explorer is forced to witness the form of justice being carried out in the colony. In many ways, we can see that Kafka shows how life in the penal colony has attempted to replicate the life of the mother country as legislation and has thereby attempted to exact the sentence of justice most literally as if the body was exactly the paper on which the judgment and sentence were inscribed. "One of the cog-wheels in the DeSigner is badly worn;' we are told.28 The former Commandant was "soldier, judge, mechanic, chemist, and draughtsmen" for the machine.29 If Kafka already pointed out the demetaphorization that had occurred here, it was because of both the literal inscription of the sentence on the prisoner, but also because of the loss of this former Commandant and the idea of home embodied within him that the officer cannot mourn. As a settler carry­ ing out the work of the homeland, the officer does not want to let the idea of home, and the sense of community associated with it, disappear. And yet the only solution to such a melancholic state is to seek the judgment of the explorer; when this is refused, he seeks the judgment of the lost Commandant by lying in the Designer itself and suffering its inscription, "Be Just:' Hatoum's rendition of the mouli-julienne is jarring precisely because it is the image of home and domesticity that is made violent. As if moving to a Vichian stage of the giant, Hatoum shows the way in which the rough justice of colonial heroes is visited in the domestic sphere to make all home, and the forms of sovereign rule and safety associated with it,

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the source of discomfort The penal colony is quite literally domesti­ cated, it is made immane and ghastly, as if the absorption of such violence would always make comfort an impossibility. If Hatoum makes the entire world into a foreign land, it is to cause us to feel the violent technology of the ideology of home, which puts the very existence of the structure of humanitas into doubt. Metaphor no longer functions as a way out of this, in spite of the gigantism-in fact, we have something more of the literal fragment that insists on breaking down wholeness. Similarly, her installation /video works like Corps etranger (foreign body, strange body) play with the idea of the foreigner and the foreign object by arousing physical discomfort. Introducing cameras (foreign objects) into bodily cavities, the most intimate spaces of the human (its core nature) are themselves made utterly foreign, banalized, turned inside out, and make the human strange to itsel£ As Jean-Luc Nancy writes of experiencing illness, and then organ transplants, " 'I' ends up being no more than a tenuous thread-from pain to pain, strangeness to strangeness:'30 In such a world of interior threat and sensory pain that divides rather than connects, it becomes less clear what it might mean to be the exiled citizen, part of a multitude, fanatical or cultivated. But it is this very sense of liminality and demetaphorization that forms the unidentifiable relation, or at least the living with the other with whom no identification can take place. Senses are, then, the very matter of sharing and division, attraction and repulsion, and the decision to be part of a world in which there is no reason for "we" imagined through an idea or an "as if;' but rather a "we" imagined through sensual labor. Commonality can only be found, then, as it is sensed, as coming undone through nonidentification, demetaphorization, unworking, and the sense of the liminal. The sight of the face, the reception of a letter, or participation in a conversation thus would not be an opening to famil­ iarity and dialogue as the constitution of community, but rather the shared sense of belonging as enslavement and nonbelonging.31

Notes 1. Shaftesbury, ''A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord;' in Characteris­ tics ofMen, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1:45. While Characteristics was first pub­ lished in 1711, the 1790 edition will be used for citation. Lawrence Klein's edition

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of Characteristics ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1999) is perhaps the most scholarly) but does not include all images. The Oxford English Diction­

ary credits Shaftesbury with the first use of "fanaticism;' although f�lIlatic was in use considerably earlier. The etymology is from fanum-a temple or temple ground.

2. Ibid.) 1:12. 3. Ibid. 4. Shaftesbury, "Sensus Communis) An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend;' in Characteristics) 1:101. S. Ibid.) 1:97. 6. Ibid.) 1:89. Philip Eyres discusses how Shaftesbury spent five years re­ searching the Stoics) particularly Marcus Aurelius) from 1689 to 1695. See Eyres) Introduction to Characteristicks. 7. Shaftesbury, "Sensus Communis;' 1:63. 8. See) for example) Rand's inclusion of a translation of '� Picture of Cebes;' found in Shaftesbury's papers. Shaftesbury, '� Picture of Cebes;' in Second Characters, or The Language of Forms) 63-87. 9. See Shaftesbury Papers) "Virtuoso-Coppy-B ook;' Public Record Office) London) 30/24 / 26 / 1. For commentary on the images) see Wind) "Shaftesbury as Patron of Art"; and Paknadel) "Shaftesbury's Illustrations of Characteristics." Philip Eyres's edition ( London: J. J. Tourneisen) 1790) includes the emblems) as does Douglas D en Uyl's ( Indianapolis: Liberty Fund) 2001) . 10. The most extensive discussion of the aesthetic can be found in Shaftesbury, Second Characters. 11. Shaftesbury) "Sensus Communis;' 1:96. 12. Gadamer) Truth and Method) 1-89) esp. 19-30. 13. Ibid.) 27. It is important to Gadamer that both Vico and Shaftesbury work with the Roman) rather than the Greek) tradition of sensus communis) because it was more historically situated in terms of Roman traditions) as distinct from Greek cultivation. Ibid.) 22.

