Art, Emotion and Value Proceedings of the 5th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics. Cartagena (Spain), 4th-8th July 2011

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Art, Emotion and Value Proceedings of the 5th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics. Cartagena (Spain), 4th-8th July 2011

Mª José Alcaraz, Matilde Carrasco y Salvador Rubio (Eds.)

© 2011. The publication of a paper in the Proceedings does not deprive the author(s) from their right to publish it – or a revised version of it – elsewhere. All copyrights remain with the author(s).

ISBN – 10: 84-615-7732-9

ISBN – 13: 978-84-615-7732-3

Nº REG.: 201222355

Design: Inizziativa Networks (http://www.inizziativa.com)

Contents / Sommaire / Índice

Contents / Sommaire / Índice

Preface / Préface / Prefacio

1. Plenary Sessions / Séances plénières / Sesiones plenarias - DOMINIQUE CHÂTEAU 9 Les valeurs de l’art à l’ère du post-art - ANNA CHRISTINA RIBEIRO 17 The Value of Sad Poetry - RACHIDA TRIKI 27 Aesthetic value, creation and emotion - GERARD VILAR 35 Deartification, Deaestheticization, and Politicization in Contemporary Art

2. History of Aesthetics / Histoire de l’Esthétique / Historia de la Estética - JORGE TOMÁS GARCÍA 45 La respuesta aristotélica de las emociones estéticas en la obra de Apeles de Cos - MAFTEI ŞTEFAN-SEBASTIAN 63 A Cultural Revolution for the “Free Spirits:” Hugo Ball’s Nietzschean Anarchism - LEV KREFT 75 Hedonistic Morality and the Art of Life: Jean-Marie Guyau Revisite - MARTA VAAMONDE GAMO 83 John Dewey on the continuity of art and morals within the consummated experience - JOSÉ MARTÍNEZ HERNÁNDEZ 91 La teoría estética de Federico García Lorca - ÉLISE DERROITTE 101 La critique esthétique comme réponse à l'exemplarité morale, la lecture benjaminienne de la tragédie - SILVIA ZAPPULLA 111 Reading Antigone through Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy - ANTONIO BENTIVEGNA 139 Sobre la posibilidad de una estética erótica: crítica y actualidad del pensamiento de Herbert Marcuse

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- JAIME ASPIUNZA 155 La experiencia estética, por ejemplo, en Kant, a la luz de las teorías neurológicas de A. Damasio - DAVID DÍAZ SOTO 167 Una cuestión de semántica. Greenberg, Fried y la expresión emotiva en artes plásticas - JOSÉ JUAN GONZALEZ 175 Art as the Expression of Emotion in the Language of Imagination: Dickie's Misunderstandings of Collingwood's Aesthetics

3. General issues in Aesthetics / Questions d’Esthétique générales / Cuestiones generales de estética - VANGELIS ATHANASSOPOULOS 185 La valeur de la métaphore: pour une économie esthétique du Kitsch - WOLFRAM BERGANDE 193 Mixed pleasures, interpassivity, and the ethical dimension of art - GABRIELE BERSA 203 Art – Éthique – Politique - CARLA CARMONA ESCALERA 211 El genio: ética y estética son una - SIXTO CASTRO 223 Towards an aesthetic hermeneutics - SABINA DORNEANU 231 Is aestheticization necessarily a moral flaw in a work of art? - MIKEL IRIONDO ARANGUREN 239 Copias del arte y arte de la copia - CANDESS KOSTOPOULOS 253 The art of politics, or the politics of art? Conceptualizing aesthetic commitment from within a Ricoeurian framework - MARTIN POTTER 263 Can Art for Art’s Sake Imply Ethics? Henry James and David Jones - NUNO MIGUEL PROENÇA 271 Aesthetics and emotions according to William James - MÉLISSA THÉRIAULT 281 Art, art des affaires et affaires d’or: le cas de l’art de masse

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4. The individual arts / Domaines artistiques spécifiques / Formas artísticas particulares

Visual arts / Arts visuels / Artes visuales - CONSTANTINOS V. PROIMOS 291 Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668) - ANTONIO GARCÍA LÓPEZ Y FRANCISCO J. GUILLÉN 301 MARTÍNEZ Las técnicas pictóricas de la desencarnación en la obra de Mark Rothko - SONDÈS HÉBIRI 311 La couleur comme passion chez Paul Klee - JON ECHEVERRÍA PLAZAOLA 321 Espacio receptivo y emoción estética. El espectador ante la obra de Jorge Oteiza - EMANUELA SALADINI 331 The art of telling history: Christian Boltanski - HELEN TATLA 345 Morality and architecture: evaluation of contemporary architectural practice within the scope of the ontological hermeneutics of Hans- Georg Gadamer - NEFELI KYRKITSOU 355 The concepts of symmetry and eumetry in Panayotis Michelis’ thinking

Performing arts / Arts du spectacle / Artes performativas - VÍTOR MOURA 365 The secret diaries of a music lover: associating emotions to music - INMA ÁLVAREZ 379 Artistic value and spectators’ emotions in dance performances - MAJA VUKADINOVIĆ 393 Aesthetic experience and emotional identification in the performances of different types of artistic dance - MOJCA PUNCER 409 Emotional topographies of performative artistic practices - ADRIAN PRADIER 421 Theater and Compassion: the Aesthetic Criteria in the Theatrical Staging - ROBERT R. CLEWIS 449 Film Evaluation and Three Temporal Notions in Hume - MARÍA SALVADOR CABRERIZO 463 Distopía y deshumanización en el arte último: el ciberpunk.

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Un viaje a través del cine

5. Contemporary Art Theory / Théorie de l’art contemporain / Teoría del arte contemporáneo - URŠULA BERLOT 471 Duchamp and the notion of optical tactility - ULLA KARTTUNEN 479 The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction and Mediated Reality Ethics and aesthetics in the dream and cream world of ever- extending publicity - LEOPOLDO LA RUBIA DE PRADO 497 Lo estético, lo mercantil y lo patológico. La estetización del mundo, la desilusión estética y las psicopatologías de la hiperexpresión - JESÚS MARTÍNEZ OLIVA 509 Representaciones de género en el contexto global. El diálogo entre culturas y la democracia sexual: conflictos éticos y politicos - MANUEL MUÑOZ GIL 519 Hackers, artistas, testers y público. Aproximación a la estética hacker - DAN EUGEN RATIU 533 L’artiste: immunité ou responsabilité? Considérations sur l’usage des catégories éthico-juridiques dans le monde de l’art - MARISOL SALANOVA BURGUERA 547 Deus ex machina, emotividad y arte de archivo - JAKUB STEJSKAL 555 Conceptual art, evaluative experience and second nature

6. Environmental Aesthetics / Esthétique environnemental / Estética del entorno - DJAMEL BENKRID 563 L’œil du jardin - NURÇIN ÇELIK 577 The role of political power and ideology in the formation of city aesthetics in the Turkish and Central Volga Regions in the 18th and 19th centuries - ANTONIO JOSÉ GARCÍA CANO 585 La memoria como emoción para transformar desde la práctica artística los lugares en hogares y crear nuevas ecologías - DAVID HALEY 597 Art, Ecology and Reality: the Potential for Transdisciplinarity - MARÍA DEL MAR ROSA MARTÍNEZ 607 Greyness, everyday and nature

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Preface

Art, Emotion and Value collects some of the papers presented at the 5th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics, which took place in Cartagena (Spain) from the 4th to the 8th of July 2011.

The global theme, which gave the Conference its name, addresses a large and long discussed subject matter within aesthetics. The main problems that have received intense discussion, both at a theoretical and a practical level, include art criticism and contemporary culture analysis. In particular, the papers collected lead to different areas of debate according to which they have been organized. The range of the topics included in this volume covers diverse questions about artistic value, in relation to moral and political value and to the expression of emotion and the affective aspects of aesthetic experience, approaching them, in the first place, at certain moments of the history of aesthetic thought but also dealing with these questions from a more general perspective. The ways in which these issues take shape, on the one hand, in particular artistic forms and, on the other hand, in reflections about contemporary art, have also been taken into account. Finally, the Congress showed too the increasing interest in environmental aesthetics which consequently deserves a place in this collection.

The papers were given in the three official languages of the Congress (English, French, and Spanish) in which they are also published. We would like to thank very much the members of the Scientific Committee for their generous work blindly reviewing the abstracts submitted. Based on their evaluation, a hundred papers were selected by the members of the Organizing Committee, from which eighty-nine papers were finally presented at the Conference, and so were eligible for publication. We are grateful to Francisca Pérez Carreño, our colleague in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Murcia, for her help organizing this Conference and editing this collection. We thank our University for the support given to this project and also the Technical University of Cartagena, which allowed the Congress to be held on its campus, in the particularly unique old Navy Training Barracks that currently lodges the Faculty of Business Studies. A special mention should be given to Antonio Garrido Hernández, who helped us greatly during the whole process of the organization of the Conference.

But the success of the 5th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics was first of all due to the talent of the participants who made it possible and who enlivened it during those five intensive days. We would like to thank them all again. Nevertheless, our final acknowledgment goes to the authors, whose contributions create this volume, including the keynote speakers of the Conference, Dominique Chateau, Anna Christina Ribeiro, Rachida Triki and Gerard Vilar.

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Preface

The topic for the Conference is intimately linked to the research projects on "Emotion and moral value in art" (Ref. FFI2008-00750/FISO; FFI2010-08842-E) and "Emotion and moral value in art: artistic theory and praxis" (Ref. 08694/PHCS/08) in which our work was framed at that time. We thank the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (MICINN) and Fundación Séneca-Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de Murcia for their generous support.

MªJosé Alcaraz León, Matilde Carrasco Barranco, Salvador Rubio Marco.

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Les valeurs de l’art à l’ère du post-art

Dominique Chateau* Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Pourquoi parler de valeurs de l’art à l’ère du post-art, au lieu de valeurs du post- art tout simplement? C’est que le mot post-art désigne, par son préfixe, un moment après l’art qui n’est pas encore absolument émancipé de l’art. L’écart du post-art vis-à-vis de l’art est son écart à partir de l’art. Mais les valeurs du post-art sont aussi les valeurs de l’art dans un contexte idéologique où la valeur de l’art en général est désormais tenue pour désuète, voire aliénante. On ne peut croire ni à l’idée d’une substitution radicale de valeurs qu’on trouve dans certains discours, ni à l’idée contraire que cette substitution n’est qu’une illusion du discours. Le passage au post-art est réel, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, comme fut l’art… En même temps, il reste en devenir, inachevé, en souffrance, en sorte que, dans la systémique de son dysfonctionnement1, les valeurs de l’art et celles du post-art sont en constante tension, formant une sorte d’« image dialectique », au sens de Benjamin.

Je m’intéresse ici aux valeurs artistiques, non pas aux valeurs esthétiques, sachant que des œuvres censément inesthétiques peuvent avoir autant de valeur artistique que des œuvres censément esthétiques. L’art est une notion complexe dont la définition comporte au moins trois registres: l’artiste, l’œuvre (ou ce qui en tient lieu) et sa réception. On peut résumer ainsi le système de référence des valeurs de l’art : l’artiste s’approprie un matériau auquel il donne, à travers l’objectivation de sa singularité, une forme distinctive, peu ou prou innovante, et destine plus ou moins immédiatement cet objet à la présentation dans un cadre ad hoc où sa singularité est susceptible de lui conférer un statut d’exemplarité culturelle.

Ces valeurs spécifiques de l’art se manifestent par des objets assignables à une source individuelle, par la signature, par la différenciation de l’ordinaire, par l’intégration au patrimoine, et surtout par la corrélation de ces différents aspects. En particulier, la singularité qui marque l’œuvre en tant qu’elle est l’objet d’une

* [email protected] 1 Dys-: en souffrance…

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Dominique Chateau Les valeurs de l’art à l’ère du post-art

appropriation est, à l’autre bout du processus, pour la réception, un signe de reconnaissance qui motive l’inscription patrimoniale. Hannah Arendt avance que l’œuvre artistique est moins caractérisée par sa singularité que par le fait que son hostilité envers la culture lui vaut d’être assimilée par elle comme son expression la plus haute (Arendt 1972, pp. 257-258). Néanmoins, cette ré-intégration paradoxale serait inexplicable sans la reconnaissance possible d’une métamorphose singularisante du donné culturel.

Cette synthèse des valeurs de l’art constitue une référence paradigmatique qui s’est formée progressivement jusqu’au XIXe siècle où elle s’est à peu près stabilisée. Dans un cadre plus raffiné, on trouverait maintes raisons de discerner des paradigmes plus fins correspondant aux périodes successives — par exemple, le romantisme et l’avant-garde. Pour en rester au paradigme synthétique, la question que je me pose est celle de son éventuelle mutation depuis que s’est ouverte la période dite du post-art.

Dans le contexte où la hiérarchie fondée sur le statut d’artiste dominait, un habitus lui-même dominant déterminait le créateur à occuper la fonction de source individuelle du processus artistique autant qu’à s’approprier le résultat à l’aune de son individualité. Et cela concernait aussi bien le processus de création dont le résultat était marqué comme propriété de la source que le processus de réception où l’œuvre était identifiable comme signe de singularité. L’habitus d’artiste s’épanouissait dans un contexte où le récepteur était lui-même déterminé par cet habitus. L’échange entre les pôles de la création et de la réception dépendait d’un système stable (historiquement stabilisé à partir du XIXe siècle) suivant lequel l’attente du récepteur était fondée sur l’intériorisation de la singularité de l’artiste manifestée dans son rôle social comme dans sa production d’œuvres critiques (au sens où elles mettaient en crise la culture). Or, si ce système est maintenant déstabilisé, ce n’est pas qu’on se soit débarrassé radicalement de l’habitus qui fondait la valeur générale de l’art, c’est plutôt qu’on reste hanté par lui tandis qu’on le refoule.

Un aspect essentiel du nouveau paradigme constitutif du post-art réside dans trois caractéristiques saillantes attachées respectivement aux trois composantes que sont l’œuvre, l’artiste et le monde de l’art. La première caractéristique est l’ambiguïté de l’œuvre non pas seulement dans son contenu (la polysémie), mais dans sa forme et son conditionnement. La deuxième, l’abandon par l’artiste de sa posture dominante vis-à-vis de son récepteur et, par voie de conséquence, de son pouvoir sur l’œuvre. La troisième, le recul progressif de la frontière qui séparait le monde de l’art du monde de la culture, marqué aussi bien par la déclaration comme art de l’objet banal que par la contamination des œuvres par des représentations culturelles assimilées pour ce qu’elles sont. Or, en reprenant plus finement, ces trois composants, on constate qu’en parlant d’ambiguïté de l’œuvre on fait encore référence à l’œuvre, qu’en évoquant l’abandon par l’artiste de sa position dominante on désigne encore l’artiste et, qu’en évoquant le trouble du monde de l’art, on suppose qu’il persiste.

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Dominique Chateau Les valeurs de l’art à l’ère du post-art

W. J. T. Mitchell (Mitchell 2002, p.173) écrit: « Le fait que certains spécialistes veuillent ouvrir le domaine des images afin de considérer à la fois les images artistiques et non-artistiques n’abolit pas nécessairement la différence entre ces domaines. On pourrait facilement arguer que, en fait, les limites entre art et non- art deviennent claires quand on regarde des deux côtés de cette frontière sans cesse changeante et établit les transactions et translations entre eux. » Un constat de bon sens a cette proposition pour corollaire: on ne peut dire que deux choses sont en train de se mélanger, sans d’abord pouvoir les distinguer. Plus spécifiquement, cela signifie que le destin du post-art, c’est l’impossibilité de se définir lui-même et la nécessité au contraire de lorgner toujours du côté de l’art — aussi rémanent que la tache de sang dans le tapis —, de se mesurer à son critère, et d’ajouter à sa référence, un rien de révérence. La croissance de l’art contemporain est concomitante à la diffusion touristique du Grand Art, loin de l’avoir aboli.

Je reprends la phrase: pour pouvoir dire que deux choses sont mélangées, il faut d’abord pouvoir les distinguer, pour souligner que pouvoir, outre la capacité, désigne une position d’où cette capacité est en mesure de s’exercer. Non seulement le pouvoir en puissance, mais le pouvoir que confère la puissance. Symptomatiquement, si on met à part les naïfs qui affirment tout de go que l’art est fini, les « spécialistes » évoqués par Mitchell sont tous ceux qui ont le pouvoir intellectuel, culturel et institutionnel de regarder des deux côtés de la frontière entre art et non-art : les artistes qui pratiquent la dissémination de l’artistique dans le culturel, les esthètes qui intègrent cette dissémination dans leur référentiel, les critiques qui en communiquent le commentaire et les théoriciens qui sur-interprètent cette situation. Penser que cette dernière interprétation, parce qu’elle en appelle, par exemple, à Nietzsche ou Heidegger, échappe au jugement historique, c’est faire preuve d’une autre forme de naïveté, l’intellectualisme. La théorie la plus abstraite doit rendre des comptes vis-à-vis des configurations historiques dont elle parle censément, quand bien même elle feint de s’en abstraire.

Du point de vue historique, le non-art absolu n’est pas plus pertinent que ne l’était l’art absolu. Le non-art absolu risque fort de rejoindre l’art absolu, comme, pour Hegel, l’être pur rejoint le néant. Le non–art est plutôt un négatif relatif, en tant qu’il est déjà médiatisé par l’autre de l’art et encore médiatisé par l’art qui n’est d’abord, lui-même, qu’un positif relatif, c’est-à-dire un positif travaillé en son sein par sa propre négation — selon le concept adornien de l’Entkunstung2. Or, ce n’est pas un processus purement logique, purement théorique : l’art est travaillé par sa négation sous la menace concrète de la Kunstindustrie et parce que la Kunstindustrie l’imprègne, le pénètre, le transforme, voire l’absorbe3. Cette Kunstindustrie est une positivité, qui, selon l’argument récurrent des commentateurs que le processus enthousiasme, offrirait une réconcilitation avec

2 Cf. Théorie esthétique (Adorno 1995). 3 Outre la Théorie esthétique, voir : La Dialectique de la raison. Fragments philosophiques (Adorno & Horkheimer 1974).

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le réel, avec le social. Mais elle ne réussit à le faire qu’en niant l’art, c’est-à-dire en le vidant de son contenu propre, un contenu négatif précédemment tourné, selon Adorno, contre le type d’aliénation qu’incarne maintenant, sur le plan culturel, la Kunstindustrie.

L’idée d’absorption, toutefois, semble aller trop loin. De même que la totale confusion de l’art et du divertissement. Il n’y a aucun apaisement dans la positivité pure. Il y a aussi du négatif dans la Kunstindustrie, notamment quand elle commerce avec l’art: elle ne peut le faire sans lui conserver un tant soit peu sa valeur spécifique, et sans admettre en elle la négativité qui le définit, y compris vis-à-vis d’elle-même. Le kitsch quand il est promu au rang d’art n’est pas le kitsch primaire et touristique, mais un kitsch critique qui associe aux représentations du kitsch primaire ou à ses parodies, la distance du double bind, ce dilemme tel que le récepteur reçoit à la fois un message et son contraire — ce qu’il ne s’agit pas de trancher, mais d’accepter dans son instabilité même comme exemplification d’une attitude esthétique sophistiquée. Avec le homard versaillais de Jeff Koons cette situation est multipliée par deux puisque le double bind pèse à la fois sur l’objet seul et sur son rapport au contexte du château royal: lequel est le plus kitsch des deux?

Les valeurs du post- sont ainsi marquées par l’indétermination de l’ère du post- que, non seulement elles traduisent sur le plan axiologique, mais encore dont elles sont imprégnées. D’où leur dissémination qui, dans la version optimiste, ouvre sur une multiplicité inventive et, dans la version pessimiste, atteste que ces valeurs sont affaiblies par la valeur de l’indétermination qui les domine et qui pèse sur chacun des registres de l’axiologie spécifiquement artistique.

C’est, tout d’abord, l’intrusion dans la sphère de l’art de ce qu’Harold Rosenberg appelle l’anxious object, depuis le readymade, un objet inquiétant en vertu de son ambiguïté ontologique, puisqu’il « persiste mais sans identité fixe » (Rosenberg 1964-1966, p. 17). Inquiétant peut vouloir dire qu’on est simplement intrigué ou qu’on est angoissé4. Je préfère parler d’objet indécis, comme on parle d’une victoire indécise pour qualifier le flux et le reflux de deux armées en guerre, mais aussi au sens où « indécis » qualifie non seulement la chose, mais l’attitude du sujet devant la chose, lorsqu’il a de la peine à trancher. Comme dit la locution française, on se demande si c’est du lard ou du cochon, par exemple au sujet de quelqu’un qui a un humour particulier. Et cet exemple est d’autant plus pertinent que l’indécision qui affecte l’objet du post-art induit corrélativement à la question ontologique — est-ce que cet objet appartient à la catégorie de l’art en dépit de son apparence? —, une question cognitive — est-ce que l’exposition de cet objet est une blague, une supercherie, etc.?

La première question, en effet, renvoie à la conviction du récepteur quant à l’habitus qu’il a intériorisé, s’agissant de savoir s’il y concordance ou discordance

4 J’en reste au premier sens qui évite la question psychologique (elle est loin d’être dénuée de pertinence, mais m’éloignerait de mon sujet).

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de l’objet indécis avec l’ontologie (les mondes possibles) admise par cet habitus. La seconde question appelle un jugement objectif, cognitif, quant à la proposition qui est soumise au récepteur de lever l’indécision qui pèse sur l’objet et de le retenir dans la catégorie voulue. Le jugement peut confirmer ou infirmer l’habitus. Le post-art est une série ininterrompue de provocations qui ont entraîné irrésistiblement la modification de l’habitus référentiel — c’est là le processus de dé-définition dont parle Rosenberg. Paul Valéry expliquait à l’avance ce processus lorsqu’il avait noté que la valeur stable du Beau tendait à être supplantée par des valeurs d’instabilité, des « valeurs de choc » (Valéry 1936, pp. 150-151). Au choc émotionnel du visiteur d’exposition, s’ajoute le choc de l’habitus mis en crise. L’indécision qui entache l’objet force le récepteur à prendre une décision, sur le moment, mais il est bien clair que les décisions individuelles ne pèsent pas lourd en face de la décision collective qui, dans le contexte du post-art, se forme au fil de l’apparition croissante d’objets indécis dans les lieux de présentation accrédités. Nos répulsions spontanées s’effacent inéluctablement sous la vague de l’habilitation et de l’habituation culturelles.

Toutefois, en corrélation étroite avec l’objet indécis, le monde de l’art nous offre aujourd’hui des dispositifs particuliers qui peuvent nous rémunérer du sentiment d’être emporté par la vague, des dispositifs de participation, d’interactivité, de co- auteurité. Tandis que l’indécision du premier contact appelle une décision individuelle ou suppose de se rallier à la décision collective, la participation du récepteur à l’œuvre signifie son implication dans le processus de l’œuvre — dans une œuvre qui ne s’achève que par lui — et, par là, comme une sorte de complicité avec elle, voire de compromission si les valeurs qu’elle propose sont contraires à un habitus qu’on aurait auparavant prétendu défendre « même sous la torture »…

Il n’y a sans doute pas de meilleure façon de gagner quelqu’un à sa cause que de l’attirer dans son jeu — même si n’on aime pas tel ou tel jeu, on aime bien jouer… Cette composante ludique du post-art est très importante en ce qu’elle manifeste symptomatiquement l’emprise de la culture sur l’art, d’une culture où le jeu est devenu la principale thérapie des traumatismes sociaux, en plus d’être lucratif. C’est ainsi que l’esthétisation chère à Benjamin peut s’appliquer à l’art comme il s’applique aux jeux collectifs où la masse retrouve sa propre image idéalisée. La valeur ludique couvre ainsi la valeur critique de l’art. L’étrangeté de l’objet jeté sur le tapis vert du monde de l’art est du même coup affaiblie. Le jeu pour le jeu est plus fort que l’art pour l’art.

Mais, en même temps que s’opère cet affaiblissement, une autre valeur supposée de l’art est mise en crise : la singularité. Il reste, bien entendu, le geste singulier de la proposition inaugurale introduite dans le monde de l’art. C’est par exemple l’appropriation par tel artiste du readymade. Duchamp disait que la peinture est readymade parce qu’elle utilise des tubes de peinture achetés. Mais ce n’est pas la même chose d’exposer un tube de peinture que de le peindre. Ce qui disparaît entre la peinture et le readymade, c’est l’appropriation par un travail

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Dominique Chateau Les valeurs de l’art à l’ère du post-art

d’objectivation du subjectif, d’inscription de signes de singularité dans l’objet fabriqué. Comme je l’ai suggéré, le contrat avec le récepteur, dans le cas de l’art, entraînait la reconnaissance de cette appropriation par l’ouvrage, de la singularité ainsi manifestée et de l’exemplarité de son résultat. Ce contrat est rompu dès lors que, non seulement l’appropriation par l’ouvrage est réduite à rien ou presque (au bricolage de l’installation), mais encore le récepteur est sollicité à entrer dans le jeu d’un partage d’appropriation. Il y a en plus la possibilité de reprendre sans cesse le jeu, pour des récepteurs sans cesse nouveaux.

La co-auteurité a des limites, certes. Le récepteur joue comme l’auteur, sauf que ce dernier reste l’initiateur du jeu et son arbitre. Il s’opère, en outre, une dissociation entre auteur et artiste. Quelqu’un est reconnu socialement comme artiste — d’autant que cette figure semble avoir acquis des lettres de noblesse qu’elle n’avait pas avant, jusqu’à considérer, comme certain sociologue, que la figure de l’artiste est devenu le modèle du travailleur post-moderne —, mais est partiellement dépossédé de sa qualité d’auteur. La seule situation claire est celle de l’art sur Internet, lorsque l’auteur, masqué ou inconnu, revendique un copyleft. Dès lors qu’il se dévoilerait, la duplicité de cette revendication apparaîtrait en plein jour. On ne peut manquer d’être frappé, aujourd’hui, par la multiplication exponentielle du nombre d’artistes, de part le monde, dans un contexte où cette posture est censée être en régression, sinon même en voie de disparition. La dissémination de l’œuvre, l’indétermination qui l’entache s’associe à la dénégation de l’artiste qui, lui-même, semble refuser l’étiquette que toute son activité demande pourtant.

Défendant l’idée qu’on ne peut apprécier les valeurs du post-art sans en référer aux valeurs de l’art, je me suis engagé sur une voie résolument négative. Il y a, de fait, quelque chose qui ressemble au travail du négatif dans le statut du post-art, et donc l’espoir d’une aufhebung, au sens d’un supprimé-conservé stabilisé, comme dans la tension des contraires de l’image dialectique, même si le processus est promis à de nouveaux rebonds. Au fil de la description détaillée des valeurs, on semble être plutôt dans l’instabilité d’un moment indécis où ce qui, dans la figure nouvellement apparue de ce que jadis on appela l’art, le conservé, c’est-à-dire la teneur de l’art, est en même l’objet d’une dénégation. D’où la figure du post- artiste dont la production demande qu’on y reconnaisse l’art, mais qui affirme qu’il n’en fait pas ou qu’il n’est pas un artiste.

Or, quel que soit le processus considéré, sa face négative ne peut exister sans une face positive. Le déni de l’art ne fonctionne pas non seulement sans la référence (négative) à l’art, mais encore sans une référence à un versant positif qu’on découvre en élargissant de la sphère de l’art à celle de la culture, au sens où ce mot recouvre en plus des objets dits culturels (dont les objets artistiques sont une sous-catégorie), l’ensemble des pratiques et des contenus qui constituent les dimensions idéologiques, politiques et philosophiques de la culture. Cela permet de mesurer l’art à la culture en même temps que la culture à l’art, un va-et-vient où leurs différences doivent apparaître au lieu d’être gommées.

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Dominique Chateau Les valeurs de l’art à l’ère du post-art

Je vise là certaines théories sociologiques ou « études culturelles » qui réduisent unilatéralement l’art à la culture. Il est vrai que cela simplifie agréablement le problème. Il n’y aurait plus de post-art, mais de la culture, du culturel… On noie le problème au lieu de la traiter. Notre défi consiste plutôt à confronter les valeurs de l’art avec celles de la culture, ce qui devient difficile si on ne les distingue plus, de même que si on évite tout débat épistémologique en reléguant l’esthétique aux oubliettes. La proposition qui me semble la plus pertinente à cet égard émane d’un travail dont on peut reconnaître la pertinence aussi bien à l’égard de la culture qu’à l’égard de l’art, à l’égard des études culturelles qu’à l’égard de l’esthétique. Il s’agit de celle d’Edouard Glissant sur la créolisation (Glissant 1996, 1997). Cette proposition d’un insulaire, sans doute parce que le lieu même de l’île lui confère la puissance d’une sorte de laboratoire, à la fois ethnique, culturel et intellectuel, peut nous intéresser non seulement dans son contenu propre (que je ne ferai qu’évoquer), mais encore dans son implication extrinsèque et surtout à l’égard du schème de pensée qu’elle nous offre. Glissant redonne de la fièreté au monde créole en caractérisant la créolité comme une anticipation et un modèle possible du multiculturalisme planétaire. Le même processus de mélange, de métissage, d’hybridation qui, ainsi, peut nous apparaître comme négatif en considération de la mondialisation néo-libérale, devient positif en considération du processus culturel spécifiquement insulaire.

Je me demande donc si l’indétermination qui pèse sur l’œuvre et l’artiste dans le contexte du post-art ne peut pas non plus être regardée à l’aune de ce schème de pensée positif. Il ne s’agit pas d’en revenir au fantasme de la réconciliation, de gommer toute négativité, mais de mieux cadrer la dénégation de l’art, au sens freudien de ce mécanisme de défense par lequel on repousse ce qu’on révèle. La dénégation affirme un renoncement verbal à l’art autonome, en raison de l’inertie du contexte multi-culturel, mais le besoin de réactiver ce contexte dans le sens de la créativité artistique demeure. Ce qui serait en jeu dans le post-art, ce n’est pas seulement la compromission ludique avec la Kunstindustrie, mais le besoin, acté par certains individus, observé par d’autres, de prolonger les valeurs de l’art, à commencer par la singularisation, dans un contexte où la culture est entrée dans une processus de métissage, incluant l’art et, par là, affectant son intégrité.

Il y a une différence entre le métissage et la créolisation, à suivre Glissant: le premier est passif et la seconde active. Le métissage est un pluralisme subi, contre lequel il n’y a rien à faire, la créolisation un métissage actif, voulu, à l’origine pour surmonter l’aliénation coloniale. Glissant souligne aussi que la créolisation produit des configurations imprévisibles vis-à-vis de ce que l’état de la culture postmoderne offre a priori. Comme prolongement de la valeur de l’art, la créolisation consisterait à transformer le métissage a priori pour produire des mélanges improbables, et c’est dans cette manière de faire des mondes sur la base du monde donné que la singularisation trouverait encore un lieu d’exercice.

L’analogie de la créolité et du multiculturalisme, certes, est réversible. À la version optimiste que représente la créolisation du monde, on oppose une version

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pessimiste selon laquelle c’est la multi-culturalisation qui rend possible la créolisation ; celle-ci, loin de fonder celle-là, ne ferait que l’enjoliver et son « triomphe » se limiterait à une valeur purement symbolique. Mais l’explication par le symbolique atteint sa limite si elle néglige l’efficace même du symbolique; s’il ressemble à une sorte de causalité parallèle qui n’indemnise que le fantasme, il convient de ne pas méconnaître son effet dans la réalité, surtout lorsqu’il s’agit d’un rapport à la réalité qui vise à y établir un monde parallèle, un monde possible. L’autonomie de l’art réside dans cette instauration — là encore, l’idée du mélange suppose qu’on puisse distinguer ce dont il se nourrit. L’autonomie de l’art résiste par la création des mondes possibles, imprévisibles, improbables, comme le fait à sa manière le rêve, mais sans réaliser les mondes dans la réalité.

L’autonomie d’instauration reste l’instrument principal de la singularisation artistique, de l’affirmation continuée de la posture d’artiste. On n’est pas artiste parce qu’on fait une œuvre; on fait une œuvre parce qu’on est artiste, parce qu’on éprouve le besoin d’extérioriser artistiquement sa singularité. L’art est un besoin ontologique avant d’être un besoin social. La raison de la persistance de la valeur de l’art réside dans le fait que des individus éprouvent toujours le besoin d’introduire dans le monde la différence imprévisible d’une représentation singularisée du monde, ce que l’idée de créolisation, de créativité créolisée, permet d’envisager encore dans le contexte de dissémination où navigue le post- art.

Références

- Adorno, Theodor W. 1995. Théorie esthétique (1970), trad. Marc Jimenez et Éliane Kaufholtz, Paris : Klincksieck, Coll. « Esthétique ». - Adorno, T. W. & Horkheimer, M. 1974. La Dialectique de la raison. Fragments philosophiques (1944-47), trad. Éliane Kaufholz, Paris : Gallimard, Coll. « Tell ». - Arendt, Hannah. 1972. La Crise de la culture (Between Past and Future, 1954), trad. sous la dir. de Patrick Lévy, Paris : Gallimard, Coll. « Folio essais ». - Glissant, Édouard. 1996. Introduction à une poétique du divers, Paris : Gallimard. - 1997. Traité du Tout-Monde, Paris : Gallimard. - Mitchell, W. J. T. 2002. « Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture », Journal of Visual Culture, 1, 2. - Rosenberg, Harold. 1964-1966. The Anxious Object, Art Today and Its Audience, New York : Collier Books. - Valéry, Paul. 1936. Paul Valéry, « Léonard et les philosophes. Lettre à Léo Ferrero », Variété III, Paris : Gallimard.

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The Value of Sad Poetry

Anna Christina Ribeiro* Texas Tech University

Consider the first two quatrains of this sonnet by the American poet Edna St Vincent Millay:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.1

Assuming Millay is speaking in her own voice, why should I care about her heartbreak? I never met her personally; she died more than half a century ago; this pain, too, is no more. Assuming she is speaking in the voice of an invented poetic persona, then perhaps I have even less reason to be touched, for this is, in effect, nobody’s heartbreak. Yet I wonder if any of you was focusing on Millay herself and

* [email protected] 1 Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), ‘Time Does Not Bring Relief; You All Have Lied’ from Selected Poems: The Centenary Edition. Edited with an introduction by Colin Falck (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), p. 13.

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looking to get further specifics about her heartbreak as you listened, or imagining some fictitious persona and feeling for her.

Sometimes we go to poetry: sometimes we go to poetry that is sad. Yet, despite this sadness, we find enjoyment in such engagement. Are we all masochists? Hardly. So, on the assumption that those of us who relish and value sad poems are not suffering from some psychological disorder, we would do well to understand better this very human practice.

Philosophers of art have long discussed the problem of emotional engagement with tragic characters, what today is referred to as the paradox of tragedy. The puzzle, they say, is that, out of their own free will, people go to theaters and cinemas, and open up books, to see other people suffer. Moreover, they enjoy such activities. Indeed, the more moved they are, the more enjoyable they claim the experience to have been, and the better and more valuable they find the work that thus moved them. As David Hume put it, ‘It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle’.2

Many attempts have been made to shed some light on this problem and make coherent this apparent inconsistency in our behavior and experience. Some of them take their inspiration from Aristotle and his notion of catharsis, according to which we are relieved of the very emotions aroused by the tragic work by the either cleansing or transformational effect the tragedy has upon those emotions.3 Others, like Hume, focus on the artistry employed by the tragedian, including not only the skilled use of rhetorical devices but also the manner of presentation of the tragic events and characters. According to Hume, together these not only offer a positive countervailing weight to the negative emotions but, by the power of their effect, absorb those emotions and convert them into something pleasurable.4 Still others find that the reason for our enjoyment of tragedy is to be found in what it says about us: the fact that we are moved by the plight of others,

2 David Hume, 1757. ‘Of Tragedy.’ In Selected Essays, ed. S. Copley and A. Edgar, 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 126. 3 Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 5. In Rhetoric and Poetics, Trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater, introduction by Friedrich Solmsen (New York: The Modern Library, 1954), p. 230. For a review and categorization of the many responses to the paradox of tragedy, see Jerrold Levinson, ‘Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain.’ In Emotion and the Arts, ed. M. Hjort and S. Laver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 20-34. 4 ‘This extraordinary effect proceeds from that very eloquence with which the melancholy scene is represented. The genius required to paint objects in a lively manner, the art employed in collecting all the pathetic circumstances, the judgment displayed in disposing them: the exercise, I say, of these noble talents, together with the force of expression and beauty of oratorial numbers [rhythms], diffuse the highest satisfaction on the audience, and excite the most delightful movements. By this means, the uneasiness of the melancholy passions is not only overpowered and effaced by something stronger of an opposite kind, but the whole impulse of those passions is converted into pleasure, and swells the delight which the eloquence raises in us’. Ibid., pp. 128-9.

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even if they are fictional, is a sign of our deep ‘common humanity’ and a reflection of our morality: ‘We find ourselves to be the kind of people who respond negatively to villainy, treachery, and injustice’.5 This recognition promotes a pleasure that compensates for the displeasure we feel for the tragic events themselves.

However successful these and other solutions to the paradox of tragedy are, we must now distinguish that problem from the topic at hand. For the paradox of tragedy is an issue about emotions that are other-directed: that is, emotions that are directed at characters in a story. It is only because these are emotions directed at others that adverting to our moral feelings is a reasonable answer to the paradox. But the lyric poem, it seems, does not invite us to feel about others at all. When we listen to, or, more typically in our now primarily writing culture, read poems such as Millay’s, our thoughts and feelings more often wander to some of our own personal experiences, not to those of the writer. So what I would like instead to bring to your attention is the question of why we should seek out, and enjoy, poems about heartbreak such as Millay’s, poems about death and dying, poems about loneliness, poems, that is, about the sad experiences that we all, sadly, go through in life—poems, in addition, that direct the painful emotions they promote in us at ourselves. We can call this the problem of negative emotions in lyric poetry, or, more succintly, the paradox of the sad lyric. We can summarize it as follows:

1. The sad lyric, a poem in the first person with a painful subject matter, elicits sad thoughts and emotions. 2. We derive pleasure from (and value) the sad lyric. 3. We do not derive pleasure from sad thoughts and emotions.

I will offer two reasons to explain the problem of negative emotions in the case of lyric poetry. The first is that formal poetic devices (alliteration, rhyme, meter, and so on) are pleasing in themselves, for reasons having to do with our auditory psychology, and, as special aids to cognition, make the process of understanding a poetic message more pleasurable. While the poetic artistry cannot do away with the sadness inherent in a sad poem, it imbues that sadness with aesthetic effect and greater significance. As should be clear from the preceding, this is a Humean- inspired solution, although I will focus more narrowly on poetic schemes and on their cognitive and affective effects. The second reason emerges from the first- person voice of lyric poetry, which promotes a phenomenon I call ‘poetic appropriation’, where we take a poet’s words as if they were our own. If part of the process of coming to recognize, understand, and perhaps overcome painful emotions involves putting our feelings into words, then finding those words in the verse of another provides a readymade vehicle for the expression of our own thoughts and feelings. By virtue of being written in the first person and thereby

5 Susan Feagin, 1983. ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy.’ American Philosophical Quarterly 20, pp. 95- 104. P. 98.

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promoting a personal engagement akin to identification6 with the thoughts and emotions expressed in the work, sad lyric poetry has a therapeutic value that helps explain the satisfaction we take in it.

Let us see first how the techniques employed by poets can help explain the pleasure we take in sad poetry. Here is another example:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

6 I say “akin to” so as to avoid being interpreted as saying that the reader or listener suddenly thinks that she is the poet, or that her thoughts and feelings are exactly like those expressed in the poem. The notion of identification has a problematic history, to be sure.

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Rage, rage against the dying of the light.7

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ famous ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’, written for his dying father (and read by the poet himself in this clip), follows the villanelle form: we are rapt in this powerful swirl with only two rhymes: the one involving the ‘night’ of the first line, and the other involving the ‘day’ of the second line. Night and day dance about in each stanza, with the middle line always ending in ‘-ay’, and flanked by the other rhyme: in other words, with ‘day’ always preceded and followed by ‘night’. No matter how much ‘day’ tries to re-emerge in every stanza, the closing lines are final: the ‘night’ rhyme asserts itself twice, locking it out conclusively.

Notice how I have mentioned nothing yet of the other words in the poem, only the two words at the end of the first two lines in the poem. And yet, by being placed in the beginning of the poem and at the end of those first two lines, we are immediately invited to compare and contrast them—indeed, ‘invite’ is even too gentle; the poem forces that comparison upon us and keeps it alive throughout by virtue of the rhyming scheme. So here we have sound and sense working together expertly.

The meter of the poem is iambic, but it is not regular. The first line, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, sets the tone by being mostly regular, so regular that indeed it is as gentle as a lullaby; but the third line breaks that regularity in the cry to his father to ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’. The cry is repeated every other stanza, until it is repeated twice, that is, in the last two stanzas. What does that say? Imagine that Dylan Thomas could instead have used ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ as that repeating line (of course, pretend for a moment that that would not have violated the form). The effect of the poem would have been completely different: rather than a forceful and desperate cry to ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’, we would have had a sad and resigned ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. In one case, I see Thomas, by his father’s deathbed, shaking him by his arms and crying for him not to die; in the other, I see Thomas holding his father’s hand and, looking down and crying in resignation, uttering the second line.

The iambic meter is also the most natural meter in modern English, and the fact that it fits the prosodic nature of the language is, I think, what makes its recitation pleasing to the ear—it is the prosody of everyday language made salient. In everyday speech English speakers already often produce sentences that follow the iamb, without trying or knowing. Perhaps having that made salient by having nearly the entire poem in regular iambs produces a pleasure of recognition—one that we need not be consciously aware of in order to feel—it’s like listening to

7 Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1957), p. 128. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyWiE1vNSxU

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ourselves speak, but better. As Homer put it in his Hymn to Delian Apollo, ‘such is their skill in composing the song / that each man might think he himself were speaking’.8

So much for the ‘sound effects’—although, as I hope to have made evident, sound is never too far from sense. If we now focus on meaning proper, we may note at least two things. One, the wise men, good men, wild men, grave men that Thomas draws his father’s attention to. Clearly, the poet is asking his father, and us, to look to these men as models of how to face the inevitable hour, and not to go, or to let ourselves go, without a fight. Perhaps he is also comparing his father to these great men, so that his elegy is also a eulogy. I’ll return to this in a moment.

The second meaning feature to note has to do with the many metaphors in this short poem. Most of them are what we may call ‘verbal’ metaphors: where the word transferred from its typical use to qualify another is not a noun, as in ‘Juliet is the sun’, but a verb, as in ‘old age should burn and rave’, ‘words fork’ ‘deeds’ dance (brightly, and in a green bay, no less), catching and singing the sun, and blind eyes blazing (like meteors!). We may also note that the deeds are ‘frail’, the sight is ‘blinding’, the tears are ‘fierce’—let us call these adjectival metaphors. How does old age, something abstract, ‘burn and rave’? How can deeds be frail? How can they dance? How can words fork anything, much less lightning? We might not have heard these things referred to in such ways before encountering this poem, and most likely not after, either, and yet, novel and unique as they are, we are able to make at least some sense of them. Of course, it is true that the line between metaphor and literal meaning is not so easily demarcated. Why, for instance, did I not point out to you the lines that mention the day closing or the light dying? Because, these days, days close and light dies out without much of a fuss. What is not happening here is what is happening in the previous metaphors, namely, what Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber call, in their renowned Relevance Theory: Cognition and Communication,9 an expansion of our ‘encyclopedic entries’ for the concepts involved.

According to Relevance Theory, our minds ‘store’ concepts in various interconnected ways. Concepts in turn collect information in three ways: lexical, logical, and denotational. A concept’s lexical entry indicates the word or phrase in natural language corresponding to that concept. The denotational or encyclopedic entry ‘contains information about the extension and/or denotation of the concept: that is, about the objects, events and/or properties which instantiate it’; finally, the concept enters into logical forms, and thus there must be rules governing its behavior within those forms—the logical entry contains a set of deductive rules.10 Speakers share the logical entries attached to a conceptual address and, when

8 Apostolos N. Athanassakis, The Homeric Hymns, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004 [1976]), p. 18, lines 163-4.

9 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance Theory: Comunication and Cognition, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 10 Ibid., p. 86.

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speakers share a natural language, the lexical entries as well. The encyclopedic entry, however, is peculiar to an individual, containing all that the individual believes to be the case about that concept. Naturally, encyclopedic entries, while they vary from person to person, must still overlap to an extent sufficient for communication, and may overlap considerably. For instance, we all here share the concept of [COW], but we have different lexical entries for it: vaca, vache, bakará], and so on. In Hindi, however, not only do they] ةرقب ,[корова [karôva call it ‘gai’, they also have a completely different encyclopedic entry for it. While for most of us a cow is a grazing animal we eat, for most of them a cow is a sacred animal they worship.

What happens when someone tells me that frail deeds dance brightly in a green bay is that I am invited to expand my encyclopedic entries for the given concepts. In this case, especially for the concepts of ‘deed’ and ‘dance’, by virtue of their being qualified in unusual ways. The same goes for the ways in which we are invited to think of Thomas’ father. For most of us, our encyclopedic entries for him are very thin indeed—we did not know his father. So placing him alongside all these men is a way of filling in our entry for him.

Why should expanding our encyclopedic entries for concepts we already possess give us pleasure? I think part of the answer can already be found in Aristotle, who claimed that all men by nature desire to know, and that acquiring new knowledge is something pleasurable in itself. However, I think the manner in which we acquire this new knowledge in poetry is something that adds to that pleasure as well. Relevance theory can help us here also. Relevance theory is a reduction of H. P. Grice’s several ‘conversational maxims’ to one: Be Relevant. In other words, say no more than what is needed for me to understand you. More importantly, there is, on the part of the hearer, an assumption of relevance: I expect the linguistic string I am required to process to result in what Sperber and Wilson call ‘contextual effects’—it should tell me something. Moreover, as the authors put it, ‘The assessment of relevance, like the assessment of productivity, is a matter of balancing output against input: here contextual effects against processing effort’.11 So, if it is true that speakers seek to make their contributions as relevant as possible, and hearers assume the contextual relevance of what they hear, then when something unusual occurs—say, a word or a sound is repeated—hearers will assume that optimal relevance is still at work. If those repetitions require more processing effort, on this view hearers should tacitly assume that the effort will be repaid with greater contextual effects. This is precisely what poetic techniques produce. Without stating anything explicitly, merely by using words that sound alike (for example), a poet may lead us to consider ways in which the concepts signified by those words relate to one another, or novel ways in which to consider the concepts themselves.12 Poets, then, follow the economic spirit of relevance theory to its limit, since they convey more with fewer words. The

11 Relevance Theory, p. 125. 12 Much of the material on relevance theory here is adapted from my ‘Relevance Theory and Poetic Effects’, Philosophy and Literature 36:1, forthcoming 2012.

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pleasure here, as in other areas of life, is that of getting more for less: fewer words, by virtue of being combined in novel ways, engender a greater and faster expansion of our ‘encyclopedic entries’ than more words combined in the usual ways would have. Perhaps this is yet another reason why paraphrasing poems feels so unsatisfactory.

Moving on now to the second aspect of our solution to the problem of sad lyric poetry, how does its being written in the first person affect our engagement with such poems and, specific to our concerns, how does it promote the therapeutic pleasure I claim explains the pleasure we take in them?

As I have argued elsewhere, ‘to the first-person expression on the part of the poet or poetic persona there corresponds a counterpart personal engagement on the part of the reader or hearer’.13 In other words, its being written in the first person automatically places the reader or listener in the position of the speaker; recall the quote from Homer’s hymn earlier. That is, we are invited to ‘try those words on’, in a way, and see if they fit us. Sad poems that speak to our state of mind can thus give voice to our thoughts and feelings, and when they do, we ‘appropriate’ them as if the were our own—perhaps we underline it in a book; perhaps we copy it out; perhaps we post it on our refrigerators; perhaps we post it on Facebook. We claim it as being expressive of something we feel. As I have tried to describe it:

When listening to or reading a poem, we begin by hearing someone else’s voice, by attending to what the poetic persona might have to share with us. … typically, by the end of the poem we have come to identify with that voice. I do not mean by this that we suddenly come to think that we are the poet, or that we are the writers of the poem. I mean an identification in the sense that we feel that we could have written those words (if only we had the talent to express ourselves as well), because they express something that we, too, feel or have felt, think or have thought, and sometimes even thoughts and feelings we never realized we had but that now, seeing them expressed, we find resonating with something within ourselves. Our experience of lyric poems is therefore peculiarly personal: … we are not being told a story, objectively, of what happened to whom and how they felt, but instead a very personal account of how one felt, in a way that invites us to recognize similar feelings or experiences or thoughts in ourselves.14

The question emerges again: if this is how we experience lyric poems, why should it give us any pleasure? I will offer three reasons that, I hope, will shed some light on that question.

The first has to do with the simple fact that the poem gives voice to my feelings and thoughts, which may be hard to express while I am having those feelings and thoughts. This alone can be experienced with a sense of relief; we may say that

13 In ‘Toward a Philosophy of Poetry’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33: 61-77 (2009), p. 69. 14 Ibid.

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the words of the poem take some of that weight that was within me and place it outside—a sensation nicely encapsulated in the idiomatic English expression ‘getting it off your chest.’ The sad lyric provides a readymade vehicle for my feelings and thoughts, and may, in addition, help me understand them better, by expanding on their significance and drawing connections I was unable to see.

The second has to do with validation of my experience and state of mind. When I encounter a poem that expresses what I feel, I see that I am not just imagining things, or that this is the first time this particular experience happens to anyone, or that I am odd, or my situation sui generis. Finding that others have had the same experience, felt and thought the same things, puts, in a way, a stamp of existential approval upon them. This, I think, is an emotional reward, but also a cognitive one, for it tells me that I was assessing my situation in a way that resonates elsewhere; whether or not it is in fact true, it makes me feel that I am not being unreasonable in thinking and feeling in the way that I do.

Finally, the third reason we can enjoy sad lyric poems is that they can help us feel we belong in this world, because we feel the way others do or have felt, and we can commune with them via their words. Sadness is a state that often makes those feeling it feel alienated from the world: suddenly nothing seems to make sense; suddenly the familiar feels foreign; suddenly the people closest to us seem like strangers who do not understand us and whom we do not understand. The sad lyric can be pleasing precisely because, in helping us dwell in our thoughts and feelings for a while, it helps us recognize them, understand them, accept them. Importantly, it helps us see ourselves in another, and another in ourselves, and in that process we may slowly come back to the world, so to speak, and gradually recover the distance of alienation created by our earlier distress.

I would like to close with one more example, one that I think encapsulates this aspect of poetry particularly well: this is Jorge Luis Borges reciting his ‘Arte Poetica’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mXFOSBS0qs.

Mirar el río hecho de tiempo y agua que es inmortal y pobre. La poesía y recordar que el tiempo es otro río, vuelve como la aurora y el ocaso. saber que nos perdemos como el río y que los rostros pasan como el agua. A veces en las tardes una cara nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo; Sentir que la vigilia es otro sueño el arte debe ser como ese espejo que sueña no soñar y que la muerte que nos revela nuestra propia cara. que teme nuestra carne es esa muerte de cada noche, que se llama sueño. Cuentan que Ulises, harto de prodigios, lloró de amor al divisar su Itaca Ver en el día o en el año un símbolo verde y humilde. El arte es esa Itaca de los días del hombre y de sus años, de verde eternidad, no de prodigios. convertir el ultraje de los años en una música, un rumor y un símbolo, También es como el río interminable que pasa y queda y es cristal de un mismo ver en la muerte el sueño, en el Heráclito inconstante, que es el mismo ocaso un triste oro, tal es la poesía y es otro, como el río interminable.

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Borges says that ‘Art should be like that mirror, that reveal to us our own face.’ I don’t know that art should be like a mirror to ourselves, but I think the lyric poem can certainly serve that function and that, when it does so in our most poignant moments, it can reveal to us various facets of what it means to be human.15

15 To look at the river made of time and water and remember that time is another river, to know that we lose ourselves like the river and that faces go by like the water.

To feel that wakefulness is another sleep that dreams it is not dreaming and that the death that our flesh fears is that death every night that is called sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol of the days of mankind and of his years, to change the outrage of the years into a music, a rumor, and a symbol,

To see in death sleep, in sunset a sad gold, such is the poetry that is immortal and poor. Poetry returns like dawn and sunset.

Sometimes in the evening a face looks at us from the bottom of a mirror; art should be like that mirror that reveals to us our own face.

They tell that Ulysses, tired of wonders, wept with love at the sight of his Ithaca, green and humble. Art is that Ithaca of green eternity, not of wonders.