14. Ibid.) 25. IS. It is for this reason that Srinivas Aravamudan stresses that the giant is not

the same as the specter. The Vichian cycles do indeed return) but they do not haunt each other. For one version of the return in the visual) see Modern Art and

the Grotesque. 16. Kant) Critique ofJudgment) translation byJames Creed Meredith) 83. 17. Ibid.) 151. 18. It is for this reason that Hannah Arendt chooses the Kantian framework of judgment to help her theorize political novelty, imagination) and ultimately

sensus communis and the space of the p olitical. See Lectures on Kant's Political

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Philosophy. Linda Zerilli has recently drawn attention t o the importance o f this work in highlighting the distinctiveness of Arendt's political philosophy from that of Habermas's or Gadamer's. See " 'We Feel Our Freedom: "

19. See Japaridze, The Kantian Subject, 26. 20. See Abraham and Torok. "Introjection-Incorporation;' 1-16. 21. See, for example, the commentary that he provided for the exhibition famously installed at the Tate Britain gallery for its inaugural show. The cata­ logue for the exhibition includes Said's essay. See Hatoum, The Entire World as

a Foreign Land. 22. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 367. 23. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 124. 24. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 144. 25. In this regard, the work of the apparatus, technology, and desire seems profoundly different for film and video. For more on this topic, see Doane, "The Film's Time and the Spectator's Space:'

26. Tristan Moyle writes of the Heideggerian sensus communis in terms of language, yet somewhat differently giving a reading that is more shaped by Gadamer. See Heidegger's Transcendental Aesthetic, 73- 82.

27. Kafka, "In the Penal Settlement;' 495. 28. Ibid., 496. 29· Ibid., 497. 30. Nancy, ''L'intrus,'' 12. 31. Jean-Luc Nancy's work has been exemplary in this regard, not only his extensive and well-known work on the communityi but also his The Sense of the World.

PA RT T W O

Partitioning the S ensible

T. J . DEMOS

D ada's Event: Paris, 1921 The " 1921 Dada Season" opened in April with a visit to the courtyard of St.-Julien-Ie-Pauvre, the thirteenth-century church located directly across the Seine from Notre Dame de Paris. The destination was perfect for the Paris Dadaists, including Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Tristan Tzara, who wished "to set right the incompetence of suspicious guides" and lead a series of "excursions and visits" to places that had "no reason to exist;' as explained in the flyer and public invitation published in several newspapers to announce the visit. "It's wrong to insist on the picturesque (lycee Janson-de-Sailly), historical interest (Mont Blanc), and sentimental value (the Morgue) :'l Only areas considered not pic­ turesque, nonhistorical-or at least not conventionally historical-and unsentimental would qualify for Dadaist tours, beginning with St.­ Julien's abandoned courtyard, which-·although it was situated next to the oldest standing church in Paris--existed in a state of disrepair and was then mistreated as a garbage dump by residents of the fifth arron­ dissement. Other than the series of provocative phrases that floated around the announcement's surface in diagonal and upside-down posi­ tions-such as "Wash your breasts like your gloves !" "One must cut one's nose like one's hair!" "Property is the luxury of the poor--Be Dirty!" -and a listing of proposed future visits (which would in fact never be carried out), including Le Musee du Louvre, the park at Buttes Chaumont, Gare Saint-Lazare, Mont du Petit Cadenas, and Canal de L'Ourcq, there was no further information on what was planned.

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It would b e easy to view the visit to St.-Julien-which did take place as planned, for the most part-as a precursor to later and more familiar artistic forays into public space, such as the surrealist excursions to flea markets and covered arcades or the situationist derives. But such an approach would be only partly justified; the visit to St.-Julien was merely a tentative and somewhat inarticulate dry run to those later experiments in collective walking, lacking the theories of psychoanalysis, cultural geography, and urbanism that would come to frame them. Termed a Dada "event" by Breton, the visit inaugurated a new form of practice in 1921, one that has received little attention to date, despite its rich legacy. This low profile undoubtedly owes to the fact that the activity fell far outside of recognizable artistic conventions at the time. Consequently, it was largely ignored by its contemporaries and generated little discussion in its immediate aftermath (other than the few bemused reports in local newspapers well practiced in sensationalizing Dada's sucd�s de scan­ dale). Owing to the fact that the visit left no significant artistic objects that could feed the market or be analyzed by art historians ( except for the flyer and the few banal photographs of the event), it was destined to oblivion. Were the visit to St.-Julien to occur today, it would do so within an art world saturated with experimental practices venturing into public space. Think of Andrea Fraser's experimental docent tours of museums, or Christine Hill's alternative walks around New York City ( Tourguide? 1999), or Martha RosIer's guided visit to the Frieze Art Fair in 2005, which figure as merely three examples among hundreds we could reference.2 By mirroring everyday activities and institutions-from commercial busi­ nesses to theatrical productions to governmental services-these prac­ tices privilege the creation of social events over the production of art objects for contemplation. They do so most commonly, asis well under­ stood by now, to critique the false autonomy of art, which is shown to be fully immersed within capitalist institutions, and to create spaces of sociability different from those enmeshed within a reality perceived to be dominated by commercial spectacle and its reified social relations. Such socially engaged practice--the discourse around which has recently been energized by the reception of French curator Nicholas Bourriaud's text Relational Aesthetics-· has grown in prominence over the last fifteen years, to the point where it can now rightly claim to be among the most dominant forms of contemporary art. This, despite criticism that its

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proponents often overlook prior historical models, such as Fluxus and conceptual art, that similarly dissolved the barriers between art and life to critical eHect. The earliest examples of avant-garde practice that trans­ gressed the domain of art and crossed over into social space, however, occurred within Dada. Its event-based form consequently becomes newly visible in relation to contemporary practices and their substantial critical-theoretical reception. Not only have these developments made the historical consideration of their antecedents increasingly significant today; there also remain important lessons for contemporary art to be discovered in Dada, particularly in terms of how it intertwined aesthetics and politics. In 'illtificial Hells;' an essay written in May of 1921, Breton explains that while he doesn't know who had the idea of the first D ada "event;' its origins must be traced to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich-the experi­ mental performances of Hugo Ball and the simultaneous poems of Tzara come to mind-and, more locally, to the poetry readings of Guil­ laume Apollinaire, Aragon, Breton, Blaise Cendrars, Phillipe Soupault, and Pierre Reverdy that were performed in Paris around 1919. Delivered in "one hall or another to the same audience, who invariably applauded;' these readings were increasingly met with a "profound boredom;' invari­ ably ending in the "bewildered public's incomprehension:' This desper­ ate situation led to the favorable welcoming of Dada in Paris, which "promised lively polemics and large audiences:'3 Tzara, who arrived in Paris on January 22, 1920, gave the necessary spark to the movement, inaugurating the Paris chapter of Dada the following evening with a performance in which, instead of reciting a poem as announced, the Romanian provocateur read a political article while an electric bell rang loudly in the background, drowning out his voice. Tzara's commitment to the critique of language's communicative functions catalyzed Paris D ada; but the new terms of the Dada event that developed the following year, which privileged moral conviction over such negative aesthetics, would threaten the movement's demise. In contrast to those Dadaist spectacles, which represented a migra­ tion of Zurich cabaret to Paris and were largely engineered by Tzara and Picabia, the Dadaist event "requires an almost total change of viewpoint [from previous D adaist activities] if we are to see it accuratelY:'4 Orga­ nized collectively, the event was constituted above all by the social