It is also like the river without end that passes and remains and is the mirror of one same inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same and is another, like the river without end.

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Aesthetic value, creation and emotion

Rachida Triki* Université de Tunis

Whether it is an occasion of a specific aesthetic judgment, or it refers to the idea of beauty, the aesthetic experience is at first revealed through an emotion. It is through the physiological experience requiring a feeling of pleasure that we need to discuss its nature. Therefore, the proper of an aesthetic experience is a sort of impartiality that allows a connection to the object or the event, establishing in us a pure emotion, a movement or a difficult experience that has an influence on our emotions. This experience is immediate, and it places us in a pure sensible relationship with what affects us. In this case, it is a kind of receptivity that does not consider either the nature, or the concept of its object.

For this reason, it was first thought by the philosophers of aesthetics, by referring to the original meaning of aesthesis, which means sensation. Sensualists, as well as philosophers of enlightenment, valued this role of sensation in the emerging process of subjectivity. This enables one to judge aesthetically and lays the foundation of an empathetic communion between man and the world beside intersubjectivity aesthetically established.

Shaftesbury has explained clearly in his treatise of Characteristics (1711) that the virtue of impartiality is indeed to allow, through a self-surpassing, the contemplation as a harmony with things and others. This is based on mutual capacity of being freed from selfishness. This kind of emotional empathy, prior to every seize of beauty, will be as we know expressed rationally by Kant in his analysis of “common sense” as communicable things in the judgment of taste without mediation. We need to affirm that intersubjectivity and universality, before being founded on the free action of faculties, are based on aesthetic satisfaction, stirred by the emotion that can seize sensibility.

* [email protected]

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Emotional dimension of aesthetic experience does not seem harmful to an intersubjective and rationalistic approach of the aesthetic object in general, and the art in particular. On the contrary, it would be its condition.

In my opinion, in aesthetic theory as well as in artistic practice, the purpose of founding rationally the judgment of taste and the artistic representation requires the presence of emotional dimension prior to the agreeing with the aesthetic dimension of artworks. This idea is usually interpreted in the practice of arts according to the proper status of the artist, consisting of the confrontation of the world in its raw presence, disconcerting as it is. For the creator, it is about a style of being in the world, beneath the instituted representations, as well as the cultural criterions.

Therefore, the question will be as follows: how to create, in respect to the primarily emotion, a real connection of the sense, founder of the value of a work?

Kierkegaard studied the position of the artist in his confrontation of anguish towards nothingness (Kierkegaard, Le concept de l’angoisse, NRF, Paris 1976, Chap. 1). For him, the artist is the one who confronts the abyss of the virgin seized in the upstream of the work. The anguish consists, in its psychological dimension, of the existential situation where a “qualitative rising” can take place and allow the artist to be a creator through his work. This is expressed in Paul Klee’s thoughts more than Paul Cézanne, when he faces chaos, through which the confrontation between the cosmic and the organic takes place. The world for these creators cannot become sensible unless it is freed from the stable forms of nature in order to allow the seizing of its appearances. Cézanne could see this in the emotion of what it could become a revelation when he declares that: “an aerial and coloured logic suddenly replaces the dark and the hard geometry…as I can see. It is by the stain. The geological stand, the preparatory work, the world of design becomes deeper; it is collapsed as if it is a catastrophe. It is carried out and regenerated by a disaster. A new period is seen. It is the true one!....” (J. Gasquet, Cézanne, Bernheim-Jeune, 1921, pp. 136 & 137). The artist himself is considered in sensibility as he lives alongside with the genesis of his work, meeting with the visible in its diversity. Therefore, the art work can be grasped as an event for “the one who exists in the midst of its becoming” (Henry Maldiney, Art et existence, Klincksieck, Paris 2003, p. 211), in occurrence to the painter who engages himself in its existence. Being engaged to creativity and faithful to all the sensations that can become visible, means being confronted to the surprising character of the world and to the interior necessity of action; captured by the art work, in order to be in the same time in emotion and truth of seeking creation.

This attitude is not proper to modern thinkers; we shall find it with the contemporary artists, if we take the example of artists of Maghreb, the practices of contemporary art represent an unquestionable tool for their emancipation. The use of new media, multimedia as well as the practice of installation art is, for them, an ideal way to construct brand new situations and stories that will make us reflect upon the present.

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Unlike what was allowed by the limited scope of Fine Arts, these new approaches broaden the field of creation to include the space of life. They are also ways of thinking, expressing and raising questions about their environment, their identity as artists and citizens, or simply about their singularity. Above all, they are a process of creation without borders. On the one hand, they release them from the pressure of belonging to the practice of the plastic arts, especially abstractionist and modern painting, as it has been instituted in the cultural field of Maghreb over the last few decades. On the other hand, they allow them to escape from a kind of exogenous recognition that defines them as belonging to a particular culture, a particular civilization manifested by the signs and symbols that would be considered characteristic.

The preoccupation with this artistic process of creating between two spaces - the endogenous and the exogenous- has been expressed particularly among the young generation of artists who want to be bound neither by the history of local art, nor by the image formed of them by the West. It is not a question here of there being a rupture with their cultural sphere or with globalised art. It is a question of creating in a different way, with a sense of self-constancy that respects their singularity and their commitment to the present – to be contemporary would be ahead of one’s time and to be able to create art out of situations or objects that touch everything in their world. Moreover, this is what gives their works a special coherence and powerful presence. In this sense, it’s just that they have, in general, gone beyond the problematic question of aesthetic criteria in current plastic arts. Wasn't Natalie Heinich (Le triple jeu de l'art contemporain, Paris 1998), who has conducted an in-depth analysis of this question, who remarked that for the contemporary arts "authenticity" is an outstanding value? Of course, it is necessary to understand authenticity not as a way of adapting to a tradition but as being true to oneself. She indicates the way in which today's artists have a commitment to create differently, faithful to their sensations, daring to use methods in keeping with their dream to seek out the truth in their desire for art. Moreover, is it not a coincidence that in the aims of artists we often find the notions of truth, sincerity and even the need to express creation as a commitment?

This way of creating without borders, free of the weight of tradition, free of the current norms and the demands of a globalised market, has, for several years now allowed Maghrebin artists to stake out the difference from a sense of "déjà vu» through their new works. They are fully aware of the exhausted state of certain aesthetic categories linked to a plastic approach that artists had previously claimed as a way of including the Tunisian heritage and even more so, that of Arab decorative and visual arts.

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Painting of the Tunisian artist Khaled Ben Slimane

The abstractionist artistic movement, born in the 1960s, has, admittedly, given rise to a diversity of configurations where the traditional signs, which have become pictorial elements, have been rekindled aesthetically. However, the recurrence of elements that play with shapes has ended up producing a mode of representation that has certainly replaced the exotic and orientalist modes dating from the turn of the last century, but which has divided up artistic productions into new bor- ders.

Yahia Turki, Henna

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These borders restrict the distribution of sensitive elements to a visual environment characterized by the signs of a recaptured land. The Berber symbols, the Arab calligraphy and the architectural lines of the medina have succeeded in fixing an identity by showing the way.

Painting of the Tunisian artist Nagib Belkhodja

Contemporary artists, who have been introduced to the new technologies and to the new means of communication, as well as to the circulation and cross- fertilization of images with their different representations, have broadened their creative scope. They claim both their singularity as artists –a kind of Maghrebin- Arab identity– and the status of world citizens. In this sense, they must confront a more extensive environment and, by capturing intense impressions and producing sensations that respond to their desire to create.

Creating means "to resist" to use the expression coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? Paris 1991). It means "'daring to opt for a future which is always an adventure" (Ibid.); in this, the artist is "a being in

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the process of evolution who attempts an uncertain fight" because he is open to all possibilities, with the capacity to change from one technique to another, depending on the process of the creation in question. This harmony with oneself, with one's desires, with one's need to produce or to simply express oneself through the appropriate medium, is a characteristic shared today by many artists of the new generation.

Their works are ways of doing things and lines of thought that are open to the diversity of sensitivity, to events, to the environment as well as to any socio- cultural phenomena. One might say that they turn their backs to the identity problem in order to better understand the evolution of their identity -not to say their singularity.

This singularity is to be understood both as a phenomenon and in social terms. The relationship with the world has to do with exhibiting these mutations, the violence, the contradictions, or simply these brand new sensations and unusual situations that the artists turn into art to have a greater receptive impact.

Along these lines is the installation of the artist, Halim Karabibene, in the form of black humor – a parable of the dream of clandestine emigration. In his photomontage, his characters, ready to leave, haunted by the ghost of a European Eldorado, are prevented from reaching their objects of desire by a grille. These objects, handed out before their eyes and opposite them, are nothing more than kitschy toys, made in China, imported to Europe and sold on the black market on the sidewalks of the Maghrebin cities, to finance the passage of the north shore.

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Deartification, Deaestheticization, and Politicization in Contemporary Art

Gerard Vilar* Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

The general subject of this paper is the precariousness of contemporary art. This precariousness has many faces and meanings, and in fact all of them are aspects of the general precariousness that characterizes the present-day post-globalized world in all aspects of life: from economy and labour to security, or beliefs and values. The precarious condition of contemporary art is an effect of a historical process that began with Romanticism. Hegel had perhaps the deepest insight into this process when introduced the topic of the end of art. From the times of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics to the present that topic has been an important way of dealing with the progressive process of art becoming ever more precarious. Many discourses try to come to terms with this condition by aiming to identify allegedly decadent traits or tendencies. Thus, since the nineteen-sixties some tendencies have been more and more present in many varieties of contemporary arts. I am referring to phenomena such as those that appear in the title of this paper: deartification, deaestheticization and politicization. We could say that these are common features of most contemporary artworks that deepened the discoveries and inventions of the classical avant-gardes. But any of these phenomena can be attributed several meanings; each has its own history. Let us consider Crystal of Resistance, the work of an important present-day artist: Thomas Hirschhorn. This is a good specific case on which to test some generalizations. The work filled every corner of the available space of the Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale last summer. When you enter the pavilion you receive a printed “artist statement” which is rather long and prolix containing the following vehement, ambitious and radical statements. For example: “I believe that art is universal, I believe that art is autonomous, I believe that art can provoke a

* [email protected]. This article is a partial result of the research project FFI2008-04339 “The Historicity of Aesthetic Experience II: continuities and discontinuities between a purely aesthetic experience and moral experience”.

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dialogue or a confrontation - one-to-one - and I believe that art can include every human being.” “With my work Crystal of Resistance I want to give a form that creates the conditions for thinking something new. It must be a form that enables 'thinking'. That’s how I see the mission of art: To give a form that can create the conditions for thinking something that has not yet existed. With this form I want to create a truth, a truth that resists facts, opinions and commentaries.” “Art resists political, cultural, aesthetical habits. Art resists morality and topicality. Art - because it is art - is resistance. But art is not resistance to something, art is resistance as such. Art is resistant because it resists everything that has already existed and been known. Art, as a resistance, is assertion, movement, belief, intensity, art is 'positive'. Art resists tradition, morality and the factual world. Art resists every argumentation, every explanation and every discussion.” And: “I want to work with the precarious and in the precarious. This is to be understood as the POLITICAL. The POLITICAL is, to understand the precarious not as a concept, but to understand it as a condition… the precarious leads to new forms, because the precarious shapes a new geography, because the precarious starts with a new exchange between human beings and because the precarious creates new values.”1

All of that constitutes the artist’s reasons, that is to say, the discourse that unavoidably goes with the visible work. Crystal of Resistance is a huge and fascinating installation created from found materials along with the artist's signature duct tape and tinfoil. It features crystal for its multifaceted, light- reflecting properties, as well as its association with genesis. The large-scale installation includes broken glass, war trophy photographs from the Internet, sticky-tape-swathed mobile phones, terrible pictures of war and violence in Arab countries, Barbie dolls and kitchen foil that together create a bizarre, glittering grotto of the contemporary world. The effects of such a crazy accumulation have at one and the same time both aesthetic and politic dimensions. The critic for The Economist, for example, says: “Hirschhorn’s Crystal of Resistance creates an idiosyncratic universe of ready-made stuff. Anarchic and politicized rather than orderly and neutral, the pavilion defies Swiss stereotypes. Mr Hirschhorn is an independent spirit who refuses to pander to political authority, fashion or the art market. His installation is filled with broken glass, silver foil, cardboard, Q-tips, plastic chairs, old mobile phones and colour printouts of low-resolution war photos, all held together by brown duct tape, a recognizable Hirschhorn motif. It is the antithesis of a boutique displaying luxury goods.” The famous critic Jerry Saltz says in his New York Magazine blog: “Hirschhorn's full-on, all-out building- filling installation involves mannequins, aluminium foil, gruesome war pictures, and broken bottles. It's a true overload, a fabulist fortress of shame, solitude, fury, resolve, and artistic/political ambition.” And Linda Fagerströms, an art critic from Sweden, even establishes a relation between this work and Goya’s “Los desastres de la Guerra”. Be that as it may, Hirschhorn’s work may well be an example of deartified and deaestheticized art, and fully critical, politicized art; but what does it

1 http://crystalofresistance.com/statement.html [accessed on 2nd July, 2011]

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really mean to apply such categories to such a work? In what follows, I will try to give a (not too) precarious answer.

I can summarize my argument as follows. Over recent decades contemporary art has experienced different and obvious processes that have modified not only the very concept of art, but also the social functions of art and the traditional functions of artist, audiences and art world institutions. Deartification is one such process. This unusual classification was introduced by T. W. Adorno towards the end of his life, particularly in his posthumous Aesthetic Theory (1970). Most readers of Adorno in English do not know this term due to the problematic decision to paraphrase it in the translation, as was also the case with the first Spanish translation of this important book. Entkunstung or deartification refers to the losing of traditional or familiar artistic qualities of art works in contemporary artistic practices; a process that corresponds to the deskilling of the artist’s competences. Some fifty years ago, Adorno was the first to understand that process as reification, commodification and ideological fetishism, and used it as to point out the dangers of a possible death of art. But new forms of art appeared just when he was making that assertion and, in the period after his death in 1969, the reverse of the Adornian point of view came to the fore: art rather has to lose traditional qualities in order to maintain its critical momentum and its role of resistance against the force of integration of the powers that be. After five decades of positive "deartification" in the sense of deaestheticization, de- materialization, and ephemeralization, art is threatened with extinction not because of the markets and capitalism, but rather due to radical defenders of politicized art that intend to blur the difference between art and "cultural practices", as is the case of many defenders of the contemporary "social turn" in art. I want to defend the idea that art can be "deartified" as much as you wish, with just one restriction: a difference must be maintained between art and life. If we cannot tell a performance from a social action, or an artwork from a real object, then we have no more art at all. In the traditional terms of art philosophy, some kind of recognizable "appearance" must be preserved in order to save art from its dissolution as already foreseen in the time of Hegel.

I will develop my argument in three steps. First, I will review the Adornian argument that to save art from deartification and preserve its authenticity, a negative radicalization of its appearance is necessary. Such a moralist argument is false, but the opposite point of view is also a mistake. Secondly, I will experiment with a definition of deartification as related to some alternatives— deaestheticization; dematerialization—and especially to the opposite phenomenon: artification. Finally, commenting on some examples, I will defend the notion that recognition could be a contemporary category to replace the old one of appearance, as a necessary step to preserve theoretically the difference between art and mere cultural practices.

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Adorno on Deartification Entkunstung or deartification is the word coined by T. W. Adorno at the beginnings of the 1950s to refer to the dialectical process by which art, or Art with a capital A, progressively loses its traditional qualities and properties to become another kind of thing. Adorno identified that other thing as products of the cultural industry, as a result of the ideological forces dominating administrated societies, and ultimately as mere commodities: a reified product which already is not a form of free thinking or of critical knowledge through the senses. This kind of —sometimes paradoxical— process is well known in the world of contemporary art. In a sense which could be described as dialectical, art has permanently experienced episodes of deartification for more than a century: on those very occasions when one of its traditional or familiar qualities has been denied in order to assert some other, new one. This was the case with the abuses of beauty, with the multiple ways of deaestheticization, with the different forms of dematerialization, with the increase of discursivity and with technologization, ephemeralization, etc. Most of these episodes and movements in art were perceived by audiences as paths to a deartification understood negatively at that moment, while later they have been conceived as moments of redefinition of art. Adorno rightly interpreted atonality as a movement in the redefinition of music, but, in contrast, saw dialogs with the rhythms of jazz in the works of Strawinsky or Gershwin as negative movements towards reification.

To the end of his well-known, merciless attack on jazz of 1953, Timeless Mode, Adorno coined his new category to refer to some aspects of what the most popular music of his time was experiencing: “art is deartified [die Kunst wird entkunstet]” because it “presents itself as part of this adaptation to what its own principle contradicts”. Such adaptation occurs in as much in the art works “instead of the realization of the utopia, these disappears of the image.” That is to say, art, instead of being an appeal to change life, to challenge the absence of freedom and the permanence of injustice, becomes a product that serves to dominate and suppress free individuality by way of its commodification and aestheticization. Jazz is for Adorno a false art in three aspects. First, as a commodity, as a marketable asset and product for consumption, i.e., as a typical product of the culture industry which is neither popular nor the spontaneous product of people’s creativity; rather it is the product of market experts, the design of late-capitalism engineers. Second, jazz reveals itself as false free music if we consider its formal properties, its nature as a musical language; because it is a strictly standardized language that at every moment is regulated and restricted, even during the moments of improvisation when its nature is essentially restricted to patterns, it becomes evident that the alleged freedom of the jazz artist is a false appearance. Lastly, in terms of the audience, Adorno sees a false or wrong effect on them in that they learn to submit their will uncomplainingly to the rhythms of jazz and its patterns: such an effect is, in his opinion, a way to reinforce the sadomasochist character traits of the personalities of the individuals who learn to obey what they secretly hate.

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Some years later, in his posthumous Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno was to use the category of Entkunstung more systematically in developing his normative theory of art. In the first place, to be authentic art, works must point to something more than themselves, something like utopia or transcendence. In that sense Adorno writes: “Only in the achievement of this transcendence, not foremost and indeed probably never through meanings, are artworks spiritual. Their transcendence is their eloquence, their script, but it is a script without meaning or, more precisely, a script with broken or veiled meaning… Art fails its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it becomes deartified”.2 Therefore, there is a logical aspect in the phenomenon of deartification besides the ideological and socio-historical aspects, that is to say, art that does not achieve transcendence fails: it does not correspond to its definition and therefore it does not measure up conceptually, it does not meet the necessary condition for being art. This is one of the main aspects of deartification. The other has to do with the transformation of artworks into something onto which spectators and audiences simply project themselves and enjoy, instead of attending to the requirements of a demanding comprehension from a necessary distance in front of the work. “As a tabula rasa of subjective projections, however, the artwork is shorn of its qualitative dimension. The poles of the artwork’s deartification are that it is made as much a thing among things as a psychological vehicle of the spectator”.3 So, in the contemporary world we find a passion to touch everything, to allow no work to be what it is, to dress it up, to decrease its distance from the viewer, a symptom already noted by Walter Benjamin in his well-known essay on post-auratic art. What a deartified work no longer says is replaced by the beholder with the standardized echo of himself, to which he hearkens. Instead of forgetting himself, the consumer can arbitrarily project their impulses, their mimetic remnants, on whatever is presented to them. Prior to total administration, Adorno believed, the subject who viewed, heard, or read a work was to lose himself, forget himself, extinguish himself in the artwork. Authentic art requires there to be a distance between the work and the subject who wants a relationship with autonomous art. Such a distance is obliterated in the products of the culture industry that are so common in the administrated society, something that reinforces the annihilation of free individuals and their replacement by good, obedient, and satisfied citizens, who reject authentic art and demand more of the same. “Those who have been duped by the culture industry and are eager for its commodities were never familiar with art: They are therefore able to perceive art’s inadequacy to the present life process of society –though not society’s own

2 T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London and New York: Continuum, 1997, p. 104. Translation modified: it is translated instead as, “it loses the quality of being art”. 3 AT, p. 23. Translation modified: it is translated as, “deaestheticization” instead of the original “deartification”.

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untruth- more unobstructedly than do those who still remember what an artwork once was. They push for the deartification of art”.4

Speaking from the present, everybody can see that even in the best case Adorno’s arguments are only partly true.

First, utopia or transcendence has today to be interpreted in deflationary terms. Art is a way of thinking through the senses, and on many occasions it is even an active way of knowledge. Whether this kind of thinking connects with utopia or transcendence or not depends on the kind of work under consideration. It is far too Hegelian to require transcendence always in every artwork. If one insists on speaking of transcendence, then it is necessary to qualify it with some adjectives, such as: “usually intramundane”, “extraordinary but profane”, etc. Artistic thinking or knowledge removes us from the humdrum of everyday ideas and practices, it helps us to see things from other points of view, whether indicating utopia or not. Very often Adorno’s categories seem to encourage theological interpretations or at least to favour such connotations. But today art is not a privileged vehicle of religious beliefs, no more than nature or the markets are.

Second, it is certainly the case that products of the culture industry such as films, novels and TV series are usually—though not always—designed to entertain and to make money. When they are pure entertainment, we could endorse Adorno’s criticism to a certain point. But sometimes, a few of these products have enough artistic quality to be considered artistic products, masterworks of their kind, if you like, as is the case of Coppola’s The Godfather, Rowling’s Harry Potter or the BBC’s adaptation of I, Claudius. Everybody is or can be a consumer of both culture industry products and select works of art. I often read both cheap best-sellers and novels by Thomas Bernhard. Some works, such as some novels by Ian McEwan or Cormac McCarthy, are even both things at once: best-sellers and great novels. Therefore, to be a product of the culture industry, and so deartified in Adorno’s sense, does not always entail a complete and automatic loss of artistic quality.

Obviously, there were other kinds of deartification movements not identified by Adorno; in part because he had no time to reflect on them, in part because of his prejudices. Deartification is a historical category in its references, besides being a systematic category. Since about 1900 each generation has identified different traits, features or symptoms of deartification. That process continues even today, although we have probably reached a limit. Today in some cases art is deartified to become a cultural practice of a kind other than artistic; for example a political, anthropological, celebratory or festive practice, and when this happens, art probably disappears by fusion or confusion with life. When art and life coincide, paradoxically art vanishes. Adorno saw this kind of end of art through the fusion of art and life, but only considered the case of the culture industry, not the case of

4 AT, p. 22. Translation modified: it is translated as, “deaestheticization” instead of the original “deartification”.

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a radically politicized art. And perhaps more importantly, Adorno did not see the other dialectical aspect of deartification: artification processes.

Artification and Deartification Among the many phenomena of contemporary art that have shown some recurrence or continuity over the years since the times of the First World War and the ready-mades of Duchamp are phenomena of artification.

Artification is the process of considering as art some object or practice that was not considered as art previously. A lot of different objects, practices and technical products, new and old, have experienced such transfiguration, to use a word introduced by Arthur Danto 30 years ago. Artification has been a massive movement whereby art has expanded unstoppably beyond its terroir. Important milestones in that process were the recognition of photography as art in the 1970s, or the recognition of appropriationism as a honourable artistic practice in the 1980s.

Deartification is the loss of traditional or familiar qualities or properties that were possessed up until a certain moment; for example, deaestheticization and dematerialization were important aspects of deartification. The aesthetic dimension was a fundamental dimension of art until the irruption of the avant- gardes, meaning that recognizable form and aesthetic qualities were the support of artistic meaning. After Duchamp, such a dimension may be present or not, and in most contemporary artworks it is absent or it is irrelevant.

In a sense, artification and deartification are parallel phenomena. Duchamp and Picasso were, respectively, at the very beginning of these two movements. Cubist collages and ready-mades were practices of artification and of deartification. A collage ratified elements of everyday life such as newspapers or tram tickets, and at the same time deartified the venerable practice of painting by that very gesture. A ready-made artified ordinary objects, such as bottlers and snow shovels, and at the same time deartified the old practice of sculpture.

Artification is going on today within the boundaries of art through fashion, design, and popular practices such as cartoons or graffiti. An interesting movement in artification is taking place today with avant-garde cuisine. Thus, what creative cooks such as Ferran Adrià, René Redzepi, Massimo Bottura and Heston Blumenthal have been doing with their dishes and menus is artifying something that until now was considered a mere craft or a minor art. This is the case because we are in presence of something new: a dinner at “El Bulli” restaurant is not merely an aesthetic experience of tasty dishes; it is an occasion to think with the senses about our body, its capacities to interact with the world, and the many ways to say something in a non-propositional language, such as edible metaphors, ironies, and other tropes. Edible language is edible art.

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Back to deartification: it occurs today mainly in installations and in performance, as in the work of Hirschhorn mentioned at the beginning, a work that does not raise any doubts about its condition as art. One faces a different case, as I said before, in artistic projects or propositions of dubious artisticity. For example, a Catalan artist and critic defends as an alternative to the productive walking of consumers in shopping malls and commercial centres, an idle walk, as resistance to consumption, to productivity. Well, it may be a good idea as a cultural practice of resistance, but I presume that it is not art, since it is very hard to recognize it as art, i.e., as something other than mere and sheer walking. Another example could be the Itinerant Home of Mary Hale (2009), a sequel -or expansion, if you like- of the Refugee Wear of Lucy Orta (1992), inspired by the situation in New Orleans after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Itinerant home, the artist tells us, provides a point of discussion of different housing possibilities. The installation takes the form of a wearable, inflatable house which shelters multiple wearers working together to navigate through historic neighbourhoods and water bodies of New Orleans. It expands on the definition of body wear, going beyond the gallery to be seen and worn by the public of New Orleans in the context of their historical building stock. Allegedly, it symbolizes and stimulates ways of thinking about the architecture of the home and the future of the city. Actually, it is only a festive occasion to enjoy with some friends via a toy for adults, playing and joking, which is fantastic, but typically remains outside the playground of art. It is a case of a sort of relational art that fails to open up a way of thinking and, therefore, falls out of the domain of art: it is deartified to the extreme of no longer being art. Of course, that is not a final judgement; in some pragmatic circumstances it could avoid its banal destiny, after all, it is a question of how to use the signs and symbols.

Art, Politics and Recognition A philosophical reflection is necessary on an important present-day dichotomy: art versus cultural practices. Such a difference has only existed in recent centuries, and has become more and more problematic in the last fifty years. The situation today is well known: anything and everything can be a work of art, everybody an artist, everybody a critic, and anything goes. However, the possibility of a deartified world foreseen by Adorno has not come about. We continue to distinguish art from other things, however difficult it may be. And it is necessary to maintain the differences between art and life, as Adorno defended.

Political art, or art with strong political motivation, is a contemporary terrain where we can easily find the phenomenon of extreme deartification. That politicization can take deartification to the limit is something that is not at all new. But has been around for at least the last hundred years. Think about the propaganda artefacts of various ideologies and regimes of the 20th century. What is new is that the contemporary art panorama has generalized the use of some very radical strategies invented by situationists and conceptualists in the 1960s and 1970s, which were highly antagonistic at the time, to the point that now they

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often completely fail and push artistic projects into banality and triviality. The reason for this can be found in the enormous changes in the sociohistorical context. One very important example of such change is the expansion of the art world out of the institutional places that it occupied fifty years ago. The art world as a world of institutionalized reasons (Danto) has become a space without boundaries; it has become a kind of atmosphere that includes everybody.

Art has to appear as art for a community: it has to be recognizable as such by some people. However, today that very often has nothing to do with visual or tonal properties. Art today does not appear in the way it used to in the past. Whether art makes an appearance depends now more on the ability to identify the singular communicative situation peculiar to art; to recognize the situation as an artistic one, and that means to recognize the reasons for art. Differences between a police report, an artistic statement, a poem, a scientific communication or a religious homily are not always a question of style or visual properties, but depend on a pragmatic situation in a space of reasons. Unlike common situations, an artistic communicative situation does not take for granted the usual meaning of signs and symbols, rather it questions and disputes their meaning, questions the usual grammar of discourses to raise a validity claim concerning the intelligibility of the very artistic languages themselves.

Art making such an appearance today depends on the pragmatic capacity of individuals, which is a cultivated common sense for different communicative situations, with artistic communication being one of them, even though it is special because it questions the usual grammars. So, recognition is the contemporary philosopher’s stone to tell art from other practices. Recognition, obviously, is not a subjective act, but an intersubjective one. It has a community as its subject. One can pretend to have created a work of art, but without recognition at a certain moment there is no art. The question that is immediately raised is: How many people constitute a community of artistic or aesthetic sense? This question has no simple answer. The art world is today global and tribal, democratic and snobbish, universal and singular. How many people form a community? There are no theorems in aesthetics and the theory of contemporary art.

Deaestheticization, dematerialization, ephemeralization, are not dangers per se for art. On the contrary, as in the case of Hirschhorn, they are the very media of an art of our time. But without recognition, deartification can cross the limits of artisticity and make of works mere cultural practices. In the example of Hirschhorn’s Venice installation, a failure of recognition is wholly impossible. There are too many elements inviting us to recognize the work –curators, critics, journalists, county bureaucrats, philosophy professors and other species.

Hirschhorn’s art appears as something challenging to our understanding; as precarious in its meaning as it is in its materials, its disposition and its composition. The aesthetic of precariousness, of his precarious art, is for me a real and correct way of producing political art today. But to justify those last sentences would require another paper.

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La respuesta aristotélica de las emociones estéticas en la obra de Apeles de Cos

Jorge Tomás García∗ Universidad de Murcia

1.- Demócrito como pionero de la estética de la recepción artística en la Antigüedad Los historiadores griegos posteriores consideraron que Demócrito sentó los fundamentos de la estética, pues trató las cuestiones estéticas de forma científica y empírica. Lamentablemente, sus escritos se han perdido. Sin embargo, es posible conocer sus ideas fundamentales gracias a los resúmenes y a las citas de autores posteriores, que recogieron algunos fragmentos de su pensamiento.

En uno de sus fragmentos, Demócrito afirma que un espectador siente gran alegría cuando contempla una obra de arte bella. En este caso, se refiere a la influencia o los efectos ejercidos por el arte, ya que los grandes placeres nacen de contemplar las obras hermosas. Como expone Tatarkiewicz1, se trata de la declaración más antigua en la que figuran juntos los conceptos de placer (o alegría), contemplación y belleza. Al considerar el arte y la belleza desde el punto de vista del placer que proporcionan se pone de manifiesto el hedonismo Demócrito, ya que pensaba que la felicidad está determinada por los placeres y el dolor. Para conseguir la felicidad el hombre debe juzgar las cosas y diferenciar entre los diferentes placeres. En este proceso debe guiarnos del principio de "armonía" (entendida como proporción, equilibrio, mesura o moderación). Si nos atenemos a este principio, lograremos el equilibrio corporal - la salud - y la tranquilidad del alma - la felicidad -. Demócrito, como los demás griegos, apreció esta armonía o "medida adecuada" y vio su importancia en todas las actividades humanas, incluidas el arte y la belleza. De una manera característica para su filosofía, dio a esta cuestión un matiz hedonista, ya que si alguien sobrepasara la medida, lo más agradable podría resultar lo más desagradable.

∗ [email protected] 1 Tatarkiewicz 2000.

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Si el alma se expresa a través del cuerpo, Demócrito aboga por la relación entre el talento y el arte. Es fundamental recurrir a la inspiración, que produce un especial estado de la mente para producir material artístico. Demócrito se refiere continuamente a la mímesis de la naturaleza, y para ello hay que recurrir a la contemplación, que provoca alegría. Aboga por un arte tomado del natural, como fuente de placer, y su devenir filosófico tiene que ver con el empirismo, con el materialismo.

Fue el primero en destacar abiertamente el placer y el júbilo que se puede obtener de la contemplación estética de la obra artística. Sus escritos se han perdido, únicamente se conservan algunos de sus títulos y algunos fragmentos que no hacen mérito de la enorme trascendencia que tuvo el filósofo de Abdera en algunos de los conceptos claves de la mal denominada “filosofía presocrática”. El determinismo, el materialismo y el empirismo de su filosofía están plenamente plasmados en algunos de sus fragmentos relacionados con la experiencia estética. Para Demócrito la influencia del arte sobre el espectador que contempla la obra es parte fundamental del valor real del arte en la sociedad. Según él, “los grandes placeres nacen de contemplar las cosas hermosas”, (Estobeo, Ecl. III 3, 46; frg. B 194 Diels), y dada la relación entre el arte y la naturaleza, las obras de arte son fuentes de belleza. Es la primera vez que se produce la ecuación belleza igual a alegría. El propio Platón coincide con Demócrito en su percepción de las formas y colores como elementos capaces de proporcionar placer a sus espectadores. En Filebo 51b, cuando Protarco pregunta a Sócrates sobre qué podría considerar alguien como placeres, Sócrates responde: “Los que se relacionan con los colores llamados bellos, con las formas y la mayoría de los olores y de los sonidos, y cuantas cosas, cuya falta no es sensible ni penosa, proporcionan plenitudes sensibles y agradables, libres de dolores”2.

Demócrito, en la definición de la belleza, está en consonancia con aquello que consideraba adecuado la cultura griega en su tiempo: la belleza está en la mesura, la proporción y la sencillez. De esta manera, “si alguien sobrepasa la medida, lo más agradable podría resultar lo más desagradable” (Estobeo, Ecl. III 17, 38; frg. B 23 Diels) y “en todo, hermoso es lo proporcionado: el exceso y la insuficiencia no me lo parecen” (Demócrates, Sent. 68; frg. B 102 Diels).

2.- Contexto y origen de la estética aristotélica En el 343 a.C. Filipo II de Macedonia convocó a Aristóteles para guiar la educación de Alejandro, y también llamó a Apeles para convertirse en el pintor de corte, dadas las buenas relaciones con Arístrato y debido a los orígenes de Pánfilo, que era de Anfípolis. Algunos de los representantes de la escuela de pintura de Sición pasaron a trabajar al servicio del poder macedonio. Con anterioridad, en el 367

2τὰς περί τε τὰ καλὰ λεγόμενα χρώματα καὶ περὶ τὰ σχήματα καὶ τῶν ὀσμῶν τὰςπλείστας καὶ τὰς τῶν φθόγγων καὶ ὅσα τὰς ἐνδείας ἀναισθήτους ἔχοντα καὶἀλύπους τὰς πληρώσεις αἰσθητὰς καὶ ἡδείας [καθαρὰς λυπῶν] παραδίδωσιν.

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a.C., Aristóteles viajó a Atenas desde Macedonia debido a la relación de su padre Nicómaco con el rey Amintas III de Macedonia, ya que su padre llegó a ser un hombre de confianza en la corte del rey. Amintas murió en 370-69 a.C., siendo sucedido en el trono por su hijo Alejandro II.

En 339 a.C. murió el sucesor de Platón en la Academia, Espeusipo, y Aristóteles fue propuesto como nuevo director. Finalmente no fue elegido, lo que significó un duro golpe en las aspiraciones del estagirita3. La Poética de Aristóteles no está exactamente delimitada cronológicamente, aunque sí parece claro que se escribió después de la segunda estancia en Atenas (335-323 a.C.), que coincide con el florecimiento de la escuela ática descrita por Plinio en los años 328-325 a.C4. La obra contiene referencias a autores del s.IV a.C., especialmente del periodo comprendido entre 360-350, por lo que se piensa generalmente que tuvo que ser escrita después del 336 a.C. Este último periodo es uno de los más importantes y productivos en la biografía de Aristóteles, seguramente el más relevante después de los años de formación en la Academia de Platón (367-347 a.C.) y de la marcha de Atenas hacia Assos tras la muerte de Platón (347 a.C.). El término post quem non viene para la cronología de la obra viene dado por Pol. 1341b38, en donde dice que hablará de la καθάρσις en la Poética, el término ante quem non lo encontramos en Rh. 1371b33, 1404b37 y 1419b2, en donde habla de la Poética como obra ya finalizada. Su posterior influencia en la cultura romana tiene que tenerse en cuenta a partir de que el general Sila llevara a Roma una colección de textos aristotélicos adquiridos en la toma de Atenas del año 86 a.C.5

Al encontrarse en la corte de Filipo se tuvo que producir una familiaridad de opiniones entre Lisipo y Aristóteles. En los años de juventud de Aristóteles se formó la teoría lisipea del retrato y, cuando el filósofo se encargó de la educación de Alejandro en 343-340 a.C., se produjo un diálogo entre el filósofo y los artistas de Sición para incluir la didáctica del diseño o del dibujo en la παιδεία del futuro rey. Las materias principales que enseñaba el filósofo a Alejandro eran las relativas a lo moral y a lo político, si bien también las que trataban de los temas a los que no debía tener acceso el resto de la población, los llamados temas acroamáticos

3 Grayeff 1947. 4 Mesquita 2008. En un interesante cuadro sinóptico el autor destaca las principales hipótesis sobre la datación de la Poética. Fue Düring 1966, el primero que planteó la hipótesis de una cronología alta entre los años 360-355 a.C. Rist 1989; Louis 1990; y Halliwell 1986, sitúan la cronología cercana al 336 a.C. 5 Plut. Sila. 26, cuenta que Sila se inició en los misterios eleusinos y se hizo con la biblioteca de Apelicón de Teos, en la que se encontraba la mayoría de las obras de Aristóteles y Teofrasto, que por entonces todavía no eran lo suficientemente conocidas en Roma. Apelicón murió en el 88 a.C. Cuando los libros llegaron a Roma pasaron de Sila a su hijo Fausto, que los acabó vendiendo. Finalmente los adquirió el gramático Tiranión (Plut. Luc.19). Murena, Cicerón o César tuvieron acceso a la obra aristotélica. Andrónico de Rodas logró conseguir unas cuantas copias, las puso en circulación y las dejó escritas en tablas. Para ver más sobre la edición de las obras de Aristóteles ver Lord 1986, pp. 137- 161.

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(Plut. Alex. 7-8)6. Cuando Aristóteles encontró a Lisipo en Meza, el artista sicionio había desarrollado la concepción del retrato que lo distinguía del resto de artistas contemporáneos que trabajaban en el mismo tema. Lisipo se encontraba en plena madurez después de treinta años de trabajo, pero Aristóteles todavía no había vivido su segunda etapa ateniense. Este encuentro fue determinante para la futura realización de la Poética, ya que Lisipo también estaba acostumbrado a desarrollar obra teórica además de práctica, y muchos de sus preceptos estilísticos tienen cabida en la idea de arte que defiende Aristóteles en su obra.

Es cierto que habitualmente reúne a muchas de las cosas que íbamos a clasificar como arte-pintura, escultura, música, danza, poesía. Pero la característica común que para Aristóteles hace de esta agrupación una coherente es la imitación o representación (mimesis, a la que la similitud es esencial: todas estas actividades, en vista de Aristóteles, implican la realización de retratos). En la Poética Aristóteles dice que los seres humanos tienen una disposición natural a participar en, y el placer de la observación, la imitación. Él va a explicar por qué, es decir, que especifica la capacidad natural para la imitación, que da el ejercicio agradable. Uso de las artes visuales como ejemplo, señala que alguien que busca un cuadro tiene que pasar por un proceso de razonamiento e inferencia con el fin de llegar a una conclusión de la forma «esto es así y asá" (Poet. 1448b12-17; Rhet 1371b4- 10)... En el más simple, hay que reconocer una imagen de (por ejemplo) Sócrates como la imagen de Sócrates.

3.- Estética de la recepción en Aristóteles El arte y el placer están relacionados para Aristóteles a través de la función que ejerce el concepto de “ocio”7, que contribuye a la realización del fin supremo para los hombres que es la felicidad. En esta esfera de la vida intelectual el arte es capaz de ocupar el ocio y ofrecer así una forma de vida placentera. La contemplación estética del arte es fuente primera de la felicidad, y la felicidad se encuentra en el ocio del sabio, que busca la paz en los placeres de los sentidos8. Las imágenes producidas por el arte son las encargadas de proporcionar placer, el placer que obtenemos de esas imágenes artificiales se debe a que reconocemos su semejanza

6 Tal y como indica Düring 1957, p. 284, las principales noticias sobre la enseñanza y la didáctica de Aristóteles a Alejandro se encuentran en Plut. De Alexandre virtute, I,4,327ss; Quint. Inst. I,I, 23; Dion Chr. Or. 49.4; Plin. Nat. 8.16; Aelian. Var.Hist. IV, 19: Ateneo IX, 398e. 7 Aristot. Pol. 8.1338a: “Por eso, los que primero introdujeron la música en la educación, no lo hicieron pensando en que era algo necesario (pues no lo es) ni útil, como las letras…para muchas actividades civiles; así pues, parece que los que la incluyeron lo hicieron como distracción en los ratos de ocio (ἐν τῇ σχολῇ): pues, pensando que es propia de hombres libres, la introdujeron en ella”. 8 Aristot. Eth. Nic. 1177b1: “Parecería que ella sola (el arte de la contemplación) se ama por sí misma; pues, nada se obtiene de ella excepto la contemplación, mientras que de las actividades prácticas conseguimos algo más o menos además de la acción. Y se piensa que la felicidad está en el ocio (δοκεῖ τε ἡ εὐδαιμονία ἐν τῇ σχολῇ εἶναι) en efecto, estamos ocupados para tener ocio y combatimos para tener paz”.

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con la naturaleza y a que admiramos la maestría del artista en su ejecución9. Más allá del puro hedonismo que el filósofo encontraba en el arte, la contemplación de la obra por parte del espectador constituía un elemento de capital importancia. El arte proporciona placeres de diversos tipos a través del empleo de colores y formas que combinadas de manera correcta por el artista proporcionan no sólo disfrutes sensoriales sino también intelectuales.

La experiencia estética para Aristóteles era, por lo tanto, un concepto amplio que no sólo se refería al estudio de la belleza. Si bien no podemos encontrar un término que defina bien y delimite lo que Aristóteles entendía por experiencia estética, son varios los pasajes de sus obras en los que podemos reconstruir un idea bastante aproximada de su original significado. La armonía y la belleza son las cualidades definitorias del placer estético. Ambas se pueden encontrar en las estatuas, en los cuadros con colores y formas, χρώμασι καὶ σχήμασι καὶ γραφῇ, en el canto, en el sonido de los instrumentos pero también en los animales o en el aroma de las frutas y el incienso10. El goce hace que el hombre se sienta como encantado por las Sirenas debido a esta intensa experiencia estética, propiciada por las impresiones sensoriales. Aristóteles –en este sentido- sigue lo afirmado anteriormente por Demócrito: el placer estético se debe a la experiencia misma y no, como es usual afirmar actualmente, a lo que se asocia con dicho placer11. El ser humano es el único capaz de disfrutar de los placeres que se transmiten a través de la vista o el oído, οἱ γὰρ χαίροντες τοῖς διὰ τῆς ὄψεως, mientras que el resto de seres vivos experimente los procedentes del sabor o el tacto.

La Poética es la base de toda la crítica literaria en la antigüedad, y en ella todos los temas importantes de la obra giran alrededor del concepto de παθός. La defensa de la ποιτική se establece como forma y resultado natural del proceso de la μίμησις, todo ello dentro de un programa de naturaleza antiplatónica. En

9 Aristot. De partibus animalium I 5: “Sería extraño que, al contemplar las imágenes de esos seres, contemplamos a la vez, por ejemplo, el arte del pintor o el escultor, y que no nos complazcamos de los mismos seres creados por la naturaleza, al menos siéndonos posible darnos cuenta de sus causas…pues en todo lo creado por la naturaleza hay algo admirable, εν πᾶσι γὰρ τοῖς φυσικοῖς ενεστι τι θαυμαστόν ” 10 Aristot. Eth. Nic. 1118a2: “En efecto, a quienes se complacen con lo que entra por la vista, como los colores, las formas y el dibujo, no se llama ni moderados ni desenfrenados: sin embargo, podría parecer que es posible complacerse con esas cosas como es debido, o con exceso o con defecto. E igualmente ocurre con los placeres del oído; pues nadie llama desenfrenados a quienes se complacen excesivamente con melodías o la representación teatral, ni moderados a quienes se complacen como es debido. Ni a los que se deleitan con los placeres del olfato, a no ser que por circunstancias imprevistas. En efecto, a quienes se complacen con aromas de frutas, rosas, inciensos, no los llamamos desenfrenados, sino más bien a quienes lo hacen con perfumes de manjares”. 11 Aristot. Eth. Eud. 1230b31: “Pues si alguien, al ver una bella estatua, o al escuchar a alguien cantando, no quisiera ni comer, ni beber, ni entregarse a los placeres del amor, sino que quisiera ver aquellas bellas cosas y escuchar a los cantores, no parecería ser un desenfrenado, como no lo parecen los encantados por las Sirenas… En cambio, en relación a los placeres proporcionados por las demás sensaciones, casi todos se muestran insensibles por igual, por ejemplo, a la armonía o la belleza; pues parecen, algo que es también digno de mención, no experimentar nada con la sola vista de las cosas bellas o con la audición de sonidos armónicos”.

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cualquier caso, no puede ser leída como el resto de las obras del corpus aristotélico, ya que en esta obra el filósofo se muestra como el primer pensador de la antigüedad en concebir una clara concepción de las bellas artes como una manifestación libre e independiente surgida de la mente humana, fuera del dominio de la religión y de la política. La lectura correcta para muchos es aquella que considera esta obra como un trabajo original, basado en la observación y comparación de poemas narrativos y de dramas griegos de los que tan sólo nos quedan fragmentos.

Es posible formamos una idea del pensamiento estético de Aristóteles, estudiando los escasos textos en que menciona la belleza y encuadrándolos en el conjunto de su sistema. Desliza opiniones sobre lo bello en la Metafísica, en la Etica y en el tratado Sobre la Poesía. El arte, en caso de considerarse virtud, pertenece a las dianoéticas o intelectuales y debe reflejar, en lo posible, la máxima grandeza de la acción moral, en su inmovilidad ideal. La liberación o purificación produce en el individuo placer. Este placer se basa en tres motivos: efecto agradable de la armonía y del ritmo, que deben existir en toda obra artística; complacencia al comprobar la imitación o mimesis perfecta, aspecto que se confunde con el placer del conocimiento intelectual, ya que depende en gran parte de un razonamiento, esto es, de la semejanza establecida entre imitación y objeto imitado. Pero este placer es algo más todavía; se solidifica en un noble contenido pasional, pues el terror nos aleja de lo vil y la piedad nos acerca a lo elevado. El placer que nos proporciona el arte no consiste solamente en la comprensión, sino también en la simpatía.

Establece, con bastante precisión, conceptos sobre qué es lo estético. Aristóteles, que considera lo bello como un resplandor de lo bueno y verdadero y que atribuye al arte una misión esencialmente purificadora, otorga al artista una misión educativa dentro del estado. En esta forma lo estético se convierte en valor pedagógico.

Es Aristóteles el que por primera vez afirma que los conceptos son un producto de la mente, dominando sobre ellos la experiencia sensorial en un proceso de abstracción. Por lo tanto, los conceptos no son sustancias. Esta teoría fue descubierta sólo cuando, después de más de mil años de hegemonía del platonismo en el pensamiento cristiano, en el s.XIII la filosofía de Aristóteles se convierte en igual de importante12. Aristóteles señala en la Poética (1, 1447a 19 y ss. (versión de Valentín García Yebra, Madrid : Gredos, 1974) que:

[...] así como algunos con colores y figuras imitan muchas cosas reproduciendo su imagen (unos por arte y otros por costumbre), y otros mediante la voz, así también, entre las artes dichas, todas hacen la imitación con el ritmo, el lenguaje o la armonía, pero usan estos medios separadamente o combinados; por ejemplo, usan sólo armonía y ritmo la aulética y la citarística, y las demás que puedan ser semejantes en cuanto a su potencia, como el arte de tocar la siringa; y el arte de

12 Gosselin 2001.

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los danzantes imita con el ritmo, sin armonía (éstos, en efecto, mediante ritmos convertidos en figuras, imitan caracteres, pasiones y acciones).

La música, de un modo análogo al lenguaje hablado, tiene frases, motivos que se repiten y entrelazan entre sí (piénsese en el caso extremo del canon). Sin embargo, a pesar de que es análogo al lenguaje hablado, su valor artístico viene dado no por su semejanza con el lenguaje o su repetición sino, más bien, por su capacidad expresiva13. Esta capacidad expresiva es la potencialidad que posee una pieza dentro del contexto musical de los oyentes para crear expectativas y generar un conjunto rico de respuestas emotivas y abstractas en el oyente. A una pieza musical, dentro de un contexto en que todos los oyentes manejan un código común, suele resultar una obra maestra, una buena obra o una obra sin demasiada trascendencia. La música, podría uno preguntarse, ¿es, entonces, representación abstracta de valores? Algunos teóricos musicales del barroco pensaron así. Es la doctrina de los afectos —Affektenlehre— que sostenía que varias figuras musicales pueden servir una vez aprendidas como signo de emociones, pasiones y afectos específicos. Se consideraba a la música un lenguaje emotivo que podía comunicar significados específicos del compositor a través del ejecutante al oyente. Pero es vital comprender el significado exacto: la música no estaba pensada para expresar ni para despertar pasiones sino sólo para significar en un nivel más objetivo que no requería participación subjetiva del compositor, ejecutante u oyente”14. Esta teoría señala un elemento importante de la música: la conexión sensible- intelectual del arte. Dicho de otro modo: la música se escucha con inteligencia. Esto en dos sentidos: 1) con inteligencia, es decir, sólo un ser inteligente disfruta la música como música (conjunción ordenada y con sentido de sonidos); y 2) que puede entender su estructura de manera inteligentemente, es decir, hay que estudiar y conocer las piezas de modo que haya una mejor comprensión y un disfrute estético.15

Los discursos retóricos son pronunciados en lugares específicos en la polis. Existen, para Aristóteles, tres especies de discursos retóricos: deliberativo, judicial y epidíctico. Tres son los lugares en los cuales ellos aparecen: la asamblea, los estrados judiciales y las ceremonias públicas. Allí, los oradores entran en contacto con sus oyentes con el propósito de que formen un juicio sobre lo que es conveniente o inconveniente, justo o injusto, digno o indigno de ser elogiado. Una comunidad, representada en sus oyentes, juzga sobre lo conveniente de una acción por realizar, sobre lo justo de una acción sucedida o sobre lo digno de una acción presente. Aristóteles, a diferencia de los tratadistas antiguos que le precedieron, hará un estudio de carácter teórico sobre los medios mediante los cuales se persuade con los discursos retóricos. Su gran aporte es evidenciar el tipo de pruebas de las que se hace uso con el fin de persuadir. Este logro sólo le fue posible a partir de la teoría que él mismo realizó sobre los distintos tipos de razonamiento en los Analíticos y en los Tópicos.

13 Gómez Álvarez 2003. 14 Rowell 1985. 15 Aarón 1993.

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Es aquí donde vemos a Aristóteles introducir las pruebas que tienen que ver con la disposición de los oyentes. Para lograr construir tales pruebas, Aristóteles considera fundamental tener un conocimiento de las emociones. La primera inquietud que surge frente a la introducción de tales tipos de prueba es tratar de entender por qué éstas aparecen en la Retórica y no en los Tópicos ni en los Analíticos. En el libro I, Aristóteles asegura que las emociones afectan nuestros juicios. Para Aristóteles, no se trata de negar las emociones, ellas son importantes y colaboran en la formación de juicios adecuados. Lo que será fundamental es lograr que ellas no oscurezcan el juicio, sino que ayuden a una mejor comprensión de las situaciones en las cuales se dan las acciones concretas. Aristóteles, Retórica, 1356 a 1-5. Ibid., 1354 a 13-1354 b 11.

En el libro II de la Retórica, Aristóteles presentará un análisis sobre las emociones, desde el cual el orador pueda obtener el conocimiento necesario para elaborar sus correspondientes pruebas. La primera inquietud que nos surge es tratar de determinar de qué tipo de análisis se trata, pues éste no parece corresponder a los que ya se han hecho en otras partes de su retórica. Lo que uno esperaría antes de empezar el análisis de cada una de las emociones es, al menos, una caracterización general de la emoción, desde la cual fuera posible identificarlas como tal. No existe en las obras que conservamos una teoría sobre la emoción; sin embargo, podemos establecer algunos rasgos de ella que se encuentran dispersos en varias de sus obras dedicadas a otros temas. Las emociones, para Aristóteles, son afecciones del alma que se manifiestan en el cuerpo16.