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experience of the dissolution of the boundary between art and life, a dissolution that also led to the interpenetration of aesthetics and poli­ tics. Dada's event, however, never had time to develop fully as an artistic paradigmj rather, it figured as an experimental modeling of a new kind of activity, one that has only recently come to fruition with the trend toward social engagement within recent art (though it still might be added to the list of Dada's major contributions to modern art, including the ready-made, montage, and performanceS). While surely prefigured by Dadaist performance-with its embrace. of spontaneity, refusal of representational clarity, attack on the transparency of language, and disturbance of the conventional modes of reception and distribution­ the event is irreducible to it, entailing, above all, an escape from the cabaret. One motivation behind the event's new development was the per­ ceived loss of Dada's shocking edge by 1921, felt not just by critics but by the participants themselves.6 Although Dada's transplantation to Paris in early 1920 had clearly done much to revolutionize existing artistic prac­ tice in France-raucous manifesto-reading replaced genteel poetry reci­ tals, rebellious publics filled previously silent auditoriums-Breton was nevertheless disappointed soon after because the movement quickly succumbed to routine. Dadaist performances were "patterned after caba­ ret shows;' yet the lack of creative innovation eventually left its practi­ tioners "discontented, hardly proud of the pitiful carnival ruses" they had employed to attract audiences. Breton noted that "the general scandal they provoked was the only benefit" the D adaists reaped, "but even this was increasingly unable to hide the poverty of the means used, which moreover were pretty much the same every time:' These means had now become "stereotyped, ossified:'7 The solution, proposed by Breton's reinvention of Dada through the concept of the event, was to break out of the theater and enter everyday life: "We imagined guiding our public to places in which we could hold their attention better than in a theater, because the very fact of going there entails a certain goodwill on their part:'s Connected to this desire to escape the familiar and stultifying institutions of its theatrical perfor­ mances was Breton's additional aim (one not widely held by the group) to move Dadaist practice beyond its familiar nihilism and negativity: "Last year, Dada activity remained wholly artistic (or anti-artistic, if one

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prefers-I don't distinguish between the two). This year) Dada proposes to raise the debate and take the discussion on moral grounds:'9 Breton's surprising announcement) however) failed to elaborate fully on the new moral program of Dada. In relation to the St.-Julien visit) one might surmise that Dada was moving against Catholicism in par­ ticular) or religion in general) undertaking a radically secular ethics to direct the movement's familiar nihilism toward a positive set of beliefs; yet nothing that happened or was said at St.-Julien indicates such a direction or offers any other clear explanation of Breton's remarks.lO "What occurred at St.-Julien) over the course of an hour and a half in the pouring rain) was a fairly familiar repertoire of Dadaist pranks) whose schematic details have been culled from several fragmentary reports. First were the strident declarations of Breton and Tzara) representing the more or less expected Dada-inflected aspersions cast at the onlook­ ers (Breton: "Do you think that we have talent) that we are bound to some success other than the scandal that you have made of us? We can imagine the worst vulgarities) you always find us an excuse. But you say one thing well: we will never amount to anything-but neither will you!"; Tzara: "Drink some beer) follow a regular life and become a grandfather. I have a horror of that. The horror is horrible!"II) Next came Ribemont-Dessaignes) who performed as a baffling tour guide) inexplicably reading entries at random from a Larousse dictionary as he approached various columns and sculptures on the church's exterior. Said Breton) " [The rain] kept us from putting into action several of our ideas) among them an auction of abstractions that might have been sensational"j on this) unfortunately, he fails to elucidate.12 One explanation for the vagueness of the event's "moral grounds" is that the St.-Julien visit occurred on April 14"--that is) a month before Breton's written report on these activities in ''Artificial Hells" (just after the Barres trial). In other words) the visit may have figured as an early experiment) preceding the event's full conceptualization by Bretonj if this is the case) it may have failed to substantiate the moral claims that were made for it the following month. Perhaps it is for this reason-that the objectives of the St.-Julien visit had not yet been defined-that it resulted in disappointment) at least for Breton. Of the visit to St.-Julien) Breton would later recall "the laborious nullity of the speeches) deliv­ ered in a tone that strove to be provocative:' He lamented) "l'Aoving