Los hombres habitan en la polis, allí se encuentran para actuar, hablar y sentir. Los hombres son afectados por su entorno, por las maneras en que los hombres se relacionan entre sí y por la clase de asuntos que consideran en cada caso. Así entendemos por qué Aristóteles propone analizar las emociones en estricta relación las emociones. Las emociones son, así, afecciones vinculadas a situaciones específicas, frente a las cuales percibimos, opinamos y somos movidos de una determinada manera17.Las emociones, entonces, en el caso del hombre, estarían determinadas por las opiniones que los hombres tienen de lo que es placentero o doloroso, o quizás también, de lo que es bueno o malo, justo o injusto, digno o indigno, como un estudio más cuidadoso del análisis que realiza Aristóteles de las emociones nos podría revelar. Los hombres, por lo tanto, formarían específicas concepciones sobre sus emociones en sus relaciones con otros.

En esta obra el Estagirita no discute opiniones de otros autores, sino que se preocupa de la poesía por sí misma, περί ποιητικῆς αὐτῆς, mientras que Platón se interesaba por la poesía desde un contexto político más amplio. Para Aristóteles, la poesía es una parte de la realidad sensible que se merece ser analizada en particular, para Platón era un instrumento al servicio de un bien superior. Parece unánime la opinión de que la obra iba dedicada a un público ateniense, ya que la mayoría de las menciones que se hacen en ella se refieren a producciones poéticas

16 Cfr. Aristóteles, Acerca del alma, 403 a 16-403 b 3. 17 Pellegrin 1982.

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áticas. Siglos después Lessin (1786) estableció perfectamente la diferencia entre poesía y pintura de la misma manera que Aristóteles, ya que el medio de un arte son los signos (Zeichen) que usa para la imitación, y los de la pintura y la poesía son radicalmente distintos. La pintura es más apta para reproducir formas y objetos reales dado que está dotada de formas y colores, pudiendo reproducir acciones tan sólo de manera indirecta, mientras que la poesía representa radicalmente lo contrario.

3.- La pintura de Apeles y la estética de Aristóteles en el contexto sicionio

Aristóteles afirma que hay tres maneras distintas de imitar por parte del poeta, del pintor o de cualquier otro creador de imágenes (Arist. Po. 1460b7): imitar representando las cosas como eran o son, como se dice o se supone que son, o bien como deben ser18. Así, Aristóteles analiza la teoría de la mímesis reflejada desde el punto de vista de la especulación (valor substancial real de las cosas tal y como son, ὃια ῆν ἣ ἐστιν, desde la idealización en el sentido ético (valor efímero, eventual e ilusorio de las cosas como deberían ser, ὃια φασι καί δοκεῖ, y desde la relatividad respecto a la opinión de otros hombres (valor idealizado gratificante y aumentativo de las cosas como se dicen que son, ὃια εἲναι δεῖ, o de otros artistas (como parecen que son). La teoría artística de Lisipo se corresponde al aspecto más innovador de Aristóteles, ya que la coherencia de las imágenes depende de la propia elección del artista. En cuanto a estos tipos de imitación son dos los errores fundamentales que pueden cometer el artista o poeta imitador: uno debido al arte y otro debido a lo accidental. El primero de ellos se debe a que el artista elige bien el tema representado pero falla en la realización. Sin embargo, si el tema elegido no es correcto, el error entonces no es intrínseco.

De todo esto se podría desprender que Aristóteles tiene verdaderamente una estética basada en su concepto de las artes plásticas. Pero esta afirmación no es cierta, ya que el filósofo no dedica ninguna obra completa o parcial a discutir sobre el concepto de belleza o sobre el juicio estético, en nuestro sentido moderno. Lo que se le supone es una teoría del arte a través de todos los pasajes en muchas de sus obras en los que reconstruye una opinión o posicionamiento sobre la creación artística. Existe un tipo de saber referido a la realización de las cosas y que tiene al arte como tipo concreto de conocimiento, práctico y productivo (Arist. EN. VI 1140a8). El pensamiento aristotélico de las artes comprende no sólo las bellas artes sino también cualquier método de producción de una obra material. Por lo tanto, los conceptos de arte-poética-educación tienen que ser entendidos siempre en paralelo como un esfuerzo del hombre en la realización de su integridad y de su personalidad.

18 Sörbom 1966.

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El arte tiene como maestra fundamental a la naturaleza según estima Aristóteles, al igual que pensaban y practicaban en la escuela de Sición. La naturaleza debe ser imitada, con el objetivo de realizar las obras como la naturaleza las haría, no sólo en el parecido externo, sino también en el interior, puesto que del arte se generan todas aquellas cosas cuya forma está en el alma. Tanto la ciencia como el arte tienen el mismo origen: la experiencia. De esta manera, la experiencia da lugar al arte, y la falta de experiencia al azar. De la entidad cognitiva y sensorial que Aristóteles supone para el arte lo aleja de los planteamientos negativos y subordinados a la lejanía ontológica planteada por Platón. Para Aristóteles, de la experiencia y de las múltiples percepciones se crea la idea de arte, de manera que los hombres dotados de experiencia tienen más valía, incluso que aquellos que poseen la teoría. La experiencia se refiere a los casos individuales, mientras que el arte se centra en lo general. El arte y la naturaleza se complementan mutuamente y se esperan, de manera que hay casos en los que el arte completa lo que la naturaleza no puede llevar a término, y en otros casos el arte imita a la naturaleza (Arist. Ph. 199a15). La consecuencia de toda esta argumentación es que las cosas producidas por el arte están hechas conforme a un fin concreto y, además, están producidas por la naturaleza. Ya Eupompo y Pánfilo eran conscientes de estas máximas que Aristóteles convirtió en inmortales: desde la enseñanza de la pintura en Sición se inculcaba el gusto por la observación de la naturaleza y por el respeto a la capacidad de creación del artista. Como se ha comentado en numerosas ocasiones, la χρηστογραφία de Sición llevaba todos estos ideales a la práctica de la pintura.

Para Aristotéles, el saber y el conocer se podían dar más bien en el arte que en la experiencia, por lo que considera más sabios a los hombres de arte que a los de experiencia. El saber y el conocimiento emparejados con el arte, con la τέχνη, con la producción manual y artística. Al igual que en Sición el arte puede ser enseñado desde temprana edad a los más jóvenes, puede ser fuente de conocimiento y de sabiduría. El arte se ve restituido en sí mismo, sin necesidad de complejos o deudas. Desde la mímesis de la naturaleza, y a través de la experiencia y los sentidos, Aristóteles supo rehabilitar la función del arte en la sociedad. Los creadores o expertos en arte conocen las causas de las cosas, el por qué, y los que poseen experiencia conocen los hechos, pero no las causas. Por lo tanto, también el artista, el ποιτής, el creador, es conocedor de las causas de las cosas, y por este motivo, es capaz de transmitir estos conocimientos. El ser capaz de enseñar es una señal distintiva del que sabe frente al que no sabe: el arte es más ciencia que la experiencia también por este motivo. Pero dentro de esta clasificación de los saberes hay grados: el hombre de arte es más sabio que el de experiencia, ὁ τεχνίτης τῶν ἐμπείρων, el director de la obra más que el obrero manual, χειροτέχνου δέ ἀρδιτέκτων, y las ciencias teoréticas más que las productivas, αἱ δέ θεωρητικαί τῶν ποιητικῶν (Arist. Metaph. 981b30).

La problemática de la relación de Aristóteles con la escuela de pintura de Sición está dirigida, por encima de cualquier otro factor, al concepto de educación y al lugar de las bellas artes en la educación elevada. Al igual que es placentero lo que

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sirve para hacer un bien, es igualmente placentero a los hombres corregir a sus semejantes y completar lo que está incompleto (Arist. Rh. 1371b4), siguiendo en este caso la analogía entre educar y completar algo incompleto que es heredera de las enseñanzas socráticas a través del concepto de μίμησις en Platón (R. 599e- 601a). La educación tenía que ser regulada por el Estado (Arist. Pol. VII, 1336a-b), de manera opuesta a lo que sucedía en Atenas, donde instituciones privadas tales como el Liceo o la Academia ofrecían este tipo de servicios. Para el filósofo la educación tiene que preparar al hombre para la paz y para el ocio, no para la guerra y la actividad política. El proceso educativo de los ciudadanos tiene que hacer hincapié en materias necesarias y útiles para el alma y el cuerpo. Se podían dividir en tres las formas básicas de entrenamiento o educación: las educación era los 7 años, a través de un entrenamiento primario del cuerpo hasta los años de pubertad; en una segunda etapa, que abarca hasta los 21 años, se entrenaba el dominio de los deseos como parte irracional del alma. Esta edad era crucial en el desarrollo psicológico del individuo.

Apeles de Colofón superó a todos sus predecesores y a todos los que habrían de venir después, Verum omnes prius genitos futurosque postea superavit Apelles Cous (Plin. Nat. 35.79), convirtiéndose en modelo del clasicismo para los artistas del Renacimiento. La cronología de Apeles se puede situar en torno al 350 a.C.- 300a.C. Fue un pintor humilde, alejado del aspecto presuntuoso de algunos pintores de la época, maestro de la semplicitas y de la benignitas. Fue el primer pintor de la antigüedad que se preocupó por conocer los efectos de su pintura en los espectadores, ya que cuando terminaba una obra la exponía en la galería de su casa, a la vista de la gente que pasaba por allí, y se escondía detrás de los cuadros para escuchar los defectos que le atribuían, porque estimaba que el público era un juez más escrupuloso que él mismo (Plin. Nat. 35.84). Se le puede considerar, por lo tanto, como el fundador de la primeras críticas impresionistas de la historia del arte, ya que se mostró sensible ante los sentimientos subjetivos que despertaban sus obras19. La χάρις tan característica de la pintura de Apeles se convertía en arma de seducción contra los espectadores de sus obras. Esta preocupación estética de Apeles está muy en consonancia con la argumentación aristotélica de la tragedia (Arist. Poet. 1455a30) y, en ambos casos, tanto en el de la pintura como en la tragedia, es evidente que buscaban los mismos efectos sobre los receptores del mensaje artístico20.

19 Plin. Nat. 35. 84: “También era él quien cuando terminaba una obra, la exponía en una galería de casa, a la vista de los que pasaban y se escondía detrás del cuadro para escuchar los defectos que le atribuían, porque estimaba que el público era un juez más escrupuloso que él mismo”. 20 Arist. Poet. 1455a25: “Es preciso estructurar las fábulas y perfeccionarlas con la elocución poniéndolas ante los propios ojos lo más vivamente posible; pues así, viéndolas con la mayor claridad, como si presenciara directamente los hechos, el poeta podrá hallar lo apropiado, y de ningún modo dejará de advertir las contradicciones. Una prueba de esto es lo que se reprochaba a Cárcino; Anfiarao, en efecto, salía del santuario, lo cual si no lo veía, pasaba inadvertido al espectador, y en la escena fracasó la obra, por no soportar esto los espectadores”.

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Combinó la sutileza técnica de la escuela de Sición con el vigor imaginativo de la escuela tebano-ática, de una manera similar a la utilizada por Lisipo al reunir en su estilo las tradiciones locales heredadas con los nuevos cauces artísticos de su época. Cursó los doce años de enseñanza obligatoria de dibujo en Sición, donde fue discípulo de Pánfilo, y a partir de las materias impartidas en esta escuela aprendió el gusto por el diseño y por la línea como elementos fundamentales de la pintura, además de la minuciosidad en el trabajo y de la policromía variada en los colores. También conserva como seña de la escuela de Sición, y de su aprendizaje junto a Pánfilo, el trabajo en cera al encausto.

Algunos siglos después, Luciano de Samostata (125-181 aprox.), en una de sus obras titulada Zeuxis, expone en el mismo sentido la preocupación del pintor griego, en este caso el conocidísimo Zeuxis, por conocer la opinión del público. La decepción del artista ante la banalidad, la ignorancia y la incongruencia del juicio estético del público es manifiesta. Se puede leer (Zeuxis 7):

“Zeuxis pensaba que al exponer este cuadro pasmaría a los espectadores con su arte. Ellos al punto le aclamaron, ¿qué otra cosa habrían podido hacer al encontrarse con un bellísimo espectáculo? Pero todos aplaudían especialmente los mismos aspectos que también a mí me elogiaban recientemente: la originalidad del tema y la nueva idea de pintura, sin precedentes en los pintores anteriores. De modo que cuando Zeuxis se dio cuenta de que les llamaba la atención la novedad del tema y les distraía de su arte hasta el punto de poner en segundo plano la precisión del detalle, le dijo a su discípulo: - Hala, Mición, enrolla el cuadro, recógelo y llévatelo a casa, porque éstos alaban el barro de nuestro arte y, en cambio, no hacen mucho caso de si están bien y dispuestos con arte los artefactos de las luces, sino que la novedad del tema prevalece sobre la precisión de los detalles”21.

Los espectadores, sin embargo, eran incapaces de deleitarse con los aspectos verdaderamente valiosos de la pintura de Zeuxis: la extensión precisa de sus líneas, la mezcla perfecta de colores, la reflexión oportuna, la sombra necesaria, la proporción en el tamaño, el equilibrio y la correspondencia de los detalles en el conjunto (Luc. Zeuxis 5). De esta manera observamos de qué manera la reflexión estética y filosófica que se había llevado a cabo en tiempos de Aristóteles sigue todavía vigente en época helenística y romana, llegando incluso hasta el Neoclasicismo22. Luciano a través de Zeuxis sigue defendiendo lo mismo que defendía Aristóteles en la Poética: el artista es ακριβεία y τέχνη, exactitud y técnica.

La obra de otro pintor de Sición, Pausias, también fue conocida y admirada en la Antigüedad, hasta tal punto que fue trasladada a Roma en el s. I a.C. y el poeta Horacio nos ha dejado un buen testimonio de ello. La expresión horaciana insane es significativa. Insane es el demente, el loco, el insensato. Por lo tanto, ¿quién se atrevería a pararse a ver una Pausiaca tabella? Y, ¿por qué razón se pararía a verla?

21 Traducción de Zaragoza Botella (2009). 22 Robert 1992.

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La obra de Pausias debería tener algo distinto a las demás obras de la época para que fuera citada por Horacio de la manera en la que la cita. El poeta no nos da más datos sobre la obra en cuestión, pero todo parece indicar que debe tratarse de la immolatio boum del complejo de Pompeyo23.

4.- Vigencia y modernidad de la actitud estética de Aristóteles y Apeles La Poética y la Retórica son, entre las obras del corpus aristotelicum, las que más directa y persistentemente han influido en el pensamiento moderno. Ambas tienen una larga historia cultural y conceptual que las ha mantenido estrechamente ligadas: su probable origen siciliano, su cronología relativa24. La vigencia y la modernidad de los escritos aristotélicos y de la puesta en escena de artistas tales como Zeuxis o Apeles reside en la preocupación por el espectador, en la ubicación de la obra dentro de un contexto plural y participando de un mensaje recíproco entre autor y espectador. Este esquema que ahora aceptamos, interpretamos y enjuiciamos de manera natural, fue en el s.IV a.C. un gran avance para la Historia del Arte y para la concepción de la obra como resultado de un proceso estético25. El elemento clave de la comunicación artística –sean estos el

23 Son numerosos los ejemplos de obras con el conquistador macedonio como protagonista en la Roma de César y Augusto. En el foro de Augusto (Nat. 35.27; 35. 93) se colocaron cuadros, πίνακες, de Apeles, en el pórtico de Filipo se podía contemplar uno sobre Alejandro de Antifilo (Ov. Fast. 6.797; Mart. V. 49, 11-13; Suet. Aug. 29.8). También en escultura la iconografía de Alejandro era común, delante del templo de Marte Vengador (Plin. Nat. 34. 48) y otras dos delante de la Regia. La utilización de motivos alejandrinos por parte de Augusto está, por lo tanto, bien atestiguado en las fuentes. A esto habría que añadir el patrimonio que Augusto hizo traer de Oriente durante su mandato. Marrone (1980), 35-41, al describir este fenómeno acuñó el acertado término de imitatio Alexandri al referirise al programa propagandístico de Augusto. Otra disciplina artística frecuente en época de Augusto, y que también tiene una enorme deuda con los modelos helenos del s.IV a.C., es la técnica del mosaico. Fueron los modelos del norte de Grecia, como Olinto o Pella, que comparten a su vez temas, motivos y forma con los de Sición, los que sirvieron de ejemplo en Roma. Para este punto ver Ovadiah 1975. 24 Marta Chichi-Suñol 2008. 25 Tacca 1985. A juicio de Oscar Tacca “uno de los cambios más importantes registrados en la crítica contemporánea es el esfuerzo por ver la obra no desde el lado de la producción, sino de su consumición”. La Teoría de la Recepción, que desde 1967 ha gozado y continúa gozando de considerable éxito en Alemania. Pone de manifiesto cómo la función estética que atribuimos a un producto artístico dado puede ser dominante o bien subordinada dependiendo del gusto, que es el que a lo largo del tiempo modifica las jerarquías funcionales. Una norma estética debe, por tanto, ser estudiada como hecho histórico, siendo el punto de partida su variabilidad en el tiempo. Ver Segre 2001. Esta argumentación tiene uno de sus comienzos capitales en los estudios de Hans Robert Jauss en las que se percibe con claridad la pertinencia de su propuesta de una estética de la recepción: “De un modo sumamente interesante, los «libros de Estética» y las obras de arte producidas en los últimos sesenta años comparten la misma diana: la teoría y la praxis artísticas coinciden en apuntar al espectador; en implicarlo, en incorporarlo. Nunca antes como ahora «se habla de él» (por parte de los teóricos) y nunca antes como ahora se le habla y se le hace hablar (por parte de las operaciones artísticas). Sólo se piensa al espectador cuando éste ya no está; sólo se «implica» artísticamente al espectador a

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emisor, el mensaje y el receptor-, es el espectador, quien toma el papel relevante en los procesos de producción, intercambio y recepción de las imágenes. El simple hecho de establecer un mecanismo de control o una interconexión entre obra y espectador –transformado en usuario– es considerado una interacción. La historia de la literatura, como la del arte, en general, ha sido durante demasiado tiempo la historia de los autores y las obras. Reprimía o silenciaba a su «tercer componente», el lector, oyente u observador. De su función histórica, raras veces se habló, aun siendo, como era, imprescindible. En efecto, la literatura y el arte sólo se convierten en proceso histórico concreto cuando interviene la experiencia de los que reciben, disfrutan y juzgan las obras26.

En Aristóteles, la poética y la retórica tenían su lugar de realización en la polis. En cada una de ellas, las emociones cumplen el papel de producir finalmente el efecto para el cual estaban destinadas. Con el temor y la compasión, en la tragedia, se da la catarsis. Con las emociones presentes en los discursos retóricos se contribuye a que se forme el juicio en el oyente sobre lo que se considera conveniente, justo o digno. En Aristóteles, no encontramos propiamente una teoría de las emociones, pero sí la más completa exposición de ellas de la que se tenga noticia en los griegos, en el libro II de la Retórica. Este hecho puede indicarnos ya el vínculo específico que ellas tienen con la retórica y también con la construcción de la comunidad, ya que, prestando atención a la afirmación de Aristóteles, la retórica se encuentra subordinada a la política, ciencia arquitectónica cuyo papel es la construcción de la comunidad, la cual se hace posible mediante la formación de nociones comunes sobre lo conveniente, lo justo y lo digno27.

Los discursos retóricos son pronunciados en lugares específicos en la polis. Existen, para Aristóteles, tres especies de discursos retóricos: deliberativo, judicial y epidíctico. Tres son los lugares en los cuales ellos aparecen: la asamblea, los estrados judiciales y las ceremonias públicas. Allí, los oradores entran en contacto con sus oyentes con el propósito de que formen un juicio sobre lo que es conveniente o inconveniente, justo o injusto, digno o indigno de ser elogiado. Una comunidad, representada en sus oyentes, juzga sobre lo conveniente de una acción por realizar, sobre lo justo de una acción sucedida o sobre lo digno de una

condición de que éste deje de ser y significar cuanto vino siendo y significando en el transcurso de la modernidad nacida en el siglo XV. Desde este punto de vista, la diferencia más destacable entre el sujeto estético y el espectador es que el primero se define a través de la capacidad de formulación de un juicio propio y susceptible de ser defendido (y hasta concebido desde la pretensión de universalidad…) entre otros sujetos con los que coincidir o disentir. Por su parte, pudiéramos reconocer como atributo principal del sujeto espectador el de su exposición a la experiencia”. Un buen comentario se puede encontrar en Puelles Romero 2007. 26 Jauss 1987. La circunstancia de que la Estética de la recepción (con independencia de que sus principales defensores sean profesores de literatura) tenga su objeto privilegiado en el lector y la lectura y menos en el espectador (de la obra artística) es ya reveladora de los comentarios que aquí haré, los cuales, por cierto, habrían de completarse con la propuesta de una estética de los espectadores. 27 Cárdenas Mejía 2009.

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acción presente. Aristóteles, a diferencia de los tratadistas antiguos que le precedieron, hará un estudio de carácter teórico sobre los medios mediante los cuales se persuade con los discursos retóricos. Su gran aporte es evidenciar el tipo de pruebas de las que se hace uso con el fin de persuadir. Aristóteles introduce tres tipos de pruebas: “unas residen en el talante del que habla, otras en predisponer al oyente de alguna manera y, las últimas, en el discurso mismo, merced a lo que éste demuestra o parece demostrar” (Aristóteles, Retórica, 1356 a 1-5).

Es aquí donde vemos a Aristóteles introducir las pruebas que tienen que ver con la disposición de los oyentes. Para lograr construir tales pruebas, Aristóteles considera fundamental tener un conocimiento de las emociones. En el libro I, Aristóteles asegura que las emociones afectan nuestros juicios. Pero es preciso establecer que no se trata de cualquier tipo de juicio, sino de aquellos que tienen que ver con acciones determinadas. Pero también se nos dice algo que todos hemos experimentado: las emociones oscurecen el juicio. Si esto es así, una de las opciones que se ha tomado frente a tal hecho es tratar de evitar su presencia con el fin de garantizar un juicio objetivo.

Sin embargo, es otro el camino que sigue Aristóteles. Para Aristóteles, no se trata de negar las emociones, ellas son importantes y colaboran en la formación de juicios adecuados. Lo que será fundamental es lograr que ellas no oscurezcan el juicio, sino que ayuden a una mejor comprensión de las situaciones en las cuales se dan las acciones concretas. En el libro II de la Retórica, Aristóteles presentará un análisis sobre las emociones. Las emociones, para Aristóteles, son afecciones del alma que se manifiestan en el cuerpo28. A ellas las acompaña el placer y el dolor29. Estas indicaciones nos permiten decir al menos lo siguiente: las emociones son afecciones del alma que se manifiestan en el cuerpo. Para que se produzcan, es preciso que estén presentes en el alma tanto el deseo como la sensación, y, con ellos, la imaginación.

Si hemos de creer a Plinio, la mejor pintura de la Antigüedad se conservaba en el palacio de César, en el Palatino, hasta que desapareció en el incendio de Roma del año 69 d.C. y pertenecía a Apeles. Plinio, que pudo contemplarla antes de su destrucción, la describe enigmáticamente de esta forma: “de gran superficie, no contenía más que líneas que escapaban a la vista, aparentemente vacío de contenido en comparación con las obras maestras de otros muchos, era por esto mismo objeto de atención y más famoso que cualquier otro” (Plin. Nat. Hist. 35.83). La anécdota sobre la realización de este cuadro es conocida: visitando Apeles la isla de Rodas, se dirigió al estudio del pintor Protógenes para saludarle. Encontrándose éste ausente, Apeles observó una tabla sobre un caballete para ser pintada, en ella dejó su firma dejando pintada una línea extremadamente fina. Al

28 Cfr. Aristóteles, Acerca del alma, 403 a 16-403 b 3. 29 “Llamo pasiones a lo que sigue indignación, temor, vergüenza, apetito y, en general, todo lo que en sí mismo va, comúnmente, acompañado de placer y dolor” (Aristóteles, Ética Eudemia, en: Ética Nicomáquea. Ética Eudemia, 1220 b 10-15). Esto también aparece en Aristóteles, Ética Nicomáquea, 1105 b 20-25.

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volver Protógenes y contemplarla, no dudó un momento sobre la autoría de tan perfecta pincelada y cogiendo otro color trazó encima de ella una línea aún más fina. Cuando Apeles la vio –cuenta Plinio- que, avergonzado de verse superado por su rival, dividió la línea con un tercer color, no dejando ya espacio para un trazo más fino. Gombrich, basándose en su estudio sobre la luz en el arte antiguo, elabora una ingeniosa hipótesis para reconstruir la imagen que describe Plinio. Para este historiador, es evidente que las dos primeras líneas, una más oscura y otra más clara, habrían dado la apariencia de modelado por medio de la luz tangente; pero la tercera línea, la última trazada por Apeles, sugeriría brillo o resplandor, y “a eso no se le podía añadir nada sin estropear la apariencia de la línea, que habría empezado a sobresalir de la tabla como por arte de magia”30. De manera que el cuadro más importante del arte antiguo, habría sido una parábola sobre la invención y la reproducción de la luz en la pintura, por medio de una línea decisoria de un blanco brillante31.

5.- Referencias

- Aarón, C. 1993. Cómo escuchar la música, México: FCE. - Cárdenas Mejía, L.G. 2009. Las emociones y la experiencia humana del lugar, Madrid. - Düring, I. 1957. Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition, Goteborg: Institute of Classical Studies of the University of Göteborg. - Düring, I. 1966. Aristoteles. Darstellung und Interpretation seines Denkens, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. - Gombrich, E. 1982. El legado de Apeles, Madrid: Alianza. - Gómez Álvarez, J.E. 2003. “Performance: un análisis e interpretación desde algunas categorías de la Poética de Aristóteles”, Signos filosóficos 10, pp. 169-184. - Gosselin, M. 2001. “Pictorial art as a natural and a cultural phenomenon”, Philosophica 68, pp. 9-29. - Grayeff, F. 1947. Aristotle and his School, Londres: Duckworth. - Halliwell, S. 1986. Aristotle´s Poetics, Londres: Duckworth. - Jauss, H. R. 1987. “El lector como instancia de una nueva historia de la literatura”, en: Mayoral, J. A. 1987. Estética de la recepción, Madrid: Arco. - Rowell, L. 1985. Introducción a la filosofía de la música, Barcelona: Gedisa. - Lord, C. 1986. “On the Early History of the Aristotelian Corpus” AJPh 107:2, pp. 137-161. - Louis, P. 1990. Vie d´Aristote (384-322 avant Jésus-Christ), Paris : Hermann. - Marrone, G. 1980. “Imitatio Alexandri in età augustea” A&R XXV: 1-2, pp. 35-41.

30 Gombrich 1982. 31 Replinger 1990.

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- Marta Chichi, G. y Suñol, V. 2008. “La Retórica y la Poética de Aristóteles: sus puntos de confluencia” Diánoia 53:60, pp. 79–111. - Mesquita, A.P. 2008. Vida de Aristóteles, Madrid: Signifer. - Replinger, M. 1990. “Elogio del color” Arte, Individuo y Sociedad 3, pp. 137- 145. - Ovadiah, A. 1975. “The Origin and Development of Mosaics to the Time of Augustus” SCI II, pp. 124-149. - Pellegrin, P. 1982. La classification des animaux chez Aristote, Paris : Les Belles Lettres. - Puelles Romero, L. 2007. “Existir sin ser visto. Aproximaciones a una teoría del sujeto espectador” Azafea. Rev. filos. 9, pp. 41-60. - Rist, J.M. 1989. The Mind of Aristotle, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. - Robert, R. 1992. “Ars regenda Amore. Séduction érotique et plaisir esthétique: de Praxitèle à Ovide” Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Antiquité 104:1, pp. 373-438. - Segre, C. 2001. “La teoría de la recepción de Mukarovsky y la estética del fragmento” Cuadernos de Filología Italiana 8, pp. 11-18. - Sörbom, G. 1966. Mimesis and Art. Studies in the Origin and Early Development of an Aesthetic Vocabulary, Estocolmo: Svenska Bokförlaget. - Tacca, O. 1985. Las voces de la novela, Madrid: Gredos. - Tatarkiewicz, W. 2000. Historia de la Estética I. La estética antigua, Madrid: Akal. - Zaragoza Botella, J. 2009. Luciano de Samóstata. Obras III, Madrid: Gredos.

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A Cultural Revolution for the “Free Spirits:” Hugo Ball’s Nietzschean Anarchism*

Maftei Ştefan-Sebastian** Babeş-Bolyai University

Addressing Dada: Methodological Concerns

Addressing the general issue of Dada’s anarchism by taking the case of Hugo Ball’s writings one finds a major motivational support in the confidence on the actuality of Dada. At the beginning of the last century, Dada represented not only an artistic, but also an intellectual phenomenon. In its development as an artistic movement, Dada reached a certain point, from which today we are still essentially not further. Questions, such as “What can we build if we cannot hold on God, the State, and the good reason?,” “Is the only positive value in this life tied to the noise of life itself?,” “Is there an inherent structure of the world or is it sheer chaos?,” and “What is really art good for, if it isn’t beautiful anymore?,” are questions that keep haunting aesthetics and philosophy almost one century after (Braun 1995). In aesthetic terms, according to Herbert Braun, Dada shares with us a radicalism of questions and problems that is becoming more and more acute in the wake of this long postmodernist age: the lack of a coherent understanding of the world, the alienation of the artist from its audience, the incomprehensible character of his art – these are questions that have been increasingly resounding in recent times.

However, the specter of incomprehensibility still lurks not only in the contemporary artworld itself, but also behind the interpretations that have been shaping the outline of Dada as we see it today. And when we say interpretations, we refer to all kinds of receptions, from academic reviews to the widespread use

* Parts of this essay appeared in my “Art as Unfulfilled Utopia: The Experience of the Political in Dada’s Redefining of Art,” Studia UBB Philosophia LIV.2, 2009. ** E-mail: [email protected].

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of the term Dada in the pop-culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Following Herbert Braun, we might contend that the presence in the last decades of the XX-th century of a rich secondary literature on the subject of Dada has not always informed on the significance of this artistic phenomenon for XX-th century art (Braun 1995). There are still methodological barriers, Braun thinks, which have kept us and are still keeping us from having a clearer view on the meaning(s) of Dada. Even the name Dada itself has been a commonplace for debate, as several opposing theories still quarrel over the name’s origins and its basic meanings.1 Nevertheless, according to Braun, starting our discussion on Dada with the issue of Dada’s reception and not with original Dada texts is not without its benefits. Firstly, we are continuously aware of the fact that even this research is only one act of reception among others, striving for objectivity. Secondly, by keeping in mind the history of Dada’s reception we are cautioned against monopolizing interpretations that are still shaping our contemporary views on this matter.

Generally, the name of Dada is widely used today, formally, in academic circles, as well as informally, as a general term describing artistic nonsense, anti-conventional art, and creative activity. As an undertone, the term reads out a “harmless nonsense” or a playful activity directed against dry rationalism, almost inevitably involved in positive connotations (Braun 1995). Among the artists, “Dada” has been best represented in the context of visual arts, traditionally related to Futurism or Surrealism. A particular widespread technique used by the Dada visual artists was the collage (although the collage had been earlier invented by Picasso and Braque in 1912). In the 1960’s, the collage has been widely embraced by many neo-avant-garde movements, such as Pop-Art and Op art. Usually, the expansive concept and the techniques of Dada were better accredited by the neo- avant-gardes of the 1960’s. As Braun contends, the re-reading of the term Dada in the 60’s also occasionally generated misunderstandings regarding the concept of Dada art. The fact is that the Dadaists did not see their art as a “harmless nonsense,” as it has been traditionally agreed upon, but as an “appendage of a great religion” or even as a kind of intense “suffering” (Braun 1995). In Hugo Ball’s own terms:

Dadaism was only an appendage of a great religion. We suffered not only at the time, but we suffered mainly on ourselves (...) You will understand that the deeper meaning of our work was suffering. Only in suffering at the time and suffering on ourselves, we had the opportunity to go beyond our own borders, because only the suffering gives you a passport to leave yourself. 2 (Ball 1963, p. 118)

1 See the meanings of Dada discussed in (Codrescu 2009, pp.142-146). 2 “Der Dadaismus war nur eine Beigabe einer großen Frömmigkeit. Wir litten nicht nur an der Zeit, sondern wir litten hauptsächlich an uns selbst. (...) Du wirst begreifen, daß der tiefere Sinn unserer Tätigkeit das Leiden war. Nur im Leiden an der Zeit und im Leiden an uns selbst hatten wir die Möglichkeit, über unsere eigenen Grenzen hinauszugehen, da nur das Leiden einem einen Paß gibt, sich selbst zu verlassen.“

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Besides the misreading in the Dada reception starting with the interpretations of the 1960’s, there is also the “mystification” problem, related to the various accounts of the “story” of Dada, which were transmitted by the Dadaists themselves in their memoirs (Braun 1995).3 The later memoirs of the ex-Dada (Huelsenbeck, Tzara, Ball) – such as the journal we will be quoting from, Flight out of Time, published by Hugo Ball in 1927, way after his Dada years – deal with the Dada in a form of an anecdotic storytelling, at times forgetting some aspects or overemphasizing others. Nevertheless, this does not weaken their historical value as first-hand subjective accounts of Dadaism.

In sum, research on Dada nowadays has to fight on several fronts. First, against the traditional interpretations, which sometimes rely too much on the artists’ personal accounts by taking these as “objective” historical sources. Second, against the mainstream, informal interpretations, which misread and also trivialize the subject to the point of commodifying “Dada” into a brand name for all “avant- garde” art. Third, against the new interpretations, which start either from neo- Marxist, or from historical-hermeneutical positions, confronting, in the end, the same incomprehensibility towards the phenomenon itself.

Another issue for the research is the interdisciplinary character of Dada, which constitutes an advantage as well as an obstacle. In Dada, poets and painters, musicians and philosophers are usually one and the same person. One simply cannot discuss Dadaism without an interdisciplinary approach. Dada texts are often written in German, French, Italian, and English. The backgrounds of different Dada artists are very different and very informing of the achievements of the Dada itself.

The first Dada: Hugo Ball in Zürich Keeping in mind the methodological concerns related to the general study of Dada, we would try to sketch out at this point Hugo Ball’s intellectual influence upon Dadaism. We will not refer here to his early career before the Dada, neither will we mention his intellectual biography in detail, which is a very sinuous one: from a cabaret musician to an Expressionist poet and writer, from a visionary anarchist to a Christian mystic during his latest period, his career and life has always fluctuated between extremes.

It is credible enough to say that, without the First World War, the first Dada group, the “Zürich Dada” of 1916, made of artist refugees from the war in Europe, often considered deserters by the people in their own lands, probably would not have been born. Various artists with quite different backgrounds, such

3 However, I do not think that the memorabilia of the Dadaists can be simply dismissed as “mystifications.” These documents are valuable sources. This would merely underscore some of the most interesting takes on the concept of Dada as described by the artists themselves. Leaving aside the issue of a certain historical “objectivity” as related to the critique of art, we should take for granted at least some of the aspects transmitted by these historical sources, even if we must, at the same time, admit their inevitable subjective character.

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as Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, and Tristan Tzara have seized that particular moment, turning it into an opportunity to manifest themselves creatively against all the madness that surrounded them. Hugo Ball, in particular, understood the war as a “natural” result of domineering modern technological and ideological state-power. In his views, borrowed, to a certain degree, from the XIXth century Russian anarchism, he perceived the world war as a self-destructive and nihilistic step in the history of the modern state. According to its own logic of power, Ball argues, the modern state may come to an end because of its own desire for domination, which is, in the end, self- destructive.4 Ball, who was the intellectual leader of the group in the first phase of the “Zürich Dada,” fused these anarchist views about the state into a nihilistic vision about modern politics, a vision which is very much resembling to Nietzsche’s own views on modern politics.5 As well as Nietzsche, Ball, who had been for a long time, starting from his teenage years, a devoted reader of Nietzsche, was hostile to modern politics. The core of Ball’s later choice for a cultural or artistic utopianism instead of a political utopianism, a cultural utopianism which also includes a vision of a new man shaped by a new form of culture – an aspect which will be later discussed – is very well reflected by one of Nietzsche’s comments from his early Untimely Meditations (III. 4): Every philosophy, which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say, solved, by a political event is a joke- and pseudo-philosophy. Many states have been founded since the world began; that is an old story. How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth? (...). Here, however, we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops, that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity. It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroys stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form too. That is why I am concerned here with a species of man whose teleology extends somewhat beyond the welfare of a state, with philosophers, and with these only in relation to a world which is again fairly independent of the welfare of a state, that of culture. Of the many rings which, interlocked together,

4 The main source for Ball is Bakunin (Statism and Anarchy, 1873), who recognizes the state’s necessity for domination as being unavoidable, yet not inevitably self-destructive: “The modern State is by its very nature a military State; and every military State must of necessity become a conquering, invasive State; to survive, it must conquer or be conquered, for the simple reason that accumulated military power will suffocate if it does not find an outlet. Therefore the modern State must strive to be a huge and powerful State: this is the indispensable precondition for its survival.” 5 One of the best readings of Nietzsche’s view of the state is Daniel Conway’s “The Birth of the State,” in: (Siemens & Rood eds. 2008, pp. 37-67).

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make up the human community, some are of gold and others of pinchbeck.6 (Nietzsche 1997, pp. 147-148)

In fact, as Daniel Conway suggests, Nietzsche observed that the modern state’s only goal was self-perpetuation (Siemens & Rood eds. 2008: 38 sqq.). Nietzsche considered thus that the modern state was doomed, since the justification of human existence cannot reside solely in man’s service to the state, as the fragment quoted above clearly shows. To justify human existence, Nietzsche argues, one must find culture as a warrant of human ideals. The only meaningful purpose of politics would thus be the supporting of culture, the only guarantee of the advancement of humanity, or the “enhancement of the human type” as Nietzsche declares in Beyond Good and Evil (§ 257). According to Nietzsche, this vision should translate into politics the following way: the legislators should support the highest “human type,” the exemplary individuals who represent humanity by their own self-perfection. Others should be inspired by and imitate the self-perfection of their most advanced fellow individuals. His aristocratic vision of society is not concerned at all with political power, on the contrary: seeking the accumulation of political power as a purpose in itself is one of the basest forms of “stupidity.” If, as Conway argues, Nietzsche should be deemed as a “political realist,” then his realism abhors the “might makes right” version of Bismarckian Realpolitik. Instead, he creates a counter-slogan by proclaiming, in his Twilight of the Idols (Germans, § 1) that political power itself “makes stupid” (die Macht verdummt). In Twilight of the Idols, he also explicitly asserts that what has been “culturally great” has always been “unpolitical, even anti-political” (Germans, § 4).7 He thus emphasizes that the sole accumulation of political power by the modern state is ultimately a symptom of its own decadence that manifests primarily as obliviousness towards its own future.

Remembering the apocalyptic times of the first modern world war, Hugo Ball declared: “It is the total mass of machinery and the devil himself that has broken loose now. Ideals are only labels that have been stuck on. Everything has been shaken to its very foundations.” (Ball 1996, p. 11) In June 1917, towards the end of the first Dada adventure, he noted that he was amazed of the fact that Lenin used to live a few steps away from the Cabaret Voltaire:

7.VI. 1917. Strange incidents. When we had the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich at Spiegelgasse 1, there lived at Spiegelgasse 6, opposite us, if I am not mistaken, Mr. Ulyanov-Lenin. He must have heard our music and tirades every evening: I do not know if he enjoyed them or profited from them. And when we were opening the gallery in Bahnhofstrasse, the Russians went to Petersburg to launch the revolution. Is Dadaism as sign and gesture the opposite of Bolshevism? Does it

6 See also Thus Spoke Zarathustra I.11 (On the New Idol), where Nietzsche perceives the state as “the coldest of all cold monsters” and considers that “the state… whatever it may tell you, it lies … everything about it is false.” Loyal to his early views, he concludes that “there, where the state ends, only there begins the human being who is not superfluous” (Nietzsche 2006, pp. 34-36). 7 The passages are quoted by Conway in: Siemens & Rood eds. 2008, p. 38.

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contrast the completely quixotic, inexpedient, and incomprehensible side of the world with destruction and consummate calculation? It will be interesting to observe what happens here and there. (Ball 1996, p. 117)

Here, Ball seeks to picture a difference between his own ideas about anarchism as opposed to anarchistic Bolshevism. Actually, as David Weir explains, the remarks from June 1917 might be interpreted as an allusion to the views of anarchists, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Fritz Brupbacher. The latter was a biographer of Bakunin. The former has been a fierce opponent of any kind of Statism, including Marxist Statism.8 Brupbacher identified Bakunin with the literary figure of Don Quixote, explaining that Bakunin was quixotic in his rebellion against “all scientific and manmade systems.” Anarchists, such as Bakunin, were entirely opposed to Bolshevik-type revolutions, which, according to him, were not genuine political revolutions, but power overthrows, through the means of the dictatorship of the working class.9

Hugo Ball had been preoccupied with anarchism even before the emergence of Dada. In 1915, Ball has published in revolutionary journals, such as Die Aktion, Der Sturm, Die Revolution. He read Bakunin, Kropotkin or Merezhkovsky (Ball 1996, p. 14). Journal notes from 1915 deal with subjects, such as nihilism or Russian anarchism. One particular entry from June 1915 comments extensively on the subject of anarchism:

The anarchists say that contempt for laws is their main principle. Against laws … any methods are permitted and are just. To be an anarchist means then to abolish rules in every connection and case. The prerequisite is the Rousseau-like belief in the natural goodness of man and in an immanent order of primitive nature left to its own resources. All additions (guidance, control) are, as abstractions, evil. The citizen is deprived of his civil rights. He is unnatural, a product of his uprooting and of the police who have perverted him even more. With such a theory the political haven is shattered. The stars go haywire. God and the devil change roles.

I have examined myself carefully. I could never bid chaos welcome, throw bombs, blow up bridges, and do away with ideas. I am not an anarchist (my emphasis). The longer and farther I am away from Germany, the less I am likely to be one.

Anarchy is attributable to the overstraining or corruption of the idea of the state. It will show itself more clearly where individuals or classes have grown up in idyllic circumstances, with close ties to nature and religion, and are then kept under strict political lock and key. The superiority of such individuals to the

8 See: Bakunin. 1873. Statism and Anarchy.: “(...) No state, however democratic – not even the reddest republic – can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self- organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves (...).” 9 See, Bakunin. 1873. Critique of the Marxist Theory of the State.

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constructions and mechanisms of a modern monster-state is obvious. About the natural goodness of man, we can say that it is possible, but it is certainly not a rule. This goodness feeds mostly on a more-or-less known store of religious education and tradition. Viewed without prejudice and sentimentality, nature has for a long time not been so totally benevolent and orderly as one might wish it to be. (...) As a theory of the unity and solidarity of total humanity, anarchism is a belief in the universal, natural, divine childhood, a belief that an unconstrained world will produce the maximum yield. Allowing for the moral confusion and catastrophic destruction that centralizing systems and systematized work have caused everywhere, no sensible man will reject the idea that a South Sea community (…) is superior to out vaunted civilization. As long as rationalism and its quintessence, the machine, continue to make progress, anarchism will be an ideal for the catacombs and for members of an order, but not for the masses, however interested and influenced they are and presumably will remain. (Ball 1996, pp. 19-20)

The question whether Ball was a committed anarchist is answered by his personal confession:

(…) And yet ideals should be identical with the person who advocates them; the style of an author should represent his philosophy, without his expressly developing it. Basically it is an adventure that I am not really taking part in. …. I am an observer, I only dabble (my emphasis). What kind of cause would I participate in body and soul? With all my varied interests in beauty, life, the world, and with all my curiosity about their opposites? (Ball 1996, p. 22)

Reading his journal, we can see that the importance of political anarchism will fade away towards the end of 1915. From this year on, Ball slightly turned towards pacifist anarchism, where the anarchist becomes the “brainworker,” the Kopfarbeiter, a creator of new life through new forms of art and a destroyer of the old “basis of belief:”

Perhaps it is necessary to have resolutely, forcibly produced chaos and thus a complete withdrawal of faith before an entirely new edifice can be built up on a changed basis of belief. The elemental and the demonic come to the fore first; the old names and word are dropped. For faith is the measure of things by means of the word and of nomenclature. The art of our time, in its fantasizing based on complete skepticism, deals primarily not with God but with the demonic; it is itself demonic. But all skepticism and all skeptical philosophy, which brought this about, are also. (Ball 1996, p. 60)

He began to believe in the idea that art had to manifest itself more directly in society. Along with his new Zurich friends, Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire in February 1916. Ball chose the name “Voltaire” not by chance, but with a belief that Voltaire was the symbol for the beginning of a revolution (Voltaire had been indeed the precursor of a Revolution). In fact, fragments from Voltaire were read aloud on the first night of the Cabaret. In the first review of the cabaret, named Cabaret Voltaire, published in May 1916, Ball explained the intent of his protests:

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[The review] is intended to present to the public the activities and interests of the Cabaret, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals” (über den Krieg und die Vaterländer hinweg an die wenigen Unabhängigen erinnern, die anderen Idealen leben) (Ball, “Preface” to Cabaret Voltaire, quoted in: Weir 1997, p. 234)

“Free Spirits” In his “Preface” to Cabaret Voltaire, an anthology of texts from 1916 that is the first publication of the “Zurich Dada” group, Ball hints to one of Nietzsche’s famous terms, the “free spirit” (Freigeist). According to Nietzsche, the kernel of the “free spirit” resides in its relation to belief (Wolting 2001, p. 26). As opposed to the “free spirit,” the “fettered spirit” is in a constant need for certitude and stability. By contrast, the “free spirit” is defined by its independence and its capacity to detach itself from the authority of traditional values and also by its ability to question these values. Therefore, in Nietzsche’s view, the “free spirit” is always capable of living with values different or even opposite to the values put into question:

Once a human being arrives at the basic conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes ‘a believer’; conversely, one could conceive of a delight and power of self-determination, a freedom of the will, in which the spirit takes leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, practiced as it is in maintaining itself on light ropes and possibilities and dancing even beside abysses. Such a spirit would be a free spirit par excellence. (Nietzsche 2001, p. 206)10

When speaking of “independent spirits,” Ball is especially alluding to another meaning of the term Freigeist: Nietzsche’s definition of the “free spirit” as “the good European,” an expression that is sometimes interpreted as a political proposal. In reality, Nietzsche spoke of a detachment from any political partisanship when he coined the expression “the good European.” In his notebooks, he used the term “supranational” when he spoke of the “good European.” He also defined “good European” as “vagabond, stateless, voyageur” (Wolting 2001, p. 27). Nietzsche also uses “free spirit” when referring to the “legislator,” or to the creator of new values. These different meanings of the “free spirit” are all alluded to in Ball’s review.

It is also worth mentioning that the first edition of Nietzsche’s Human All to Human (subtitled A Book for Free Spirits), issued in 1878, was dedicated to Voltaire, marking Nietzsche’s shift from Romanticism and the break-up with Wagner. The “free spirit,” who appeared in Human All Too Human, was an heir of the Enlightenment, and the actor of an uncompromising, sober philosophical

10 See also Human, All Too Human (I, § 225): “He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him. He is the exception, the fettered spirits are the rule (…),” in: (Nietzsche 1996, p. 108).

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undertaking of examining the possibility of a “higher humanity” in the absence of any transcendent meaning.11

Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s “free spirit” is still connected, although not observably, to its backgrounds: the Romantic model of a community of intellectuals. As Olivier Ponton remarked, Nietzsche’s “free spirit,” appearing in the subtitle of his Human, All to Human of 1878, is closely connected to one of Nietzsche’s personal experience from the summer of 1876, when, disillusioned with Wagner’s Bayreuth, he joined some of his closest friends, Malwida von Meysenbug, Paul Rée, and Albert Brenner, in Sorrento, for a communal experience of “mutual learning” (gegenseitiges Lernen) and “friendly living together” (freundschaftliches Zusammenleben) (Ponton 2007, pp. 254-316). Actually, it was Malwida who came out with this idea of an educational venture, a venture which Nietzsche baptized as “a kind of monastery for free spirits” (eine Art Kloster für freie Geister) in a letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz. In the same letter, Nietzsche confessed that this project could still be a path to creating a real “school for educators,” where the educators would educate themselves (Ponton 2007, p. 263). He also named this venture a “modern monastery, an ideal colony, a free university” in a letter to his sister, dated January 20, 1877. Nietzsche’s adherence to this project is also very close to his earlier intellectual preoccupations with Greek culture and with the foundation of a new educational model, a contemplative way of life based not on “learning from,” but on “self-learning.” It is the same educational impetus revealed by the expression “Be your self!” which appears as a kind of motto in his early Schopenhauer as Educator. In Nietzsche’s view, this is the moment where, paradoxically, the “free spirit” can be your “educator.” Because every man has an intrinsic nature that is basically individual, irreducible, therefore uneducable,12 the “free spirit” cannot be the educator per se. The “free spirit” as an educator acts as more as a “liberator.” The only real education is a self-education, but the “free spirit” can set the example.13 And the only way this education, i.e. “liberation” becomes possible is through culture. “Culture is liberation” declares Nietzsche in a famous fragment; therefore, culture is education and the only possible way for the self-emancipation of man.14

11 See Richard Schacht’s Introduction, in: Nietzsche 1996, pp. vii-xxiii. 12 “In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is (…). The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be your self!’ All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.” (Nietzsche 1997, p. 127) 13 ”Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralyzed; your educators can be only your liberators.” (Nietzsche 1997, p. 129) 14 “And that is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant, an outstreaming of light and warmth, the gentle rustling of nocturnal rain, it is imitation and worship of nature where nature is in her motherly and merciful

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Surely, the figure of the “free spirit” is not a real, but a utopian response15 to a crisis of modern European culture, a crisis that Nietzsche identifies with an “atomistic chaos.” He perceives this “chaos” as a result of the dissolution of a higher from of authority into individual forces. This dissolution is largely related to a long process of weakening of religious authority that first began with the advent of Christianity. Nietzsche perceives the modern political authority of the state as an heir to the former spiritual authority of the Church. But he also witnesses his contemporary world, which, in his view, is indisputably a world made not for the state, but for the individual. To Nietzsche, this aspect has its dangers as well as its opportunities. A world made for the individual urges chaos, dissolution, as well as hope. The individual, as the most significant element of modern times, foregrounds the opportunity for an “atomistic revolution,” for a renewal of the ideal or the “image” of man. Here, the term “revolution” does not, in any way, refer to a political change,16 but should be interpreted both as destruction of previous decadent ideals of “humanity,” and as a renewal, as a rebirth of a more dignified “image of man:”

We live in the age of atoms, of atomistic chaos. (…). The revolution is absolutely unavoidable, and it will be the atomistic revolution: but what are the smallest indivisible basic constituents of human society? It is incontestable that the spirit of humanity is almost in greater danger during the approach of such eras than it is when they and the chaotic turmoil they bring with them have actually arrived: the anxiety of waiting and the greedy exploitation of every minute brings forth all the cowardice and the self-seeking drives of the soul, while the actual emergency, and especially a great universal emergency, usually improves men and makes them more warm-hearted. Who is there then, amid these dangers of our era, to guard and champion humanity, the inviolable sacred treasure gradually accumulated by the most various races? Who will set up the image of man when all men feel in themselves only the self-seeking worm and currish fear and have thus declined from that image to the level of the animals or even of automata?17

This view about the persistence of a major crisis in modern civilization and about the necessity of a spiritual revolution is thoroughly consistent with Ball’s own

mood, it is the perfecting of nature when it deflects her cruel and merciless assaults and turns them to good, and when it draws a veil over the expressions of nature's step- motherly mood and her sad lack of understanding.” (Nietzsche 1997, p. 130) 15 See the Preface of the Human, All Too Human, written ten years after the first publication of his work, where Nietzsche recognizes the advent of the “free spirit” as an event to come and as a sign of hope for a future Europe: “Thus when I needed to I once also invented for myself the ‘free spirits’ to whom this melancholy-valiant book with the title Human, All to Human is dedicated: ‘free spirits’ of this kind do not exist, did not exist (…) That free spirits of this kind could one day exist, that our Europe will have such active and audacious fellows among its sons of tomorrow and the next day, physically present and palpable and not, as in my case, merely phantoms and hermit’s phantasmagoria: I should wish to be the last to doubt it.” (Nietzsche 1996, p. 6) 16 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (III.4): “How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth?“ (quoted above). 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1997, p. 150.

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interests in the possibilities of a cultural renewal. The “liberation” and “education” are current themes in Ball’s writings. As early as 1909, as student in Munich, Ball initiated a thesis on Nietzsche with the title Nietzsche in Basel. Eine Streitschrift, where he saw Nietzsche as a Kulturreformator of Germany.18 Here he criticized the common views about Nietzsche’s vocational philological career and about his philosophical discipleship of Schopenhauer, stressing more his vocation towards “culture” in general and his lifetime as Kulturdenker: “culture as his mission, his task, his muse and his life goal” (die Kultur als seine Aufgabe, sein Beruf, seine Muse und Lebensbestimmung). In this writing, Ball shows a very intimate knowledge of Nietzsche’s life and works. He is also very aware of Nietzsche’s solution concerning the utopian renewal of a modern, “higher” image of man, through a new kind of art, an art that could be, by Nietzsche’s definition, “human, all too human,” more concerned with man as such:

Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, uniquely himself to every last movement of his muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in uniqueness he is beautiful, and worth regarding, and in no way tedious.19

It is obvious Hugo Ball’s cultural anarchism transformed anarchism as a political doctrine into spiritual (geistig) anarchism. One can see the “cultural” anarchism permeating Ball’s writings after 1917. According to Wolf Lepenies, this remains a special feature of the German notion of “culture,” which has always been very carefully separated from German politics (Lepenies 2006). Lepenies contends that from Herder’s notion of “cultural nation” onwards, almost every German intellectual sought to perceive “culture” as a “noble substitute” for “politics.” Moreover, he says, the German intellectuals always exhibited not only a propensity to separate culture from politics but also an indifference to politics. Another specific feature was the “urge to solve a political problem in the field of culture” (Lepenies 2006, p. 205). This probably explains why Hugo Ball’s own “anarchism” takes shape as a cultural utopia which constantly exhibits social and political aspirations towards “emancipation,” “liberation,” “education,” yet never seeks to relate these goals to particular political actions.

18 See Nietzsche in Basel. Eine Streitschrift (1910), in: Hugo Ball, Schriften zum Theater, zur Kunst und Philosophie. 19 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (fragment quoted above). See also a posthumous fragment of Nietzsche from 1883-1888: “The most universal sign of the modern age: man has lost dignity in his own eyes to an incredible extent. For a long time the center and tragic hero of existence in general; then at least intent on proving himself closely related to the decisive and essentially valuable side of existence – like all metaphysicians who wish to cling to the dignity of man, with their faith that moral values are cardinal values. Those who have abandoned God cling much more firmly to the faith in morality.” (Nietzsche 1968, p. 16)

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References - Bakunin, M. 1873. Statism and Anarchy (online: www.marxists.org, accessed 25.06.2011). - Ball, H, 1963. Gesammelte Gedichte. hrsg. v. Annemarie Schütt-Hennings. Zürich: Arche. - Ball, H. Schriften zum Theater, zur Kunst und Philosophie. Schriften: Geschichte und Politik (online: www.textlog.de, accessed 1.05.2011). - Ball, H. “Die Kunst unserer Tage,” in: Pörtner, P. 1960. Literatur-Revolution 1910-1925. Dokumente, Manifest, Programme. Bd. 1. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, pp. 136-140. - Ball, H. 1927. Die Flucht aus der Zeit. München: Duncker & Humblot. - Ball, H. 1996. Flight Out of Time: A Dada diary. Introduction and notes by John Elderfield. Berkeley: University of California Press. - Braun, H. 1995. Wege aus dem Dadaismus. Am Beispiel von Hugo Ball und Kurt Schwitters. MA Thesis. Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (online: http://woerter.de/hb/texte/ball-schwitters.html#12, accessed 25.06.2011). - Codrescu, A. 2009. The Posthuman Dada Guide. Tzara and Lenin Play Chess. Princeton: PUP. - Lepenies, W. 2006. The Seduction of Culture in German History. Princeton: PUP. - Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Will to Power. transl. by W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale. edited with commentary by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. - Nietzsche, F. 1996. Human, All Too Human. transl. by R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Richard Schacht. Cambridge: CUP. - Nietzsche, F. 1997. Untimely Meditations. Daniel Breazeale ed. transl. by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: CUP. - Nietzsche, F. 2001. The Gay Science. Bernard Williams ed. transl. Josefine Nauckhoff. Poems transl. by Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: CUP. - Nietzsche, F. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Adrian del Caro & Robert B. Pippin eds. transl. Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: CUP. - Ponton, O. 2007. Nietzsche - Philosophie de la légèreté (Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung Bd. 53). Berlin: De Gruyter. - Siemens, H. W. & Roodt, V. eds. 2008. Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought. Berlin: DeGruyter. - Weir, D. 1997. Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. - Wolting, P. 2001. Le vocabulaire de Nietzsche. Paris: Ellipses Édition.

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Hedonistic Morality and the Art of Life: Jean-Marie Guyau Revisited

Lev Kreft* University of Ljubljana

To approach Jean-Marie Guyau today is not an easy job. His thought, influential and well known at first, nearly forgotten later, and rarely used or quoted nowadays, appears in those rare interpretations as eclectic structure build from Epicurean and Stoic shell, French positivist and English evolutionary scientific theories and their philosophical universalisations, put on liberal and utilitarian background, and brought into relation with artistic modernism and l'art pour l'art- ism. From such perspective, it resembles eclectic imperial universality of French Second Empire.

However, Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888) belongs to next generation, not to that of Palais de l'industrie and Second Empire, and is definitely not a Saint-Simonian scientifico, as emissaries of Napoleon III to Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz were called. His end was not to put ideas one beside, or one over the other, classifying them into mechanic and invented order. His aim was to discover a moving force uniting conflicting ideas and conflicting facts of the 19th century into readable and acceptable synthesis which should appear as more than just sterile scientific explanation: it must make sense. A moving force which makes sense – that is what his short but creative philosophical expedition was trying to get at. As his stepfather Alfred Fouillée said in his »Preface« (Guyau 1927, p. 2), »le ordre est la lumière de la pensée« -order is the light of thought-, but there are two ways to illuminate. One is to put different systems into a structural grid prepared in advance to enlist any possible kind of thought, another, a way taken by his stepson, is to put aside artificial divisions and subdivisions, and to reproduce

*[email protected]

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Lev Kreft Hedonistic Morality and the Art of Life: Jean-Marie Guyau Revisited

systems development and evolution by starting from fundamental and concrete idea. If we apply this Guyau's method on Guyau's philosophy, we find that his master-key is life as energy which makes everything else possible. For Guyau, however, »life« is not just an idea, and not even a source of energy only: before any philosophical utterance life is an embodied truth about ourselves and our world. This vital force echoes in, but is not to be confused with Bergson's later élan vital (translated as vital impetus or vital force). For Guyau life is »morally indifferent, a blind force« (Michon 2008), and this means that it is morally neither good nor evil. But life always appears as embodied, which means that it appears in concrete circumstances; concrete circumstances include its ability to reflect upon its being-in-the world, and its position in circumstances which are historically shaped. This goes for all that is life, but in human conditions it brings out an evolutionary difference: our circumstances are historically pre-determined through our culture and not just through humans being another species of life among the others. Or, to put it in relationship with other kinds of social Darwinism and/or positivism, Guyau promotes history into primary human evolutionary environment. However, it would be wrong to interpret this historicity in terms of historical materialism (Marx) or cultural studies. History is a social environment which includes embodied artifacts and institutions already framed, but primary substance of historicity of human beings is their sociality as a space of free intersubjectivity beyond any strict determinism. Guyau's idea of social environment as historically embedded is not oriented towards discovery of hard mechanical laws of human behaviour, quite the contrary, it seeks to understand social milieu with its traditions and interactions as a complex field of differentiations and free choice. To put Guyau in relationship with Taine and positivism, F. J. W. Harding (1973, p. 65) accentuates that »...the influence of a social environment ceases to be dominant in highly complex and dynamic communities which tend to break up into a number of smaller, independent milieux.« Beside »life« as dominant idea, there is a dominant motive in Guyau's thought: to liberate philosophy and science from positivist or social evolutionist ambition to represent human beings and their social interaction in terms of mechanical determinism, and to sinthesize such knowledge into laws of absolute necessity which call for scientifical manipulation management of the people, a discipline which political leaders found so compelling in Saint-Simonian doctrines.

Life is an unconditional force, and source of ethical considerations which are not deducted from duty or other already culturally constructed principles. What conditions our ethical disposition in the first place is time, following »life« as next ethically most important Guyau's category. For the sake of interpretation, I will speak here about clock-time, psychological time, and existential-ethical time. Clock-time developed through 19th century for the first time: a phenomenon of time-control over life and especially over working time periods which was examined and interpreted so well by historian E. P. Thompson, including invention and mass use of clock and watch by individuals which started initially as a consequence of »Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude« (E.P. Thompson, 1967). What Guyau is best known for is his elaboration of psychological time.

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Lev Kreft Hedonistic Morality and the Art of Life: Jean-Marie Guyau Revisited

From this point of view, time is an acquired organisation of representations enabling humans to store and remember past events. According to Guyau who was well informed about most recent developments in psychology, the cognitive functions or strategies that realize this organisation nearly always establish coherent episodes that are situated in concrete, spatially defined contexts, which means that we get to the idea of time by constructing our own narrations from raw memory material, or, if you want, by knitting autobiographic telenovelas about our own lives. Guyau himself states that our memory is an art as well – »la mémoire est aussi un art« (Guyau 1890, III). Still, beside this posthumously published text on time, Guyau treated time as an ethical category in his first great text already. This happened in Guyau (1927) »La morale d'Épicure et ses rapports avec les doctrines contemporaines« (The Morality of Epicurus and its Relations to Contemporary Doctrines) which gained him an award by French Academy for moral and political sciences. In this text, divided in two parts (on Epicurus, and on his influence on contemporary thinkers), he connects contemporary utilitarian morality with Epicureanism in a way which strongly suggests his personal idea of moral integrity. There are two schools of practical morality fighting passionately for supremacy through centuries: Epicurean which starts from embodied life and its interest for pleasure or joy (juissance) of being alive, and Stoic which starts from virtue and builds a case for moral duty of a person. For Epicureans (and Guyau here enlists himself among the ranks), good is what is good for us, and that is pleasurable life: pleasure is at the same time true and good (Guyau 1927, p. 23). Before we start to measure morality of our decisions and actions with any kind of virtues deducted from pure ideas, we have to recognize our senses and our bodily existence as moral and epistemic criteria which cannot be pushed aside or subordinated to something else because such diminishing of their authority cannot function in practice.

Life is desire for pleasure. Looking for pleasure and avoiding pain is its sensual experience. For pleasure to appear as good to be folowed, it is enough to have senses and bodily existence. This makes life a utilitarian, making choice between pleasure and pain to get at maximum pleasure. Reason (phronesis) starts from these decisions and experiences. But to stop at this stage and call it a source of all our ethical stance would be Aristippus' of Cyrene position, i.e. bare hedonism which lives always in present, making decisions from past experiences but recognizing no other future than continuing repeat of the same. If compared with utilitarian approach, bare hedonism is wrong because there is no pleasure without pain, as well there is no pain without pleasure: the joy of being alive is always there (Guyau 1927, p. 39). To live life in full sense, it is not enough to be happy from pure pleasure. This is an empty happiness, and what we want is fullness of living, not emptiness of pain. To use French expressions, it is not enough to be hereux, what we have to long for is to be bienhereux. Experiencing life in full sense is real happiness – le bonheur. Those who remember that Stendhal's definition of love and of artistic beauty is promesse de bonheur might ask if there is a connection to aesthetics in this fullness of life. Indeed there is: Guyau calls this state a state of

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beauty, because it means subordination of all of its parts, sensations, pleasures and pains to universal tendency to get at a state of balanced harmony of life.

To proceed from one pleasure to another, Aristipe's choice is obviously not an option. But this morality of balance would hardly hold our lives together without existencial time framework. We are born into life, and getting aware of that fact means getting aware of our mortality as well. The span between birth and death is our time-span, the first form of time we get aware of, and it constitutes the meaning of future in our reflective ability: because life has to end, we need to follow an end during its duration. Death does not concern us, because (a well known Epicurus and also Stoic position) when we are alive, there is no death, and when death is here, we are already absent. Dying is another story, and it could be painful as it was in Epicurus case, but we have to suffer without complaint, with serene mind and calm awareness: if we have courage to live, we have to have courage to die.

Time-span of life from birth to death makes ethical stance of human beings complete: if we follow our own happiness which is in living full life, we make prudent and rational decisions without need for any external moral doctrine, just following the determination of our existence. This brings out a life which is at the same time pleasurable and morally perfect, aesthetically and ethically consistent. But, to bring ethical and aesthetic attitude of our lives together, and to proceed from his youth inclination towards Epicurus and its contemporary utilitarian and evolutionary followers, Guyau has to alter the idea of the aesthetic too. On one side, there were modernists with their insistence on the pure aesthetic which does not belong to life but to art beyond everyday life; on the other side, there were utilitarians and evolutionists who dismissed art and beauty because they seemed to be mere play: pleasant, but not serious business. Guyau's position, build in just few years of his active life, was that there is much more to the aesthetic than just pure art, and that there is much more to art and beauty in our lives than simple play and entertainment. The aesthetic is at the core of everyday life: feeling of being alive is in itself pleasurable and aesthetic feeling which engages all our senses, which makes our sensuality and perception aesthetic pleasure in itself. We are not aware of this side of our aisthesis all the time, but when we turn our attention from »just existing« to awareness of »being alive« it springs out immediately. We could say that our primordial aesthetic experience is also a kind of primordial reflexivity: from our immediate perception of external stimuli we turn perceptional attention to our own sensuality and perception, and this is pleasurable because it turns on awareness of being alive.

This fact has ethical consequences for our moral choices. If life itself generates ethical stance, we do not need to deduct moral norms from ideas and ideals. We do not need the idea of God for moral guidance, as Stoics thought, but have to listen to ourselves and reflex on our life in its living context which is, among other circumstances, the necessity of some pain in pleasure and some pleasure in pain, our life-time embedded between birth and death, our ability for reflexive

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perception which brings out aesthetic awareness of being alive, and our historically determined existence which puts us in previously existing social and cultural circumstances of our lives. This kind of ethics is therefore evolutionary ethics and not normative ethics. Guyau translated Epictetus' manual for stoic ethical life when he was 17, being deeply inspired by him, but in 'war' between Epicureism and Stoicism his philosophical position was more with Epicurus. Ethics without obligation and sanction, i.e. without any higher court above human life demanding that metaphysical rules should be followed, is ethics of freedom which belongs to life itself. Guyau opposed the view that starting from drive for pleasure we must arrive at selfish struggle between individuals. Here again, his principle of life and pleasure is opposed to the idea of isolated individual. »Living means spending as much as it does acquiring« (Guyau 1898), he states, meaning that life has to be active, and in activity it tends to increase its own strength: »Like fire, life only preserves itself by communicating itself.« (Guyau 1898) Our entire being is sociable. Not because of some law superior to life itself, but because there is pleasure in sharing, as well as there is pleasure in sharing pleasure. It is a pleasure to see others seeing that we enjoy: »Sensibility has the same expansive force: we must share our joy, we must share our pain.« (Guyau 1898)

Aesthetic realm thus becomes much wider than in pure artistics, and aesthetics cannot deal only with beautiful, as in calistics. What it amounts to, however, is a definite connection and merger between aesthetics and ethics founded on pleasure principle as reliable criterion and guide of ethical choices. Ethical attitude might depend on personal choice and not on definite arguments, which makes it hard to say that Guyau invented a certain aesthetic compass for ethical dilemmas. But I believe that his solution is the most consistent possible if we want to avoid obligations and sanctions as the only way to establish ethical principles applicable to human existential situation. At the same time, the aesthetic as unavoidable component of our sensual and supra-sensual life is not without ethical. Avoiding to get trapped in well known paradoxes of ordinary utilitarianism, Guyau puts in front two phenomenological features of human existence: life embraced in timespan from birth to death, and our pleasure's call for presence and pleasure of the others. To put it differently: the aesthetic is not something objective, yes, but neither is it simply subjective relationship, because its basic conditions arise from sociality, and its fundamental features come from collectivity.

The most important part of Guyau's polemical evolutionism is a point he makes to establish aesthetical realm as something serious, against Spencer's and others attitude that art and the aesthetic domain are just a play on the other side of survival or adaptation principle. As F. J. Harding (Harding 1973, p. 14) characterizes Guyau's Les problemes de l'esthétique contemporaine (1884), »Guyau at once reveals his own approach, which is indeed designed to show that art and poetry have all the seriousness of life itself... «Guyau's position is a typical polemics with two confronted camps, that of German aesthetic idealism represented by Kant and Schiller, and of English utilitarianism and evolutionism represented by Herbert Spencer, James Sully and Grant Allen. Those who defend

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disinterestedness, and those who understand art and the aesthetic as pure play which has no impact on basic evolutionary change and adaptation, share the same bias because they cannot see how art is involved with life itself, not on some disinterested level far away from serious matters of usefulness and interest but within its very core. Similar reduction as this of art to pure play is reduction of our aesthetic sensibility to just two senses, those of eye and ear: from Guyau's position, all senses together are important for aesthetic experience.1 Guyau does not oppose to Spencer's claim that art is a play, but to his presupposition that it is a harmless use of surplus energy.2 For Guyau, all play contains some aesthetic elements, because even strength and skill are aesthetic qualities. The beautiful consists in a perception or an action which stimulates life in us, Harding rightly says (Harding 1973, pp. 27, 29) in his interpretation of Guyau. But positivism is just one side of this wrong approach; another belongs to art itself, with modern artists who also proclaim that it has nothing whatsoever to do with life (Harding 1973, p. VII). The beautiful, however, is not something deprived of its serious importance for and involvement with life: »We have seen that whatever is serious and useful, and all that is real and alive can, under certain conditions, become beautiful.« (Guyau 1884, p. 37). The beautiful can appear in movements, sensations and sentiments, and has three main components: power, harmony and grace. With this last component, Guyau enters in polemics with Schiller and Schelling, confirming Herbert Spencer views, but only to a certain extent: grace is power executed with ease, which means that it is efficiently applied. However, he again does not agree that grace appears in play only, and argues that there is grace in executing useful work as well. What is most important for Guyau, be it with grace or within aesthetics or with morality is freedom and liberty. Liberty, because there is no other power hidden in life or in control of life than life itself, and freedom, because all the movements of life come from its own energy. This view is compatible with Epicurus atomist theory.

Guyau appears as eclectic if we study his thought in positivist manner, as a crossroad of different influences and inspirations from otherwise conflicting schools of thought. What makes his philosophy, especially aesthetics and ethics, a coherent and still important contribution to pertinent problems of modern and post-modern condition, is his insistence on everyday aesthetics and everyday ethics, his insistence on importance of all senses and his development of aesthetics beyond art. On top of all that, he dismissed individualism of liberal theoreticians,

1 But for Guyau, on the other hand, every agreeable sensation, no matter what its origin, can take on aesthetic character both by acquiring a certain degree of intensity and by a resultant re-echo in consciousness.« (Harding 1973, p.18) It is well known that Guyau was probably the first one in aesthetics to attribute aesthetic quality to all senses, and to everyday aesthetic feelings, such as mere breathing which, if we turn our attention to what otherwise goes on without reflection, becomes a source of our pleasant awareness of being alive. 2 Spencer was wrong, however, to conclude from this form of pleasure that art, a kind of refined play based on the instinct of struggle against nature or man, is a harmless use of surplus energy which acts as a safety value in society, but remains a superfluous enjoyment.« (Harding 1973, p. 26)

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and stressed that our relationship with the aesthetic is historical social relationship.

Guyau deserves his place in history of aesthetics, especially as philosopher who opened discipline to new fields after it became quite narrowly concerned with art, and still managed to support his claim that art has to be taken seriously. What is more important, however, is that today we have some similar problems as those he addressed at the fin-de-siècle moment, after pure post-modern subjectivism and relativism is confronted again with positivist interpretations of evolutionism in aesthetics. That, however, is another story: our own.

References - Fouillée, A. “Avant-propos.” In: Guyau, J.-M., 1927 (7th edition). La morale d'Épicure et ses rapports avec les doctrines contemporaines, Paris: F. Alcan. - Guyau, J.-M. 1884. Les problèmes de l'esthétique contemporaine. Paris: Alcan. - Guyau, J.-M. 1887. L'irreligion de l’avenir. Étude sociologique. Paris: Alcan. Available through Onread (Accessed 15.11.2011). - Guyau, J.-M. 1890. La genèse de l'idée du temps. Paris:Alcan. - Guyau, J.-M. 1898. A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction (transl. G. Kaprteyn). London: Watts. Available through Scribd (Accessed 15.11.2011). - Guyau, J.-M. 1921. Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction. Paris: Alcan. - Guyau, J.-M. 1927. La morale d'Épicure et ses rapports avec les doctrines contemporaines. Paris: Alcan. - Harding, F. J. W. 1973. Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888). Aestheticiam and Sociologist. A Study of His Aesthetic Theory and Critical Practice. Genève: Droz. - Michon, A. J. 2008. Jean-Marie Guyau. Life and Ideas. Available through: John Michon Writings (Accessed 15.1.2011). - Thompson, E. 1991. “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”. In Customs in Coomon. Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. London: Merlin Press. Available through: Past Oxford Journals (Accessed 15.11.2011).

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John Dewey on the continuity of art and morals within the consummated experience

Marta Vaamonde Gamo* Navarra University

“To aesthetic experience, the philosopher must go to understand what experience is.” (Dewey 1934, p. 278)

The artistic experience as a consummate experience The artistic experience has the achievement of the culmination of the individual- environment interaction in which experience consists as an explicit objective. In the majority of our experiences that interaction does not imply integration; the emotions and the intentions of the subject are not materialized in what is done. As a result they are accompanied by dispersion or routine. However, there are activities, such as a conversation, a game, etc. Which achieve complete singularity, which are lived as complete or a culmination. According to Dewey, the function of art is to intentionally reach the culmination of experience and consequently the aesthetic theory of Dewey allows the understanding of his notion of experience, the root of his philosophy, while at the same time as dissolving some erroneous interpretations of his empiricism.

The majority of the incorrect interpretations of his instrumentalism derive from understanding it as a type of positivism that tries to turn philosophy into an experimental investigation, just as within a science. In spite of the emphasis Dewey puts on applying an investigative method to philosophy, he does not reduce thought to an instrumental activity applicable to whatever type of imposed

* [email protected]

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purpose, given that in the philosophy of Dewey the means are inseparable from the ends, and this integration of means and ends is explicitly manifest in art.

For that reason, the publication of Dewey’s Art as Experience surprised many who were considered supporters of his naturalism and pragmatism. Bernstein reports the reaction of one of them in this way. “Has Dewey inverted his Hegelianism in recent years? Or have I understood so little of pragmatism that I have only seen the half of it and perhaps that of least importance?” (Bernstein 2010, p. 181)

Against the abstract interpretation of experience in the empiricist and positivist tradition, as perceptions contained within an isolated and introspective conscience, Dewey refers us to the everyday experiences lived by individuals in order to analyse culminating experiences. I will follow Dewey's discourse in order to show those traits of culminating experiences which are emphasized, according to our author, within the aesthetic experience.

In ordinary language we describe culminating experiences such as “an experience”, a conversation, a game or a lecture as a culminating experience if certain requirements are met. We are dealing with experiences, Dewey maintains, which stand out qualitatively from the remainder of lived experiences. They possess a singularity which makes them unique, and thus we are dealing with self- sufficient activities (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 42) In this type of experience there is an organic relationship, an integration, between that which the individual does and is subjected to, and for that reason they are experiences which do not cease but which flow towards their culmination. We are thus not dealing with a mechanical reaction to an external factor, as is the case of the hand pulling away from the fire, but that there is within the culminating experience a harmony between the distinct aspects of the individual interacting with his environment.

The singularity and unity of this type of experience is derived from the organic integration of the elements of which it is composed. The majority of everyday experiences do not culminate but cease. That is to say, there is a factor experienced as external which terminates the action. There is a lack of unity between the sentiments of the individual, his intentions and his action, and as a consequence those elements within the environment to which they relate manifest themselves as opposites.

In culminating experiences the emotions of the individual underpin and strengthen the experienced environmental elements, which are perceived as integrated. The perceived harmony is felt, the felt harmony is perceived, and intelligence and emotions combine and strengthen in this type of experience (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 44) This harmony is that which provides aesthetic quality to culminating experiences.

Dewey presents the concept of virtue from the classics as a mark of the culminating experience (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 46). Virtue is that excellence in the activity that makes it self-sufficient. Excellence derives from harmony, which is the

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result of the combination of the distinct elements; emotive, intellectual, volitional, of actions, which strengthen themselves mutually. For that reason virtue strengthens and intensifies the disposition of the person and empowers growth, which is manifest and develops through activity. Thus for the Greeks there was an aesthetic quality in moral behaviour.

The reference of art to the culminating experience allows it to be related to other types of culminating experience, such as the scientific or the moral (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 45). The difference consists in the purpose of these activities, the materials worked with and the emotive, intellectual or productive dimensions emphasized. Scientific activities use symbols whereas artistic activities work directly with the qualities of the materials used. In scientific activity the intellectual aspect stands out, as we are dealing with the understanding of a question. In the case of the aesthetic experience the qualities of materials are integrated with the intentionality of the artist. Thus the emotional integration of the elements of the work is understood, that is to say the emotive and intellectual characters of the work are inseparable.

The distinction between the artistic experience and the scientific experience allows Dewey to demonstrate the meaning of the same. The artistic experience has as its purpose the realization of the culminating character of experience, and in this way expresses and clarifies the living and aesthetic character of the culminating experience. (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 53)

The overcoming of dualism in Dewey's aesthetic theory and continuity in art and morality. Dewey realigns art with experience, which allows him to integrate the productive and contemplative dimensions of artistic activity, and also analyse the mutual implication of ends and means which the work of art represents. In the modern age, Dewey thinks, the ends have been separated from the means, the first being interpreted as purely subjective, and the second as merely external. This dualism which affects artistic theory impedes an understanding of art and is the result of the disintegration of experience. Dewey's aesthetic theory is thus of capital importance as by analysing the integration of aesthetic experience it allows the understanding and recuperation of the integral meaning of the experience itself. This is essential for understanding the meaning of the ends and overcoming the purely subjective interpretation of those values which undermine the moral.

In the modern age, Dewey affirms, works of art have been decoupled from the position they occupied in the life of the community, from the forum, from temples, and have been located in museums, places specifically designated for aesthetic recreation. This concept of art is a response to specific historical conditions. Museums came about in Europe as an expression of the power of nations and monarchs; places in which the trophies of some of their conquests

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were displayed. Imperialism and nationalism were factors that contributed to the new situation, and together with these and closely connected to this development was capitalism. Works of art have been severed from the activity producing them and they are regarded as “pieces” o “gems” which express the economic and social status of whoever purchases them. Dewey goes further: “Moreover, works of art are now produced, like other articles, for sale in the market.” (Dewey 1934, p.15)

However, the fragmentation and isolation of art with respect to other dimensions of human experience and life within a community is not exclusive to art, but a characteristic of modern life. Dewey points out: “Life is compartmentalized […] religion, morals, politics, business has each its own compartment, within which it is fitting each should remain, art, too, must have its peculiar and private realm. Compartmentalization of occupations and interests brings about separation of that mode of activity commonly called "practice" from insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from work, of emotion” (Dewey 1934, pp. 26-27).

The fragmentation of modern life has its origin in a disintegration within the practical and intentional dimension of the activity (Cf. Dewey 1934, p.12) This produces a rupture in the individual himself, of his practice and his principles, which transforms the working class into an instrument of external intention. At the same time principles, without any relationship to practice, either become futile or are violently imposed. Dewey outlined the nihilism of modern society, social conflicts and the alienated state of the worker doing work in which he is removed from its intentions and projects, that is to say from its human dimension, as did other thinkers of his time.

Dewey is widely known for considering that this fragmentation which results in alienation at work and the nihilism of values is the result of dualism and the abrupt parting of the ways between theory and practice which is present in the modern age. This theory - practice dualism began in the Greek era1. The Greeks “naturalized” social separation between the ruling class and the slaves dedicated to productive activity. This led them to believe that there was an essential natural order which ordered and integrated human life within the community.

The natural separation between directive activities, free and self-sufficient, and those of the body, productive and subordinate, led the Greeks to interpret artistic production as the reproduction of essential universals through craftsmanship. The natural essences introduced order, perfection and beauty. In that way nature was interpreted as a type of artist who directed each activity towards its own perfection, integrating each one within a harmonic, determined and finite cosmos. The Greeks possessed a wide aesthetic sense and in fact extrapolated the virtue

1Bernstein beautifully illustrates Dewey’s criticisms of the Greek separation of production and contemplation. For a more detailed analysis see Bernstein 2010, p.181.

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of technique, applying it to the moral and political fields, which they transformed into an art.

The changes in living conditions in the modern age, the developments in trade and the appearance of the bourgeoisie all led to the appearance of the individual. The human being was interpreted as being naturally independent. The rational nature of the individual allows him to direct himself, determining his own life unconditionally; that is to say removed from physical nature and society. The essences, as natural references within human life, become meaningless. The Scientific Revolution, with its Aristotelian critique of physics and cosmology, contributed towards their elimination. The conclusion is that the ends are located within consciousness, and consciousness is interpreted as having substance, that is to say independent or, in other words, introspective.

Thus Cartesian dualism introduced a separation between two types of reality, the thinking substance and that with extension; pure interiority and pure exteriority. Even the empiricists, in an attempt to regain experience as a reference for ideas, reduce them to perceptions, which they define as pure contents of consciousness.

The most notable manifestation of this dualism, which in the modern age means a rupture between the subject and the physical and social world, was the separation of means and ends within the whole range of human activity. The analysis of objective events was considered a function of science; the determination of the ends, being solely intentional, a task for the moral. The result was that science was linked more and more with technical issues and production, and the moral, directed as it was towards intentions and principals, was separated from productive activities considered to be purely instrumental. Ultimately this means- ends separation entailed the fragmentation of human life; the public and political from the private and moral, science from ethics. Art also suffered the consequences of the fragmentation of life and was separated from the rest of human experience and life in the community.

Dewey maintains, however, that art is manifest proof of the integration of means and ends within experience (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 31) The intentions of the artist are realised through those means within the environment, via perfect interaction in which all factors of which it is composed, emotions, movements of the body, ideas, converge and strengthen each other. The perfect integration of artistic experience transforms the interaction into communication and participation (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 28) For that reason the understanding of art as experience implies the recovery of the very integration of which experience consists, which at the same time allows the recovery of a vital sense of the ends and thus the continuity between art and the moral.

Finally I will move on to analyse the Deweyan explanation of the integration of perception and action in artistic production and aesthetic appreciation, and thanks to the communication between the artist and whoever appreciates the work of art, the civilizing, moral and social function of art itself.

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According to Dewey, aesthetic perception and artistic production are organically linked during the creation process (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 56) The perception of the qualitative relationship between the elements that make up the work, in which imagination, sensation and intelligence concur, is what produces aesthetic taste. The integration, which characterizes the work of art, is that which produces satisfaction on its perception, and for that reason appreciation is a test that allows the calibration of the quality of a work. Without this aesthetic component the work would be merely technique. Thus the artist calibrates aesthetically the quality of the work he produces. Taste in appreciation and productive activity are mutually implied in the process of generation of the work, but also at the moment of aesthetic appreciation.

Neither is aesthetic appreciation on the part of the observer passive. For taste to be aesthetic the observer must perceive the relationship between the different elements in an integrated whole (Cf. Dewey 1934, p. 58). In this way whoever appreciates a work of art recreates his own experience. If this labour of recreation, selection and integration is not present then according to Dewey there is no aesthetic appreciation, but recognition through the work of something external to it.

Art as experience, according to Dewey’s analysis, conducts and clarifies that trait which makes the experience paradigmatic and genuine, namely integration. Within artistic experience various factors from human experience are strengthened and for that reason, through art, experience is enriched and life is intensified. Art is an indispensable element for vital growth and for that reason it has a moral dimension.

Dewey considers that the fruit of this vital growth is the satisfaction which it generates, which is one of the indispensable ingredients of happiness. The contemporary separation between the productive and material from the ideal has deprived daily and business life of aesthetic qualities, which are not considered productive. In addition, and given that aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation are considered to be isolated from the conditions in which they are developed, individuals are deprived of that artistic training necessary for aesthetic enjoyment2. Dewey collaborated with Barnes, to whom his work Art as Experience was dedicated, in setting up the foundation which this philanthropic businessman dedicated to artistic education3.

In addition art allows the discovery and communication of values and ends, thus serving as a preamble to the moral. Art gives us the possibility to understand the vital meaning of the ends and their integration within experience, which makes possible the avoidance of adulterations in moral theory interpreted as exclusively

2 According to Dewey, the capacities, which could be developed within aesthetic enjoyment, without training, are blighted and become reduced to pleasurable excitations. The isolation of art has provoked a lack of aesthetic taste in daily life. Dewey 1934, p. 16. 3 Dewey expresses his gratitude to Albert C. Barnes in the prologue to Art as Experience, which he considers to a large extent the fruit of his conversations with Barnes.

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natural, as occurs in classical ethics, or as exclusively subjective, as occurs in modern ethics.

Conclusion The aesthetic theory of Dewey, the interpretation of art as experience, allows an understanding of the integral meaning of the experience itself, thus breaking with dualism. The separation of the natural as pure objectivity and exteriority from the intentional as pure subjectivity and interiority, that which dualism leads to in the modern age, has as a result the fragmentation of life and experience. On losing the reference which integrated them, the moral is separated from science and art, and retires to its own space isolated from other manifestations of communal life.

Within this state of affairs the aesthetic theory of Dewey and the reference of art to experience take on vital importance. According to Dewey art is a test of the integration between those subjective and objective aspects within experience, given that in the artistic experience, as much in its productive as in its appreciative dimensions, they appear as integrated. The intentions of the artist and of whoever contemplates the work appear integrated and expressed through the materials within the environment. Art explicitly realizes, clarifies in the words of Dewey, the integral character of culminating experience, that is to say it vitally intensifies the experience, allowing both the growth of the person and the humanization of the environment.

The interpretation of art as experience which Dewey offers allows us to circumvent the dualism which runs through moral theory, offering a vital interpretation of the ends. According to Dewey the ends are neither natural determinations, as classical moral theory maintains, nor are they purely subjective intentions, as maintained in the modern age, but through an integration of both points of view they are intentions which are expressed and refer to the natural and social media. In this way the reference to experience and the integral meaning of the same in Dewey offers us an understanding of the ends which serves as a preamble to moral theory.

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References - Alexander, T. M. 1987. John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience & Nature, the Horizons of Feeling. Albany: State University of New York Press. - Bernstein, R. 2010. Philosophy and democracy: John Dewey. Barcelona: Herder. - Cochran M. (ed.) 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Dewey. New York: Cambridge University Press. - Dewey, J. 1925. Experience and Nature. In: Boydston, J .A. (ed.) 1996. The Later Works of John Dewey (1925-1953), vol. I, Illinois. - Dewey, J. 1934. Art as Experience. In Boydston J. A. (ed.) 1996. The Later Works of John Dewey (1925-1953), vol. X, Illinois. - Hildebrand, D. L. 2003. Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. - Rud, A. G., Garrison, J. & Stone, L, (eds.) 2010. John Dewey at 150, reflections for a New Century. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.

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La teoría estética de Federico García Lorca

José Martínez Hernández* Universidad de Murcia

La poesía y el teatro de Federico García Lorca son, como es notorio, universalmente conocidos, admirados y estudiados por su grandeza y originalidad. Sin embargo, no ocurre lo mismo con el pensamiento estético que subyace a sus geniales creaciones poéticas y dramáticas, que sólo ocasionalmente ha merecido la atención de los especialistas en su obra.1 La teoría estética del poeta granadino, que está a igual altura de lo mejor que escribió, es la gran desconocida en el conjunto de su producción literaria, la gran ausente de todos los análisis y celebraciones, y el propósito de esta reflexión es contribuir en lo posible a deshacer ese entuerto.

En torno a la filiación estética de García Lorca se han acumulado los tópicos: la influencia del Siglo de Oro español, la importancia del simbolismo, su acercamiento a las vanguardias, especialmente al surrealismo, su adscripción al neopopularismo, etc. Todas estas influencias son ciertas y consabidas, pero el tópico, con ser verdad, es también, a menudo, la pereza del pensamiento y nos hace resbalar por la superficie de la realidad impidiéndonos ahondar en lo que creemos ya definido y, por tanto, sabido. Detrás del Lorca simbolista, surrealista o neopopular hay algo más, están la genialidad y la singularidad de un creador difícil de etiquetar con el rótulo de turno para disipar el vértigo y el asombro que su voz nos sigue produciendo. Hay en él una nueva concepción del arte y de la creación artística, tan importante como ignorada, que no se encuentra desarrollada sistemáticamente en forma de tratado o ensayo, sino condensada y resumida, como un pensamiento

* [email protected] 1 Cabe destacar en este sentido a Laffranque (1967) y Doménech (2008).

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destilado, en la más extraordinaria de sus conferencias, la que lleva por título “Juego y teoría del duende”.2

Ese texto excepcional es, en palabras de su autor, "una sencilla lección sobre el espíritu oculto de la dolorida España" y fue pronunciada por primera vez el 20 de octubre de 1933 en la Sociedad de Amigos del Arte de Buenos Aires.

Esa sencilla y breve conferencia contiene, a mi entender, una de las más profundas reflexiones que se han dado desde la cultura española sobre la creación artística. Se trata de un texto influido por la idea romántica del Volkgeist, el espíritu del pueblo, y pretende pensar y poner de manifiesto la peculiar contribución del espíritu español a la cultura universal, teniendo muy en cuenta el sabio consejo del Juan de Mairena de Antonio Machado: “Si vais para poetas cuidad vuestro folklore. Porque la verdadera poesía la hace el pueblo. Entendámonos la hace alguien que no sabemos quién es o que, en último término, podemos ignorar quién sea, sin el menor detrimento de la poesía” (Machado 2006, p. 355). El escrito de García Lorca no es una meditación al uso sobre el arte, sino que, como su título indica, es teoría y juego al mismo tiempo, síntesis de concepto y metáfora, de precisión e imaginación, y está lleno de intuiciones aún no superadas sobre la esencia del arte español y sobre el origen de su emoción estética más profunda.

En "Juego y teoría del duende" García Lorca realiza un prodigioso ejercicio de metamorfosis tomando del lenguaje popular, flamenco y taurino, la palabra "duende" y transformándola en una nueva categoría estética, en una nueva visión de la génesis del arte. La gran virtud de esa conferencia está no sólo en querer desentrañar e iluminar lo esencial de un arte tan español como el Flamenco, sino, sobre todo, en partir de la raíz del Flamenco para establecer desde ahí la sustancia última de todo arte. Para empezar, Lorca recoge la famosa frase del cantaor Manuel Torre: "Todo lo que tiene sonidos negros tiene duende" y la iguala con la afirmación de Goethe sobre la música de Paganini: "Poder misterioso que todos sienten y que ningún filósofo explica" (García Lorca 1997, p. 151). ¡Un gitano pobre y analfabeto situado a la misma altura que una de las cumbres de la cultura occidental! Nadie antes se había atrevido a tanto. "Juego y teoría del duende" está lleno de este tipo de comparaciones, de esos maravillosos atrevimientos. Por ejemplo, flamencos como Manuel Torre y La Niña de los Peines y toreros como Rafael el Gallo, Lagartijo, Joselito, Belmonte o Cagancho se codean en sus páginas con Sócrates, Descartes, Nietzsche, Goya, Rimbaud, Santa Teresa, San Juan de la Cruz, Jorge Manrique, Veláquez, Cervantes o Quevedo, borrando de un plumazo la rígida e intransigente frontera entre lo culto y lo popular. La vieja metáfora griega y clásica de la Musa como inspiradora del arte es apartada con firmeza para dejar paso a la nueva metáfora española y popular del duende. Nietzsche, el gran defensor del espíritu trágico de la música, aparece vislumbrando ese espíritu en sus formas exteriores, en la música de Bizet por ejemplo, sin saber que se hallaba en estado puro en los

2 Esta conferencia ha sido publicada también con el título de “Teoría y juego del duende”. Yo sigo la versión del título dada por Miguel García-Posada en García Lorca (1997, pp. 150-162)

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grandes artistas flamencos de Andalucía. Y por si todo ello fuera poco, la estética romántica que identifica lo trágico con lo sublime es corregida y superada por las sorprendentes reflexiones poéticas de un García Lorca genial y enduendado.

"Juego y teoría del duende" es un escrito revolucionario en muchos sentidos. En él nuestro poeta denuncia sin alardes, con increíble naturalidad, el clasismo y el menosprecio que se ocultan detrás de la vieja distinción entre arte culto y arte popular. Recurre al habla del pueblo y no a las grandes teorías estéticas para acuñar una nueva concepción de lo artístico. Hace suyo el tópico castizo y rancio de la España de flamencos y toreros y es capaz de alumbrar la profunda verdad que ese lugar común encierra. Recoge con gran sutileza y sin asomo de pedantería el concepto nietzscheano de lo dionisíaco en el arte y lo enriquece con una inédita interpretación. Se adentra en el inconsciente colectivo de los españoles y vuelve de allí cargado con un tesoro de intuiciones. Hace, en fin, del duende, palabra humilde y oscura, una nueva categoría del arte universal.

"Juego y teoría del duende" es también una prodigiosa indagación poética sobre la génesis de la emoción en el arte. García Lorca sitúa en el interior del artista el origen de esa emoción. Para ello compara dos viejas metáforas de la inspiración artística, la del ángel y la musa, con la nueva metáfora del duende. El ángel, dice Federico, deslumbra, vuela sobre la cabeza del hombre, derrama su gracia, y el hombre, sin ningún esfuerzo, realiza su obra. La musa dicta y, en algunas ocasiones, sopla. Ángel y musa vienen de fuera; el ángel da luces y la musa da formas. Pero el duende tiene su morada en las últimas habitaciones de la sangre y es allí donde hay que atreverse a despertarlo para pelear con él y quemarse con su fuego. El duende es un poder y no un obrar, un luchar y no un pensar, es estilo vivo, creación en acto, espíritu de la tierra. Para buscarlo no hay mapa ni ejercicio, pero para encontrarse con él es preciso rechazar al ángel y dar un puntapié a la musa.

Estilo vivo, creación en acto, el duende no se repite nunca: "Todas las artes son capaces de duende pero donde encuentra más campo es en la música, en la danza y en la poesía hablada, ya que éstas necesitan un cuerpo vivo que interprete, porque son formas que nacen y mueren de modo perpetuo y alzan sus contornos sobre un presente exacto" (García Lorca 1997, p. 155). Nuestro poeta concibe la creación artística como un tránsito del alma, un alumbramiento interior en el que su protagonista sólo oye tres fuertes voces que afluyen dentro de sí: la voz del arte, la voz del amor y la voz de la muerte.

A través de su teoría del duende Lorca muestra una nueva relación entre arte y verdad, entre ética y estética. Revela hasta qué punto la verdadera creación es un proceso de ascesis y despojamiento, no es un poner, sino un quitar, no es componer, sino desgarrar, no consiste en alzarse con orgullo sobre el andamio seguro del talento, sino en arrodillarse, huérfanos y desvalidos, ante el espejo de la fatalidad. El duende surge en la superación de toda técnica y artificio, brota como un milagro, como un entusiasmo sagrado: “La llegada del duende presupone siempre un cambio radical en todas las formas. Sobre planos viejos, da sensaciones de frescura

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totalmente inéditas, con una calidad de cosa recién creada, de milagro, que llega a producir un entusiasmo casi religioso” (García Lorca 1997, p. 155). El éxtasis mágico que provoca su advenimiento nace de la desnudez y el desamparo del artista, viene como bálsamo piadoso para su dolor, como dádiva inesperada para su pobreza y humildad: "El duende hiere, y en la curación de esta herida, que no se cierra nunca, está lo insólito, lo inventado de la obra de un hombre" (García Lorca 1997, p. 159).

Con su teoría del duende García Lorca nos revela un nuevo y sorprendente concepto del arte. En esa revelación se sugiere una filosofía trágica, se halla implícita una nueva concepción del ser humano en la que éste se muestra sobre todo como sujeto pasional, agónico y doliente, antes individuo sentimental que racional. En "Juego y teoría del duende" hay una ética de la pasión, de la autenticidad, de la expresión pura, hay también una nueva teoría de la catarsis, en la que la expresión de las emociones es un medio para el autoconocimiento, una concepción ritual del arte, en la que éste no tiene ya simplemente una función social, sino una misión comunita- ria, pues se convierte en creador de comunidad: “Con duende es más fácil amar, comprender, y es seguro ser amado, ser comprendido” (García Lorca 1997, p. 159).

Filosofía, antropología, ética, estética, religión mágica del duende, todo ello se deja vislumbrar detrás de las inspiradas palabras de García Lorca. Al final de su genial conferencia nos hace una última y definitiva revelación sobre la íntima relación que existe entre el arte y la muerte: “El duende no llega si no ve posibilidad de muerte, si no sabe que ha de rondar su casa, si no tiene seguridad de que ha de mecer esas ramas que todos llevamos y que no tienen, que no tendrán consuelo” (García Lorca 1997, p. 159). Desde los antiguos egipcios y desde Platón sabíamos que la religión y la filosofía nacieron abrazadas a la experiencia de la muerte. Gracias a García Lorca sabemos que también lo esencial del arte se nutre y crece estremecido por tan amargo y duro alimento. Sabemos que la verdad última del arte coincide con la verdad última del hombre, pero esa verdad no es racional ni abstracta, se resiste a ser domesticada en conceptos filosóficos; es pasional, furiosa y abrasadora, nace del dolor y del horror, es hija de la pena. Es la pena del individuo que se asoma con los ojos abiertos al abismo y al vértigo de la fragilidad de su existencia. "Juego y teoría del duende" es, en definitiva, un viaje iniciático hacia el oscuro secreto que une la vida con la creación artística. En ese texto Lorca trazó de manera decisiva el camino a seguir para una reflexión sobre el duende como nueva categoría estética y nos regaló dos intuiciones poéticas geniales, dos insuperables definiciones: "el duende es el espíritu de la tierra" y “el duende no llega si no ve posibilidad de muerte”. Sigamos ese camino y esas intuiciones.

Para Lorca el arte sólo puede ser entendido desde un sentimiento mágico de la realidad y si queremos comprender lo que significa aquí espíritu de la tierra hemos de abandonar la concepción racionalista del mundo, que acaba por secularizarlo y desencantarlo privándolo de alma y espíritu, que contrapone el espíritu a la naturaleza como ideas contrarias. Tenemos que recuperar su concepción mágica, la única capaz de sentir y testimoniar la presencia del anima mundi, el alma o espíritu del mundo. Estamos acostumbrados, por una inclinación racionalista y

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dualista, a pensar en el espíritu sólo como un poder divino que proviene del cielo y desciende sobre la tierra, como una gracia angélica que los dioses derraman sobre los hombres, pero con ello hemos olvidado otro sentimiento de lo sagrado y del espíritu que lo experimenta en la naturaleza y en la tierra, que lo siente como un temblor interior, un ímpetu furioso que nos conmociona e ilumina nuestras raíces.

Para comprender esto mejor, tomemos como ejemplo la música. En ella hay voces, como las del canto gregoriano o el bel canto que por su modo de sentir y de decir nos elevan y nos transportan más allá de este mundo, evocando y despertando nuestra naturaleza celeste, pues son educadas para desarrollar una técnica sublimadora de las emociones; pero hay otras voces, como la del Flamenco, que, por ser de condición muy diferente, más espontánea, natural y primitiva, nos hacen sentir nuestra naturaleza terrestre, humana, y nos arraigan al suelo que pisamos expresando una emoción elemental y desnuda. Las primeras serenan el alma; las segundas, en cambio, la hieren y la desgarran. Unas adormecen el cuerpo y nos hacen olvidar que somos carne; otras, sin embargo, lo hacen vibrar y lo tensan recordándonos nuestra condición corporal y carnal. Unas son, en fin, voces celestiales, sonidos que parecen provenir de los dioses y nos acercan a ellos, y las otras son voces terrenales, sonidos que provienen de los hombres y nos hermanan con nuestros semejantes en nuestra común condición natural. La voz enduendada del Flamenco es, ante todo, voz de un cuerpo terrenal que canta y que lo hace desde un estado de ánimo peculiar pasional y extremo. Su modo propio de decir es el grito, el ¡ay!, la síntesis del gozo/queja de estar vivos, la voz de la pasión.

En la concepción estética de García Lorca el arte aparece como una experiencia de lo sagrado en la naturaleza, como un testimonio fulgurante del misterio que nos rodea. Patetismo y magia van en él unidos porque, como dijo Sartre, “lo que llamamos emoción es una caída brusca de la conciencia en lo mágico”. Su experiencia artística es mágica, es una visión naturalista de lo religioso, en la que el mundo está lleno de fuerzas divinas que nos rodean, que actúan sobre nosotros porque las llevamos dentro y nos provocan el sentimiento de un contacto intramundano y cercano con lo sagrado. Son fuerzas telúricas, presencias terrestres, irracionales e inconscientes, potencias del llamado mundo intermedio, daímones ocultos que a veces se apoderan de los hombres para hacerles llorar o reír ofuscados, maldecir o bendecir sin medida, que fraguan en silencio y sin razón aparente su dicha o su desgracia.

El arte expresa, así, nuestra pertenencia a la tierra, habla de nuestra condición de seres naturales, de nuestro arraigo a la physis, naturaleza viva y poderosa de la que brotan todas las criaturas. Pero dicha pertenencia es contradictoria y ambigua, porque la tierra nos arraiga a la vida y nos promete a la muerte, nos sostiene y nos aplasta con idéntica firmeza e indiferencia, es, como dijera Leopardi, “madre en el parto y en el querer madrastra”. La naturaleza, la tierra, no es en el arte sólo caos o sólo cosmos, no es desorden u orden absoluto, sino caosmos, mezcla

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inseparable e incomprensible de orden y desorden, diosa contradictoria y de doble rostro que guarda celosamente el enigma de la vida y de la muerte, fuente secreta de la que siempre mana lo imprevisible, tanto lo peor como lo mejor. El espíritu de la tierra es paradójico y trágico, azaroso y sin porqué. Pone en entredicho todas nuestras frágiles seguridades, ridiculiza a cada momento la ansiosa soberbia de nuestra razón, es el escándalo en el que tropiezan todas nuestras aparentes respuestas convirtiéndose en preguntas cada vez más urgentes y pavorosas.

La voz del espíritu de la tierra, la voz del duende, es la que transmite de forma inmediata y directa, prelingüística, esta experiencia estética del mundo. Llamamos duende al genio tutelar que se apodera de nosotros y nos introduce en esa experiencia y decimos que tiene duende la persona capaz de adentrarse en ella. El duende no es ni ángel ni demonio, es, a un tiempo, diabólico y angélico y siempre terrenal. Es voz de la naturaleza y voz humana, voz en la que coinciden lo natural y lo humano, en la que el ser humano se reconoce como humus, tierra, y se manifiesta como hijo de la tierra. Esa voz ya no es, hablando con propiedad, música; es sonido natural que se sitúa en el origen sonoro, en el umbral de toda música. Es grito pánico, gemido, aullido, bramido, estertor, refleja el terror, la angustia, el espanto de vivir en el caos y en la negrura de la vida, pero grita desde ese caos, desde esa noche oscura del alma, con el deseo desesperado de ser oído en alguna parte, con la acongojada esperanza de que no sea delito el mero hecho de haber venido a este mundo. Ese grito es exclamación y pregunta a un tiempo, mitad interjección, mitad interrogación, voz desgarrada que parece decir a cada instante: ¡Dios mío! ¿Por qué?

“El duende no llega si no ve posibilidad de muerte”, dijo también García Lorca con genial acierto. Estableció así una íntima relación entre la aparición del duende y la vislumbre de la muerte. ¿Quiere ello acaso decir que en esta concepción el arte es morboso y que se complace en el memento mori como una objeción definitiva a la vida? De ningún modo. El arte no es aquí masoquista o nihilista, no está animado por una pulsión de muerte, sino de vida, no se asoma a la muerte por gusto o por curiosidad, ni indaga en ella por una preocupación teórica o especulativa al modo filosófico. La muerte está presente en la experiencia estética radical como certeza absoluta, como incontestable evidencia que nos sobrecoge. Esa evidencia no tiene que ir el artista a buscarla a ningún lugar recóndito ni esforzarse en pensarla como problema que atormenta a la razón, la tiene a su lado en la experiencia cotidiana, está en su mano como negro pan nuestro de cada día. Por eso no es verdad que sólo se canta lo que se pierde, se canta también lo que nos pierde y contra aquello que es causa de nuestra perdición.