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fram auditarium to. the apen air was nat enaugh to. get us away fram the 'Dada' cliche:'13 Sealing its failure, paradoxically, was its papular success: "One ar twa hundred anlaakers were huddled there, silent under their umbrellas to. the paint that we wandered whether Dada was ready to. disappear, fallawing a famaus axiam we aften invaked: 'A successful man, ar simply ane who. is no. langer attacked, is a dead man: "14 Still, ane cauld argue canversely that the event was neither a failure far its lack af a clearly articulated maral program, nar a success far its rather phenamenal papularity; far accepting either canclusian sur­ renders a mare nuanced camprehensian af the event's significance. That Bretan was unsatisfied with the autcames af the visit-it neither pra­ vaked its anlaakers sufficiently nar transcended the cliche af Dadaist perfarmance-shauld nat avershadaw the pramise af its radical gesture: to. dissalve the divisian between the life af art and the art af life. It is in this sense that the Dada event, rather than existing as either histarical anamaly ar failed experiment, can be seen to. embady what Jacques Ranciere has termed "the aesthetic regime;' which, far him, defines the lagic fundamental to. madern art.1S This lagic camprises art's twafald promesse de bonheur-afbath a new warld of aesthetic experience and a new life far individuals and cammunity. Fram madern art's claims far bath aesthetic autanamy and palitical engagement-what represents its fundamental antinamy-unfald the numerous negatiatians af avant­ garde pasitians, from the mast hermetically sealed farms af abstractian that nevertheless maintain utapian sacial hapes, to. the mast palitically activist practices that still rely an a farm af autanamy that canstitutes their difference fram everyday life. 16 The productive aspect af the Dada event is that it raises this cantradictian to. a new histarical intensity, refusing to. resalve it ane way ar the ather. Bretan's refusal to. distinguish between the artistic and anti-artistic daes nat mean that the event did nat differentiate between the artistic and the nanartisticj althaugh the Dada event critically blurred these categaries, the transgressive nature af its strategy depended an the maintenance af the categaries, even if they emerged altered in the process. In additian to. situating Dada within an expansive histarical paradigm, Rahciere's view af aesthetics reveals the Significance af viewing the event as a madel af the "heterogeneaus sensible" -what Ranciere defines as art's irreducible state af plurality as bath a farm af aesthetics and af palitics. This Significance is nat to. be faund in reducing Dada simply to.

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art or non-artj in this sense, the narratives of Dada that stress either its escape from artistic conventions (acceding to the social processes of everyday life) or its aestheticization of the world (through its gener­ alized theatricalization) appear insufEcientY Rather, it is by sustaining and exploiting the tension between art and life that the Dada event, in my view, acquires its moral cast-that is, what Ranciere would call its politics: "its way of producing its own politics, proposing to politics rearrangements of its space, reconfiguring art as a political issue, or asserting itself as true politics:'18 More than merely coupling two dis­ tinct elements-joining art and life, and advancing an ethical impulse­ the event realizes its "moral directions" by both transgressing and per­ petuating the division between aesthetic autonomy and social practice. In this sense, the visit to St.-Julien can be deemed successful. The visit to St.-Julien was thus neither merely a mimicry of a guided tour, nor simply a parody of it, but rather both and neither: it punctured the wall between artistic performance and social process, resulting in a new kind of assertion of art's autonomy-not as a self-contained ideal realm of aesthetic experience, but rather as an autonomous form of social experience.19 The Dada event consequently unleashed several effects: its artistic practice opened up a creative zone of possibility within everyday life, where its accepted rules were challenged (suggest­ ing the potential for different forms of life, modes of socialization, and types of discourse, while implicitly rejecting established conventions) j and its social procedures reinvented its artistic practice through its very hybridization (thereby challenging the repetitions and the suppression of innovation within Dada). In addition, following the abandonment of traditional artistic venues came the experimental rezoning of public space as one of "dissensus;' to use another of Ranciere's key terms. This meant not simply creating an arena of dissent that would function as the opposite of consensus-whose false unit)1J constituted by the expulsion of social antagonism, the Dadaists certainly attacked. It also meant a "recomposition of the landscape of the visible" -that is, what can be said where, when, and by whom--entailing a refusal of the normative conditions by which social life is reproduced.20 The second major "event" of the 1921 Dada season was the public trial of journalist and politician Maurice Barres. As Breton later explained, the trial was motivated by the quest "to determine the extent to which a

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man could b e held accountable if his will to power led him to champion conformist values that diametrically opposed the ideas of his youth:' In the case of Barres, "how did the author of Un homme libre become the propagandist for the right-wing Echo de Paris? If there was a betrayal, what were the stakes? And what recourse did one have against them?"21 In his earlier life, Barres represented the paragon of anarchist individual­ ism, authoring the trilogy Le culte du moi (1880-91), as well as L'ennemi des lois (1892), which celebrated personal liberty over moral conventions (Breton, Eluard, and Soupault courted him as late as early 192122-and indeed Barres performed quite well in a recent Litterature poll that rated him favorably23) . But Barres later transformed into a reactionary conser­ vative, joining the nationalist Cult of the Dead (who elevated warfare to mythic status) and serving as president of the Ligue des patriotes. He was understood to have contributed to the offensive culture of national­ ism, xenophobia, and militarism during the Third Republic's period of political backlash, which encompassed continued patriotic reprisals against Germany, ongoing racist attacks on immigrants, and the anti­ democratic machinations of Charles Maurras's L'action fran