El duende llega con la posibilidad de la muerte porque es la muerte la que nos hace humanos, terrenales, la que abate todas nuestras seguridades y nos obliga a cantar, pensar o rezar desde ese abatimiento. El duende no nos llega estando de pie, firmes y seguros de nuestras fuerzas, tampoco nos visita cuando nos sentimos amparados o acomodados en el mundo, sustraídos al espanto y al vértigo de la existencia, sino

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cuando la tierra se abre de súbito bajo nuestros pies. El duende es el genio de la postración, de la perdición definitiva, del dolor irreparable y sin consuelo, es el aliento inspirador de todo aquello que el hombre crea hincado en el polvo, aterrado y de rodillas. Para invocarlo no basta saber que somos mortales y hemos de morir, es preciso sentirlo como algo inminente, es necesario tensar el alma con la queja del duelo y la agonía, hacer vibrar la frágil cuerda que nos une a la vida y a su última verdad. El duende es la verdad del arte siempre que esté abierto a la posibilidad de la muerte. Si la muerte se olvida, se oculta o se silencia, si no se la tiene en cuenta viviendo como si ella no existiera, la vida misma queda disminuida, frívola y superficial como un tránsito vacío y gris, sin pena ni gloria. La presencia de la muerte en la creación artística no es un fin, sino un principio, es el comienzo de toda vida verdadera, que se sabe y reconoce mortal y se resiste a morir. Se trata de ser en la muerte, no para ella. Tener en cuenta la posibilidad inminente de la muerte es estar en la verdad de la vida, asomarse al límite y temblar en él a compás y con medida, sin perder la dignidad y la compostura del alma. El duende no es enajenación o locura en un sentido trivial, no es un arrebato histérico o una demencia sin sentido; al contrario, es una sabia demencia, consiste en romper las formas sin perderlas interiormente, es una locura sensata, una embriaguez lúcida. Crear con duende no es estar fuera de sí, es estar ensimismado, lo cual no significa hallarse distraído o falto de atención, sino concentrado en lo esencial, más consciente que nunca de sí y ajeno a cualquier apariencia engañosa. Para el artista enduendado sólo existe el Amor/Muerte, todo lo demás es mentira. Crear con duende es, en fin, sentirse arrojado al mundo sin remisión, desgarrado entre el amor y la muerte, expuesto a la pasión, expósito, huérfano y desamparado.

La teoría estética de Federico García Lorca supone una peculiar perspectiva de la condición humana. El ser humano no aparece caracterizado en aquello que le distancia de la naturaleza (razón, lenguaje articulado, autonomía moral, libertad, individualidad y sociabilidad, etc.), sino en lo que le hace ser natural y vivir apegado a la tierra (pasión, grito, fatalidad, comunidad), como hijo de la tierra. El ser humano no es mostrado como racional y lógico, sino como ser pasional y paradójico; es mirado con asombro y extrañeza, no definido o comprendido, porque se revela sorprendente, misterioso, contradictorio, atravesado por fuerzas que lo hacen incomprensible sobre todo para sí mismo. En su experiencia de lo humano García Lorca bien podría hacer suya la célebre frase del coro en la Antígona de Sófocles: “Muchas cosas asombrosas (deinón) existen y, con todo, nada más asombroso que el hombre” (Sófocles 2006, p. 149). El comienzo de esta famosa oda al ser humano merece ser analizado con algún detenimiento para entender nuestra condición tal y como aparece a través de esta perspectiva. En él se nos dice que el hombre es lo más deinón que existe, pero la palabra griega deinón, no admite una sola traducción, pues su riqueza semántica es muy compleja. Deinón, es, al mismo tiempo, lo asombroso, formidable, deslumbrante, monstruoso o terrible. Es lo extraño o fuera de lugar, sorprendente, carente de armonía, excéntrico y discordante con lo que le rodea. Las connotaciones de este término son tan amplias que entraña una gran ambigüedad, es el calificativo paradójico por excelencia. Sirve para designar tanto lo admirable y maravilloso como lo horrible y monstruoso, pero, en cualquier caso,

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hace siempre referencia a lo que excede toda definición y previsión, a aquello que es de condición cambiante y metamórfica, inaprensible, asombroso, ambiguo, exagerado y extremado para bien o para mal.

En la estética lorquiana del duende el ser humano aparece como un fascinante e inagotable enigma. Su sabiduría nos dice que si la lógica es la ley de la razón, la paradoja es la ley de la pasión. La condición humana es representada en aquellos aspectos que se resisten al uso de categorías reduccionistas basadas en la lógica de la disyunción, una lógica que sólo puede dejar satisfechos en este caso a quienes se contentan con una visión superficial de las cosas. Para entender al ser humano, parece decirnos la voz del duende, no nos sirve la técnica analítica de la división: o lo uno o lo otro. O instinto o razón, o determinismo o libertad, o inocencia o culpabilidad, o naturaleza o cultura. Por el contrario, para la estética del duende ser humano es ser, a la vez, lo uno y lo otro sin separación: ser en el Amor/Muerte, en la fatalidad/libertad, en la culpa/inocencia, en lo natural/cultural. Ser humano es ser en devenir, transitorio, mudable, en continua metamorfosis doliente y jubilosa. Es vivir en la paradoja, en el límite confuso de todos los contrarios, y habitar en él con autenticidad y dignidad. La teoría estética del duende de Federico García Lorca no se erige en juez de la condición humana, sino que la muestra atravesada e iluminada por la pasión, con su desvalimiento y fragilidad, con su radical incertidumbre, viviendo entre una lúcida ceguera y una ciega lucidez, mitad luz y mitad sombra, tan incapaz de gobernar su destino como de aceptarlo con resignación. En ella el arte es entendido como una prodigiosa mezcla de lucidez, coraje, piedad e inocencia, como una mirada que contempla cada día con asombro y entusiasmo el amanecer del mundo.

Termino con las últimas palabras de Federico en su conferencia: “El duende… ¿Dónde está el duende? Por el arco vacío entra un aire mental que sopla con insistencia sobre las cabezas de los muertos, en busca de nuevos paisajes y acentos ignorados; un aire con olor de saliva de niño, de hierba machacada y velo de medusa, que anuncia el constante bautizo de las cosas recién creadas” (García Lorca 1997, p. 162).

Referencias − Díaz Plaja, G. 1961. Federico García Lorca. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. − Doménech, R. 2008. “El pensamiento estético de F. García Lorca”. En García Lorca y la tragedia española, Madrid: Fundamentos. − García Lorca, F. 1997. “Juego y teoría del duende”. En Obras completas, Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores. − Grande, F. 1992. García Lorca y el flamenco. Madrid: Mondadori. − Laffranque, M. 1967. Les idèes esthetiques de Federico García Lorca. Paris: Centre de Recherches Hispaniques. − Machado, A. 2006. Juan de Mairena. Madrid: Cátedra. − Martínez Hernández, J. 2007. Poética del cante jondo (Una reflexión estética

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sobre el Flamenco). Murcia: Nausícaä. − Quignard, P. 1998. El odio a la música. Barcelona: Andrés Bello. − Sófocles. 2006. Tragedias. Madrid: RBA.

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La critique esthétique comme réponse à l'exemplarité morale, la lecture benjaminienne de la tragédie

Elise Derroitte* Université Catholique de Louvain

L'enjeu de notre exposé concerne la critique que Walter Benjamin adresse à une lecture morale de la théorie de la tragédie. Cette critique est particulièrement virulente dans la lecture benjaminienne de la Naissance de la Tragédie de Nietzsche, et plus généralement des instrumentalisations politiques de la théorie de l'art, instrumentalisations contre lesquelles il tente de dresser une anthropologie du drame baroque allemand.

Pour Benjamin, les rapports entre l'art et l'action doivent toujours, s'ils ne veulent pas finir par occulter complètement le moment de l'expérience esthétique et de son caractère potentiant pour le sujet, faire l'objet d'un processus de subjectivation. Ce processus ne peut se produire à partir de normes morales données d'emblée, il doit au contraire être spécifique à la particularité de l'expérience de l'art.

Notre exposé se déroulera donc en trois temps. Le premier concernera la lecture benjaminienne des lectures morales de la tragédie dans l'Origine du drame baroque allemand. Ce premier moment tentera de comprendre comment la figure du héros tragique n'est plus efficiente pour Benjamin face à l'historicité de la conscience collective au temps baroque. Le second tentera de développer l'anthropologie spécifique du protagoniste baroque comme une réponse à une esthétique de l'exemplarité défendue par les lectures morales de la tragédie. Il s'agira de montrer comment l'anthropologie de la créature produit une opération de subjectivation de l'histoire avec la théorie de la mélancolie. Enfin, notre troisième moment visera à comprendre les dangers d'une lecture morale et anhistorique de l'art au vu de sa possible instrumentalisation par l'esthétisation de

* [email protected]

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la morale (et de la politique) et la spécificité politique d'une démoralisation de l'expérience esthétique. Cette troisième étape tentera de comprendre la tâche à laquelle Benjamin invite son lecteur à la fin de son texte sur l'Œuvre d'art à l'ère de sa reproductibilité technique d'une politisation de l'art en réponse à l'esthétisation de la politique.

Introduction S’il fallait identifier une particularité des écrits esthétiques benjaminiens, nous pourrions dire sans trop nous avancer, qu’il s’agit toujours pour lui d’intégrer sa pensée dans une conception plus générale d’une philosophie de l’histoire voire d’une philosophie politique. Dès ses premiers textes sur le concept de critique esthétique chez les Romantiques jusqu’à son texte sur l’œuvre d’art à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique, en passant par les écrits sur Brecht, l’enjeu final, plus que de dresser une histoire des genres ou d’établir des critères d’interprétation individuels de l’art, est plutôt de parvenir à construire une théorie de l’art en prises avec la réalité sociale dans laquelle elle s’inscrit. Il ne s’agit pourtant pas d’une sociologie de l’art. Au contraire, c’est bien au niveau méthodologique que l’analyse sociale de l’art se produit. Il s’agit dès lors de comprendre les œuvres d’art non comme des manifestations mortes du passé mais plutôt comme des objets toujours actifs au moment de l’expérience qui en est faite, objets d’une réception au présent par leur spectateur.

Le Trauerspielbuch ne fait pas exception à cette règle. Dans ce texte, Benjamin, s’il délimite son sujet dans le cadre d’une étude du drame baroque, vise en réalité une critique profonde d’une théorie de l’art isolée d’une théorie de la réception des objets esthétiques. Tout l’enjeu de la distinction entre le drame baroque et la tragédie n’est donc pas une distinction stylistique mais plutôt une distinction dans la structure sociale et collective que ces deux genres littéraires impliquent. Avec le drame baroque, Benjamin tente plus de faire une théorie de la modernité qu’une théorie d’un style artistique assez mineur dans l’histoire de la littérature. C’est donc bien le filtre d’une analyse dynamique que Benjamin emploie pour aborder l’esthétique et non celui d’une théorie de la caractérisation formelle des genres littéraires.

Afin de mettre en évidence cette spécificité de l’esthétique benjaminienne, nous allons nous concentrer sur une des modalités d’occultation du moment de la réception esthétique d’une œuvre, celle de l’imposition de valeurs morales dans une théorie de l’art. Ce cadre nous permettra de mettre en évidence la structure d’objectivation que Benjamin critique tout au long de son œuvre, que ce soit dans la critique du progrès comme forme d’objectivation de l’histoire ou dans la critique des totalitarismes en général. Nous nous concentrerons ici sur le texte consacré à l’Origine du drame baroque allemand. Le contenu de notre exposé sera donc d’analyser la critique que Walter Benjamin adresse à une lecture morale de la théorie de la tragédie. Cette critique excède pourtant la seule théorie

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aristotélicienne sous-jacente aux systèmes esthétiques du XIXe. Elle intervient aussi plus généralement dans la conceptualisation des instrumentalisations politiques de la théorie de l'art, instrumentalisations contre lesquelles il tente de dresser une anthropologie du drame baroque allemand.

Pour Benjamin, les rapports entre l'art et l'action doivent toujours, s'ils ne veulent pas finir par occulter complètement le moment de l'expérience esthétique et de son caractère potentiant pour le sujet, faire l'objet d'un processus de subjectivation. Ce processus ne peut se produire à partir de normes morales données d'emblée, il doit au contraire être spécifique à la particularité de l'expérience de l'art. Nous pensons en effet que le cadre au sein duquel l’expérience tente d’être délimitée depuis l’extérieur peut occulter la réelle rencontre du sujet avec l’œuvre d’art et ainsi manquer ce qui, dans la rencontre entre l’œuvre et le sujet, peut avoir un caractère potentiant pour lui, peut intensifier son expérience du monde et déplacer le cadre institutionnel dans lequel cette expérience est produite.

Notre exposé se déroulera donc en trois temps. Le premier concernera la lecture benjaminienne des interprétations morales de la tragédie dans l'Origine du drame baroque allemand. Ce premier moment tentera de comprendre comment la figure du héros tragique n'est plus efficiente pour Benjamin face à l'historicité de la conscience collective au temps baroque. Le second tentera de développer l'anthropologie spécifique du protagoniste baroque comme une réponse à une esthétique de l'exemplarité défendue par les lectures morales de la tragédie. Il s'agira de montrer comment l'anthropologie de la créature produit une opération de subjectivation de l'histoire avec la théorie de la mélancolie. Enfin, notre troisième moment visera à comprendre les dangers d'une lecture morale et anhistorique de l'art au vu de sa possible instrumentalisation par l'esthétisation de la morale (et de la politique) et l’enjeu politique d'une démoralisation de l'expérience esthétique. Cette troisième étape tentera de comprendre la tâche à laquelle Benjamin invite son lecteur à la fin de son texte sur l'Œuvre d'art à l'ère de sa reproductibilité technique d'une politisation de l'art en réponse à l'esthétisation de la politique.

La critique de l’exemplarité morale dans la tragédie Afin de mettre en évidence la critique que Benjamin adresse à une forme d’instrumentalisation de l’art à partir d’une finalité qui lui est extérieure, nous proposons de relire les critiques que Benjamin adresse aux interprétations morales de la tragédie. La tendance de la critique littéraire majoritaire au XIXe siècle qui veut analyser le drame baroque à partir du cadre d’analyse de la tragédie grecque reste attachée à la théorie esthétique d’Aristote. Or, pour Benjamin, ce qui se joue dans le drame baroque est la naissance d’une forme de subjectivité moderne. Le mariage forcé entre cette forme d’art et la théorie de la tragédie grecque cache, pour Benjamin, une forme d’idéologie qui n’est pas assumée par les

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commentateurs. En effet, « on a voulu voir dans la tragédie, c'est-à-dire dans la tragédie grecque, une forme ancienne du Trauerspiel, apparentée dans son essence à la forme moderne. La philosophie de la tragédie a par conséquent été élaborée comme théorie de l’ordre éthique du monde, sans aucune relation avec les contenus historiques réels » (Benjamin 1985, p. 105). La critique de Benjamin envers les épigones qui commentent les formes dramatiques modernes à l’aune de la tragédie est donc double. D’une part, elle concerne l’inadéquation d’une conception essentialiste du tragique. Elle est donc d’une part une critique interne sur la méthode de la théorie esthétique au XIXe. D’autre part, elle est aussi politique. Pour Benjamin, en effet, cette opération, cette conception de l’homme est de nature idéologique. Cela signifie que l’effet de connaissance produit par ces penseurs induit un effet de société particulier. Pour Benjamin, ce qui est caché sous l’association du drame baroque à la tragédie grecque est une lecture moralisante de l’art qui veut déterminer les modes d’expérience en jeu dans le rapport à l’art. Pour Benjamin,

Dès qu’une interprétation s’amorce, il lui est impossible d’épargner un préjugé qui apparemment n’a jamais été attaqué. Il s’agit de l’hypothèse selon laquelle il faut recourir aux actes et aux comportements qu’on rencontre dans les personnages littéraires pour expliquer les problèmes de morale, comme on se sert du mannequin pour les leçons d’anatomie. On n’hésite pas à soutenir que l’œuvre d’art (…) est capable de reproduire les phénomènes moraux de manière exemplaire, sans même se demander s’ils sont reproductibles. (Benjamin 1985, p. 110)

La confusion, dès lors, qui s’opère entre l’expérience particulière d’une œuvre et la surimpression, sur cette expérience d’une vie qui ne concerne pas le personnage tragique, implique de manquer ce qui, dans l’œuvre, est l’objet d’une réception particulière au vécu de chacun. L’écueil est donc d’imposer à une œuvre un seul mode de lecture qui existe avant l’expérience elle-même et qui ne lui fait pas droit. Pour Benjamin, au contraire,

Le contenu de vérité de cette totalité, qu’on ne rencontre jamais dans une thèse abstraite, encore moins dans une thèse morale, mais seulement en développant, en critiquant et en commentant l’œuvre, n’implique justement que de façon très indirecte les préceptes de la morale. Chaque fois que ceux-ci s’imposent au premier plan comme le fin mot de la réflexion (…), la pensée s’est débarrassée du souci bien plus noble de déterminer la position d’une œuvre ou d’une forme dans l’histoire de la philosophie, au prix misérable d’une réflexion plus inauthentique et donc plus insignifiante que n’importe quelle doctrine morale. (Benjamin 1985, p. 111).

Nous retrouvons les deux niveaux de critique soulevés par Benjamin. D’une part, la morale vient occulter la réelle expérience qui peut être faite d’une œuvre d’art. Et d’autre part, et c’est le sens de la critique qu’adressera plus tard Benjamin à l’instrumentalisation de l’art dans les régimes totalitaires, cet effet de

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connaissance, le fait de penser que l’art est une sorte de ‘directeur de conscience’, qu’il est, sans médiation, le contenu de la vie, produit un effet de société particulier, à savoir le fait que cette interprétation empêche une autre forme d’interprétation que seule la critique peut mettre à jour. L’interprétation morale de la tragédie occulte donc une autre forme possible d’interprétation, c’est elle que Benjamin va tenter de construire dans son texte sur le drame baroque avec la théorie de la mélancolie et de l’allégorie.

La théorie du protagoniste baroque comme ipséité de la modernité Cette autre forme de réception que la morale vient occulter est précisément une forme critique et historique de réception des œuvres. Qu’est-ce-à-dire? Dans tout son texte, l’argument-clé qui permet à Benjamin de dévaluer les interprétations morales de la tragédie est que ces théories excluent de leur construction la question de l’histoire. Or, pour Benjamin, le propre d’une expérience est d’être incarné dans un temps qui ne peut être un temps homogène et vide de l’universalité morale mais le temps de l’à-présent de la réception d’une œuvre. Pour cette raison, quand Benjamin envisage le drame baroque à l’aune de cette question de l’histoire, c’est toute une théorie de l’art qu’il critique en réalité.

Face à cette surdétermination de la structure de la tragédie dans les études du drame qui comprennent l’art comme la manifestation figée, symbolique, d’une forme d’essentialisme de l’art déterminée de l’extérieur par une idéologie, Benjamin oppose une théorie du détour, de la sortie de la linéarité de la tradition. La figure qui entérine cette option de décalage est celle de l’allégorie. Néanmoins, il ne s’agit pas ici de rejoindre une théorie stylistique de l’opposition entre symbole et allégorie. Bien au contraire, comme le commente Bernd Witte dans son texte Walter Benjamin – Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker, l’allégorie devient plutôt un instrument méthodologique (Witte 1976, p. 123) d’analyse du drame baroque qu’une figure de style. Cet instrument est en effet ce qui permet de rompre avec la méthodologie moraliste du XIXe qui appliquait l’ontologie antique de la tragédie au drame baroque moderne. Nous pourrions aller jusqu’à dire que le Trauerspielbuch devient une forme d’allégorie d’une étude littéraire habitée de tout le processus critique allégorique que nous allons exposer maintenant. Cette hypothèse qui est la nôtre dans ce travail impose donc de construire en quoi l’allégorie est une forme critique.

Si cette forme peut être qualifiée de critique, c’est en raison de la manière dont elle construit son rapport à l’histoire. Manière qui, dans sa compréhension benjaminienne, diffère de celle usuellement appliquée à la tragédie. Le drame baroque, pour Benjamin, a pour particularité d’être la représentation artistique d’une structure de l’histoire qui s’articule sur l’expérience d’un pur présent. Comme le dit Benjamin, « il n’y a pas d’eschatologie baroque » (Benjamin 1985, p.

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66). Il ne s’agit donc pas de comprendre l’action dans le drame baroque comme la réalisation autotélique d’une rationalité extérieure (dans ce qui précède l’exemplification d’un problème moral prédéterminerait l’action du héros tragique) mais plutôt de voir comment le protagoniste baroque ne possède pas une solution extérieure au problème que la dramaturgie baroque pose. Le protagoniste baroque doit donc trouver cette solution au présent et pour le présent. C’est sur cette distinction entre une forme d’histoire accomplie avant même qu’elle ne soit vécue dans la tragédie et une forme d’histoire qui se construit au présent que la distinction entre l’allégorie et le symbole intervient. Comme le précise Benjamin, « le rapport entre le symbole et l’allégorie peut être défini et formulé avec précision sous la catégorie décisive du temps » (Benjamin 1985, p. 178). Alors que le symbole représente la plénitude du temps accompli du salut, l’allégorie est la face malade de l’histoire (Benjamin 1985, p. 178). « Ce n’est pas simplement la nature de l’existence humaine, mais l’historicité de la biographie individuelle » (Benjamin 1985, p. 179). Cette construction incarnée de l’allégorie dans l’histoire dans son pâtir radical est ce qui échappe au symbole. Le symbole est la figure abstraite de la représentation qui s’est émancipée de toute attache au vécu1. Elle vaut pour tous et en tout temps. L’apport critique de l’allégorie est donc de parvenir à intégrer l’expérience du vécu dans la construction de l’œuvre d’art. En effet, l’allégorie, n’étant pas attachée à une signification absolue, n'a de valeur qu'au vu du contexte dans lequel elle est produite, « elle doit sans cesse renouveler ses développements, sans cesse surprendre » (Benjamin 1985, p. 197). Cette particularité, pour Benjamin, loin d’être péjorative, impose au contexte une nouvelle noblesse. Pour Benjamin, l’allégorie doit se lire dialectiquement. Cette opération doit permettre de relier l’idée et le contexte où elle s’énonce. Elle nécessite donc un processus de subjectivation pour être accessible. La critique que Benjamin adresse au symbole est donc analogue à la critique que nous avons citée face à la croyance en une exemplarité morale des formes d’art. Le symbole semble reposer sur l’illusion d'une pure affectivité accessible sans être précédée par un procédé de transformation.

A contrario, la principale caractéristique de l’allégorie est de faire précéder toute production (l'image) d'une opération de réévaluation, à partir de la position particulière de l'allégoriste, des conventions, dans le cas qui nous occupe, des préceptes moraux, antérieurs à la réception subjective qui peut en être faite. Elle relie alors la convention à son expression particulière, c’est-à-dire qu’elle transforme la convention, comme Benjamin l’explique: « De même que d’une manière générale la théorie baroque concevait l’histoire comme un déroulement d’événements créé, l’allégorie en particulier, dans la mesure où elle est une convention, comme toute écriture, sera une convention créée. Au XVIIe siècle, l’allégorie n’est pas une convention de l’expression, mais l’expression d’une convention » (Benjamin 1985, p. 188). Nous retrouvons ici les deux opérations

1 C'est en ce sens qu'Adorno voit dans la théorie de l'aura la transposition de la théorie du symbole classique. Le symbole est, comme l'aura, l'allégeance d'une forme esthétique à une forme de discours qui la précède et veut la déterminer. (Adorno 2001, p. 168).

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qui permettent de qualifier l’allégorie de forme de critique. D'une part, le retour de l'allégoriste à sa propre affectivité qu'il doit exprimer s'il veut sortir du monolinguisme du symbole où le sujet est exclu ; et, d'autre part, la relance du processus historique dans l'élaboration provisoire d'une convention. Cette expression d’une convention créée montre l’assise du baroque dans sa matérialité. Le baroque ne prétend pas signifier une vérité anhistorique qui surdéterminerait sa manifestation (par exemple la croyance en l’exemplarité morale des tragédies antiques pour la compréhension des drames modernes).

L’enjeu de la distinction entre la lecture morale de la tragédie et la lecture historique du drame baroque Nous nous trouvons, à la suite de ce parcours, face à deux formes d’interprétation de la méthode de l’esthéticien. D’une part, nous avons la méthode du XIXe siècle qui considère que les œuvres d’art sont le vecteur de vérités éternelles et d’autre part, nous avons la méthode benjaminienne qui consiste à comprendre les représentations baroques comme le résultat de l’incarnation temporelle et fugitive d’une identité moderne. Ainsi, d’une part, nous avons l’art comme la manifestation objective d’une vérité absolue (proche de la théorie goethéenne de l’Urbild) et d’autre part nous avons l’art comme l’incarnation temporelle et toujours revisitable d’une expérience particulière. Cette structure se retrouve comme grille d’interprétation quand Benjamin en vient à analyser les rapports entre l’art et la politique dans le texte sur l’Œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique. Ce texte se clôt sur la formule restée célèbre : « Voilà l’esthétisation de la politique que pratique le fascisme. Le communisme y répond par la politisation de l’art » (Benjamin 2000, p. 316). Nous pouvons analyser cette sentence épistémologiquement à la lumière des deux types de rapport à l’histoire envisagés dans le livre sur le baroque. L’esthétisation de la politique serait le versant intemporel d’une esthétique manifestant des idées absolues et le communisme serait la réponse « baroque » à cette esthétisation par l’intégration en art d’un contenu vécu par les acteurs. Pourtant, cette dichotomie nous semble poser un nouveau problème qui n’apparaissait pas encore clairement dans le texte sur le baroque, à savoir quelle est la procédure de cette « politisation ». En effet, si la critique de l’esthétisation de l’art est identique à la critique de la moralisation de l’art, entendez sa déconnexion avec l’expérience réelle des acteurs qui sont en contact avec l’œuvre ; dans la politisation de l’art, comme dans l’allégorie, rien ne garantit cette liberté pour le spectateur. En effet, dans l’allégorie, comme dans la politisation de l’art, si l’art est en lien avec le contexte où il est produit, il ne l’est que pour l’artiste qu’il soit allégoriste ou communiste.

Ce qui prédomine encore ici, c’est l’absence de réception possible de l’art pour une théorie esthétique articulée sur une théorie de l’histoire par d’autres acteurs.

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Dans ce cas encore, le spectateur est soumis à la loi que lui impose une forme d’art donnée comme accomplie. La solution à ce problème, Benjamin la trouve dans la théorie de la critique. Cette opération consiste d’abord en un déplacement épistémologique de la question. La politisation de l’art entendue comme une émancipation d’un régime d’oppression, qu’il soit moral ou politique, ne doit pas intervenir au sein de l’objet mais bien du sujet. La critique n’est donc pas mise en branle au sein de l’œuvre elle-même mais au sein de la réception critique qu’un sujet fait de cet objet. La séquence épistémologique de la critique peut donc être construite comme suit : en premier lieu, le théoricien de l’art identifie un effet de connaissance qui produit un effet de société particulier qui empêche une autre forme d’analyse du dit effet de société par d’autres acteurs. Cette première opération consiste en une forme d’attention déconstructive du théoricien face à l’objectivation à l’œuvre dans son champ de recherche. C’est ce que Benjamin identifie dans son analyse de la tragédie. Il constate que le drame moderne est analysé à la lumière des théories morales de la tragédie antique (effet de connaissance) ce qui occulte le réel intérêt des pièces baroques, selon notre auteur, à savoir qu’elles sont la manifestation d’une forme moderne d’anthropologie qui précisément ne peut se voir dirigée par une téléologie posée d’emblée. L’anthropologie moderne, pour Benjamin, consiste précisément en la subjectivation d’un système posé comme absolu, au vu de son inadaptation au présent qu’il voudrait qualifier.

En second lieu, le théoricien produit une nouvelle méthodologie pour appréhender son objet qui tienne compte de son attention déconstructive à la surdétermination de son champ d’étude. Cette seconde opération est ce que produit Benjamin dans son livre sur le drame baroque allemand. Au lieu d’analyser les drames comme des faits littéraires au sein d’une histoire générale de l’art, il les analyse à partir de sa question propre qui est celle du vécu de la modernité. Le drame baroque devient alors la dramatisation d’une forme d’anthropologie moderne qui ne peut plus se contenter des grands récits mais qui doit réinventer ses codes d’interprétation du monde. C’est en cela que Benjamin reprend la théorie de l’allégorie comme une forme d’incarnation de la pensée dans le temps présent de sa production. Pourtant, cette deuxième opération est encore incomplète si elle ne s’associe pas à une troisième qui réside précisément dans la réception critique de cette nouvelle production, dans son dépassement dans une nouvelle forme mise en branle par les acteurs eux-mêmes

Conclusion A la suite de l’exposé que nous avons proposé aujourd’hui, nous avons tenté de montrer que la critique des interprétations morales de la tragédie au XIXe siècle participe d’une économie plus générale dans l’œuvre benjaminienne. Son point focal autour duquel cette critique gravite est celle d’une construction créative de l’histoire et de la place d’une théorie de l’art dans ce processus. En ce sens, la critique de Benjamin est avant tout une critique politique. L’art est un des lieux de

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manifestations des rapports de force au sein de la société et une théorie de l’art doit pouvoir tenir compte, dans sa construction, de ces rapports.

Pourtant, il ne s’agit pas de déterminer a priori le champ de l’art par une idéologie politique, comme nous l’avons critiqué dans l’opération de politisation de l’art. Au contraire, il s’agit plutôt de montrer que cette méthodologie a une double finalité. D’une part, elle déplace le champ de la théorie afin de porter l’accent sur le rôle du théoricien dans l’effet de connaissance qu’il produit. Nous avons montré que dans les théories morales qui imposent une lecture de la tragédie au drame baroque, s’articulait deux enjeux idéologiques: celui d’une croyance en la fixité des formes esthétiques dans l’histoire et celui de l’imposition d’une lecture morale de l’art qui inhibe une réception particulière et historique des œuvres. Et d’autre part, il s’agit de porter attention sur l’effet de société induit par cette théorie. L’effet de société produit par les théories critiquées était donc, selon nous, une isolation de la théorie de l’art d’une théorie de l’histoire comprise comme l’autotransformation des acteurs (artistes et spectateurs) par leur vécu particulier de l’expérience esthétique et de l’apprentissage nouveau qu’ils pouvaient en tirer. Cette seconde attention impose donc l’intégration des acteurs dans le processus de réception d’un œuvre d’art et le maintien de leur liberté interprétative afin que l’art soit un espace vivant de créativité et non la manifestation morte d’une idéologie qui existe en dehors de lui.

Références - Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 2001. Sur Walter Benjamin, trad. de l'all. par C. David, Paris : Gallimard. - Benjamin, Walter. 1985. Origine Du Drame Baroque Allemand, trad. de l’all. par S. Muller, Paris : Flammarion. 2000. l’Œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique, trad. de l'all. par M. de Gandillac revue par R. Rochlitz, in Œuvres III, Paris : Gallimard, pp. 269-316. - Witte, Bernd. 1976. Walter Benjamin – Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker, Stuttgart : JB Metzlersche Verlagbuchhandlung.

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Reading Antigone through Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy

Silvia Zappulla* University of Siena

Peter Euben (1986 p. ix) starts his work on Greek Tragedy and Political Theory by quoting Judit Shklar, who, on the occasion of Hannah Arendt’s death, said: “Political philosophy is tragic thought”.

The sense of the Shklar’s statement on the juxtaposition of Greek tragedy and political theory lies in the fact that a political theory, which is interpretation of everyday actions, cannot be just “theoretical”. Since the Greek tragedy is an “imitative art”, it offers a concrete means of interpretation of the human condition. This suggests that classical studies, literature and political philosophy do not belong to different fields, while they are complementary.

In Arendt, we find this interdisciplinary approach to Politics. The tragedy had a deep influence on Arendt’s political philosophy, so that a comparative study between Greek tragedy and her political theory is promising in order to provide a new insight on her political thought.1

My intuition is that Arendt’s reference Greek tragedy is continuous (not only in passing). Besides the explicit quotations of the tragedy, a dialogue with tragic texts

* [email protected] 1 Euben writes: “While Arendt only referred to Greek tragedies in passing, her overall emphasis on the prephilosophical articulation of politics and her substantive concerns (with action and speech, public and private life, heroism and immortality) stimulated others to do so”. Ibidem, p. xiv.

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seems to shape many passages of her writings, even when she does not cite Greek tragedy directly.2

This essay takes as its task the critical comparison between Sophocles’ Antigone and Arendt’s philosophy. While other tragedies (Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, Persians and Agamemnon by Aeschylus, and Medea by Euripides) also substantially affected Arendt’s thought, in this paper I specifically focus on the relationship between the Antigone’s and the Arendtian view of the public and private space, the human desire for immortality, authority and action.

The method used to achieve the aim of this paper is the comparative analysis between the Sophocles’ text under question and a select number of Arendt’s works (above all Human Condition, the essays collected in Between past and future, and On Violence). Moreover it was very important to discover in the personal library of Hannah Arendt (which is located at Bard College, USA) an edition oxoniensis of the Sophoclean plays. The text of Antigone, in particular, is underlined in many parts and commented on by Arendt with marginalia.

The tragic theatre as metaphor of the public space As a preliminary remark it is important to point out what Greek theatre represents in Arendt’s view.

For Arendt the theatre is the metaphor of the public space, where people interact. This view is inspired directly by the political nature of the attic drama, one of the fundamental institutions of Greek democracy.

Several studies demonstrate that the theatre – like the agora, the assembly of the citizens (Ecclesia) and the tribunal (Eliea) – was founded by the polis to guarantee the process of self acknowledgment of the individuals as members of the community.

Jean Pierre Vernant (1969 p. 107-108) points out the close connection between theatre and political life in Athens:

by establishing […] a performance open to all citizens, directed, played and judged by qualified representatives of the various tribes, the city makes itself into a theatre; in a way it becomes an object of representation and plays itself before the public.

2 Arendt’s personal library overflows with classical texts, physical proof of the influence of Classical culture on her thinking, embodied in the texts of the authors she most loved. Most of these texts are inscribed with marginalia Arendt wrote, providing evidence of a continuous dialogue between Arendt and authors like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The personal library of Hannah Arendt is a collection of the books found in her apartment in New York when she died. It is situated, for her will, in the Stevenson library at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

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And he claims (Vernant 1992, p. 36):

It [the tragedy] does not merely reflect that reality, but calls it into question.

I claim that this connection inspired Arendt thought.

The institutional function – along with the artistic one – of the theatre in classical Greece, i.e. the transposition of the political debates of the city on the stage, is considered by Arendt as a precious pre-philosophical means (we agree here with Euben, quoted above) to express the articulations of politics. Some historical and literary notes can support this argument.

Theatre was one of the establishing elements of the political, moral and religious foundation of the polis during the years of Athenian democracy (V- IV century B.C.). Moreover, the tragic poets participated to the political and intellectual education of their audience (Euben 1986, cit. p. 107).

As Kottman (2003 pp. 81-97) articulates:

with the birth of the tragedy the community of spectators begins to find itself in, and in fact to constitute itself through, the work of a shared self-representation.

Longo (1990 p. 6) affirms that the Athenians in the theatre were spectators not only of the drama but also of a series of events (religious sacrifices, athletic competitions and celebrations of the winners) before, during and after the dramatic spectacles; by those rituals the polis intended to enforce the civic identity of the people.

In this respect, the dramatic action and the political situation are similar: both represent the game of the human relationships. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, for example, this continuity between reality and fiction is very well showed. Oedipus reconstructs his personal biography thanks to the dialogue with the characters that recall the events of his past, and, step by step, he becomes aware of his identity. When, at the end of the play, he discovers who he is, he comes onto the stage, in front of the audience, revealing the truth: this means that the process of self acknowledgment is considered by the polis a fact of public interest and the aim of tragedy is to represent this process (Euben 1986, cit., p. 109).

Hannah Arendt refers to this trait of the Greek theatre, especially when she deals with the concepts of plurality, identity and visibility. Nobody exists without the presence of the others, she says, merely because they are spectators of the subject’s actions.

In the theatre the spectators see the play, they judge it and so they offer a key to interpret that action. The story takes its sense from the judgment of the spectators.

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In the same way, the people in everyday life look at the actions of the other human beings. If those actions wouldn’t appear, they were as if they never happened. Hence the presence of the others is guaranty of existence for the subject and its actions. By the point of view of the others, the actions of every subject make sense. The subject knows himself, who he is, thanks to the others. The others complete the self-acknowledgment process of the subject.

This is a political fact, since in this common world people talk and act, disclosing their reciprocal roles; the community becomes – in this way – essential, giving significance to the single lives and founding the individuality on a plural relationship. As Arendt writes (1998, pp. 180-184):

This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them – that is, in sheer human togetherness.

The realm of human affairs, strictly speaking, consists of the web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together. The disclosure of the “who” through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. […] this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life.

Finally, the theatre offers a place where people are visible. Tracing the etymology of the word theatre, we realise it comes from the Greek theaomai – to see and to be seen – exemplifying the conceptualisation of Greek political life and the contiguity between the Greek and the Arendtian position.

As Arendt avers (1998 p. 199):

“for what appears to all, this we call Being” (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1172b3 ff), and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream.

Besides the theatre portrays the “web”, the space in-between people, which, in Arendt’s view, is both political and narrative: political, because it consists of subjects, who express their humanity by living together, needing each other, as we already said; narrative, because the spectators of the play (i.e. the other human beings in the everyday life) say who the others are by telling their stories.

The power of the narration in Arendt is more important than the ability to act in front of the others: if there was nobody to tell the story of a deed (in poetries, in dramatic plays, in histories), the deed itself would perish and be forgotten (Arendt 1998 p. 184).

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[action] produces stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things. These stories may then be recorded in documents and monuments, they may be visible in use objects or art works, they may be told and retold and worked into all kinds of material […]

They tell us more about their subjects, the “hero” in the centre of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it.

There are several studies on the importance of the narration in Arendt’s philosophy and we shall discuss this point later in this article. Here, it is noteworthy that to recount the action entails the rendering of the human beings immortal. In this sense, among the narrative forms that can be used to tell a story, the imitative one, which is peculiar of the tragedy, is the most appropriate to describe the human deeds.

According to the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, which is imitation of action or mimesis, Arendt finds that the tragedy reproduces the human condition, because it is able to imitate human actions (Arendt 1998 p. 187).

The specific content as well as the general meaning of action and speech may take various form of reification in art works which glorify a deed or an accomplishment and, by transformation and condensation, show some extraordinary event in its full significance. However, the specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and “reified” only through a kind of repetition, the imitation or mimesis.

Hence, we can affirm with Arendt (1998 p. 188) that:

The theatre was the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art. By the same token, it is the only art whose sole subject is man in his relationship to others.

The conflict between Public and Private: Arendt and Sophocles To undertake a rigorous analysis of Arendt’s use of Sophocles, we consider specifically – besides Arendt’s published works – one text found in her personal library, Sophoclis, Fabulae, Oxonii, e Typographeo clarendoniano, 1924.3

The book is a collection of Sophocles’ seven surviving tragedies.4

3 The format of the title is in Latin language. 4 It is interesting to note that Arendt’s comments in the book are in two languages: English and German. I suppose, then, that the first time Arendt read the play was probably before she arrived in the United States, which implies that she read them already before 1933. In the preceding period she had no reason to write in a language other than German. Then, while she was living in the United States, she might have read the play again when the use of English might have been more familiar to her, so that she could use both

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Sophocles, and in particular his Antigone, affected Arendt more than most. Arendt kept several editions of Antigone in her library and she quotes Antigone more than any other Greek tragedy. Moreover, the topics covered by Sophocles closely mirrored the philosophy Arendt promotes: Authority, Democracy and Freedom are recurrent themes in both Arendt and Sophocles, especially in the Sophocles of Antigone.

In this respect, Arendt is neither the first nor the only author to refer to the Greek drama to elaborate a political theory. As P. Euben (1994 p. 24) makes clear, sometimes Greeks are like an “aid to clarify the character and contours of modern theory and society”. Hence there are several studies where the mythical themes depicted in the most famous tragedies are used to introduce, develop or explain topics as justice (e.g. Euben 1994 pp. 67-96), political rationalism (P.J. Ahrensdorf 2009), free speech as political freedom (A. Saxonhouse 2006), the conflict between private and public law (J. Butler 2000). In particular, Antigone has been largely used in political theory. Antigone has usually been associated with the image of the “civil disobedient” and the lonely heroine who fights against the absolute power; she has represented the principle of the natural law, which belongs to human beings simply for the fact that they are (P. Nonet 2006).

She has been considered, moreover, the voice of the female claim against the rules of the patriarchal law (L. Irigaray 1985), or, like in a recent work of Bonnie Honig (2009), the last claimant of “Homeric/elite objections to the classical city’s democracy” about the question of burial.

Arendt considered the dialectics of Sophocles’ Antigone well suited for explaining the contradictions of the modern age and of the human condition in the modern age. In the Sophoclean world, human beings realize they no longer possess a standard code of values which can regulate their choices. The divine laws of piety give Antigone the right to bury her brother; the polis’ law gives Creon the right to condemn Antigone. Both rights are legitimate. This conflict proves that the public dimension of the human beings cannot remain totally separated from the private one.

Arendt dedicates an entire section of her Human Condition (II. The public and the private realm, Human Condition, cit. pp. 22-78) to the discussion of how the modern age has lost this condition of agreement-and-distinction between the public and private worlds. This happened – Arendt contends – because people had not been able to separate, since the end of the polis era, what belongs to the oikos and what, on the opposite, must be displayed in public (Arendt 1998, p. 33).

The disappearance of the gulf that ancients had to cross daily to transcend the narrow realm of the household and “rise” onto the realm of politics is an essentially modern phenomenon.

languages as mother tongue. Furthermore, the text is rich with underlining, notes and marginalia.

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The mass society reigns, having displaced the polis, and men’s doings – labouring and working – dominate over men’s political acts. Yet political acts remain an important factor of the human condition. Here, the problem is that the boundaries of the public and private spheres vanish, which results in the “loneliness” of men in totalitarian regimes, and which, as Peg Birmingham claims, constitutes the reason why human beings may feel as superfluous, abandoned and banned from the public world (P. Birmingham 2003, pp. 80-103).

Sophocles deals with this topic in his Antigone, asking how a principle of private behaviour (the love of a sister who desires funeral honours for her brother’s body) can be integrated in the public law.

At a first glance, following Arendt’s theory, Creon should not give importance to Antigone’s claim, because she is trying to confuse private and public, idion and koinon; her behaviour is not political, since it regards blood ties, so it has to remain within the boundaries of the household.

This is the criticism to Arendt by Judith Butler (Butler 2000) in her book Antigone’s claim. Kinship between life and death; she disapproves the Arendt’s theory, that all is human is to be public. Antigone’s attention to the family, which leads her to oppose uncle’s edict, is not a public matter, while it is human. The problem is with the positive law, because it does not account for a fundamental part of the human nature. Thus, in this case, Philippe Nonet, quoted above, would be right, in raising the question about natural and non-natural law. If natural law belongs to men qua men, Antigone’s claim is legitimate and Creon is maintaining a non-natural principle, which imposes upon the dead to remain with living people, and living people to stay with the dead. And Arendt, in such an instance, would be wrong, because the question is not about the conflict between private and public law, but between natural and positive law, where the positive law is not allowed to contrast with the principles of the natural one, irrespective of whether it is private or public.

I believe that this is not Arendt’s point: she describes several times Creon as a tyrant, as a man who governs without an acknowledged power, by using sheer violence.

She posits that Creon is responsible for the confusion between private and public law, while Antigone is not. Creon, indeed, governs the polis like a pater familias ante litteram. He considers the citizens like slaves or children incapable of making their own choices. He talks with violence, he behaves as a basileus (word used by Arendt in her marginalia to comment the character), i.e. as a political figure preceding the advent of democracy, where Arendt’s conceptualization of the public sphere lies. We do have a conflict between private and public law, but this is not rooted in Antigone’s claim, but rather in Creon’s.

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This fact clearly appears in the dialogue between Creon and his son Haemon, that Arendt quotes in a passage of the essay What is authority, where she points out the importance of having agreed actions in politics (Arendt 1983, pp. 104-105):

To the polis, absolute rule was known as tyranny, and the chief characteristics of the tyrant were that he ruled by sheer violence, had to be protected from the people by a bodyguard, and insisted that his subjects mind their own business and leave to him the care of the public realm. The last characteristic, in Greek public opinion, signified that he destroyed the public realm of the polis altogether – a polis belonging to one man is no polis [here Arendt reports on a footnote the Greek transcription of the verse 737 of Antigone]– and thereby deprived the citizens of that political faculty which they felt was the very essence of freedom.5

And here there are Sophocles’ verses (in Sir Jebb’s edition and translation. Jebb, 1987, vv. 737-739):

Ai. pÒlij g¦r oÙk œstq\ ¼tij ¢ndrÕj ™sq\˜nÒj.

Kr. oÙ toà kratoàntoj ¹ pÒlij nom…zetai:

Ai. Kalîj ™r»mhj g\ §n sÝ gÁj ¥rcoij mÒnoj.

Hae: That is no city, which belongs to one man.

Cr: Is not the city held to be the ruler’s?

Hae: Thou wouldst make a good monarch of a desert.

In correspondence with these verses Arendt writes, in the edition of Antigone found in her library: “Zeichen der Tyrannis”, which means the marks, or the features, of tyranny.

This argument leads us directly to the Arendtian concept of authority.

Power’s nature and authority Arendt took the Greek polis as an historical ideal-type for her concept of public space: the polis was a political organization removing the distinction between ruler and ruled; the polis comprised a community of free citizens sharing the space in which they could act and speak, so that every individual concurrently exemplified his constitutional plurality (Arendt 1983, p. 93):

The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither in common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place.

In this way the polis was not only a physical space, but already a political situation.

5 The footnote with the quotation from Antigone is on p. 289 of the same book.

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The instrument of power in Greece was not to subdue people through violence (that Greeks used in governing foreign affairs), neither through persuasion, used in domestic affairs (Arendt 1983, p. 93). Authority in the polis was not the principle to legitimate the duties of citizens, but rather represented the acknowledgment of the reciprocal roles that people had inside the polis itself. The consequence of this free state of acknowledgement was the public dialogue in the agora, which inspired Arendt and that we find in the tragic agon.

Connections between people’s speeches in the polis and the tragedy lie both in their structure and their contents. Not only the speeches of the people in the public realm are similar (in terms of their structure) to the logoi in the tragedy; but the plots of the tragedies also provide fertile material for their arguments.

In an interesting article, Josiah Ober and Barry Strauss (1992 pp. 237-270) have drawn a comparison between the language used by the political rhetoric in the Athenian democracy and the contemporary drama, pointing out how both were just different forms of the public speech.

Like legal trials and Assembly speeches, Athenian theatrical performances and dramatic texts were closely bound up in the mediation of conflicting social values.

The authors repeatedly argue that the orators, like the dramatists, had to hold the attention of the audience by performing their own show. And, on the other side, the poets used to compose their logoì like the speeches of the orators. A clear example is offered by Creon of Sophocles’ Antigone, in particular his agon with Teiresias (Ober and Strauss 1992 pp. 261-262). They also affirm that plays and orators’ speeches are similar also in their structure:

The structural tactics of metaphors, analogies, images and topoi that were devised by elite authors, displayed in public speech, and judged by mass audiences, were integrated into a comprehensive, flexible, and functionally effective socio-political strategy.

These considerations are important to our discussion because Arendt inherits this political sense of the language from the political foundation of the tragic art, whence she derived her concept of political power.

Jürgen Habermas (1977), interpreting Arendt’s concept of power, describes it as “communicative”. There is a sort of transcendental community of speaking subjects (the word “transcendental” in Arendt is very problematic, since it refers to Arendt’s interpretation of Kant), which discusses certain principles of political behaviour and by whose decisions the power is legitimated.

Thus the importance of the speech in politics, belonging to Arendt’s philosophy and pointed out by Habermas, is rooted in the “much talked reality of the polis”, as Canfora affirms (2008); the speech for Arendt has a dominant role in politics, because the web of relationships, which constitutes the human condition, enacts the web itself in this narrative net, where people tell about the others by telling their stories.

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Some significant comments on this topic, found as marginalia in Arendt’s Antigone, seem to be particularly interesting. In the argumentum of the tragedy Arendt underlined “tes poleos” (genitive, “of the polis”) and wrote “Creons” beside it.

'AntigÒnh par¦ t¾n prÒstaxin tÁj pÒlewj q£yasa tÕn Polune…khn ..6

This implies that she is identifying the polis with the law, and the law with Creon’s order not to bury the body of Polynices.

It is worth recalling that Creon was king because the dynasty of Oedipus became extinct after the death of Oedipus’ two sons. Only Oedipus’ daughters survived. However, women could not govern in ancient Greece, and Creon was the closest relative, as he was the brother of Clytemnestra, Oedipus’ mother-wife. In that moment, Creon identified himself with the polis and he established that Polynices, who waged war against Thebes to obtain the control of the polis, had to be considered a public enemy. Polynices could have had a place inside the polis neither while alive nor dead, and he had been sentenced to remain unburied, to be eaten by wild animals.

Antigone, against the edict of her uncle, buried her brother’s corpse. She thought that to disobey human law would be better than to disobey divine law. Although Polynices was considered an enemy of the city, he was not only her brother, but a man. Human pity, Justice and the laws of the Gods establish that a man must be buried, whoever he is and regardless of his crimes.

In Creon’s opinion, on the other hand, Antigone’s choice to disobey him marks a rebellion against the law, which he represents. Thus, like her brother, Antigone became an enemy of the polis.

Considering why Arendt wrote “Creon” beside “tes poleos”, we can infer that she intended to be ironic about the contradiction between the polis and Creon. As I mentioned, in the context of the Antigone, Creon is the polis. Nevertheless, it remains true that his law – the law of one ruler – cannot be the law of a democratic polis. The first reason for this is that Creon has established this order without consultation with the people (and we already said how to be acknowledged via public speeches is important for the power). The second reason is that, according to Greek religious precepts, human law cannot contradict holy law. Moreover, the law must be universal, in a Kantian sense, i.e. it must always apply to everyone. What would happen, if every king of every state would establish who can be buried and who cannot? This demands a further ethical question: who claims the rights of the dead?

Because the polis is a plurality, a ruler cannot judge without considering the viewpoints of the ruled. Otherwise, the risk is to transform the community into a desert. Recalling Sophocles’ verses quoted above, we find in Arendt one more

6 Sophoclis, Fabulae, Oxonii, e Typographeo clarendoniano, 1924.

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passage where such are mentioned again. It is in Human Condition, where Arendt is discussing power’s nature and the importance of a shared space in which people can act together. Arendt writes (1998, pp. 200-201):

While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse […]

Popular revolt against materially strong rulers, on the other hand, may engender an almost irresistible power even if it foregoes the use of violence in the face of materially vastly superior forces. To call this “passive resistance” is certainly an ironic idea; it is one of the most active and efficient ways of action ever devised, because it cannot be countered by fighting, where there may be defeat or victory, but only by mass slaughter in which even the victor is defeated, cheated of his prize, since nobody can rule over dead men.

(Note that here “nobody can rule over dead men” is clearly Sophocles’ Antigone v. 739 – see page 8 of this article – but it is not quoted by Arendt. She quoted it only in What is authority? as reported in this paper on page 8).

A preliminary remark on understanding the concept of authority is about the idea of power itself: power for Arendt is dynamis, in the aristotelic sense of energy (energheia), which discloses its effects only if it finds the conditions to be enacted. The only way that people have to wield their power is to live together.7

A more precise conceptualization of power, violence and authority is emphasized by Arendt in her essay On Violence, where she points out the differences between those concepts, and demystifies the incorrect use of such terms (Arendt 1970, pp. 44-46).

Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together […]

Strength unequivocally designates something in the singular, an individual entity […]

Force, which we often use in daily speech as a synonym for violence, especially if violence serves as a means of coercion, should be reserved, in terminological language, for the “forces of nature” or the “force of circumstances”, that is, to indicate the Energy released by physical or social movements.

Authority, relating to the most elusive of these phenomena and therefore, as a term, most frequently abused […] is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed. […] the greatest

7 In Human Condition, cit., the analogy to her concept of power and the Aristotelian “energheia” is clearly remarked by Arendt: “it is this insistence on the living deed and the spoken word as the greatest achievements of which human beings are capable that was conceptualized in Aristotle’s notion of energheia (“actuality”), with which he designated all activities that do not pursue an end (are ateleis) and leave no work behind, but exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself” (p. 206)

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enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to under mine it is laughter.

Violence, finally, as I have said, is distinguished by its instrumental character.

Analyzing her text of the tragedy, we find another interesting aspect of the law in the polis: in line 8 Arendt underlines the word “strategòs” and annotates “Creon als basileus” (a combination of German and Greek) (Sophocles, vv. 7-8)

kaˆ nàn t… toàt\ a} fasi pand»mJ pÒlei

k»rugma qe‹nai tÕn strathgÕn ¢rt…wj;

And now what new edict is this of which they tell, that our Captain hath just published to all Thebes?

Here it is useful to recall an argument discussed in the precedent paragraph. In Ancient Greece the “basileus”, that is, the king, had both political and military power (the English translation in fact is “Captain”). This also means that the basileus as a political figure precedes the advent of democracy in Greece. Calling Creon basileus means to judge him as antidemocratic. The nature of the polis requires instead that citizens participate to the politics; that the power of the ruler is limited by the public assembly, and that political roles are divided across the proper magistrates. In this way, Creon seems more like a tyrant than a king and, from what we can learn from the Arendt’s point of view, Creon represents power founded on violence, in contraposition to the democratic nature of the power itself, which should be an acknowledged authority.

To refer to Creon as basileus also implies that the root of the power represented by Creon can be considered an undeveloped form of constitution, which, rather than being the democracy of the polis, represents the tribal, domestic power of the oikos. Oikos (that is at the base of the word “economy”) in its primitive sense, means household organization, in which people think mostly about the problems of surviving. Here we can find the foundation of the distinction between the private and public realms. Before the rise of the democracy – where people are citizens before being individuals – the laws used to establish a different kind of organization of power: there was a private world, inside the household, separated from the common, where nothing political held. In the oikos the only organization of roles was the division between men, women and slaves, and the objectives were procreation and subsistence. At the opposite extreme, in the public space, the attitudes of the people were different, because concerns in public life involved the organization of the public itself. Further, to put private behaviour in the public realm would have implied that politics had regressed to the governance of the household.

Creon thus moves back to a primitive and private form of power. He denies the plural dimension of the citizens. This phenomenon occurs both in tyrannies, during the ancient age, and in totalitarian regimes, during the modern age.

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Arendt (1998, pp. 28- 31) discusses this in Human Condition:

[The difference between the private and the public] has become even more confusing in modern usage and modern understanding of society. The distinction between a private and a public sphere of life corresponds to the household and the political realms, which have existed as distinct, separate entities at least since the rise of the ancient city-state.

We therefore find it difficult to realize that according to ancient thought on these matters, the very term “political economy” would have been a contradiction in terms: whatever was “economic”, related to the life of the individual and the survival of the species, was a non-political, household affair by definition.

The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as the life of the species needs the company of others. […] The realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis.

Even more interesting is what Arendt writes in a footnote on page 32: she is discussing the difference between the public space – founded on equality – and private realm – where people experience strict inequalities –. When an authoritarian power deprives the citizens of their public sphere, the governor acts as the head of the household. Here are Arendt’s words:

According to Coulanges, all Greek and Latin words which express some rulership over others, such as rex, pater, anax, basileus, refer originally to household relationships and were names the slaves gave to their master.

The word basileus comes again in What is authority? in a passage which discusses the same topic (Arendt 1977, p. 105):

[In Greece] the head of the household ruled as a “despot”, in uncontested mastery over the members of his family and the slaves of the household. The despot, unlike the king, the basileus, who had been the leader of the household heads and as such primus inter pares, was by definition vested with the power to coerce. Yet it was precisely this characteristic that made the despot unfit for political purposes; his power to coerce was incompatible not only with the freedom of others, but with his own freedom as well.

The subject deprived of his plural condition, i.e. the subject who lives alone, is an “idiot” by definition, since, in the etymological sense of the word, the idiot is the lonely man, outside of the common world, a point which Arendt reiterates, again, in Human condition (1998, p. 38). Unfortunately, this phenomenon, i.e. idiocy, plagued political power in ancient Greece, and also plagues the use and abuse of political power in the modern world.

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In the essay What is authority we find that Creon echoes this kind of degeneration of power. Arendt claims that the foundation of authority rests in tradition, and, without this condition of self-acknowledged authority, the polis suffers and the society withers. Moreover, according to Plato, tradition is the power of rationality, and, after that, the power of myth and religion, for those, the majority, who cannot be persuaded by the evidence of the truth (Arendt 1977, p. 32).

Belief is necessary for those who lack the eyes for what is at the same time self- evident, invisible and beyond argument. Platonically speaking, the few cannot persuade the multitude of truth because truth cannot be the object of persuasion, and persuasion is the only way to deal with the multitude. But the multitude carried away by the irresponsible tells of poets and storytellers can be persuaded to believe almost anything; the appropriate tales which carry the truth of the few to the multitude are tales about rewards and punishments after death; persuading the citizens of the existence of hell will make them behave as though they knew the truth.

In this aristocratic mode of thinking, the few, the philosophers, should govern, because they do not need to be persuaded: they can see the truth and therefore understand the order that derives from it. But the multitude of men, who cannot judge according to Reason, requires persuasion deriving from a kind of courtship of their minds. Plato’s use of myth represents such attempt of persuasion, and in almost every religion we can observe stories about reward or punishment in the afterlife that act to persuade. In Arendt’s opinion the platonic solution is not either the philosophical foundation for the authority. This is the reason why she claims that the ancient Greeks did not have a theory of authority, since they had experience of it in the concrete political life. On the opposite, they started to philosophize about authority when their democracy decayed.

This form of authority, where people acknowledge their roles in the public sphere, without needing a constitution of rules to uphold the hierarchy, is a form of authority that humanity will never have again. The Greeks experienced such authority for a short period, and they always tried to avoid tyranny. But the first step can allow a system to degenerate, as Creon’s example demonstrates.

Creon’s example (like several other characters of the tragedies) demonstrates that Greeks did not have a theory of authority but they had indeed the tragedy to think over it. This kind of pre-philosophical reflection has been considered by some scholars to constitute the background for the birth of the so called “tragic thought” (Givone 1988 and 2008; Garelli 2010). We shall return to this point during the conclusion of this essay.

The tyrant, believing that his will represents the will of the people, precludes public outcry in making his own decisions, and he thus substitutes his will for the will of the populace. The result is a denial of both the public sphere and of the (implicit) hierarchy. The loss of the public sphere implies then the decay of democracy. The loss of hierarchy demonstrates the impossibility of a different kind of organization of power, which Arendt brands the authoritarian state. This

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inchoate authority may be the most dangerous form of authority because it justifies absolute power, such as, for example, Creon in Thebes or, in the modern age, the absolute power of dictators in totalitarian regimes.

Arendt’s theory of authority demonstrates that the loss of hierarchy corresponds to the loss of political freedom (Arendt 1977, pp. 96-98). Structurally, in the political regimes, this means a variation of the power schema. She writes:

These structural differences become apparent the moment we leave the over-all theories behind and concentrate our attention on the apparatus of rule, the technical forms of administration, and the organization of the body politic. For brevity’s sake, it may be permitted to sum up the technical-structural differences between authoritarian, tyrannical and totalitarian government in the image of three different representative models.

These models are pyramid for the authoritarian government, again pyramid but “as though all intervening layers between top and bottom were destroyed” (p. 99) for the tyranny, and the onion for the totalitarian state (pp. 98-99). The significance of these images is that they represent the “evolution” or devolution of power from democracy to the totalitarian regime means a progressive disappearance of freedom, until the “total elimination of spontaneity itself” (p. 96).

Thus Creon’s edict sounds, from Arendt’s point of view, as going into the direction just described, like a sentence produced in a political context where the public speech is impossible. In this sense, another annotation that Arendt made in the text of Sophocles is noteworthy. In verse 44, in the dialogue between Antigone and Ismene, Ismene tries to convince her sister that to bury Polynices would be dangerous and illogical, because his burial is forbidden by the city (Sophocles, v. 44)

g¦r noe‹j q£ptein sf', ¢pÒrrhton pÒlei;

Thou wouldst bury him, when ‘tis forbidden to Thebes?

Ismene uses the phrase “aporreton polei”, which Arendt underlines. Arendt’s attention to it is – we believe – motivated by the fact that the verb aporrein entails both refusing something and refusing to discuss it. The impossibility of political speech in the polis ruled by Creon put the citizens (in this case represented by Ismene) in a condition of total submission to Creon and a condition of alienation from common sense, so that citizens believe that they no longer have the right to say something or to contradict the decisions of the king.

The theme reappears in verses 505-509. Here Antigone says to Creon that the citizens would oppose his rules, if they were given the opportunity to speak. But the terror, which his behaviour strikes into them, forces them to hold their tongues (Sophocles vv. 505-509).

An. Lšgoit\ ¥n, e„ m¾ glîssan ™gklÇoi fÒboj.

Kr. sÝ toàto moÚnh tînde Kadme…wn Ðr´j.

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An. Ðrîsi coÏtoi: soˆ d\Øp…llousi stoma.

An: all here would own that they thought it well, were not their lips sealed by fear. But royalty, blest in so much besides, hat the power to do and say what it will.

Cr: Thou differest from all these Thebans in that view

An: These also share it; but they curb their tongues for thee.

Arendt underlines these verses and writes in correspondence of “upillein stoma” (v. 509) “to check one’s tongue”. This is the English translation of the Greek, but it is also what Arendt means when she talks about the feeling of the citizens deprived of their public lives. We know that speech, together with action, forms one of the most important concepts of the Vita Activa. As Arendt writes (1998):

A life without speech and without action […] is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.

Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?”

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.

So, if speech reveals the human identity, the individual deprived of the possibility to speak is also deprived of his or her faculty of judgment, i.e. humanity. In the case of Creon, who checks the tongue of the citizens, the tyrant destroys the human dimension of the politics in the city he governs. Later, Haemon says to his father (v. 737), as already quoted (by us and by Arendt): you cannot rule on a desert. What kind of power can a tyrant have, if he denies the community and transforms the citizens into dead men?

We can argue, therefore, that citizens can be deprived of their faculty of judgment in two respects: first, the loss of the ability to participate in the debate for what is good for the community, and second, their passive acceptance of rules that facilitates the loss of this ability. The citizens become part of an indifferent mass. Arendt analyzes the loss of the autonomous judgment by people who live in a regime of political submission in her book The origin of the totalitarianism and again in her report on Eichmann’s trial. We will not discuss this here, but we can infer now that totalitarianism is the logical and practical consequence of a crisis of authority and power.

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The polis and the struggle for immortality Another topic, which is contemporaneously both Sophoclean and Arendtian, is the human being’s fight against mortality, aiming to leaving a sign of human life in the world. The tragic sense of the human condition rests, in fact, upon the awareness of men that they are limited and conditioned by both a start and an end point, which is the parabola of the human existence. Arendt’s words (1998, p. 18-19):

Men are “the mortals”, the only mortal things in existence, because unlike animals they do not exist only as members of a species whose immortal life is guaranteed through procreation. The mortality of men lies in the fact that individual life, with a recognizable life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological life. This individual life is distinguished from all other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movement of biological life. This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.

In this passage we find an important key to interpret the human condition, even if at a first glance it could seem that Arendt provides a pessimistic analysis of it. Men are mortals but their “linear” lives have much more power than the circular existences of the other living beings, because they own the ability to create something new and to initiate something unpredictable.

Men are not only mortal, since they were also born. Natality, not sheer mortality, is the main feature of the human condition and it is the redemption for men’s limited existence. It follows that action, with its ability to renew the world by creating in it something original, takes its power directly from natality. This means that human beings can reproduce the gesture of renewal every time they act, thanks to the fact that they were born. Arendt points out this topic at the very beginning of Human Condition (1998, pp. 8-9)

All three activities [labour, work, action] and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labour assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artefact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of moral life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history […]

action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities.

Hence, to leave a signal of their presence in the world means, for human beings, eventually to create political institutions and stories.

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As noted at the beginning of the paragraph, this is a tragic topic. The awareness of human beings to live an ephemeral existence is tragic and the Greek thought (literature, poetry, theatre and philosophy) is full of considerations on this theme.

Sophocles talks about this concept in the famous second chorus of Antigone. Sophocles calls man deinòs, which means something great and terrible because it is sublime, and simultaneously awful because of its power. Deinòs is the human feature to dare to do everything, even at the cost of violating nature. Is it hybris or is it only desperation and wish to live forever?

Antigone, vv. 332-341:

Poll¦ t¦ dein¦ koÙdûn ¢n-

Qrèpou deinÒteron pšlei:

Toàto kaˆ polioà pšran

pÒntou ceimer…J nÒtJ

cwre‹, peribruc…oisin

perîn Øp’ o‡dmasin, qeîn

te t¦n Øpert£tan, G©n

¥fqiton, ¢kam£tan ¢potrÚetai,

„llomšnwn ¢rÒtrwn œtoj e„j œtoj

ƒppe…J gšnei poleÚwn.

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man;

the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind,

making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him;

and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear,

turning the soil with the offspring of horses,

as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.

The echo of this chorus is evident in Arendt (1998, p. 19) when she celebrates the human activities (work, labour, action) and the effort of men to create great works, which can outlive their creators, also imposing changes upon Nature.

The task and the potential greatness of mortals lies in their ability to produce things – works and deeds and words – which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves. By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave non perishable traces

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behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a “divine” nature.

The chorus is directly quoted by Arendt (1983, p. 42) in The concept of History, where again she talks about mortality (with almost the same words used in Human Condition quoted upon):

This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order. Whenever men pursue their purposes, tilling the effortless earth, forcing the free-flowing wind into their sails, crossing the ever-rolling waves, they cut across a movement which is purposeless and turning within itself. When Sophocles (in the famous chorus of Antigone) says that there is nothing more awe-inspiring than man, he goes on to exemplify this by evoking purposeful human activities which do violence to nature because they disturb what, in the absence of mortals, would be the eternal quiet of being-forever that rests or swings within itself.

It is repeated on a further occasion, again in Human Condition, although in this case the quotation is attributed to Pericles (Thucydides); the words are the same used by Arendt quoting Sophocles in The Concept of History in the discussion of the same topic (immortality): this is the reason why we suppose that Arendt’s dialogue with this tragedy is so intimate to be sometimes even unconscious. Here is the quotation from Vita Activa (Arendt 1998, p. 197):

The polis – if we trust the famous words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration – gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them.

This theme introduces a consideration on the importance of history and memory, which are the means to escape mortality, and the key to understand the relevance of narration in Arendt’s philosophy.

Briefly, limiting our analysis to the main theme of this paper, it is important to consider that for Arendt the tragedy is the political art which allows the human condition to be transposed in narration, as we mentioned in the opening section of this paper. Tragedy is a mimetic representation of the human condition, and, amongst the other ways to tell a story, it is certainly the more appropriate one to express human actions.8 But why is narration so important?

To tell a story of a deed means to let it have a sense. If action, on the one hand, is always free and unpredictable, on the other hand the actor may become aware of the meaning of his actions – that means, he may know who he is – only by seeing or listening to the narration of those deeds. The narrative voice in fact sees the things at their conclusion and only for the listener the outcome is clear. The action process needs the narration to have a definitive significance.

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Moreover, by acting, people insert themselves in a web of relationships, the world inhabited by their fellow human beings, which, with their stories, constitute the space where the subject appears. This circle of interaction between actors and storytellers corresponds to the human worldly condition of appearing and being perceived. Arendt says (1998 p. 184):

That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end. But the reason why each human life tells its story and why history ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind, with many actors and speakers and yet without any tangible authors, is that both are the outcome of action.

Thus the narration is much more important than the action itself. Scholarly literature on this theme, as I have said above, is huge. Prestigious interpreters of Arendt’s philosophy have already pointed out the importance of this topic (Kristeva 2001; Curthoys 2002; Speight 2011; Benhabib 2003) and I am not going to discuss it here; it is indeed a starting point for further research. Nevertheless, I will try to answer this question: is there a substantial difference between the tragedy and the other various forms of narration, or drama is simply one of these forms? And, if tragedy is something different and “more” than the narration, how does the drama found the Arendtian theory of narration?

On the one hand, Arendt seems to consider the theatre better suited than any other form of art to express human action (1998, p. 187):

The specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and “reified” only through a kind of repetition, the imitation or mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate only to the drama…

But, on the other hand, a few pages later, Arendt also affirms (1998, p. 192):

Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants.

In this second assertion, the supremacy of the mimetic art on the narration does not seem to be maintained anymore. At least it seems ambiguous whether story and drama are two different grades of the same narrative or different at all.

My intuition is that there is a difference between narration and drama, and that such difference lies in the difference between both acts of seeing and listening. Theatre and drama are bound up with their visibility. In the dramatic action people not only tell their stories but also perform them. In this way they respond to the human necessity to appear, i.e. to exist. The peculiar feature of the drama, which makes it representative of the human condition, is indeed the presence of the spectators. The narrative voice, at the opposite end of the spectrum, can

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evocate images which however remain out of the space of appearance. The demonstration of this claim is provided in the first part of The Life of the Mind. Thinking, where Arendt (1978, p. 19) explains very clearly that what is real is what appears, and where, using the metaphor of the theatre, she talks about the importance of the spectators.

In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.

Hence the dramatization is to be considered the evolution of the human way to tell a story, with a peculiar capacity to imitate what has been being related. This evolution derives from the increasing attention paid to the visibility.

History, since the Greek age – starting from Herodotus –, became a scientific discipline when the histor (historian) wanted to verify what he had to write (i.e. to see with his own eyes).

Histor is a word whose root comes from idein, which, as theaomai, means “to see”. Thus theatre and story belong to the same family, since they both narrate something which has been seen. The difference lies in the function of the spectators: in the theatre they see, while in the other narrations, they only listen. But the human existence, which is appearing and disappearing (inter homines esse and inter hominess esse desinere,9 to live and to die) is well expressed only by drama, where the actors can be seen by the spectators. In Arendt’s words (1978, p. 93)

their [of the spectators] place is in the world and their “nobility” is only that they do not participate in what is going on but look on it as a mere spectacle. From the Greek word for spectators, theatai, the later philosophical term “theory” was derived, and the word “theoretical” until a few hundred years ago meant “contemplating”, looking upon something from the outside, from a position implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualize it. […] as a spectator you may understand the “truth” of what the spectacle is about.

Hence we demonstrated that there is a strong resemblance between the theatre and the wider world, between people and actors, between human condition and drama. We shall now conclude with some considerations on action: this concept will result now clearly close to the attic tragedy.

Action: from the stage to the public realm Arendt depicts very precisely what action means, dedicating the central chapter of Human Condition to this theme. Action for the human beings is the sign of their presence in the world; it is boundless and unpredictable, because it is free. By acting, men renew the world again and again and every time they reproduce the

9 See H. Arendt, Human Condition, cit., pp. 7-8.

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gesture of natality. Action is also the way to make one’s self-visible to others and to take part in the common world.

Action is finally bound up with the narration, because, as we have said, storytelling fixes in memory what happened in the past, and it so gives a sense to the action. Coming back to what we were arguing in the first paragraph, we can know – Arendt says (1998, p. 181 e seg.) – “who one is” through his story, while “what one is” is already clear without the presence of a spectator. “What men are” is the system of qualities that men share with others. But to understand “who men are” in their uniqueness requires the presence of others, and it requires that we see men from outside so as to tell stories about them once they conclude their personal histories. The actor cannot be the narrator of the part that he plays.

[subject: stories] they tell us more about their subjects, the “hero” in the centre of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it, and yet they are not products, properly speaking. Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his story.

In the same paragraph, a few pages after, we find the Arendt’s argument about the theatre and its capability to narrate human actions (pp. 187-188). Moreover, in the copy of her Antigone, Arendt annotates line 155 and some of the following verses with a large inscription on the top of the page: she writes “the who of action” in correspondence with the moment in which Creon enters the scene.

¢ll\ Óde g¦r d¾ basileÝj cèraj,

Kršwn Ð Menoikšwj, . . . neocmÕj

Chorus: But look, the King of the land comes yonder, Kreon, son of Menoeceus, our new ruler…

What Arendt is pointing out is that Creon is the crucial node of the discussion about justice and authority; she therefore claims that there is a direct connection between the scenic action and the human activity of Action.

Creon appears on the stage in front of the chorus and the spectators. While the dialogue between Antigone and Ismene had already introduced his figure in previous scenes, he had not yet directly appeared in the public space. Coming to the defence of his edict and fighting against Antigone and Haemon, he puts himself outside of his private existence and lets his actions be judged by the people around him. The theatre thus becomes the most important metaphor for describing and locating the dynamics of acting and speaking in a public sphere, where people build their personality in comparison and in opposition to others.

So, Arendt’s commentary referring to Creon corresponds to her theory of action which takes place in Human condition. Several times, describing the concept of

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action, Arendt (1998, p. 179) uses a language which evocates theatre or theatrical images:

Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the world, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do.

Theatre and the human condition become almost synonymous, if we consider that action, speech, plurality and dialogue with the other are the peculiar features of both. “Who one is” is the result of what he shows to the others. On the opposite end of the spectrum, to come out of the scene means, for an individual, to be unable to integrate himself to the others (this is the idiocy of which we talked above). In this sense Creon and Antigone offer a clear example of alienation: they are not dissimilar in their one-sidedness (Hegel 1978; Steiner 1986; Gentili, Garelli 2010) and their inability to compromise with the point of view of the other condemns both of them to be isolated from the community. This, in Arendtian terms, is akin to being dead.

The political suicide of Antigone and Creon is called madness several times in the tragedy: Sophocles uses the words dysboulian (v. 95); aphrosyne (v. 383); mora (v. 469); phrenon dysphronon (1262) to describe Antigone’s action and Creon’s behaviour. The antonym of all these words is phronesis. Phronesis means wisdom, i.e. the ability to choose through the use of the moral law in the concrete situations. It follows that Antigone and Creon lack in phronesis.

The concept of Phronesis is deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition and Arendt here is using it according to the Aristotelian meaning of practical reason. Moreover, Arendt uses this concept with a specific political connotation, which she inherits from the Kant’s sensus communis.10

Phronesis is, in fact, for Arendt a political virtue and it means the ability to deliberate something, internalizing the point of view of the others. The political choice needs a common world and a constant dialogue with the members of the community. Only in the common world is a true politics possible. This is not the case of Thebes as described in Antigone: there is neither a common space (tyranny annihilates it) nor a plurality (people are isolated from each other). The polis has become a desert. Idiocy, meaning alienation from the political community, is lack of phronesis, thoughtlessness, and the main cause of the crisis of the modern man.

10 The discussion on this topic has interested Arendt’s scholars for the last thirty years. I can’t discuss the problem in this paper, but I am taking the liberty of referring you to D. Marshall, The origin and character of Hannah Arendt’s theory of Judgement, in Political Theory, vol. 38, No. 3, (June 2010), pp. 367-393. In this paper the author examines some very authoritative interpretations (and criticisms) of Arendt’s theory of judgement and tries to give a new key to read it.

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Conclusions In this paper, we tried to depict the legacy of the Greek tragic thought in Hannah Arendt’s thinking. The Greek tragedy offers indeed new insights which help us to understand Arendt’s philosophy. In particular, we have discussed the relationship between Arendt’s political thought and Sophocles’ Antigone. This relationship is the most prominent ground on which Hannah Arendt and the Greek tragic thought dialogue.

We have argued that there are three main aspects which appear to be extremely relevant in this respect. First, the way through which Arendt explores the problem of the crisis of the authority and the nature of power in modern age retraces the conflict between private and public law of the Antigone. Second, Arendt’s concept of action as evidence of the human existence in the world, in spite of the oblivion following mortality, echoes the deinà features of the Sophoclean man. Third, more generally, Arendt’s use of the theatrical metaphor is strictly tied to the meaning that she gives to the act of seeing. Theatre epitomizes the human condition of talking, which is based on the dialogue between actors (plurality) and on the dialectics between to appear and to be seen by the others - i.e. the spectators - (visibility). The whole first part of Arendt’s The life of the mind is built on the analogy between appearance and being and on the relevance of the plurality of subjects in the common world.

Moreover we believe that to read Arendt’s philosophy through the categories of the Greek classical theatre may introduce the following question: can we consider Hannah Arendt’s philosophy a tragic thought? P. Szondi in an essay of the 1978 (p. 1) claims: “since Aristotle there has been a poetics of tragedy. Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic”.ì This means that the idea of tragedy and what tragedy means is a modern philosophical problem, while the ancient philosophers dealt with tragedy as a literary form.

The tragic thought is indeed central in the idealistic and post-idealistic German philosophy and it has influenced a strand of Italian contemporary philosophy (L. Pareyson, E. Severino, S. Givone).

In general, the tragic thought examines the unsolvable conflicts that characterizes the tragic hero – i.e. the hero of the Greek tragedy – and takes inspiration by them to reflect on the human condition and on the nature of the Being.

The Greek tragedy, which celebrates the absolute paradox, the simultaneous presence of justice and injustice, of sin and redemption, of happiness and infelicity, of freedom and necessity, in the same situation and in the same character, demonstrates the ambiguity of the Being and the coexistence in it of its opposite. The tragedy thus offers the philosophical categories to analyze the contradictions of existence.

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If we consider now that Arendt’s philosophy is essentially an inquiry about the human condition, her reference to the tragic drama in the way we have discussed can justify the definition of her philosophy as tragic thought.

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References - Ahrensdorf, P. J. 2009. Greek tragedy and political philosophy. N.C.: Davidson College. - Arendt, H. 1983. Between past and future. New York: Penguin books. - Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, New York. - Arendt, H. 1998. The human condition. University of Chicago Press. - Arendt, H. 1978. The life of the mind. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. - Aristotle 1917. Poetics. Translated by S.H. Butcher, St. Martins Street, London: M.P., McMillian and Co., Limited, - Benhabib, S. 2003. The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. - Birmingham, P. 2003. “Holes of oblivion” Hypatia, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 80- 103. - Butler, J. 2000. Antigone’s claim, kinship between life and death. Columbia University Press. - Cambiano, Canfora, L. 1992. Lo spazio letterario della Grecia antica, Roma: Salerno Editrice. - Canfora, L. 2004. La democrazia, storia di un’ideologia. Roma: Laterza. - Canfora, L. 2008. Prima lezione di storia greca, Roma-Bari: Laterza. - Curthoys, N. 2002. “Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative”, Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 348-370. - Euben, P. J. 1994. The tragedy of political theory. The road not taken, Princeton University Press - Euben, Peter J. 1986. Greek Tragedy and political Theory. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. - Euben, Peter J. 1994. The Tragedy of Political Theory. Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press. - Gentili, C., Garelli, G. 2010. Il Tragico. Bologna: Il Mulino. - Givone, S. 1988. Disincanto del mondo e pensiero tragico. Milano: Il Saggiatore. - Givone, S. 2008. Storia del nulla. Roma-Bari: Laterza. - Habermas, J. 1977. “Hannah Arendt’s communications concept of power” Social Research, vol. 44 no. 1. - Hegel, G.W.F. 1978. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford Clarendon Press. - Honig, B. 2009. “Antigone’s laments, Creon’s Grief. Mourning, membership and the politics of exception” Political Theory, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 5-43. - Irigaray L. 1985. Speculum of the other woman. New York: Cornell University Press. - Kottman, P. A. 2003. “Memory, Mimesis, Tragedy: the scene before philosophy” Theatre Journal, Vol. 55, No. 1, Ancient Theatre, pp. 81-97. - Kristeva, J. 2001. Hannah Arendt. Life is a narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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- Lanza, D. 1977. Il tiranno e il suo pubblico. Torino: Einaudi. - Lanza, D. et al. 1977. L’ideolgia della città. Napoli: Liguori Editore. - Longo, O. 1990. The Theatre of the Polis, in Winkler, Z. Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. - Marshall, D. 2010. “The origin and character of Hannah Arendt’s theory of Judgement” Political Theory, vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 367-393. - Meier, C. 1990. The Greek discovery of Politics. Harvard University Press. - Meier, C. 1993. The political art of Greek tragedy. The John Hopkins University Press. - Nonet, P. 2006. “Antigone’s law” Law, Culture and the Humanities 2, No. 3, pp. 314-335. - Ober, J. and Strauss, B. 1992. Drama, Political Rhetoric, and the Discourse of Athenian Democracy. In: J. Winkler, N. Zeitlin, Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 237-270. - Saxonhouse, A. W. 2006. Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens. Cambridge University Press. - Sophoclis 1924, Fabulae, Oxonii, e Typographeo clarendoniano. - Speight, A. 2011. “Arendt on Narrative Theory and Practice” College Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 115-130. - Steiner G. 1986. Antigones. New Heaven: Yale University Press. - Szondi, P. 2002. An essay on the Tragic. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. - C. Jebb, Sir R. 1987. The Antigone of Sophocles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Vernant, J.P. 1992, “Myth and tragedy” In: Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics. O. Rorty, A. (ed.), Princeton University Press. - Vernant, J.P. 1969. “Tensions and ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” In: Interpretations, John Hopkins University Press. - Vernant, J.P. 1980. Myth and society in ancient Greece. Harvester Press. - Vernant and Vidal Naquet 1988. Myth and tragedy in the ancient Greece. New York: Zone Books.

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Sobre la posibilidad de una estética erótica: crítica y actualidad del pensamiento de Herbert Marcuse

Antonio Bentivegna Universidad de Salamanca

El pensamiento de Herbert Marcuse es muy determinante para comprender la conexión entre la teoría del arte contemporáneo y el activismo social y político en los EE.UU., cuyas raíces remontan a la lucha para los derechos humanos y civiles durante las dos décadas entre 1960 y 1980.1 En este contexto, el antiguo debate en torno a las relaciones entre ética y estética se presenta de forma nueva en el panorama artístico norteamericano. En los años sesenta, los asuntos políticos, culturales y sociales comienzan a influir directamente en ámbito artístico. A principio de los ochenta, tras la muerte del Marcuse, se reconoce oficialmente la influencia del filósofo en el llamado “movimiento contracultural”2. Dicho movimiento, cuyo origen remonta a los escritos del artista conceptual Abbie Hoffman (1980), se caracteriza por una crítica de la institucionalización de la cultura, un rechazo que ánima el pensamiento de Marcuse e incide

1 Para estas cuestiones se recomienda el estudio de Thomas Crow sobre el surgimiento de los movimientos artísticos en los EE.UU. entre la segunda década de los cincuenta y el final de los años sesenta. (Crow 2001). 2 Para un análisis histórico sobre el origen y el desarrollo de la “cultura underground” en los EE. UU. se recomienda el texto del Maffi, (1975). Sin embargo, en el presente ensayo hemos adoptado el término de “contracultura” eliminando el anglicismo utilizado por Maffi.

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notablemente en ámbito de la crítica activista y contestataria contra el monopolio del patrimonio artístico y museístico por parte de la llamada “cultura oficial”.3

Es sabido que el principal objetivo de los teóricos exponentes de la contracultura fue transformar la vida social y política utilizando el potencial creativo del arte de forma radicalmente nueva. Se trataba principalmente de convertir el arte en un eficaz instrumento de crítica ideológica invirtiendo su función tradicional institucionalizada y, al mismo tiempo, utilizarlo para incentivar el desarrollo de las múltiples expresiones sociales y colectivas. De esta manera, los artistas se otorgaban el derecho, y el deber, de transformar la sociedad trabajando en función de la crítica social.

Sin embargo, la configuración más radical del problema estético dentro del nuevo marco sociopolítico de los años sesenta requiere al artista grandes determinaciones éticas; en efecto, el modelo más radicalizado de arte no admite ningún tipo de testimonio fuera de la relación dialéctica entre la labor artística y aquellos contenidos sociales introducidos para reforzar el pensamiento crítico y contestatario.

En este contexto, la creación artística pronto terminó siendo asociada a la producción de formas contra-representacionales que, en contraste con los modelos artísticos más tradicionales, reclamaban un nuevo tipo de cohesión social fundada en la contestación de la autoridad y de la institución. Y, aunque parezca algo paradójico, este discurso no influyó negativamente en la conciencia política de los artistas sino, todo lo contrario, convirtió su trabajo en una suerte de herramienta crítica, ética y social. En rigor, el arte representaba, por lo menos en teoría, el medio más idóneo, para señalar ciertas anomalías de fondo en la sociedad democrática norteamericana cuyos principales recursos económicos quedaban en mano de los burócratas y de los administradores de la cultura que ignoraban las verdaderas necesidades de las comunidades de ciudadanos a quienes pretendían dirigirse. (Deutsche 1996).

A raíz de esta contestación, cuyos efectos se hicieron evidentes durante los años ochenta, las especulaciones sobre problemas estéticos y éticos dejan de ser parte de un discurso exclusivamente filosófico a medida que llaman en causa necesidades más profundas, constitutivas de la misma experiencia humana; pronto se comprendió que dichas exigencias podían ser canalizadas para la lucha social desestabilizando y perturbando los modelos dominantes y reivindicando nuevas expresiones simbólicas, escrituras e interpretaciones de la realidad social. Al mismo tiempo, la creación de espacios alternativos, dentro de la esfera pública, como demuestra el ejemplo de Hoffman (1980), se dirija a los individuos para estimular su participación activa y su compromiso ético-social con la realidad, con el fin de reclamar el derecho a intervenir y a construir la propia cultura. De contra, se existía el modelo de “arte institucionalizado”, la adorniana industria

3 Con respecto a este punto, Hoffman, padre fundador del Youth International Party, el movimiento Yippie, promulgó la lucha para ocupar las calles como gesto de rebeldía contra al monopolio del arte por parte de las instituciones oficiales. (Hoffman 1980).

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cultural, que se dirigía a individuos sin una auténtica conciencia social y cuya identificación con otros grupos minoritarios era problemática y casi imposible. Por esto, la contracultura, de acuerdo con el análisis que hace Maffi, conlleva un movimiento dialéctico y ascendente, una voluntad de superación que la proyecta hacia la dimensión social y que es, al mismo tiempo, la expresión de un deseo, de una pasión individual y colectiva:

La superación del círculo restringido de algunos artistas ultrasensibles a la catástrofe cotidiana lleva a una ampliación de la “nueva sensibilidad” y, por consiguiente, al abandono de posiciones fácilmente lindantes con el tradicional círculo intelectual de élite, a la difusión, en todos los niveles, de una nueva función poética (cultural) de denuncia que ya no es patrimonio de unos pocos. (Maffi 1975, p. 34.)

Este planteamiento revisionista del arte y de la cultura, encontró un poderoso aliado en el “arte erótico”, la propuesta estética de Marcuse. En su célebre texto publicado en 1953, Eros y civilización, el teórico alemán afirmó:

La experiencia básica en la dimensión estética es sensual antes que conceptual; la percepción estética es esencialmente intuición, no noción. [...] La percepción estética está acompañada del placer. (Marcuse 1976, pp.167-68).

Reformulando la relación kantiana entre el arte y el placer, y considerando el concepto de cultura desde un punto de vista distinto al de Sigmund Freud (1986), Marcuse critica la afirmación freudiana de que el carácter esencial de la cultura “consiste en que los miembros de la comunidad restringen sus posibilidades de satisfacción, mientras que el individuo aislado no reconocía semejantes restricciones” (Marcuse 1976, p. 39). Para ello, basándose en el supuesto de que los individuos pueden utilizar los impulsos eróticos para manipular la estructura social, Marcuse supedita la experiencia del erotismo al compromiso ético y social de cada individuo con su cultura.

No es del todo erróneo - puesto que el mismo Marcuse lo reconoce - hallar las raíces críticas de esta concepción utópica en el marco del pensamiento romántico, especialmente en el proyecto schilleriano de transformar el mundo “implementando”, a través de la educación, el sentimiento estético en los individuos. Esta idea de Schiller - según Marcuse - representaría una cultura no represiva que se concreta en el nivel de una civilización madura en que “los instintos tienden hacia relaciones existenciales libres y duraderas” (Marcuse 1976, p. 185).

Sin embargo, aquí se hacen necesarias ciertas elucidaciones, puesto que trasladar la concepción romántica e idealista de Schiller a la cultura europea y estadounidense de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, profundamente marcada por el pesimismo y las decepciones ideológicas, presenta obvias dificultades. En rigor, Marcuse se ve obligado a manipular la teoría de Freud invirtiendo finalmente la relación conceptual entre autonomía y dominación. Dialécticamente hablando, la coerción que - de acuerdo con Freud - el mundo civilizado ejercería sobre los

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individuos, se convierte en una determinación necesaria para la emancipación de los mismos en la sociedad. Sin embargo, el grado de autonomía que Marcuse reconoce en los individuos, queda determinado dialécticamente dentro de un sistema dinámico que constituye una estructura de relaciones compartidas. Asimismo, semejante organización ha de reflejar todas aquellas actividades sociales cuyo objetivo principal no puede reducirse a la producción de bienes materiales. La principal función de la sociedad - de acuerdo con Marcuse - debe permitir el desarrollo libre de Eros.

No obstante, sería ingenuo pensar que Marcuse confía únicamente en el erotismo como vía para solucionar los complejos problemas de la organización social y política: “Los hombres - escribe el filosofo alemán - no viven su propia vida, sino que realizan funciones preestablecidas. Mientras trabajan no satisfacen sus propias necesidades y facultades, sino que trabajan enajenados” (Marcuse 1976, p. 54). Marcuse es consciente de que la perniciosa fragmentación de los individuos y la consiguiente castración de Eros se reflejan sobre todo en el mundo hipertecnificado y fragmentado de la sociedad contemporánea, con la atomización de los individuos y la división de las funciones humanas y productivas. Dicha situación se reproduce en la realidad cotidiana, especialmente en la esfera de la organización social y del trabajo. En lugar de realizar el sentido de la vida de forma plena, fomentando las relaciones y los encuentros entre sus miembros, la sociedad civil habría monopolizado y burocratizado los deseos, produciendo nefastas disociaciones entre el erotismo y la esfera de la cotidianeidad. Dicho de otra manera, la civilización - de acuerdo con el análisis que hace Freud - se ha construido reprimiendo el placer, negando a Eros (Freud 1986).

Por otro lado, el sociólogo Theodore Roszak utilizó el término de “tecnocracia” (technocracy), aludiendo a una conjunción simbólica entre los términos “técnica” y “burocracia”, para aislar unos elementos, a parecer los más característicos, que definen la composición organizativa y la estructura de las sociedades industriales avanzadas. Su conclusión fue la siguiente:

Es esencial darse cuenta que la tecnocracia no es el producto exclusivo del viejo demonio capitalista, sino más bien el resultado del industrialismo maduro y acelerado (Roszak 1976:33).

Y puesto que, de acuerdo con Marcuse, una de las consecuencias más funestas de la tecnocracia ha sido la separación que se produce entre el individuo y el trabajador especializado, en tanto que partícula social, las competencias específicas de cada tecnócrata pasan a ser la base de todas las actividades sociales y productivas. Asimismo, dichas competencias se distribuyen como actividades que se desarrollan en ámbito público, es decir, en la esfera social y comunicacional. No obstante, raramente asignan al individuo aislado una función social que satisface plenamente sus deseos. Por contraste, entonces, el individuo ha de encontrar su propia gratificación fuera de la esfera pública, en la vida privada.

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Desde este presupuesto dicotómico, que separa individuo y sociedad, espacio público y espacio privado, Marcuse plantea su propuesta reconciliadora presentándola desde el punto de vista de un arte erótico. De esta manera, Marcuse asigna al arte la tarea nada fácil de reorganizar de forma polisémica la esfera pública y comunitaria. Todo esto, naturalmente, no desde los cánones impuestos por el discurso oficial, en el espacio donde actúa la institución artística, sino desde la vida cotidiana. Desde luego, se trata de un espacio en que se plasman nuevas fuerzas que inciden en todas las actividades humanas, productivas o improductivas. Un espacio que requiere una constante participación social de los individuos, un fuerte empeño ético por parte de una comunidad.

Trasladado a la esfera de la vida cotidiana, el espacio donde se sitúa el “arte erótico” de Marcuse constituye, entonces, un nuevo importante marco de referencia de la estética contemporánea, un marco que quizá podría ofrecer una perspectiva mucho más alentadora que la muy célebre concepción kantiana que subordina el gusto estético y el placer a las meras experiencias subjetivas y personales. En rigor, Marcuse, sin quitarle ninguna importancia a dicha experiencia subjetiva, traslada el placer sensible desde la esfera privada a la esfera pública.

Es muy difícil escaparse del poder seductor de estas ideas marcusianas, sobre todo si las asociamos al deseo, siempre presente en Marcuse, de animar y promover la llamada “revolución contracultural”. En el fondo, Marcuse intentaba considerar otros tipos de escrituras y representaciones del mundo que apuntaran a la reorganización de la sociedad, confiando en todas las posibilidades innovadoras: en primer lugar, las que se enunciaban como nuevas formas de arte, desde la esfera íntima del eros. ¡Arte y erotismo! La fascinación que ejercen estos dos términos, más aún si son utilizados - como hace Marcuse - conjuntamente, permite comprender su relación con el bosquejo de una nueva estética, dispuesta a incorporar todas las actividades humanas, incluso las más triviales y rutinarias: el trabajo, el ocio, la reorganización del tiempo libre, el deporte, el deambular por las ciudades…4 Todas ellas se van sumando al repertorio de las actividades artísticas más tradicionales, suministrando una amplia base contextual para delinear modelos estéticos alternativos con el fin de ensanchar el territorio de las distintas experiencias humanas.

Huelga decir que el principal objetivo de dichas prácticas, al menos en el caso específico de Marcuse, es perturbar la estructura del orden social dominante, reparando así, idealmente, a través de la negación dialéctica, la supuesta discrepancia que existe entre la cultura represiva y el individuo. Esto aclara las siguientes palabras de Marcuse:

4 La práctica de deambular por las ciudades, la deriva, fue introducida en Francia por los surrealistas y retomada por el Movimiento Letrista y por la International Situationniste (IS). Fueron sobre todo estos últimos que, asociando la deriva con la práctica del desvío (détournement), la utilizaron como una importante herramienta teórica para la revolución contracultural. Véase: Guy Debord, “Teoría de la deriva”. (Debord 1958).

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Una existencia no represiva [...] puede serlo sólo como resultado de un cambio social cuantitativo. (Marcuse 1976:10).

Sin embargo, el cambio cuantitativo a que alude Marcuse no se resuelve simplemente en su propuesta de una “estética erótica”, por lo menos si se interpreta dicha definición de manera trivial, pensando en la mera subordinación de todas las actividades humanas, incluyendo el arte, al placer de los sentidos. Presentando la cuestión de esta manera se tergiversa el problema fundamental de Marcuse: Eros expresa un compromiso ético, el único que, según Marcuse, puede curar la sociedad enferma y represiva. Toda mala lectura de Marcuse sobre este punto termina asignando a Eros la función inversa a la que le asigna el filósofo, es decir, reforzar aquellos estereotipos de la cultura dominante que, muy por el contrario, debería ayudar a relevar. Por esta razón, la utopía de Marcuse, que opone el erotismo a la sociedad freudianamente represiva, sólo puede expresarse a través de un ethos estético. Eros expresa así la resistencia, la tergiversación de la institución, la lucha del individuo que ha de poner a prueba los valores culturales que configuran la cultura dominante.

Asimismo, este planteamiento general implica que el impulso erótico deba utilizarse de forma pragmática, es decir, para transformar, aunque sea de manera libre y creativa, la vida social y colectiva. La liberación de Eros se resuelve en la congregación final de arte y política. Este vínculo se expresa de forma clara a través del concepto de “tergiversación”, utilizado repetidas veces por Marcuse para subrayar la acción radical que exige a Eros: transformar la sociedad negando y manteniendo, al mismo tiempo, todas las determinaciones anteriores. El destino del arte está entonces, de acuerdo con Marcuse, en su dimensión erótica; el artista debe personificar a Eros, es decir, negar y servir la sociedad.

Sin embargo, cierta aparente paradoja en el discurso de Marcuse atañe la doble función de afirmación/negación que cumple Eros. Por un lado, en virtud de este poder un artista puede juzgar y poner en crisis todos los valores sociales preestablecidos; de esta manera, el artista rechaza la realidad simplemente impuesta. Por otro lado, recurriendo a la ayuda de Eros, al poder del erotismo, el artista tiene también que contenerlo, domesticarlo, transformarlo en ethos, en responsabilidad social.

Es bastante emblemático que en muchos de sus escritos Marcuse utilice el término de “gran rechazo” para expresar la unión entre las esferas política y erótica. La negación del mundo que hace Eros, según Marcuse, precede dialécticamente el proceso de expansión de la libido. Por un lado, para afirmarse, Eros ha de negar el mundo, poner en discusión todos los fundamentos - ya sea tecnológicos, burocráticos, políticos e ideológicos - que rigen la cultura. En este sentido, de acuerdo con Marcuse, el erotismo proporciona conocimiento filosófico:

La filosofía se origina en la dialéctica; su universo del discurso responde a los hechos de una realidad antagónica. […] En las exigencias de pensamiento y en la

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locura del amor se encuentra la negación destructiva de las formas de vida establecida” (Marcuse 1994: 153-55).

Sin embargo, en su proyecto para la realización de una filosofía erótica Marcuse reconoce el mérito que tuvo Freud en comprender la precisa correspondencia entre represión sexual y castigo social. Concretamente, reintroduce el concepto freudiano de “sublimación” que, según evidenció el mismo Freud, expresa una condición represiva, una actividad psíquica que encadena y reprime las pulsiones eróticas e instintivas del Yo. Sin embargo, la represión sexual - de acuerdo con el psicólogo y sociólogo Wilhelm Reich- es también relativa al orden social impuesto y, por tanto, tiene una historia y un desarrollo, cuyo objetivo final es obligar a los ciudadanos a aceptar el orden dominante. Nuestras democracias, argumentó Reich, no nos sitúan más allá de dicho orden, siendo, en este caso, el orden impuesto simplemente trasladado a la lógica capitalista que lo filtra interpretándolo sobre la base de los dogmas del libre comercio, la división del trabajo, la propiedad privada y el crecimiento desmedido de los bienes materiales. (Reich 1972, pp. 44-5).

Sin duda, Reich unificando las teorías de Marx con las de Freud, sentó las bases para una teoría socio-psicológica que, desarrollando el concepto de sublimación desde el punto de vista específicamente social, formula una crítica al sistema institucional en cuanto agente que normaliza y radicaliza la represión colectiva de forma autoritaria. Reich denomina este proceso “función social de la represión sexual” (1979, pp. 38-49). Sin embargo, si admitimos su tesis, todos los problemas sociales podrían remitir a una suerte de “erotismo invertido” o “desviado”. No obstante, considerado desde esta perspectiva reduccionista, el arte erótico de Marcuse perdería la función que le asigna el teórico alemán, puesto que no podría subsanar la sociedad poniendo al descubierto traumas tan profundos que han lacerado el alma humana durante siglos y cuya conciencia histórica y social sería incluso preferible disimular. Pero, de esta manera el problema no estaría bien planteado.

Las ideas de Marcuse sobre el erotismo han de ser reconsideradas en la actualidad sólo en relación con su valor intrínseco. Se trata de abandonar toda esperanza utópica de crear mundos más felices, sin por ello renunciar a la pretensión de transformar la realidad existente. Hay que asumir que el antagonismo que Marcuse expresa cabalmente con los dos términos de “Eros” y “civilización” describe una relación entre fuerzas recíprocas, asimétricas y ambivalentes, fuerzas que se manifiestan en los individuos y que los hacen chocar con el mundo real. Fuerzas que se ratifican incesantemente poniendo a prueba diferentes intentos o experimentos existenciales5. Baste con afirmar que Eros - en el lenguaje de Marcuse- encarna de forma irrefutable toda pasión conexa con el placer y la unión, mientras que la civilización - de acuerdo con Freud- representa la patología, el trauma y el sacrificio, la consumición de Eros. Como Prometeo, Eros es

5 Para profundizar sobre la complejidad de esta relación se recomienda el texto Las lágrimas de Eros de G. Bataille (1997).

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derrotado y obligado a la expiación y al sufrimiento a través del dolor. Sin embargo, Marcuse mantiene la esperanza en un “ethos”, que es asimismo “estético” y que permite al dios resistirse heroicamente a todo lo que pretenda negar el placer de los sentidos. En suma: Eros libre no impide la existencia de relaciones sociales civilizadas duraderas”. (Marcuse 1976, p. 52).

No obstante, el pensamiento de Marcuse no se agota con esto: el filósofo frankfurtiano apunta a un arte erótico que se deja guiar por la imaginación y que se concreta en la configuración de un mundo, en la determinación de una realidad en que el placer constituye el punto de conexión para que se articulen y se refuercen, el uno con el otro, todos los instintos vitales. De esta forma, Marcuse imagina que sería incluso posible bloquear simultáneamente todas las fuerzas perversas, dañinas y perniciosas, aunque - eso queda claro- sin expulsarlas definitivamente del mundo:

Liberada de la servidumbre a la explotación, la imaginación, apoyada en los logros de la ciencia, podría dirigir su poder productivo hacia una reconstrucción radical de la experiencia y del universo de la experiencia. […] En otras palabras: la transformación sólo es concebible como el modo por el cual los hombres libres configuran su vida solidariamente, y construyen un medio ambiente en el que la lucha por la existencia pierde sus aspectos repugnantes y agresivos. (Marcuse 1969, p. 51).

Insinuando la idea de que la civilización pueda ser, asimismo, una obra de arte, una obra de Eros, Marcuse invierte drásticamente el pensamiento de Freud. Sin embargo, se ve obligado a mantener la conjetura shilleriana de que lo bello es una cualidad esencial de la libertad (Marcuse 1969, p. 51). Dejando atrás el pesimismo freudiano, Marcuse reconoce que una cultura no aspira sólo a la conservación a través de la sublimación, sino que, además, se transforma de manera siempre nueva. Esto implica el sacrificio de muchos individuos, pero Marcuse, a diferencia de Freud, tiene una visión radicalmente dialéctica. El optimismo de su pensamiento se mantiene a través de su apuesta por la rebeldía de Eros, por un arte emancipador y contestador.

Sin embargo, esta postura de Marcuse no considera críticamente la relación entre la manifestación de la represión de Eros en la cultura, y su dinámica operativa dentro del sistema tardocapitalista. Sin duda, la sublimación representa una forma de evasión, una vía alternativa que, de acuerdo con Freud y Reich, permite conservar la función erótica, la libido, redirigiéndola hacia nuevas tareas. En rigor, esta operación mantiene la libido trasladándola hacia nuevos procesos vitales socialmente útiles, es decir, en grado de procurar ciertos beneficios comunes. Dicho de otra manera, la asimilación social de la libido, a diferencia de su represión, permite que los procesos eróticos, incluso los más desenfrenados, sean mitigados, asimilados y tolerados por la cultura. Pero, dicha sublimación socialmente útil no ha de separar el erotismo de las relaciones cotidianas entre distintos individuos y agentes sociales.

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Por lo tanto, las actividades sociales, el trabajo el ocio, las relaciones públicas, se constituyen como elementos constituyentes de la esfera erótica marcusiana. Las instituciones artísticas, por otro lado, los museos, las galerías, los espacios y los canales por los cuales el arte es conservado y difundido, son también el producto de la sublimación. Este último aspecto hizo pensar a Freud que el concepto de “civilización”, siendo connaturalmente represiva, expresa cabalmente el fracaso de Eros. No obstante, Marcuse, se opone a esta drástica conclusión freudiana figurándose la posibilidad de una inversión de la sublimación, eso es, de un “desvío” del erotismo para ser dirigido hacia nuevas tareas no represivas. La idea de “sublimación no represiva” (Marcuse 1976, p. 11) fue concebida por el filosofo alemán con la idea de favorecer, sin contenerla del todo, la retrasmisión de la libido. De esta manera, las pulsiones eróticas, en lugar de ser desviadas hacia impulsos destructores como afirmó Reich (1972) o simplemente contenidas y bloqueadas por el Logos, según la tesis de Freud (1986), podrían ahora manifestarse a través de un “ethos erótico” o, si se prefiere el término de Marcuse, una “razón libidinal” (1976, p. 186), una síntesis entre placer y razón que tiene cabida en el mundo civilizado. El mismo Marcuse recomienda, shillerianamente, “educar a Eros” para producir “formas más altas de libertad civilizada” (1976, p. 186).

Sin embargo, con esta hipótesis de la organización racional de la libido, Marcuse se refuta a sí mismo. El presupuesto erróneo de su tesis consiste en la plena confianza de que un individuo pueda constituirse como segmento del espacio social y tener, casi simultáneamente, un alto grado de conciencia y de intensidad en la propia experiencia vital. Se trata de un error común a muchas corrientes vitalistas que han intentado ingenuamente reparar a la dicotomía freudiana entre individuo y colectividad humana, puesto que no se trata de opuestos que se excluyen mutuamente sino, por el contrario, de elementos disparejos que se complementan. En rigor, esta hipótesis es muy alentadora, y no es muy difícil hallar principios teóricos que pueden convertir la erótica de Marcuse en un poderoso instrumento de propaganda ideológica dirigida en contra del sistema dominante. Por lo general, los defensores de esta postura especulativa, se han inspirado en cierta filosofía vitalista (sobre todo la de Nietzsche) asociando los sistemas represivos con los innumerables tabúes sexuales que habrían producido y fomentado.

Sin embargo, muchas de estas críticas han equiparado las prácticas sexuales con otros procesos vitales y creativos, desde el punto de vista lúdico y relacional. El arte, en este contexto, ha sido interpretado como una actividad espontánea del ser humano, de acuerdo con el modelo kantiano de “libre juego de las facultades”. Parafraseando a Kant, el arte gusta sin concepto alguno, es decir, sin un fin útil y racional. No obstante, este argumento es demasiado simplista para que sea verdaderamente plausible. En rigor, toda separación radical entre arte, libido y

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sociedad huele a reducción dualista, que convierte el erotismo en ficción espectacular6.

Por otro lado, una clara refutación de dichos planteamientos está en el hecho de que el mismo erotismo ha sido manipulado por parte de la industria mediática. Numerosas multinacionales han producido y fomentado símbolos eróticos para obtener enormes beneficios de tipo económico, adoptando nuevas y más refinadas estrategias de dominación, muy distintas de la represión pura y simple. Para explicar este problema, el sociólogo Theodore Roszak utilizó el concepto de “versión Playboy” (Roszak 1976, p. 28) aludiendo a la homónima revista norteamericana. De acuerdo con esta interpretación, Playboy, impone una imagen agradable y liberal del eros que circula y se difunde por todo el mundo a través de películas y catálogos y que, sin embargo, sólo reproduce ciertos modelos sociales bastante homogéneos y estereotipados. Unos clichés muy limitados que determinan la sexualidad de los actores de Playboy y que no responden a las exigencias eróticas reales de los individuos. El erotismo es utilizado aquí como pretexto para incentivar las relaciones anónimas, describiendo determinadas tipologías de encuentros en que sus protagonistas se cuidan de forma obsesiva para no dejar huella. Finalmente, el modelo de Playboy encubre estratégicamente la moral de sus productores: la absoluta e incondicional consagración a la empresa a la que pertenecen:

En la sociedad de la abundancia tenemos sexo, montañas de sexo, al menos esto es lo que nos parece. Pero cuando miramos más atentamente vemos que esta promiscuidad sibarítica viste unos colores sociales especiales. Vemos que ha sido asimilada y que está hecha específicamente para un determinado nivel de ingresos y para un status social particular al que sólo tienen acceso nuestros brillantes jóvenes ejecutivos y toda su corte.[…] Sí, hay tolerancia en la sociedad tecnocrática para los grandes vividores y consumistas. Es la recompensa que se da a los lacayos de confianza, políticamente seguros para el status quo. Antes de que nuestro playboy en ciernes pueda ser seductor en serie, tiene que ser un empleado leal (Roszak 1976, p. 28-29).

Sin duda, el mismo Marcuse temía que la búsqueda del erotismo se confundiera con una trivial “desublimación del deseo” y que dicha liberación de sexualidad reprimida se debilitara paradójicamente, reduciendo la misma libido. Marcuse describió este proceso con el término de “desublimación represiva”, oponiéndola a una “sublimación no represiva” en que los impulsos sexuales trascienden el mismo objeto de la sublimación, el fetiche, erotizando el ambiente cotidiano. (Marcuse 197, p. 11). La desublimación represiva es descrita por el filósofo alemán como “una de las más horribles formas de enajenación impuesta al individuo por su sociedad y espontáneamente reproducida por el individuo como una necesidad y satisfacción propia” (Marcuse 1976, p. 12). Se trata de unas de las formas más peligrosas y abrumadoras del totalitarismo, puesto que utiliza el arte y el eros

6 Unos ejemplos muy sugerentes son ofrecidos por las corrientes vitalistas relacionadas con el happening, la performance y el arte de acción, en particular los “accionistas vieneses” (Soláns 2000).

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como aliados, convirtiéndolos en una poderosa herramienta cotidiana para la sumisión del hombre al sistema productivo.

Sin duda, Marcuse va mucho más lejos del concepto de “industria cultural” teorizado por Horkeimer y Adorno, proponiendo que el tardo capitalismo ya no se limita a la creación de objetos fetiches, sino que utiliza el propio erotismo como una herramienta de control y sumisión. Esta nueva barbarie convertiría al individuo en un mero objeto erótico, apetecible, aprovechando los beneficios de las industrias de belleza: la producción de ropa interior y de perfumes, los productos para la higiene del cuerpo, la cirugía estética y la fabricación de accesorios para el deporte… En fin, el valor de un individuo, en cuanto objeto erótico, se determina en tanto que objeto listo para ser usado, mientras, de acuerdo con el análisis de Foucault, la sociedad se organiza y se estructura siempre más en contra de su efectiva emancipación. (Foucault 2000).

De esta manera, el circuito industrial y la propaganda mediática fabrican una nueva forma de producto que atrae eróticamente a los consumidores. Mario Perniola define el resultado de este proceso de la siguiente manera:

El núcleo teórico de esta experiencia se constituye a partir de una mezcla de elementos entre la sensibilidad humana y la dimensión material del objeto; mientras, por un lado, la primera se reifica, por otro las cosas parecen dotadas de una sensibilidad propia. […] Sin embargo, detrás de todas las configuraciones del inorgánico actúa el paradigma de lo que es máximamente real y efectivo: el dinero. (Perniola 1997, p. 171).

Perniola llega así a la conclusión extrema de que la “erotización de la mercancía” destruye no sólo el erotismo en cuanto tal, sino el propio deseo. (Perniola 2006, pp. 38-39). Este proceso se acompañaría de la democratización del deseo, es decir, según Perniola, al surgimiento de la “sociedad de la comunicación”, en que todo lo que se había mantenido oculto y secreto se torna de dominio público. (2006, p. 40).

En un estudio sobre la psicología en las sociedades democráticas, Eric Fromm había analizado detalladamente estos aspectos relativos a relación entre el deseo y la ideología en la cultura de masas:

La dificultad especial que existe en reconocer hasta qué punto nuestros deseos - así como los pensamientos y las emociones - no son realmente nuestros sino que los hemos recibido desde afuera, se halla estrechamente relacionada con el problema del autoridad y la libertad. (Fromm 1974, p. 279).

Fromm describe la manera en que ciertos factores característicos de las sociedades técnica y burocráticamente avanzadas, conducen al desarrollo social de personalidades inestables, que se sienten impotentes, solas, angustiadas e inseguras. Estas ideas refutan la creencia convencional de que la democracia moderna reflejaría la máxima expresión del individualismo, al liberar al individuo de todos sus vínculos exteriores:

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Nos sentimos orgullosos de no estar sujetos a ninguna autoridad externa, de ser libres de expresar nuestros pensamientos y emociones, y damos por sentado que esta libertad garantiza - casi de manera automática - nuestra individualidad. (Fromm 1974, p. 266).

Sin embargo, el derecho de ser libre sólo puede expresarlo quien se reconoce como tal. Dicho de otra manera, se puede ser libres sólo cuando las condiciones psicológicas íntimas que rigen nuestro comportamiento nos permiten determinarnos como seres singulares sin dejar de ser agentes sociales. La dificultad de conciliar las individualidades con el autoritarismo de las sociedades está en la base del problema de Marcuse y nos remite al prólogo que Aldous Huxley hace a su célebre novela Un mundo feliz:

A medida que la libertad política y económica disminuye, la libertad sexual tiende, en compensación, a aumentar. Y el dictador (a menos que no necesite carne de cañón o familias con las cuales colonizar territorios desiertos o conquistados) hará bien en favorecer esta libertad. En colaboración con la libertad de soñar despiertos, bajo la influencia de los narcóticos, del cine y de la radio, la libertad sexual ayudará a reconciliar a sus súbditos con la servidumbre que es su destino. (Huxley 1969).

Finalmente, la “distopía” de Huxley, las tesis de Fromm y de Perniola y el mismo concepto de “desublimación represiva” de Marcuse, nos conducen al mismo problema: la dificultad de una reconciliación entre ética y erotismo en la sociedad occidental de fin de siglo. Sin embargo, paradójicamente, todos estos autores no temen la represión del eros y de la libido, ni mucho menos la limitación de sus facultades expresivas: muy por contrario, temen los excesos de una carga libidinal potencialmente dañina. Marcuse llegó a describir esta aparente exuberancia del eros como un engaño para encubrir la parálisis ideológica, la falta de imaginación creativa en la sociedad contemporánea caracterizada por una absoluta falta de antagonismos.7 La sociedad contemporánea, alimentándose del concepto de “neutralidad tecnológica”, recurre al arte y a Eros para instituir conexiones sociales más agradables. Pero en realidad, casi todos los ejemplos de arte relacional, lejos de ser de maneras efectivas de reprogramar el mundo y las formas sociales sólo limitan la localización y concentración de la libido a la mera experiencia sensorial. La propuesta estética del crítico francés, Nicolas Bourriaud, es un claro ejemplo de lo planteado:

La obra de arte puede consistir en un dispositivo formal que genera relaciones entre personas, o puede nacer desde un proceso social cuya característica principal es la de considerar el intercambio en sí mismo y para sí mismo. (Bourriaud 2004, p. 29).

Sin embargo, Bourriaud no consideraba, como hace Marcuse, dichos “dispositivos formales” que generan “intercambio en sí mismo y para sí mismo” una

7 Más recientemente este aspecto ha sido retomado por Chantal Mouffe (1999) y por las activistas y teóricas del arte que en los años noventas introdujeron el concepto de “arte público de nuevo género”, especialmente Susan Lacy (1995) y Rosalind Deutsche (1996).

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herramienta para ampliar la creatividad del artista a cuesta de la intensificación de los mecanismos de subordinación del eros. (Marcuse 1994, pp. 19-48). La consecuencia más visible de dicha subordinación es una suerte de desfase que se produce entre la erotización de la mercancía (Perniola 1998) y la experiencia misma del erotismo como tensión interna experimentada por el individuo. Esta última nos remite, finalmente, al concepto de “espectáculo” de Guy Debord:

Los espectadores ya no encuentran lo que desean; desean lo que encuentran. El espectáculo no rebaja tanto a los hombres como para hacerse querer, sin embargo, muchos de ellos son pagados para fingir. Ahora que no pueden llegar a afirmar que esta sociedad sea plenamente satisfactoria, se apresuran a declararse insatisfechos de toda crítica de lo que existe (Debord 2004, p. 116).

Puesto que, como sugiere Debord, el espectáculo es el punto de llegada de un proceso en que el individuo se limita a reproducir sus deseos sin realmente desearlos, una suerte de simulacro de la voluntad de desear, puesto que, de acuerdo con el crítico situacionista el mismo deseo se ha convertido en bien de consumo, intercambiable, la libido termina replegándose hacia su propio objeto del deseo, identificándose con el mismo. En una palabra, se convierte en fetiche. Perniola define este proceso con el término de “sex appeal de lo inorgánico” (1998) aludiendo no sólo al placer que produce el objeto de consumo sino a la des-erotización del mismo erotismo, del deseo convertido ahora en pura mercancía. El resultado es lo que Debord solía llamar un “mundo invertido” (2003), un ejemplo extremo que nos remite al mundo creado por Huxley en su novela: un “mundo feliz” (1969). Pero ¿sería acaso también el mejor de los mundos posibles? Esta posibilidad basta por sí sola para justificar el “Gran Rechazo” de Marcuse y aceptar la lucida desconfianza crítica de Debord hacia todo lo que predispone el cuerpo y la mente del individuo a la aceptación espontánea de cualquier objeto que se le ofrezca.

En efecto, dicha conformidad con lo dado describe la imposibilidad intrínseca de satisfacer los deseos, puesto que, de acuerdo con Perniola, se desvió por completo la estructura simbólica que hace posible el reconocimiento del objeto de deseo dentro de un sistema de relaciones compartidas Este desvío se expresa a través de una falsa “socialización del deseo, [cuya] dinámica no ha de buscarse en la naturaleza de la cosa deseada, sino en el hecho de que ella es deseada por otro” (Perniola 2006, p. 66). Este proceso desarticula el mismo erotismo ocultándose detrás de falsas nuevas ontologías de la comunicación, muy seductoras al promover la democratización de la cultura apelando a la idea de “esfera pública”, aunque al final esta última se demuestre inexistente (Lippmann 1999).

Por otro lado, la contradicción de fondo entre el deseo individual y la necesidad de valores éticos más profundos no se resuelve en las propuestas de modelos de tipo relacional. De acuerdo con Nicolas Bourriaud, por ejemplo, siendo el arte relacionado exclusivamente con el intercambio de bienes de consumo, su principal objetivo se reduce a borrar el objeto artístico a favor de sus elementos

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performativos y comunicativos (Boaurriaud 2004, p. 29). Sin duda, a diferencia de muchos artistas que durante los años sesenta difundieron este nuevo género de arte participativo (Marchan Fiz 1986), esta vez se trata de un replica posmoderna vaciada de todo contenido crítico. En este caso, asistimos a una propaganda ideológica, la del consumo, en que los mismos medios de difusión propagandística trabajan en contra de la emancipación social. Bajo estas condiciones la propuesta marcusiana, la “estética del eros” parece siempre más quimérica.

No obstante, como hemos señalado, existen claras contratendencias que apuntan a una necesidad de volver a un grado elevado de compromiso social y político contrastando la resignación y la falta de deseos que los autores más radicales, como Debord y Roszak, han denunciado en sus escritos críticos. Sus denuncias apuntan a nuevas formas de concebir la cultura y el arte a través de la participación directa y activa del individuo. Una manera, quizá, de reconstruirnos, al mismo tiempo, como sujetos sociales y como individuo más libres, dentro de una sociedad tendencialmente fragmentada que prefigura un retorno de las pasiones más vehementes y de los deseos más ocultos.

Referencias

- Bataille, G. 1997. Las lagrimas de Eros. Barcelona: Tusquets. - Bourriaud, N. 2004. Postproduction. Come l’arte riprogramma il mondo. Milano: Postmedia Books. - Bourriaud, N. 2001. Esthétique relationnelle. Dijon: Les presses du réel. - Crow, T. 2001. El esplendor de los sesenta: arte americano y europeo en la era de la rebeldía, 1955-1969. Madrid: Akal. Traducción en español de S. Blasco. - Debord, G. 2004. Opere cinematografiche. Milano: Bompiani. - Debord, G. 2003. La sociedad del espectáculo. Madrid: Pre-Textos. - Debord, G. 1958. “Teoría de la deriva” en - "http://www.sindominio.net/ash/is0209.htm" [Consulta 18 / 11/2009]. - Deutsche, R. 1996. Evictions: Art and the Spatial Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts y Londres: The MIT Press. - Ferlinghetti, L. 1995 City lights: Pocket poets’ anthology. San Francisco: City Lighs Publishers. - Foucalt, M. 2000. "Los cuerpos dóciles" en Vigilar y castigar: nacimiento de la prisión. Madrid: Siglo XXI de España. - Freud, S. 1986. El malestar en la cultura y otros ensayos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. - Fromm, E. 1974. El miedo a la libertad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós.

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- Hoffman, A. 1980. “Museum of the Streets” en http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Abbie_Hoffman_Museum_of_the_Str eets.html [Consulta 14/11/2011]. - Huxley, A. 1969. Un mundo feliz. Barcelona: Plaza & Janes. - Lacy, S. (Ed.) 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press. - Lippmann, W. 1999. The Phantom Public. New Brunswick (New Jersey): Transaction Publishers. - Maffi, M. 1975. La cultura underground. Tomo I. Barcelona: Anagrama. - Marchán Fiz, S. 1986. Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (1960-74): epílogo sobre la sensibilidad posmoderna, antología de escritos y manifiestos. Madrid: Akal. - Marcuse, H. 1994. El hombre unidimensional. Ensayo sobre la ideología de una sociedad industrial avanzada. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel. - Marcuse, H. 1976. Eros y civilización. Barcelona: Seix Barral. - Marcuse, H. 1969, Un ensayo sobre la liberación. México: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz. - Mouffe, C. 1999. El retorno de lo político: comunidad, ciudadanía, pluralismo, democracia radical. Barcelona: Paidós. - Perniola, M. 2006. Contra la comunicación. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. - Perniola, M 1998. El sex appeal de lo inorgánico. Madrid: Trama. - Perniola, M. 1997. L’estetica del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino. - Reich, W. 1972. Psicología de masas del fascismo. Madrid: Editorial Ayuso. - Roszak, T. 1976. El nacimiento de una contracultura: reflexiones sobre la sociedad tecnocrática y su oposición juvenil. Barcelona: Kairós. - Soláns, P. 2000. Accionismo vienés. Hondarribia (Guipúzcoa): Nerea.

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La experiencia estética, por ej., en Kant, a la luz de las teorías neurológicas de A. Damasio

Jaime Aspiunza* Universidad del País Vasco

Ya en su primera obra de divulgación más conocida, El error de Descartes (1994), indagaba Damasio, partiendo de los conocimientos en neurología cerebral, la relación entre emociones y racionalidad, matizando y en definitiva desmontando la tradicional contraposición de lo emocional y lo racional. Su tesis era aquí que lo emocional es el suelo fundamental, imprescindible, sobre el que tomar cualquier decisión racional.

En su segunda obra, El sentimiento de lo que ocurre (2001), ampliaba el foco, tratando de ver el lugar de las emociones en la percepción y en la conciencia. Lo que ahí sale a la luz es el carácter orgánico y al tiempo judicativo de las emociones. Esta idea le lleva en su tercera obra, En busca de Spinoza (2003), a acercar la neurología cerebral a la filosofía, dedicándola a rastrear sus teorías en el pensamiento ético de Spinoza.

De una manera muy esquemática, teniendo en cuenta el carácter en muchos casos hipotético de sus propuestas, intentaré explicar la concepción kantiana de la experiencia estética valiéndome de los conocimientos aportados en sus obras por A. Damasio. Obviamente, entiendo «experiencia estética» en su sentido más amplio de experiencia sensible, que me parece es el que corresponde al planteamiento de Kant: parto de la idea de que la tercera crítica es una investigación en la estructura de la subjetividad, que le lleva a Kant a pensar el papel de la percepción, del sentimiento y del juicio, facultades dejadas de lado en sus anteriores críticas, y a tener algunas intuiciones afortunadas al respecto.

Son éstas las que intentaré explorar con la ayuda de las propuestas de Damasio.

1. «Estética» [Ästhetik], el substantivo, aparece ¡una sola vez! en la Crítica del Juicio;1

* [email protected]

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el adjetivo, ästhetisch, figura unas cuarenta veces, siempre con el significado de «sensible». No hace referencia a cierta clase de objetos, como hoy tendemos a pensar, sino que equivale a subjetivo, y equivale a «subjetivo» porque el juicio de gusto –que es estético– nos habla exclusivamente del «sentimiento de vida», del «sentimiento de estar vivo» [Lebensgefühl] del sujeto. «Subjetivo», por lo tanto, tampoco es en Crítica del Juicio lo que hoy en día solemos entender, al menos en el habla corriente. El ser humano es para Kant sujeto de facultades,2 y el juicio de gusto es subjetivo, no por que sea personal sino por hacer referencia exclusivamente a una facultad del sujeto, cual es el sentimiento de placer o displacer. — Y dicha facultad la poseen en principio todos los seres humanos.3 No hay objeto estético, no hay estética en la tercera crítica kantiana. Como nos dice en el prefacio: allí se va a tratar de la facultad del gusto en cuanto facultad de juzgar estética «únicamente a efectos trascendentales».4 La Crítica del Juicio o, mejor, la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar, esto es, de la capacidad y no del producto particular, es una indagación en la estructura y funciones del sujeto, un análisis de la subjetividad del sujeto, siendo el «sujeto» una determinada concepción del ser humano. Y el juicio de gusto, con la experiencia estética, tendrán, eso sí, valor paradigmático, al ser el gusto una función especial de dicha facultad de juzgar. De lo que se ocupa la Crítica de la facultad de juzgar –expone Kant en el mismo prefacio– es de si la facultad de juzgar tiene también por sí misma principios a priori; de si éstos son constitutivos o meramente regulativos […], y de si da a priori la regla al sentimiento de placer y displacer […]»5 Podemos avanzar aquí que la Crítica del Juicio va a suponer el descubrimiento de la íntima e inconsciente racionalidad de la facultad de sentir placer y displacer, de sentirse vivo. — Una suerte, pues, de teoría de la vida: biológica y espiritual.

1 En el «Comentario general» con que acaba la «Analítica de lo sublime» [B 118, A 116]. 2 Es Baumgarten quien propone dicha noción, que Kant adoptará: el sujeto en cuanto «substancia poseedora de potencias por medio de cuya realización es capaz de hacer algo». Menke (2008), p. 33. 3 «dasjenige Subjektive, welches man in allen Menschen ... voraussetzen kann» [B 151, A 149; subrayado, mío].

4 «bloß in transzendentaler Absicht» [B IX, A IX]. 5 «Ob nun die Urteilskraft, die in der Ordnung unserer Erkenntnisvermögen zwischen dem Verstande und der Vernunft ein Mittelglied ausmacht, auch für sich Prinzipien a priori habe; ob diese konstitutiv oder bloß regulativ sind (und also kein eigenes Gebiet beweisen), und ob sie dem Gefühle der Lust und Unlust, als dem Mittelgliede zwischen dem Erkenntnisvermögen und Begehrungsvermögen (eben so, wie der Verstand dem ersteren, die Vernunft aber dem letzteren a priori Gesetze vorschreiben), a priori die Regel gebe: das ist es, womit sich gegenwärtige Kritik der Urteilskraft beschäftigt.» [B V- VI, A V-VI.]

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2. ¿Por qué escribe Kant una crítica de la facultad de juzgar? Lo hace, dicho sin ambages, por ver si se puede salvar el abismo que se abre entre la teoría y la práctica moral o, lo que es equivalente, entre los dominios de lo sensible y lo suprasensible, que se presentan «como si fuesen dos mundos diferentes».6 — No habiendo en principio relación alguna entre ellos, ¿cómo va a ser posible que la acción humana transforme el mundo? … que, sin embargo, transforma. Algo falla, o algo falta en las dos primeras críticas. Como la facultad de juzgar ocupa un lugar intermedio entre el entendimiento y la razón, las dos facultades rectoras respectivamente en los dominios de la teoría y de la práctica, se plantea Kant si no será dicha facultad la que posibilite cierto tránsito entre ambos dominios, la que de alguna manera sostenga7 o aporte la necesaria unidad de conocimiento y práctica. En sus dos primeras críticas, Kant se ha estado ocupando del mundo conceptual; hora es ya de prestar atención a la realidad empírica, a la vida. Y lo que la facultad de juzgar va a hacer es mediar entre mundo conceptual y mundo empírico, y eso es algo que se descubrirá en el lugar del sujeto que queda libre del concepto y, sin embargo, posee organización, en la experiencia estética. De ahí que la crítica de la facultad de juzgar vaya a ser una teoría del sujeto en cuanto ser sensible, en cuanto ser vivo. En definitiva, Kant, al indagar en la facultad de juzgar, se está preguntando por el carácter unitario del sujeto: ¿se trata sólo de un agregado revuelto de facultades, o las facultades que lo componen forman un sistema –como dice él–, poseen y constituyen una organización?

3. ¿Qué es, qué hace la facultad de juzgar, el Juicio? El Juicio «es la facultad de pensar lo particular en cuanto comprendido en lo universal», aclara Kant en la introducción.8 En caso de que el concepto ya exista se le llama juicio determinante; vemos una silla de diseño y tenemos que decidir si el concepto que le cuadra es el de silla, escabel, caballete o instrumento de tortura. Puede ser, sin embargo, que sólo esté dado lo particular y haya que

6 «Ob nun zwar eine unübersehbare Kluft zwischen dem Gebiete des Naturbegriffs, als dem Sinnlichen, und dem Gebiete des Freiheitsbegriffs, als dem Übersinnlichen, befestigt ist, so daß von dem ersteren zum anderen (also vermittelst des theoretischen Gebrauchs der Vernunft) kein Übergang möglich ist, gleich als ob es so viel verschiedene Welten wären, deren erste auf die zweite keinen Einfluß haben kann: so soll doch diese auf jene einen Einfluß haben, nämlich der Freiheitsbegriff soll den durch seine Gesetze aufgegebenen Zweck in der Sinnenwelt wirklich machen» [B XIX, A XIX].

7 En el prefacio se insinúa ya que la facultad de juzgar ocupa los cimientos [die erste Grundlage] del edificio que constituiría la metafísica. [B VI, A VI.] 8 «Urteilskraft überhaupt ist das Vermögen, das Besondere als enthalten unter dem Allgemeinen zu denken» [B XXV, A XXIII].

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buscar el universal correspondiente, ascender desde lo particular hasta lo universal: Kant lo llama entonces juicio reflexionante o reflexión.9 Más acá de tales definiciones, el Juicio es lo que se suele llamar «sentido común», esa facultad cuya posesión y empleo tan importante es –o era– en nuestra vida.10 Es aquello cuya carencia –llega a decirnos Kant en una nota de la primera Crítica– es lo que en sentido estricto se llama «ser tonto».11 El ser humano, al menos el adulto, es un ser de reglas, un ser de universales, que constantemente se encuentra sólo con particulares: su principal actividad es conjugar unos y otros. Juzgar (lo que hace, por ej., el juez) consiste en saber aplicar las normas, porque – no hay que olvidarlo– no existen normas para aplicar las normas. Pero eso lo hacemos todos y cada uno de nosotros cada vez que buscamos una palabra adecuada para algo que ocurre, o cuando tenemos que decidir qué hacer en una situación concreta, esto es, qué pauta seguir en cada caso. La facultad de juzgar opera, por lo tanto, bajo diversas figuras: el saber del juez, la conciencia moral, el sentido común y, naturalmente, el gusto. Juzgar es, pues, la facultad más humana; y, curiosamente, como el propio Kant recuerda, es un talento especial que no se puede enseñar, un don natural [Naturgabe] que sólo se puede perfeccionar: por medio de la práctica y la experiencia, a través del ejemplo.12 Se tiene o no se tiene, es un saber efectivamente práctico, vital: el de compaginar adecuadamente universales y particulares, esos dos mundos entre los cuales el ser humano tiene que desenvolver su existencia. — Tras haber trazado los mapas de la razón, Kant viene a ver cómo se aplican.

4. La primera cuestión que a Kant le interesa dilucidar es si la facultad de juzgar reflexionante tiene un principio propio. Es decir, ¿en qué condiciones funciona el Juicio? ¿Es caprichoso o se atiene a alguna ley, se apoya en algún presupuesto? Para que el Juicio reflexionante pueda realizar su labor –buscar en lo particular conceptos universales no dados– hemos de dar por supuesto: a) que la esfera de los particulares está sometida a cierta regularidad, b) que no están dadas las reglas

9 «Ist aber nur das Besondere gegeben, wozu sie das Allgemeine finden soll, so ist die Urteilskraft bolß reflektierend.» [B XXVI, A XXIV-XXV.] De modo semejante en la primera introducción: «es la facultad de encontrar lo universal para lo particular» [zu dem Besonderen das Allgemenine zu finden, H 14, p. 186]. Un poco más adelante, en la misma sección IV: «Die reflektierende Urteilskraft, die von dem Besondern in der Natur zum Allgemeinen aufzusteifen die Obliegenheit hat» [B XXVI s., A XXIV]. 10 «gesunder Verstand» [B VII, A VII]. 11 «Der Mangel an Urteilskraft ist eigentlich das, was man Dummheit nennt, und einem solchen Gebrechen ist gar nicht abzuhelfen» [Kant (1781), A 133, B 172, nota]. 12 «ein besonderes Talent, welches gar nicht belehrt, sondern nur geübt sein will». In ihr liege «auch das Specifische des so genannten Mutterwitzes [ingenio natural], dessen Mangel keine Schule ersetzen kann» [Kant (1781), A 133, B 172]

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de dicha regularidad, sino que debemos buscarlas. Pues bien, este presupuesto insoslayable, por estar implícito en la propia actividad del Juicio, va a ser el principio de la facultad de juzgar. Al pretender conocer el mundo, al tratar con él estamos ya presuponiendo que es cognoscible, y tratable, y que lo es según nuestras entendederas; en palabras de Kant: como si la naturaleza nos la hubiese dado un entendimiento para provecho de nuestras facultades de conocimiento.13 En ese sentido dirá Kant que es la propia facultad de juzgar la que se da a sí misma dicho principio, al que llamará «conformidad a fin, Zweckmäßigkeit, de la naturaleza». No significa que la naturaleza esté sometida al entendimiento, sino que el ser humano sólo puede tratar con ella partiendo de ese presupuesto. Por ello, porque sólo atañe al funcionamiento del sujeto, señalará Kant que se trata de un principio subjetivo. El ser subjetivo, no obstante, no lo hace de menor rango o importancia que si fuera objetivo. Todo lo contrario, es un principio, digamos, más básico y fundamental que los principios objetivos, imprescindible para que pueda haber conocimiento objetivo empírico. Es subjetivo pero funda la objetividad, puesto que la mente humana tiene que asumirlo para que haya experiencia. La facultad de juzgar actúa suponiendo a priori que en lo contingente de las leyes particulares empíricas de la naturaleza hay «una unidad de ley, para nosotros insondable pero pensable»;14 y ese es «el único modo como podemos proceder en la reflexión».15 Es una máxima de la facultad de juzgar, el principio primero de actuación del ser humano en el mundo: dar por supuesto que se puede entender, que posee algún orden, que se adecúa en alguna medida a nosotros. Zweckmäßigkeit, «conformidad a fin de la naturaleza», en definitiva, presunción de cosmos. — Y lo bello será un paradigma de dicho orden. Kant, empero, no habla del juicio de gusto hasta la sección VII de la introducción. Antes, en la VI, explica cuál sea

13 «da allgemeine Naturgesetze ihren Grund in unserem Verstande haben, der sie der Natur (ob zwar nur nach dem allgemeinen Begriffe von ihr als Natur) vorschreibt, die besondern empirischen Gesetze in Ansehung dessen, was in ihnen durch jene unbestimmt gelassen ist, nach einer solchen Einheit betrachtet werden müssen, als ob gleichfalls ein Verstand (wenn gleich nicht der unsrige) sie zum Behuf unserer Erkenntnisvermögen, um ein System der Erfahrung nach besonderen Naturgesetzen möglich zu machen, gegeben hätte.» [B XXVII, A XXV.] 14 «so muß die Urteilskraft für ihren eigenen Gebrauch es als Prinzip a priori annehmen, daß das für die menschliche Einsicht Zufällige in den besonderen (empirischen) Naturgesetzen dennoch eine, für uns zwar nicht zu ergründende aber doch denkbare, gesetzliche Einheit» [B XXXIII, A XXXI; subrayado, mío: J.A.].

15 «die einzige Art, wie wir in der Reflexion über die Gegenstände der Natur in Absicht auf eine durchgängig zusammenhängende Erfahrung verfahren müssen, […] folglich ein subjektives Prinzip (Maxime) der Urteilskraft» [B XXXIV, A XXXII].

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5. La relación entre la conformidad a fin de la naturaleza y el sentimiento de placer. Este paso, la clave de todo el argumento, es el más llamativo. Sabemos que el entendimiento y la razón procuran el principio de actuación del conocimiento y del deseo respectivamente; si el Juicio dotara de principio a la tercera facultad del ánimo, el sentimiento de placer y displacer, éste sería independiente de las otras dos y podrían constituir un sistema. Y eso se da gracias al vínculo necesario que Kant halla entre placer y presunción de cosmos: el descubrimiento de que la naturaleza, para nosotros solo contingente, puesto que somos incapaces de acceder al fondo suprasensible que la informa, coincide en ocasiones, diríase por azar, con el presupuesto básico del ser humano para poder comprender dicha naturaleza –el de su conformidad a fin– provoca un placer notable.16 Kant interpretará que dicho placer se debe al logro «no pretendido» de esa pretensión que debemos dar por sentada en el fondo del ánimo humano, la presunción de cosmos. Y como ésta, siendo principio del Juicio, es una representación a priori, dicho sentimiento tendrá también fundamento a priori y será válido para todos.17 No es excesiva aquí la pretensión de Kant al universalizar el placer que se siente cuando se halla sentido en el mundo, en la vida. Reconocernos en ellos, ver una correspondencia, sentirnos parte, palpar siquiera ya una abertura, una vía de acceso es algo que produce alegría o al menos cierto gusto, por más que todo esto pueda llegar en casos concretos a pervertirse, ya lo sé. Que inesperadamente se haga real la presunción de cosmos es algo que en cuanto seres humanos nos place. Tal es la tesis fundamental de Kant en la Crítica del Juicio, y ese fenómeno, que él considera a priori, le permitirá sostener la unidad del sujeto de las facultades.

6. En la experiencia estética, caso especial de la facultad de juzgar, es donde más a las claras se presenta dicho fenómeno En el caso del gusto no se llega a concepto alguno; decir de algo que «es bello» significa predicar sólo el placer del sujeto. Se trata, pues, de un juicio reflexionante en cierto modo malogrado, que por lo mismo posee un valor especial. En él sale a la luz una función y una estructura de la subjetividad que hasta ahora Kant no había podido observar. Toda la primera parte de la Crítica del Juicio está dedicada a ello, pero ya en la introducción nos avanza por qué una crítica de la facultad de juzgar comienza por el juicio estético, cuando lo que en todo momento ha

16 «eine sehr merkliche Lust, oft sogar eine Bewunderung» [B XXXIX, A XXXVII]. 17 «Die Erreichung jeder Absicht ist mit dem Gefühle der Lust verbunden; und, ist die Bedingung der erstern eine Vorstellung a priori, wie hier ein Prinzip für die reflektierende Urteilskraft überhaupt, so ist das Gefühl der Lust auch durch einen Grund a priori und für jedermann gültig bestimmt» [B XXXIX, A XXXVII].

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constituido hasta ahora su interés era el conocimiento empírico de la naturaleza. Y es que lo que un juicio estético nos comunica, aunque parezca hablar de un objeto, es el estado llamémoslo anímico del sujeto, en concreto lo que Kant llama das Gefühl der Lust oder Unlust, que si hasta ahora he estado llamando «sentimiento», se podría traducir también como «sensación de placer o displacer». En el juicio estético –eso es lo que tiene de especial–, al no contener concepto, queda aislada en su función la facultad del sentir, sentir que, recuerdo, tiene que ver con el estado anímico, vital del sujeto. Kant considera que la facultad de juzgar reflexionante ha descubierto la adecuación del objeto a las facultades del conocimiento: comparando –«sin querer» [unabsichtlich]–18 la forma del objeto presente en la imaginación, se encuentra –una vez más «sin querer» [unabsichtlich]– que se halla en armonía con el entendimiento, y es eso lo que despierta la sensación de placer. Tenemos, pues, una facultad independiente del concepto y del deseo, cuya función consiste en responder al principio de conformidad a fin del mundo, y en responder ¡«sin querer»! La forma del objeto es el fundamento del placer, un placer que no puede ser inteligido por medio de conceptos, sino sólo por medio de la «percepción reflexionada» como algo que ella misma trae consigo.19 El juicio de gusto en cuanto juicio empírico no puede reclamar necesidad objetiva ni validez a priori; «lo extraño y anómalo –añadirá Kant– es que no es un concepto empírico, sino la sensación de placer lo que se exige a todo el mundo y lo que se espera que la representación del objeto traiga consigo.»20 La reflexión –es lo que se ve en el juicio de gusto– es una operación involuntaria y aconceptual del sujeto en que por medio del sentir placer o displacer dicho sujeto se apercibe del orden o desorden provocado en su ánimo ante la presencia de un objeto determinado. Esta primera operación del Juicio viene a ser una respuesta del ser vivo que somos, aun en cuanto sujeto de facultades, a las condiciones del entorno. Cuál sea la regla por medio de la cual el Juicio traduce la percepción en placer o en displacer es algo que no sabemos ni podremos saber; que está implícita en la facultad del gusto, eso es lo que Kant trató de hacernos ver. 21 Ahora bien, y con esto acabo con la Crítica del Juicio, ese placer no apunta sólo a la conformidad a fin de los objetos respecto del sujeto –caso de lo bello–, sino también a la inversa: del sujeto con respecto a los objetos según su forma o su falta de forma, con arreglo –precisa Kant– al concepto de libertad; es decir, a ese

18 Viene a ser lo mismo que «desinteresado». 19 «nur durch reflektierte Wahrnehmung als mit dieser verknüpft erkannt werden muß» [B XLVI, A XLIV] 20 «Das Befremdende und Abweichende liegt nur darin: daß es nicht ein empirischer Begriff, sondern ein Gefühl der Lust (folglich gar kein Begriff) ist, welches doch durch das Geschmacksurteil, gleich als ob es ein mit dem Erkenntnisse des Objekts verbundenes Prädikat wäre, jedermann zugemutet und mit der Vorstellung desselben verknüpft werden soll.» [B XLVI, A XLIV.] 21 «nur zur Kritik des urteilenden Subjekts und der Erkenntnisvermögen desselben» [B LII s., A L s.]

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sentir el espíritu que Kant vislumbra tras la experiencia de lo sublime.22 A través del Juicio, con su presunción de cosmos por principio, y del sentimiento, que refleja la realización de dicho principio en el mundo o su posible ampliación por medio del espíritu, viene a darse el tránsito entre lo sensible y lo suprasensible, a abrirse teóricamente la posibilidad de actuación del ser humano en el mundo. Y es que la sensibilidad, el sentimiento responde también a cierta regla.

A. Damasio es un neurólogo portugués que, basándose en investigaciones acerca del cerebro, intenta pensar el ser peculiar de lo humano. (Aquí no puedo sino resumir brutalmente…) La hipótesis básica de la que parte es que «algunos patrones neurales son también imágenes mentales»23. Dicho de otra manera: que lo mental emerge de lo corporal. No toda la actividad cerebral deviene consciente; gran parte es inconsciente –ya lo sabemos– y, por supuesto, indispensable para que se conserve la vida del organismo. La conciencia no sería sino la punta del iceberg de ese gran inconsciente. La función del cerebro es gestionar y cuidar la vida. Desde una perspectiva evolucionista, y considerando al ser humano en cuanto ser vivo, resulta palmario cómo el cerebro es el dispositivo más complejo desarrollado para la regulación de la vida. La conciencia serviría también a tal designio. No se puede atribuir la conciencia a ninguna parte determinada del cerebro; es el resultado del funcionamiento integrado de muchas zonas. Tampoco se puede hablar de ningún centro rector; la dirección es algo que se improvisa en el desarrollo de cada experiencia. Pues bien, la tesis fundamental de Damasio es que la conciencia es algo más que la mente, si entendemos por mente ese teatro cartesiano por el que van pasando los pensamientos de uno. Hace falta que a la mente se le añada lo que él llama el proceso del yo-mismo, del self, es decir, un componente de subjetividad. Tener conciencia implica que «la mente sabe que el organismo vivo y activo al que

22 «Die Empfänglichkeit einer Lust aus der Reflexion über die Formen der Sachen (der Natur sowohl als der Kunst) bezeichnet aber nicht allein eine Zweckmäßigkeit der Objekte in Verhältnis auf die reflektierende Urteilskraft, gemäß dem Naturbegriffe, am Subjekt, sondern auch umgekehrt des Subjekts in Ansehung der Gegenstände ihrer Form, ja selbst ihrer Unform nach, zufolge dem Freiheitsbegriffe; und dadurch geschieht es: daß das ästhetische Urteil, nicht bloß, als Geschmacksurteil, auf das Schöne, sondern auch, als aus einem Geistesgefühl entsprungenes, auf das Erhabene bezogen, und so jene Kritik der ästhetischen Urteilskraft in zwei diesen gemäße Hauptteile zerfallen muß.» [B XLVIII, A XLVI.]

23 «some neural patterns are simultaneously mental images.» 38/28. [Cito de la última obra de A. Damasio (2010a), corrigiendo en ocasiones la traducción; indico por ello también la paginación del original (2010b).]

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pertenece existe».24 Aun cuando ese saber se concrete en un tenue sentir; se lo vea o no, siempre se le siente:25 uno siente que es él mismo. Podemos, entonces, decir que el tema de Damasio también es la subjetividad. No le da al término el mismo sentido que Kant, mas en su indagación acerca de la conciencia sí que está buscando aquello que caracteriza al ser humano en cuanto ser vivo. Y lo que aquí nos interesa de todo esto es que, de modo semejante a Kant, Damasio va a encontrar en el origen de la conciencia subjetiva, por detrás de cualquier conocimiento de objeto, ciertas sensaciones básicas que se despliegan en la dimensión placer-dolor, dando cuenta en todo momento del estado vital del sujeto. Veamos esquemáticamente cómo llega a eso. Me centraré en tres puntos: 1. Cómo se distinguen, y por qué, mente y conciencia. 2. Cómo se construye la conciencia, cuál es su germen primero. 3. La emoción como posible modelo de la experiencia estética.

1. Hay un transtorno llamado automatismo epiléptico que constituye la mejor prueba de que una cosa es la mente y otra la conciencia dotada de subjetividad. Lo característico de tal enfermedad es una «crisis de ausencia» en que la acción se congela por completo, seguida de un período de «automatismo», en que se ejecutan actos sin conciencia. El enfermo está presente corporalmente, ausente como persona.26 Tras narrar detalladamente el fenómeno, nos dice Damasio: aquel hombre estaba despierto en el sentido pleno del término, y realizaba acciones; sus acciones, sin embargo, no sugerían la presencia de un plan organizado: no tenía una intención global, no sabía cuáles eran las condiciones de la situación, no se daba cuenta de qué era lo apropiado, sus actos poseían sólo una coherencia mínima. Esto es, su cerebro producía imágenes mentales, había mente, mas no un yo-mismo. Ni sabía quién era ni dónde estaba, ni quién tenía delante ni por qué. — Aquel hombre no tenía sentido de su propia existencia y el sentido que tenía de su entorno era defectuoso. El yo-mismo no es una cosa, es un proceso dinámico. La manera de ensamblar dicho proceso había quedado gravemente afectada. «Estaba confinado en un ahora desorientado y desubicado».27 La sensación de ser él mismo en cuanto sujeto material casi había desaparecido y, de manera más clara, él mismo en cuanto sujeto de conocimiento había desaparecido por completo.28 Estar despierto, tener

24 «It is also a mind capable of knowing that such a living, acting organism exists.» 29/20. 25 «Now you sense it, now you don’t, but you always feel it.» 27/19. 26 «bodily present, but unaccounted for as a person.» 252/203. 27 «our man was confined to an aimless, unsituated now. The self as material me was mostly gone, and so was, even more certainly, the self as knower.» 254/205. 28 «The self as material me was mostly gone, and so was, even more certainly, the self as knower.» 2010b, 205

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mente y tener una identidad –una conciencia propia– son tres procesos cerebrales diferentes que se dan gracias al concurso de componentes cerebrales diferentes. — No son compartimientos estancos, pero sí procesos separables. «La formación de una mente consciente es un proceso muy complejo, resultado de la adquisición y la supresión de diversos mecanismos cerebrales a lo largo de millones de años de evolución biológica. No hay un único dispositivo o un único mecanismo que pueda dar cuenta de la complejidad de la mente consciente, y por ello es preciso abordar, por separado y como les corresponde, las diferentes piezas que forman el rompecabezas de la conciencia, antes de esbozar una explicación integral.» (277/224)

2. El cerebro construye la conciencia generando la formación de un yo-mismo en una mente despierta; este proceso de subjetivación hace que la mente se centre y enfoque en el organismo que habita. Dicho yo-mismo se forma de manera escalonada: a) la etapa más simple surge de la región del encéfalo que representa el organismo, y consiste en una recopilación de imágenes que describen aspectos relativamente estables del cuerpo y generan sensaciones espontáneas del cuerpo vivo; es lo que Damasio llama el protoself o «proto-yo-mismo». b) La segunda etapa –que da lugar al yo-mismo nuclear y a la conciencia del aquí-y-ahora de la percepción– resulta de establecer una relación entre el organismo (tal y como el protoself lo representa) y cualquier parte del encéfalo que represente un objeto que se da a conocer.29 El germen primero de la conciencia –y en esto insistirá Damasio– es la producción de esas sensaciones primordiales que constituyen la experiencia directa del propio cuerpo vivo, desprovista, por supuesto, de palabras, experiencia, podríamos decir, del puro sentirse vivo. Tales sensaciones primordiales son, además, el componente primero y primordial de lo que será nuestra vida afectiva. Se producen en el tronco encefálico, en el mismo lugar en que de manera automática e inconsciente y gracias a una representación completa e integrada del cuerpo se regula nuestro organismo para mantenerse dentro de los intervalos adecuados en que se conserva la vida. Hay niños que nacen sin corteza cerebral; se les suele tratar como si estuvieran en estado vegetativo. Damasio, sin embargo, ha descubierto que muestran

29 The hypothesis comes in two parts. The first specifies that the brain constructs consciousness by generating a self process within an awake mind. The essence of the self is a focusing of the mind on the material organism that it inhabits. Wakefulness and mind are indispensable components of consciousness, but the self is the distinctive element. The second part of the hypothesis proposes that the self is built in stages. The simplest stage emerges from the part of the brain that stands for the organism (the protoself) and consists of a gathering of images that describe relatively stable aspects of the body and generate spontaneous feelings of the living body (primordial feelings). The second stage results from establishing a relationship between the organism (as represented by the protoself) and any part of the brain that represents an object-to-be-known. The result is the core self. 277-9/224

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emociones, es decir, que perciben y revelan preferencias, y tales emociones tienen que haberse producido ¡a nivel subcortical!, fuera de la conciencia.

3. Damasio hace una distinción que creo aquí fundamental entre «emoción» y «sentimiento». En la experiencia cotidiana solemos confundirlos, y razonablemente, puesto que somos conscientes de las emociones sólo cuando las sentimos. Es posible, no obstante, delinear mejor el campo que corresponde a cada una de tales nociones: - Las emociones –miedo, ira, tristeza o asco– son «programas complejos de acciones, en buena medida automáticos, que la evolución ha ido preparando»30 y que nuestros cuerpos despliegan. Contienen, como se suele decir, elementos cognitivos, pero lo fundamental es que se trata de acciones que el cuerpo realiza en respuesta a la situación. Dichos elementos cognitivos, en cualquier caso, no son conscientes; los deducimos de la eficacia de la acción. La emoción sirve a la conservación de la vida. - «Las sensaciones o los sentimientos [feelings] que tenemos acompañando a las emociones son percepciones –imágenes de acciones, no acciones– compuestas de lo que sucede en nuestro cuerpo y en nuestra mente cuando se emocionan.»31 Constan de un componente esencial que corresponde a lo que llamábamos sensaciones primordiales: se basan en esa relación única entre cuerpo y cerebro que privilegia la interocepción; el hecho de que se sientan depende de ella.32 La emoción es, pues, una respuesta automática del cuerpo ante determinados estímulos, respuesta, podríamos decir, reflexiva aunque inconsciente, que se refleja en un sentimiento correspondiente a la situación, sentimiento que en última instancia es una variación o modulación de las sensaciones primordiales de placer o de dolor.

Concluyo Damasio nos habla del cuerpo, Kant, del espíritu; mas ese espíritu es algo de la naturaleza, es la animación de nuestras fuerzas vitales, la potencia que se supera a sí misma sin dejar de ser potencia; que, organizada, organiza; y que, en la segunda

30 «Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are complemented by a cognitive program that includes certain ideas and modes of cognition, but the world of emotions is largely one of actions carried out in our bodies». 2010b, 136 31 «Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as the body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than actions themselves; the world of feelings is one of perceptions executed in brain maps.» 2010b, 136 32 «contain a special ingredient that corresponds to the primordial feelings discussed earlier. Those feelings are based on the unique relationship between body and brain that privileges interoception. There are other aspects of the body being represented in emotional feelings, of course, but interoception dominates the process and is responsible for what we designate as the felt aspect of these perceptions.» 2010b, 137

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parte de la Crítica del Juicio, llegará a ser tratada de «fuerza plástica o creadora» [bildende Kraft]. Ese espíritu es, pues, algo de un organismo, de un cuerpo vivo. Por eso no es tan disparatado iluminar a Kant con Damasio. Un rasgo característico de la experiencia estética –pensemos en los cuatro momentos de lo bello– es que lo que al entendimiento le resulta contradictorio – complacencia sin interés, universalidad sin concepto, conformidad a fin sin fin, necesidad subjetiva– aquí adquiere sentido, porque refleja el equilibrio logrado entre los antagonistas; la oposición sirve de vehículo a la armonía, es complementariedad. Aunque sólo sea por ello, que no es el caso, entiendo que no se deben contraponer espíritu y cuerpo. Y así como Damasio nos corrobora por medio de sus investigaciones que en el fondo inconsciente, pero eficiente para la vida, de la conciencia son las sensaciones de placer y dolor las que encienden la tenue llama de la subjetividad, así también podemos entender que Kant no andaba demasiado descaminado al entrever en el sentimiento de placer ante lo bello el fundamento involuntario y aconceptual de la racionalidad. Si el sujeto, si la conciencia es racional (o puede serlo) es porque el organismo, el gran inconsciente del cuerpo ya lo eran.

Referencias - Damasio. 2010a. Y el cerebro creó al hombre, Barcelona: Destino. - Damasio. 2010b. Self Comes to Mind, New York: Pantheon Books. - Kant. 1781. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Werke, Bd. II, ed. de W. Weischedel, WBG, 1983. - Kant. 1790. Kritik der Urteilskraft, Werke, Bd. V, ed. de W. Weischedel, WBG, 1983. - Menke, Ch. 2008. Kraft. Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Una cuestión de semántica. Greenberg, Fried y la expresión emotiva en artes plásticas

David Díaz Soto* Universidad de La Rioja

Suele señalarse la escasa permeabilidad de la teoría formalista del arte hacia las implicaciones emotivas del arte y hacia los enfoques hermenéuticos. Partiendo de figuras fundacionales del formalismo que así parecen confirmarlo, nos centraremos en dos autores vinculados a dicha corriente: Clement Greenberg y Michael Fried. En Greenberg hallamos una interesante tensión entre la típica aversión formalista contra la concepción de la obra artística como ‘signo’ (interpretable por remisión a un significado ‘externo’), y el reconocimiento de la dimensión emotiva de la experiencia de las formas y los recursos plásticos. Ello produciría en el espectador un intraducible ‘efecto emotivo’ constitutivamente inefable, pero que constituiría el significado propiamente artístico de las obras plásticas y la fuente misma de la calidad artística. Por el contrario, en los textos críticos tempranos de Michael Fried hay un abierto discurso sobre el contenido y las emociones expresadas en la obra de arte, relegando a veces las consideraciones formales a un plano secundario. Examinaremos su noción moralmente negativa de “emoción abstracta”, y la de “significado abstracto”, ésta ya no peyorativa, que Fried empleará para analizar obras abstractas. Veremos el desarrollo de estas ideas en la posterior historiografía de Fried, que reflexiona sobre la expresión corporal y gestual y el significado de la representación narrativa de la acción, pero también sobre la dimensión inerte e inexpresiva del cuerpo. Y señalaremos cómo ello lleva Fried a polémica contra las tardovanguardias de fines de los años 60 y contra su implícita concepción “materialista” de la corporeidad y del significado, especificando así la noción de ‘teatralidad’ como ambigüedad e indeterminación, con una valencia ética negativa.

La tradición formalista de teoría del arte se opone al subjetivismo; rechaza entender las artes como medios de expresión emotiva. Rechaza también la concepción de la obra de arte como ‘signo’ que refiere a un significado ‘externo’). Por eso, es hostil a los enfoques interpretativos, que pretenden “traducir” las artes no verbales al lenguaje verbal. También repudia la intromisión de lo “literario” en artes distintas a la literatura. Además, el formalismo se opone a la

* [email protected]

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“contextualización” de la obra artística en su entorno social, histórico, biográfico y mundano de origen, la cual sería buscar una “explicación” de la obra en cosas ajenas a ella.

Un ejemplo significativo de todo lo anterior es Konrad Fiedler, quien menospreciaba lo que él denominaba “significado material”, y otras veces, “contenido conceptual” o “ideal” de la obra (el cual supuestamente sería lo que el autor de la obra “quiso decir” mediante ella). Según sostiene Fiedler (1991, p. 56), frente al “contenido conceptual”, que la obra de arte meramente toma del acervo icónico y cultural de su época, existiría un verdadero “significado artístico” de la obra, el cual constituiría la aportación original del arte y del artista a la cultura, y sería irreductible a términos de esta última. Análogamente, en el terreno de la estética musical, el formalismo, que aquí tiene su figura fundacional en Hanslick, se opuso a la “estética del sentimiento”, según una de cuyas variantes la música sería un arte representacional cuyo objeto de representación son “sentimientos” (Hanslick, 1989, pp. 20-57).

Uno de los últimos grandes representantes del formalismo fue el crítico norteamericano Clement Greenberg. Pero en Greenberg, como antes que él sucedía en Roger Fry (1981, pp. 7-8, 18-22, 25-26), hay una tensión entre el típico rechazo formalista a concebir la obra artística como ‘signo’, y el reconocimiento de la dimensión emotiva y semántico-expresiva del arte1. Ahora bien, Greenberg entiende la “emoción” y el “significado” en las artes plásticas de un modo muy peculiar.

En su artículo “Complaints of an art critic” (Greenberg, 1993, pp. 265-274), rechaza diversas concepciones habituales del significado artístico, por ser o bien triviales (caso del subject matter, el ‘tema’ u objeto explícito de una representación figurativa) o bien arbitrarias e incontrastables. El verdadero significado artístico de las artes plásticas sería un intraducible ‘efecto emotivo’, producido en el espectador por las cualidades sensibles, las formas y recursos plásticos presentes en la experiencia de la unidad formal de la obra de arte. Sería una experiencia “contemplativa” en sentido kantiano, y por tanto, plena e intensa, según sostiene en otro artículo Greenberg (1993, pp. 75-77, 82). Dicha respuesta emotiva sería exclusiva de la experiencia artística; no tendría nada que ver con las emociones corrientes del mundo vital extraartístico. Y poseería cierta ‘universalidad’, ligada al fundamento ‘objetivo’ del juicio crítico sobre el valor artístico de la obra; pues Greenberg la llega a identificar con la calidad artística misma (1993, p. 267). Pero, paradójicamente, aunque tal ‘significado’ propiamente plástico sería el aspecto crucial de la obra, jamás tendría sentido alguno pretender explicitarlo directamente mediante el discurso. Ya que, al ser accesible únicamente en la experiencia de cualidades plásticas de la obra de arte, resultaría constitutivamente inefable.

1 Durante este período de su producción crítica, son frecuentes, aunque dispersas, las alusiones a este asunto por parte de Greenberg (1993, pp. 99-106, 193, 110-111, 153).

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No piensa así Michael Fried. Éste achaca al formalismo una concepción dualista de la forma y el contenido en el arte; concepción que Fried rechaza, por considerarla inviable y carente de atención a la concreción histórica (Fried 1990, p. 47). Fried rechaza también la concepción purovisualista de las artes plásticas, que otorga legitimidad teórica exclusiva a las categorías morfológicas y gnoseológicas del estilo y los “modos de visualidad”, reduciendo el “contenido” a irrelevantes cuestiones de identificación y semejanza icónica. Por contra, en su serie de estudios historiográficos sobre arte francés del siglo XIX, Fried adopta un enfoque centrado en las nociones de “absorción y teatralidad”, y que exige atender al contenido representativo de las obras de arte figurativo. Para Fried, el arte no es sólo “cosa de la mano y el cerebro” (Fried 1962, p. 52). El arte expresa o encarna (to embody) emociones, ideas, pensamientos, que constituyen todo un modo de subjetividad del artista (el cual puede manifestar, a su vez, aspectos cruciales de la cultura, artística y extraartística, de su época).

Ya en textos críticos muy tempranos, Fried desarrolla un explícito discurso sobre el contenido y sobre las emociones expresadas en la obra de arte, relegando a veces las consideraciones formales a un plano subordinado. Fried identifica aquí grados de “abstracción” o “generalización” de las emociones expresadas, y las valora éticamente. Para él, una “emoción abstracta” tiene valor negativo: sería una emoción indiferenciada, de rango inferior al de las emociones propiamente humanas, que es el que Fried considera digno de ser expresado y comunicado por las obras de arte. Con tal criterio, Fried censura a artistas como los británicos Jacob Epstein (Fried, 1962a) y Francis Bacon (Fried, 1962b) por su embrutecimiento expresivo, su complacencia en lo patológico, su tosca representación del cuerpo y del gesto humanos, y su explotación “teatral” y calculada de imaginería figurativa (ya sea original o tomada de prestado del arte del pasado) para producir golpes de efecto2.

Para Fried, de acuerdo en esto con Greenberg, los elementos plástico-formales poseerían una capacidad semántico-expresiva propia: un “significado abstracto” (ahora sin connotación peyorativa), independiente de cualquier iconografía figurativa representada por la obra. Dicho significado es “vivido” y “sentido”, rebasando la condición de la obra de arte como mero artefacto material (el aspecto de la obra al que Fried y Greenberg denominan “literalidad”). Pero, contra lo que sostuvo Greenberg, según Fried este significado no sería inefable, sino accesible al discurso verbal. La verdadera virtud y finalidad de buena parte del mejor arte moderno y abstracto radicaría en el refinamiento de tales capacidades expresivas (Fried 1963, pp. 22-27; 1998, pp. 126-127).

Fried se inspira en ciertas poéticas “simbolistas”, de Mallarmé a Crane, y más tarde, en Saussure, Merleau-Ponty o Wittgenstein. También entabla fructífero

2 Resultaría apresurado identificar este tipo de apreciaciones de un jovencísimo Fried con la “teoría de la teatralidad” de sus textos historiográficos maduros de Fried, aunque no podemos aquí, por limitaciones de extensión, entrar en más detalles sobre esta necesaria distinción.

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diálogo, desde 1965, con Stanley Cavell, pensador crítico hacia la estrecha noción de “sentido” de los filósofos analíticos oxonienses, y defensor de una semántica intencionalista y basada en la noción wittgensteiniana de “convenciones” y de un criterio de valor estético donde juega un papel la noción de “autenticidad”. (Cavell, Stanley 1976, pp. 1-43, 54-56, 62-60, 74-82).

Esta temática la desarrolla Fried en sus textos críticos, publicados durante la segunda mitad de la década de 1960, sobre tres de sus artistas predilectos: los pintores Kenneth Noland y Jules Olitski y el escultor Anthony Caro, cuyos logros, no circunscritos al plano formal, radicarían en la dimensión semántico-expresiva. En Olitsky, la expresión se desplegaría libremente a través del color; en Noland, lo haría también por medios cromáticos, pero en tensión con el interés formal “modernista” por la “estructura deductiva” (otro concepto clave de Fried en esta época). Fried lleva su discurso aún más lejos en el caso de Caro. Con su técnica de ensamblaje de piezas de hierro, Caro habría superado las limitaciones expresivas del inerte medio material de la talla figurativa en piedra, cuya tradición culminó en Rodin. En obras como Span u Horizon, Caro crearía “gestos expresivos abstractos”, que alcanzarían la expresividad propia el cuerpo humano, pero sin mimetizar sus formas orgánicas (Fried, 1969; 1997, pp. 173-179, 180- 184).

El tema de la expresividad gestual del cuerpo humano seguirá presente en textos historiográficos de madurez de Fried. En ellos, Fried desarrolla su tesis sobre los orígenes del arte moderno3, que estarían en una “tradición antiteatral” francesa, nacida en el siglo XVIII. Dicha tradición respondería al “problema de la teatralidad”: la representación artística ha de evitar toda sensación de ser un artificio producido para mostrarse y complacer al espectador; de lo contrario, no convencerá a éste, sino que resultará “teatral”, y parecerá que los personajes representados “posan”. Un problema, pues, de relación retórica entre representación y espectador, que afectaría a las obras pictóricas expresivamente poco convincentes, o de temática narrativa ambigua o ininteligible.

En Absorption and theatricality, Fried explica que esta tradición “teatral” surge como reacción contra las convenciones de la representación alegórica en la pintura decorativa y mural del rococó, con sus composiciones “ambientales”, dispersas en amplias superficies, y sus figuras de gestos retóricos, estereotipados y carentes de vínculo narrativo, que resultarían ambiguos y carentes de convicción (Fried 1988, pp. 88, 211 n. 77, 90, 212-214 nn. 83-87)4. La alegoría pretende

3 La exposición básica de estas ideas está en Absorption and theatricality (Fried, 1988) obra fundacional de una “trilogía de la tradición antiteatral francesa”; que completan sus libros Courbet’s Realism y Manet’s Modernism (Fried 1990; 1996), los cuales son desarrollos de este mismo argumento, históricamente localizado y limitado al ámbito francés entre los siglos XVIII y XIX. Fried insiste en la necesidad de atenerse a esta especificidad histórica. 4 Todo esto no implica en absoluto que Fried asuma o comparta la hostilidad hacia la alegoría de los críticos “antiteatrales” cuyas respectivas posiciones él analiza. Muy al contrario, Fried emplea una metodología interpretativa que a veces él mismo denomina “alegórica”, e interpreta ciertas obras especialmente destacadas en términos de “alegoría real” del acto pictórico de su propia producción.

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transmitir un significado mediante un simbolismo cuyo código no está dado en la obra misma, sino en textos literarios o filosóficos, indispensables para su comprensión. Ello reduce la obra de arte a una escritura o vehículo sígnico, y su contemplación a un acto intelectual y mediato de lectura y traducción. Lo cual contraría la aspiración antiteatral a restituir la relación entre obra y espectador a un estado prístino de ingenuidad, credibilidad, inmediatez y comunicación.

Los primeros teóricos “antiteatrales”, encabezados por Diderot, ya habrían comprendido que el problema de la mediación contextual de la inteligibilidad no afecta sólo a la alegoría, sino a toda representación pictórica figurativa del gesto, la acción y la narración. Pues al ser representados artísticamente, gesto y acción quedan privados del contexto de convenciones, instituciones sociales, y situaciones cotidianas que los hace inteligibles en la vida real. Para evitar que la representación artística resultara ininteligible, la tradición antiteatral, a lo largo de su desarrollo, habría empleado diversas estrategias más o menos “formalizadas” de representación (como la “absortiva”, la “dramática”, y etc.). Con ellas, habría intentado siempre alcanzar el ideal normativo del tableau: la obra pictórica convincente, “completa” y autosuficiente, independiente del espectador y del contexto de su exhibición. Este desarrollo concluiría a mediados del siglo XIX, con la figura crucial de Édouard Manet. Éste constataría la impotencia última de cualquier estrategia de representación para neutralizar la dependencia contextual de su comprensión. Renunciaría al ideal de inmediatez e inteligibilidad narrativa y expresiva, emprendiendo una verdadera “destrucción del significado”5, como única vía posible para que la tradición artística prosiguiera su desarrollo, saliendo del impasse (Fried 1996, pp. 354-356).

En estudios posteriores, Fried prosigue su discurso sobre cuerpo, gesto y expresividad, insistiendo en la perspectiva genealógico-crítica de un Foucault sobre el cuerpo como construcción histórica. K. Malcolm Richards (2000) ha señalado que Fried suele priorizar una imagen positiva del cuerpo: sano, vigoroso y expresivo. Pero en su libro Menzel’s Realism, Fried tematiza explícitamente la contraposición entre el “cuerpo vivido”, animado y expresivo, y su contrapartida negativa: el “cuerpo abyecto”, en tanto que objeto físico inerte e inexpresivo6. No se trata sólo del caso evidente de la representación del cadáver, sino también de ciertos aspectos, partes, e incluso modos de experiencia del cuerpo vivo que, según Fried, resultan expresivamente opacos: el vello, las experiencias de enfermedad, lesión, fatiga, vejez, o la pérdida de sensibilidad en un miembro.

5 Lo cual, según Fried (1996, p. 111, 359, 401), habría provocado dificultades de comprensión del proyecto pictórico personal de Manet ya entre sus propios contemporáneos. Dicho proyecto no consistiría en una mera despreocupación ‘formalista’ por cuestiones de tema y representación. Y tampoco sería un gesto destructivo de abandono nihilista (Fried 1986, p. 66); sino que tendría la finalidad positiva de abrir un horizonte nuevo para la pintura. 6 Fried se remite a la contraposición entre Leib y Körper, planteada por Max Scheler (Fried, 2003, p. 197). Hasta aquí, el planteamiento de Fried tendía a dejar poco espacio para la enfermedad o los procesos corporales fuera de control, salvo aquellos procesos vegetativos inconscientes que tienen, por su condición de soporte fundamental de la vida, un papel positivo (y que Fried asocia a su compleja noción de “absorción”).

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Incluso el cuerpo animado de la persona puede a veces resultar opaco e inexpresivo. Fried vincula la abyección a la opacidad “literal” de los materiales de la obra artística y a la arbitrariedad de las relaciones entre los elementos de la representación, cuya pérdida de poder de convicción ilusionista va ligada a una falta de claridad de la intención expresiva de su autor.

Esto permite entender un importante aspecto de la polémica de Fried, culminada en su célebre artículo de 1967 titulado “Art and objecthood” (Fried, 1998, pp. 148-172), contra el Minimalismo y otras tardo-vanguardias, que él denominó “literalistas”7. Los partidarios del literalismo pretendían ostentar una concepción crítica de la corporeidad y de la relación intersubjetiva, y acusaban a los artistas que practicaban la escultura de construcción en hierro, apreciada por Fried y Greenberg, de realizar obras “antropomórficas”, de retórica expresionista, y no verdaderamente abstractas. Por su parte, Fried denuncia “una suerte de naturalismo latente u oculto, incluso de antropomorfismo” (Fried 1998, p. 155) en las obras literalistas, que manifestarían una visión nihilista del ser humano como mero objeto inerte. Los rasgos típicos de las obras minimalistas (simetría rígida, holismo, yuxtaposición seriada, gran escala, sensación de “oquedad” interna) mimetizarían de modo literal el cuerpo humano así concebido (Fried 1998, pp. 151-152, 155-156, 168 n. 4). Todo ello, sostiene Fried, sería funcional a la estrategia “teatral” empleada por los literalistas: la reducción “objetual” de la obra de arte a su mera fisicidad material, y su posterior “escenificación” como mero elemento de una “situación total” que incluye y manipula violentamente al propio espectador. De este modo, el literalismo alcanza su fin espurio de asegurar el impacto sobre su audiencia de unas obras en realidad mediocres y sin capacidad de convicción.

Años más tarde, Fried (1998, p. 142) explicitó aún más las implicaciones de esta concepción literalista del cuerpo. Ésta iría ligada a un principio de indeterminación y opacidad semántica (Fried, 2005, pp. 571-573); enlazando así con el debate de Fried contra el “materialismo lingüístico” de la corriente que él mismo denomina, a secas, “Teoría” (Fried 1987; 1998, pp. 52, 73-74 n. 77), representada, entre otros, por Paul de Man. También conviene valorar estas implicaciones a la luz de la reflexión de Stanley Cavell (1979, pp. 318-353; 1979, pp. 329-496) sobre el vínculo entre el origen de la era moderna y el problema filosófico de la duda escéptica sobre la realidad del “mundo exterior” y de las “otras mentes”. Desde esta perspectiva, el literalismo sería la consecuencia histórica remota de aquella pérdida del carácter significativo y convincente de la representación pictórica del cuerpo, el gesto y la acción humana iniciada a ya comienzos del siglo XIX, y culminada por la radical intervención de Manet, con la legítima intención de abrir nuevos caminos para el arte. Tras ella, el arte moderno habría quedado librado al proceso de simplificación y abstracción que Greenberg, un siglo después,

7 Es desde la perspectiva de este debate, y en su ejercicio como crítico del arte de su tiempo (pero no, en principio, en su papel de historiador del arte del pasado), donde Fried sí se proclama heredero de la tradición de crítica antiteatral inaugurada en el medio artístico e intelectual francés a mediados del siglo XVIII.

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denominaría “reducción modernista”, y cuya más funesta interpretación, según Fried, conduce directamente al literalismo, del cual el formalismo habría sido cómplice.

Referencias

- Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Must we Mean what we Say? A Book of Essays, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. - Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. - Fiedler, Konrad. 1991. Escritos sobre arte, ed. e intr. Francisca Pérez Carreño, trad. Vicente Romano, Madrid: Visor. - Fried, Michael. 1962a. “Epstein amid the Moderns”, Arts magazine 36 (Jan.), pp. 50-52. - Fried, Michael. 1962b. “Bacon’s achievement”, Arts Magazine, 37 (Sept.), pp. 28-29. - Fried, Michael. 1963. “Some notes on Morris Louis”, Arts Magazine no. 37 (Nov.), pp. 22-27. - Fried, Michael. 1969. “Introduction”, en Anthony Caro, cat. de la exp. en Hayward Gallery, Londres, 29 Enero-9 Marzo 1969, pp. 5-16. - Fried, Michael. 1985. “How Modernism Works: A response to T. J. Clark”, en Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and after: The critical debate, London: Harper & Row, pp. 65-79. - Fried, Michael. 1987. “Stephen Crane’s upturned Faces”, en Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: on Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, pp. 93-161. - Fried, Michael. 1988. Absorption and theatricality: Painting and beholder in the age of Diderot, 2ª ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press (trad. cast. El lugar del Espectador: Estética y Orígenes de la Pintura Moderna, trad. Amaya Bozal, Madrid : Antonio Machado, 2000). - Fried, Michael. 1990. Courbet’s realism, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. (trad. cast.: El Realismo de Courbet, trad. Amaya Bozal, Madrid : Antonio Machado Libros, 2003). - Fried, Michael. 1996. Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860's, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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- Fried, Michael. 1998. Art and objecthood: Essays and reviews, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (trad. cast: Arte y objetualidad: Ensayos y reseñas, trad. Rafael Guardiola, Madrid: Antonio Machado Libros, 2004). - Fried, Michael. 2002. Menzel's Realism: art and embodiment in Nineteenth- Century Berlin, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. - Fried, Michael. 2005. “Barthes's punctum”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 31 no. 3 (Spring), pp. 539-574 (trad. cast.: El punctum de Barthes, Murcia: CENDEAC, 2008).

- Fry, Roger. 1981. Vision and design, ed., intr. y notas de J.B. Bullen, Minneola, N.Y. : Dover. - Greenberg, Clement. 1993. The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol 4, Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press. - Hanslick, Eduard. 1989. Vom musikalisch Schönen, Wiesbaden : Breikopf & Härtel. - Richards, K. Malcolm. 2000. “Eavesdropping/Eve’s Dropping”, en Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts y Tony Ross (eds.), Refracting vision: Essays on the writings of Michael Fried, Sydney, Power Publications, pp. 247-287.

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Art as the Expression of Emotion in the Language of Imagination: Dickie's Misunderstandings of Collingwood's Aesthetics

José Juan González* University of Salamanca

It is a common statement in the most traditional views of the history of the philosophy of art to consider the nineteenth century as the moment of birth of the expression theory of art, a theory that ended pushing aside the already declining imitation theory of art. It is also usually understood that the expressionist theory defended that the essence of art was to express emotion, that the artist aim was to translate somehow emotions into artworks, and that these emotions ended in some way reaching the audience or the public of the work of art that was contemplated, listened to, or read.

This explanation of art received a further development during the first half of the twentieth century by R. G. Collingwood among others, but was soon replaced by other theories that moved in a wider scope. Nevertheless Collingwood's approach to art continues being a reference for the reflection of many contemporary philosophers, although the general sense of their approach to his philosophy of art is mainly negative: it is more worried about criticizing Collingwood's view than about understanding it.

The aim of this exposition is not to defend Collingwood's explanation of art, but to show important errors of interpretation that have become a common place in the objections that are made against his proposal. To accomplish it, I pretend to take a close look to the criticisms to his theory made by one of the most

* [email protected]

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important exponents of the aesthetics of the analytical tradition, George Dickie. I have chosen him because he both summarizes and has contributed to extend quite well the general tone of the objections against Collingwood's account of art. These mainly focus on the understanding of art as imagination, on the definition of art as expression of emotion, and on the relation between these two approaches to art. By their analysis, I hope to give some clues to help in a better understanding of these concepts in Collingwood's philosophy of art, not only because of the historical value that this might have, but because of the light that Collingwood's approach to art can throw upon contemporary reflections on the relation between art, emotion and value.

Exposition I am aware that this is neither the place nor the time to review Dickie's conception of art and aesthetics. Even more, in another kind of setting, I will have divided my exposition into, at least, two differentiated sections: one to expose a brief summary of Dickie's chapter on Collingwood in his Introduction to Aesthetics. An Analytic Approach In order to develop my objections to Dickie. But since there is no time to spare, I will try to go straight to the point.

Dickie understands Collingwood's philosophy of art as a twentieth century example of the expression theory of art that was born in the nineteenth century in close connection to the development and settlement of Romanticism.

Having all this in mind let us move on to the pages (Dickie 1997, p. 62-69) that really interest us to see Dickie's understanding or misunderstandings of Collingwood's philosophy of art. In this sense, it is possible to accept his summary of The Principles of Art as mainly right, so we can skip until page 64 where he begins a critical review of the theory. It is precisely on that page that he writes the first paragraph that I wish to examine:

Having analyzed amusement and magic in terms of evoked emotion, Collingwood assumes without argument that there is a necessary connection between art proper and emotion, although it is not a matter of evoking. (His assumption is perhaps explained by the fact that E. F. Carritt, a well-known expressionist, was Collingwood's tutor at Oxford. Collingwood may, for all his subtlety, be perpetuating without question a tradition he learned at school. Collingwood's theory is also strongly influenced by the Italian philosopher Croce.) The connection between art and emotion seems so obvious to Collingwood that he simply asserts it to be the case. (Dickie 1997, p. 64)

I hope the extension of the paragraph has allowed you to understand the tone of the accusations Dickie is throwing against Collingwood: Collingwood's aesthetics is biased by the assumption of the connection between art and emotion, a connection irrationally adopted by him that could even be traced back to his studies in Oxford and to E. F. Carrit.

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In this sense, the first of the statements is true if we do not take into account the development of Collingwood's philosophy of art and we center our interpretation of his aesthetics exclusively on The Principles of Art (1938). But, this means completely forgetting about a series of facts that I wish to recall now, facts of which either Dickie did not know about or did not take into account. The first of them is obvious to any of the scholars of Collingwood's aesthetics: his theoretical interest on art begins as soon as 1916, in the first book published by him: Religion and Philosophy (Collingwood 1916), although it is true that this book is mainly concerned with the analysis of the relation between philosophy and religion. But if we take into consideration only Collingwood's production related to aesthetics, in 1919 he will pay tribute to Ruskin in the first centenary of his birth. It is in that conference, and speaking about Ruskin's conception of art that Collingwood states the following:

The soil in which art grows is not art but life. Art is expression, and it cannot arise until men have something to express. When you feel so strongly about something - the joys and sorrows of your domestic or national life: the things you see round you: your religious beliefs, and so on - that you must at all costs express your feelings, then art is born. And so you cannot encourage art by teaching people the manual knack of drawing, and hoping that the feeling will come of itself. If you could only teach people to feel, they would teach themselves to draw, fast enough. The problem is not, in Ruskin's own words, how to give gentlemen and artist's education; it is how to give artists a gentleman's education. (Donagan 1966, p. 33)

We have here all the elements that Dickie had previously talked about: art, expression, feeling or emotion. But, from the perspective of Collingwood's published works, the connection of these elements is not done through Carritt but through Ruskin – to which Collingwood's father devoted more than one book. It is true that E. F. Carritt was Collingwood's tutor at Oxford, and that in his Theory of Beauty, published in 1914, he defends the expression theory of art, but I am rather inclined to think that this was something that was “in the air” when Collingwood studied at Oxford, and that he was used to understand art in such a key, so Carritt's teachings did not provoke any dissonances in his mind. Nevertheless, the question is not so simple as that for, although in 1924, in Speculum Mentis he still speaks of art as having a contradictory essence (Collingwood 1924, p. 91) – being imagination and expression -, one year later, in his Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, art will only be defined as imagination, and there is an interesting path from that book until his Principles, where Collingwood will completely recover the definition of art in terms of expression and imagination.

With all this, I do not pretend to close in a few lines the possible historical debate around the origin of Collingwood's theory in aesthetics, but I do want to show that the question is much more complicated than a simple influence received while studying at Oxford.

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But let us continue with the section Dickie consecrates to Collingwood. Beginning in page 66, he is going to develop a series of objections against Collingwood's expression theory. The first of them states the following:

And there is a further question: how can someone other than the artist himself know that his work expresses emotion? Collingwood's answer is that “we know that he [the artist] is expressing his emotions by the fact that he is enabling us to express ours.” This answer suffices for some cases, but what of the cases in which, say, a poet has in fact expressed his or her emotion, but the reader for some reason is unable to realize this fact? In such cases, the reader will not be able to tell whether the work is craft or art. Collingwood's reading of Shakespeare may be a case in point. Perhaps Shakespeare's words do not "work" for Collingwood and he has therefore concluded that they must have been designed to evoke emotion and are craft. This point brings out that Collingwood criterion of art proper is difficult to apply. (Dickie 1997, p. 66)

I believe Dickie has, once again, simplified the argument in this point. Collingwood's allusion to us, in the citation, is referring to the audience of the artist which must be inserted in what might be best described as a community. And who belongs to that community? One can answer easily saying that anyone that reads the book, listens to a concert, or looks at a painting. But, in Collingwood's aesthetics, both concepts - community and audience - play such an important role that there are many shades of meaning that need to be taken into account to understand him correctly. In this sense, Collingwood speaks of three components of the community of an artist besides the artist himself: other artists, the performers and the audience. He also describes the relation between all of them as one of collaboration and criticizes the consideration of the work of art as “self-expression” of the sole artist (Collingwood 1938, pp. 318-324). But this means that the judgment on whether an artwork has expressed emotions or not is not a prerogative of the artist alone, but a community question: the artist expresses not his emotions but his community's in as much as he feels them. The horizon of all this thesis is also clear in The Principles, although Dickie has seemingly not notice it: it is a radical opposition to individualism in art:

The understanding of the audience's function as collaborator is a matter of importance for the future both of aesthetic theory and of art itself. The obstacle to understanding it is a traditional individualistic psychology through which, as through distorting glasses, we are in the habit of looking at artistic work. (Collingwood 1938, pp. 315-316)

This way, if the reader is not able to realize the fact that a given poet has express his emotion, this is not an objection against Collingwood's definition of art proper: it is an example of readers who do not belong to the poet's community in question. In this sense, the fact that many people nowadays – beginning by many of my own High School students – do not understand contemporary art, does not prove that art does not express emotions anymore, but that they are out of the community where those artists belong to.

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The next objection against Collingwood's aesthetics I want to call your attention to is going to bring us very close to the relation between imagination and expression we have already talked about, and to a common feeling many have about Collingwood's aesthetics. The objection could be summarized in the following way: Collingwod not only claims that art is expression but that it is simultaneously imagination. But he confuses two senses of the word “imagine”, being one of them the act of forming mental images and the other, the act of bringing something into consciousness. But even accepting that both senses are applicable to art, there is no relation between them: describing a work of art as the result of becoming aware of something does not imply necessarily that the thing so brought into consciousness is only in our head. The objection ends with the following words:

The second sense of “to imagine” appears to be identical with what Collingwood means by “to express,” so that to say that works of art are expressions and imaginary in the second sense is redundant. Collingwood appears to have confused his two senses of “to imagine” and drawn the conclusion that all works of art are imaginary in the sense of being “in the head” only. Consequently, he denies that such public objects as statues, paintings, and the like are works of art. He claims that the only real works of art are the mental images formed in the spectator's mind as the result of experiencing a public object. This conclusion is especially strange for a philosopher who purports to be following ordinary language. (Dickie 1997, pp. 66-67)

To answer the first part of the objection, the accusation of a confusion between two senses of the word “imagine” will require much more space and time than the one we have left, for in this case it is backed up by one of the most eminent scholars in Collingwood's philosophy: Prof. Alan Donagan. But I do want to briefly point out some interesting issues, at least to serve as working hypothesis that could be developed some other time. The first one is Collingwood's definition of imagination. Beginning in 1924 with Speculum Mentis, he always understood imagination in the following way:

This non-assertive, non-logical attitude is imagination in the proper sense of that word. The word is sometimes used with the implication that the imagined object is necessarily unreal, but this implication is illegitimate; the correct implication is that in imagining an object we are indifferent to its reality or unreality. (Collingwood 1924, pp. 60-61)

This way of talking about it is going to be repeated in every work where Collingwood develops his aesthetic theory1, and it shows that the main feature of imagination is its indifference to the reality or unreality of that which is imagined. So it is at least questionable to reduce imagination to mean some kind of mental image. But there is more. The supposed confusion between the two senses of

1 See, for example, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art in Donagan 1966, pp. 54-55; or Collingwood 1938, p. 136: “Imagination is indifferent to the distinction between the real and the unreal.”

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imagination is not clear to be such a confusion. Let me introduce what I mean with the following citation from The Principles of Art:

Regarded as names for a certain kind or level of experience, the words consciousness and imagination are synonymous: they stand for the same thing, namely, the level of experience at which this conversion occurs. But within a single experience of this kind there is a distinction between that which effects the conversion and that which has undergone it. Consciousness is the first of these, imagination is the second. Imagination is thus the new form which feeling takes when transformed by the activity of consciousness. (Collingwood, 1938 p. 215)

That is, from certain perspective, imagination can be defined as consciousness or awareness; but, properly speaking, is the form a feeling takes when we become aware of it. The question is the following: is there any incompatibility or inconsistency between this meaning and saying that when imagining – or better – when becoming conscious of a feeling, we are indifferent to the reality or unreality of that of which we are becoming aware of? I don't think so.

But let me go another step and try to face what is probably the most common interpretation of Collingwood's position about works of art: their imaginative character, their being “only in the head”. After what we have just explained, I believe it is clear that there is nothing to object to saying that, for Collinwood, works of art are imaginative. The problem lies in the implication that, like Dickie, many people make from that to stating that, for him, works of art are “only in the head”.

But this is just the subject of my actual research project so I will not be able to offer you final conclusions. As I read and reread Collingwood's works, it is becoming problematic for me many of the common statements around his philosophy of art, and even his philosophy in general, that are usually held; especially the ones that have tagged Collingwood as a Neo-Idealist2. Leaving aside this general problem, it is also true that even in The Principles of Art there are many passages, most of them at the end of the book, that simply do not fit together with considering works of art as “only in the head”. Let me cite only one of them, that comes just after Collingwood has said, speaking in the name of a painter that “one paints a thing in order to see it”:

What our painter is saying, then, comes to this. The painted picture is not produced by a further activity upon which he embarks, when his aesthetic activity has already arrived at completion, in order to achieve by its means a non- aesthetic end. Nor is it produced by an activity anterior to the aesthetic, as means towards the achievement of aesthetic experience. It is produced by an activity that is somehow or other bound up with the development of that experience itself. The two activities are not identical, (…) but (…) each is

2 It was Aaron Ridley's book on Collingwood philosophy of art (Ridley 1998) that made me reconsider Collingwood's idealism, not so much because he thinks that he is not an idealist, but because he defends an interpretation of his aesthetics saved from what he describes as his philosophical charge, namely, his idealism.

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conditional upon the other. Only a person who paints well can see well; and conversely (…) only a person who sees well can paint well. There is no question of 'externalizing' an inward experience which is complete in itself and by itself. There are two experiences, an inward or imaginative one called seeing and an outward and bodily one called painting, which in the painter's life are inseparable, and form one single indivisible experience, an experience which may be described as painting imaginatively. (Collingwood 1938, pp. 304-305)

Does this sound coherent with defending the mere existence of works of art “in our head”? Besides, and this is on of the line I have been lately following in my research on the question of the “work of art” in Collingwood, in this text, like in many others, he uses an activity-centered language: he focuses on the activities the artist does rather than on the results or products of those activities: the painter paints in order to see, imagines to become conscious of his feelings, and so on. This will mean that, from certain perspective, the product of the artist's activity, what is usually called “artwork”, is only a kind of “residue”. But since this “residue” can become the starting flame of the aesthetic activity of the reader, spectator, ... provided that he approaches this “death” object to make it alive again in his imagination, it cannot be considered as mere waste.

The next objection Dickie develops against Collingwood's theory relates to its critical side, for his aesthetics offers also criteria for distinguishing good art from bad art. The disagreement rises on the following statement that Collingwood makes in The Principles: “The definition of any given kind of a thing is also the definition of a good thing of that kind.” (Collingwood, 1938, p. 280) Dickie continues the objection stating that Collingwood has confused classifying a thing as a thing of a certain kind with evaluating it as a good or bad thing of its kind. The paragraph ends with these affirmations:

We do, however, frequently speak of bad works of art. Collingwood tries to account for this by saying that “A bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails.” (Collingwood op. cit., p. 282) In other words, a bad work of art is something that tried to be a work of art but failed. The most obvious difficulty is the paradox that a bad work of art turns out not to be a work of art! One would think that for something to be a bad thing of a certain type, it would have to be of that type - a bad horse would have to be a horse to begin with. Also, Collingwood evaluational scheme is so simple that it cannot account for some cases of bad art. For example, someone might write a poem that in fact expresses one's emotion without any preconceived plan of evoking emotion, and it might still be a bad poem.” (Dickie 1997, p. 67)

What Dickie questions in this case is whether Collingwood's definition of art can be taken in an evaluative sense as well. According to him, it cannot be considered that way because it would imply leaving aside our common way of speaking about good and bad art. To support his view, Dickie argues that for something to be a good or bad thing, it must be that thing in question first – for example, a horse, a goat, or whatever. It is interesting to note that Dickie's examples, here and elsewhere, are always taken from the natural world. Is this kind of conception

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about definitions and evaluation criteria extensible to the cultural, social or human world? I make the question not only to show that nobody is free from certain assumptions, but because Collingwood himself makes clear his intention to center the problem of evaluation only in works of art (Collingwood 1938, p. 280) and Dickie, who once again seems to have skipped this part of the book, keeps treating the issue relating it to objects or things that are not works of art, or even to leaving organisms.

But, besides, there is much to discuss about Dickie's treatment of the criterion. Collingwood understands that bad works of art are just failed works of art. Dickie goes one step further, and understands that this means that Collingwood defends that they will not be works of art at all, because they do not express anything, they are failures of expression. But I don't believe the criterion can be pushed that far. The difference between art and not-art lies, for Collingwood, in what the supposed artist was trying to do. If he was merely trying to evoke emotion, according to a preconceived plan, then his work is not an artwork. If he was trying to express emotion, becoming aware of this emotion while expressing it in his work, the object that results will be a work of art. Now, if trying to express his emotion, he is contempt with whatever he gets, although he is conscious that he has not yet become aware of the emotion he was trying to get conscious of, then, that is bad art. What qualifies the object as art is the attempt. What qualifies it as bad art is that is a failed attempt.3

Besides, the question is not so simple as Dickie has exposed it. The work of expressing one's emotions in, say, a painting, is something that the painter does in every stroke, as Collingwood describes in The Principles of Art. After each of them, there is always a question: is this what I pretended? If the painter, not being satisfied with it, decides – for example, out of laziness – that it is so, and deceives itself, the result will be bad art. Once again, what makes an object a work of art is the intention of the artist, and not the result (Collingwood 1938, pp. 281-284). This is, for sure, the thesis that might be disputable from some other theory – whether the intention of the artist is to be counted as a classificatory criterion –, but it is not how Dickie has developed his objection.

With this, I have ended with the criticisms that are related to Dickie's interpretation of Collingwood's aesthetics. The chapter ends with three last objections that judge Collingwood's thesis in general. Since it is not my intention, in this exposition, to decide on the merits or demerits of the expression theory of art, I will not review them.

3 Cf. Collingwood 1938, p. 282. “A bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails. This is the difference between bad art and art falsely so called, to which reference was made on p. 277. In art falsely so called there is no failure to express, because there is no attempt at expression; there is only an attempt (whether successful or not) to do something else.”

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Conclusion I hope that the final result of my exposition and criticism to Dickie's treatment of Collingwood is clear: I have tried to show how Dickie has developed a distorted interpretation of Collingwood's philosophy of art, and has constructed his objections against it based on his own misunderstandings. With this, I pretend to call everyone's attention to the extended practice of criticizing philosophers and their philosophies without a well-established knowledge of their philosophies. But, in Collingwood's case, my concern is even greater. His philosophy in general, and his aesthetics in particular, have come in for a great deal of misunderstandings based, many times, in hasty readings of his works. I only hope not to be falling in the same trap.

References - Carritt, E. F. 1914. The Theory of Beauty. New York: The MacMillan Company. - Collingwood, R. G. 1916. Religion and Philosophy. London: MacMillan. - Collingwood, R. G. 1922. Ruskin's Philosophy: An Address delivered at the Ruskin Centenary Conference. Kendal: Titus Wilson & Son. Reprinted in Donagan, A. (Ed.) 1966. - Collingwood, R. G. 1924. Speculum Mentis, or, the Map of Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. - Collingwood, R. G. 1925. Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. - Collingwood, R. G. 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. - Dickie, G. 1997. Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach. New York: Oxford University Press. - Donagan, A. (Ed.) 1966. Essays in the Philosophy of Art by R. G. Collingwood. Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press. - Donagan, A. 1962. The Later Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - Ridley, A. 1998. R. G. Collingwood: A Philosophy of Art. London: Phoenix.

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La valeur de la métaphore: pour une économie esthétique du Kitsch

Vangelis Athanassopoulos* Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne

La notion de valeur désigne en esthétique et en économie politique deux choses diamétralement opposées : d’une part une qualité de l’objet qui le rend unique et non échangeable et d’autre part son insertion dans la sphère de l’équivalence généralisée. Or, dans les sociétés contemporaines, où le Kitsch est souvent promu au rang de culture officielle, l’évaluation esthétique se trouve elle-même fatalement prise entre ces deux pôles : comme qualification et comme quantification, comme reconnaissance d’une propriété et comme attribution d’une valeur ajoutée.

Partant de ce constat, nous souhaitons focaliser sur un objet particulier, le sac « Canal Street » (ou sac « Barbès ») créé par Marc Jacobs pour la collection printemps/été 2007 de la maison Louis Vuitton. Bien que griffé, le sac en question imitait les cabas bon marché utilisés par les migrants et les colporteurs, faisant un clin d’œil ironique à l’univers de la contrefaçon au moment même où la marque, par ailleurs activement investie dans la promotion de l’art contemporain, menait une bataille juridique féroce contre l’exploitation non autorisée de son sigle.

Des étalages des marchandises contrefaites aux défilés de mode, en passant par les salles d’audience des tribunaux de commerce se dessine une cartographie fragmentaire de la globalisation en tant que territoire de migration, physique autant que symbolique. Notre hypothèse est que le sac « Canal Street » constitue un objet métaphorique, produit d’un mouvement, d’un transit, qui se situe au croisement de trois registres différents de déplacement : déplacement sémantique, exil économique, circuit de la valeur. Toutefois, contrairement à la fonction traditionnelle de la métaphore, ici l’objet ne fait que mieux séparer les sphères culturelles qu’il semble rapprocher. En faisant un tour complet sur lui- même, il émerge à partir du circuit même de son appropriation illustrant ce que Fredric Jameson appelle « la consommation de la pure marchandisation comme processus ». D’où sa contradiction inhérente, qui est aussi celle du partage, problématique de point de vue esthétique, qu’il opère entre le « Kitsch d’élite » et

* [email protected]

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le « Kitsch populaire » : d’un côté il matérialise la production de la plus-value comme pure abstraction et de l’autre il prétend à une qualité qui échapperait à l’interchangeabilité de la valeur.

Dans The Lady from Shangai (1947) d’Orson Welles, Michael O’Hara, l’aventurier interprété par le cinéaste, séduit par la fascinante Rita Hayworth (alias Elsa Bannister), se fait embaucher comme skipper par son mari, Arthur Bannister (un riche avocat interprété par Everett Sloane) et finit par s’embourber dans une histoire de meurtre compliquée1. Vers la 18e minute du film les deux personnages masculins entament une discussion qui commence ainsi :

Arthur Bannister : « Vous avez passé trop de temps à voyager à travers le monde pour apprendre quoi que ce soit sur lui. »

Michael O’Hara : « J’ai toujours pensé qu’il était très hygiénique d’être fauché2. »

Avant de se terminer, presque deux minutes plus tard, sur la maxime de l’avocat :

« Chacun a sa propre idée du bonheur mais l’argent est ce que nous avons tous en commun3. »

Dans l’extrait en question le voyage et la connaissance sont liés dans un échange verbal qui porte sur l’argent, c’est-à-dire la réalité. Car du point de vue pragmatiste la vie réelle, c’est l’abstraction de la valeur, la valeur abstraite est la seule réalité. Et ceci parce que l’argent constitue la convention universellement (around the world) partagée, ce qui nous rapproche, ce que nous avons en commun.

Pour la collection printemps/été 2007 de la maison Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, directeur artistique de la marque, présenta un cabas au motif rouge et bleu connu sous le nom de « Canal Street » ou « sac Barbès ». Selon les mots de Mr. Jacobs : « Nous avons voulu créer quelque chose de très frais, très féminin, très joli. »

Quelques années auparavant je visitais la Biennale de Venise avec des amis. Ce que l’on peut expérimenter à la Sérénissime en juillet, sous 35 degrés de température, 65% d’humidité et 95% d’occupation de la cité par toute sorte de touristes, participe de la tendance prédominante de ce genre d’événements culturels. À cette différence près que les manifestations de la Biennale – contrairement à la Documenta de Kassel par exemple – sont largement disséminées dans la ville, une

1 Comme le remarque un des personnages de The Limits of Control (2009) de Jim Jarmusch, The Lady from Shangai est le seul film dans l’histoire du cinéma où Rita Hayworth apparaît blonde. 2 - You’ve been travelling around the world too much to find out anything about it.

- I have always found it very sanitary to be broke. (nous traduisons) 3 Each man has his own idea of happiness but money is what all of us have in common. (Nous traduisons)

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dissémination qui est liée à l’histoire et la géographie singulières de celle-ci et qui implique une multiplicité d’itinéraires et de parcours qui croisent le local et le global. La tendance à laquelle je me réfère est celle qui entoure les rendez-vous internationaux de l’art contemporain d’un nombre croissant de programmations périphériques et d’expositions collatérales qui tissent autour du noyau institutionnel un réseau dense de croisements et d’interférences culturelles.

Pas loin de la Scuola Grande di San Rocco, entre deux expositions, nous sommes tombés sur quelques vendeurs à la sauvette d’origine vraisemblablement africaine qui étalaient leurs marchandises (vraisemblablement contrefaites) sur des draps à même le trottoir. Comme mes amies ont manifesté un certain intérêt, notamment pour les copies « made in China » de sacs féminins de luxe (Louis Vuitton entre autres), nous avons pris le temps de bavarder avec l’un des vendeurs. Il s’est avéré qu’il avait travaillé dans la plupart des pays méditerranéens et que, au-delà de sa langue maternelle et de l’anglais il parvenait à se débrouiller en italien, français et grec. À côté de lui il y avait un grand cabas en plastique au motif rouge et bleu dans lequel il transportait ses marchandises.

Durant les dernières années LVMH mène une guerre féroce contre la contrefaçon et l’utilisation abusive de son nom de marque. L’entreprise fut engagée dans une bataille juridique de plus de six ans contre Google à propos des recherches liant les internautes à des sites qui proposent des accessoires de mode contrefaits. En juin 2006 la Cour d’appel de Paris condamna Google et sa filiale française à 300.000 euros de dommages et intérêts pour violation du droit des marques, concurrence déloyale et publicité mensongère. En juillet 2010 la Cour de Cassation rejeta la décision de la Cour d’appel et renvoya le cas devant la Cour Européenne de Justice qui statua en faveur de Google cette fois4. L’affaire, retournée en appel, est toujours en cours.

En juin 2008, après deux ans de procédures légales, un autre poids lourd d’Internet, eBay, fut condamné par le Tribunal de Commerce de Paris à verser à LVMH le montant de 38,6 millions d’euros – réduit en appel à 5,7 millions – pour avoir autorisé la vente de contrefaçons sur son site. Cette décision, qui fut prononcée un mois après qu’eBay ait été condamné à payer 20.000 euros pour contrefaçon de sacs Hermès, n’est qu’un épisode dans la longue série d’affrontements qui opposent le leader mondial des sites de vente aux enchères à l’industrie du luxe. Quant à LVMH, l’entreprise considère que « cette décision constitue une étape importante dans la protection des marques et des modèles contre les pratiques parasitaires » félicitant le Tribunal d’avoir apporté « une

4 La Cour de Cassation, reprenant à son compte le jugement de la Cour Européenne de Justice, estime que « le prestataire d’un service de référencement sur Internet qui stocke en tant que mot-clé un signe identique à une marque et organise l’affichage d’annonces à partir de celui-ci, n’en fait pas un usage assimilable à celui d’une marque, et ne commet par conséquent pas d’acte de contrefaçon ». Fradin 2010.

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contribution précieuse à la protection des œuvres de création qui comptent parmi les éléments les plus importants de notre patrimoine national5 ».

Parallèlement à sa lutte contre la contrefaçon, LVMH développa une stratégie marketing sophistiquée fondée sur l’investissement dans la culture et la promotion des arts. Pour reprendre les termes de Bernard Arnault, PDG du groupe et grand collectionneur d’art contemporain, les dernières années Louis Vuitton « a trouvé son âme » dans le mécénat. Suivant l’exemple de son rival François Pinault, il créa en 2006 la Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création et l’art contemporain qui devrait ouvrir ses portes à Paris fin 2012, dans un bâtiment conçu par Frank Gehry dans l’enceinte du Jardin d’acclimatation. « Cette fondation aura pour but de faire rayonner la culture et faire rayonner la France dans le monde », déclara-t- il.

Des podiums parisiens aux trottoirs vénitiens en passant par les salles d’audience des tribunaux européens et l’espace virtuel de la toile, le patrimoine national, le cosmopolitisme du monde de l’art et la globalisation économique se trouvent entrelacés d’une manière qui re-cartographie l’économie culturelle comme territoire de migration, symbolique au même titre que physique : la migration en tant que processus qui déplace l’objet aux interstices entre le global et le local, la copie et l’original, le centre et la périphérie, l’événement principal et les effets collatéraux.

Les vendeurs à la sauvette peuvent être considérés comme faisant partie de ces effets collatéraux, bien que leur présence puisse aussi être remarquée ailleurs, à des lieux qui ne sont pas directement liés au monde de l’art, mais toujours liés au transit. En fait, dans notre cas le contexte artistique rendit visible un phénomène si répandu les dernières années qu’il tend à paraître normal, c’est-à-dire transparent. En tout cas, il est difficile dans des cas pareils de ne pas esthétiser l’objet – et le discours. Mais au lieu d’être contourné, ce danger doit être transformé en argument, c’est-à-dire en arme. Dans ce contexte, le « sac Barbès » signé Marc Jacobs se donne comme ce que j’appellerai objet métaphorique, le produit d’un mouvement, d’un transit, qui se situe au croisement de trois registres différents de déplacement : déplacement sémantique, flux migratoire, circuit de la valeur. Le déplacement produit de la connaissance. Or, il y a une différence entre la flânerie touristique, le défilé de mode et l’exil économique.

La globalisation n’est pas l’abolition pure et simple de la polarité entre le centre et la périphérie mais la reconfiguration constante de leurs relations. Comme le note Hal Foster « pendant que le marché mondial délocalise la production vers sa périphérie, une migration inverse conflue à ses centres urbains pour y être intérieurement marginalisée6 ». La marge est assimilée par le mouvement de globalisation, célébrée et en même temps réifiée, mise sous le feu des projecteurs et pour cela même rendue invisible. La marginalité effective n’est pas abolie mais

5 Communiqué de presse de LVMH (2008). 6 Foster 1999, p. 214, note 19, nous traduisons.

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seulement déplacée de la périphérie vers le centre, intériorisée et mondialisée au point où elle est devenue en même temps le crime et l’alibi de nos sociétés.

Bien que fabriqué en cuir et avec le savoir-faire inimitable des artisans de Louis Vuitton et aussi tamponné avec le sigle de la marque, le cabas à 1.200 euros créé par Marc Jacobs rappelait directement le plastique bon marché des sacs à provisions utilisés par les migrants et les camelots pour transporter leurs marchandises contrefaites. Même le nom est une référence topographique à l’art de la contrefaçon : Canal Street en anglais, Barbès en français, le premier à New York, le second dans le 18e arrondissement de Paris. Le clin d’œil ironique de la Haute culture envers la culture de masse est plus que flagrant, s’inscrivant dans la longue série d’appropriations et de recyclages dont le modernisme et le postmodernisme sont faits. Avec cette complication particulière qui fait que, dans notre cas, c’est la différence, la distance même dont l’analogie semble faire abstraction qui constitue la valeur de la métaphore. En d’autres termes la capitalisation institutionnelle et commerciale sur la culture populaire n’est pas un fait nouveau. Mais dans ce cas particulier l’objet fait d’une certaine manière un tour complet sur lui-même, émergeant à partir du circuit de sa propre appropriation-contrefaçon, illustrant ce que Fredric Jameson appelle « la consommation de la pure marchandisation comme processus 7 ».

Je me suis demandé quel serait le nombre de combinaisons possibles entre les sacs Louis Vuitton et les sacs Barbès : des vrais Louis Vuitton remplis avec des faux Barbès, des vrais Barbès remplis avec des faux Louis Vuitton etc. Je me suis amusé à penser que ceci pourrait fournir le schéma ou la matrice conceptuelle pour un projet artistique, un essai critique ou une plaisanterie sur les complications contemporaines des rapports entre l’original et la copie, la Haute culture et la culture de masse, le symbole et la valeur. Or, contrairement à la fonction traditionnelle de la métaphore, ici l’objet ne fait que mieux séparer les sphères culturelles qu’il semble rapprocher sous la houlette du Kitsch. D’où sa contradiction inhérente, qui est aussi celle du partage, problématique de point de vue esthétique, qu’il opère entre le « Kitsch d’élite » et le « Kitsch populaire » : d’un côté il matérialise la production de la plus-value comme pure abstraction et de l’autre il prétend à une qualité qui échapperait à l’interchangeabilité de la valeur.

La notion de valeur désigne en esthétique et en économie politique deux choses diamétralement opposées : d’une part une qualité de l’objet qui le rend singulier et non échangeable et d’autre part son insertion dans la sphère de l’équivalence généralisée. Or, dans les sociétés contemporaines, où le Kitsch est souvent promu au rang de culture officielle, l’évaluation esthétique se trouve elle-même fatalement prise entre ces deux pôles : comme qualification et comme quantification, comme reconnaissance d’une propriété et comme attribution d’une valeur ajoutée.

7 The consumption of sheer commodification as a process. Jameson 2007, p. 16.

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La contradiction entre le phénomène et sa fongibilité est le point de départ de la théorie marxiste de la valeur. Après la division de l’objet en valeur d’usage et valeur d’échange, la première disparaît sous la seconde car les marchandises sont équivalentes et interchangeables dans la mesure où elles entretiennent des rapports quantitatifs. « La valeur d’usage devient la forme sous laquelle se manifeste son contraire, la valeur8. » Dans la division initiale de la valeur (usage/échange) on lit l’opposition entre qualité et équivalence. La valeur proprement dite naît de cette division ; mais la valeur est aussi elle-même intérieurement divisée. Quand je reconnais à un objet une certaine qualité, je lui reconnais une valeur distinctive sans forcément y associer une valeur hiérarchique (ce qui le placerait en comparaison avec d’autres objets, même si une comparaison est déjà présupposée dans mon jugement). Or, l’expression même « valeur distinctive » recèle une contradiction qui renvoie à la question de savoir si l’on peut vraiment séparer la qualification de la hiérarchisation. En fait, ce que la contradiction révèle, c’est le caractère dialectique des deux faces de la valeur comme qualité et comme équivalence : d’un côté la qualité est ce qui s’oppose à l’équivalence comme son contraire. Mais de l’autre côté – l’histoire de la modernité le montre – la valeur a besoin de la qualité pour alimenter le processus de fongibilité et pouvoir se perpétuer en créant de la plus-value. Elle doit produire son contraire pour l’intégrer afin de pouvoir se recycler elle-même – et ainsi s’imposer comme réalité.

Sous ce prisme le sac Barbès signé Louis Vuitton se donne comme l’emblème d’une approche de l’économie culturelle qui mise sur l’effondrement de la valeur d’authenticité tout en opérant une nouvelle division, arbitraire (Kitsch d’élite/Kitsch populaire) qui vient remplacer les oppositions hiérarchiques que le Kitsch lui- même prétend liquider. La plus-value devient le substrat de l’authenticité – et non pas l’inverse ; celle-ci n’est pas abolie mais reproduite comme abstraction d’elle même, suivant un processus selon lequel « la qualité des choses cesse d’être leur essence et devient l’apparition accidentelle de leur valeur9 ».

On pourrait dire que Marc Jacobs a voulu créer un produit qui résisterait à la contrefaçon, dont l’imitation n’aurait aucune raison d’être. Mais ce geste trahit, dans son esprit ludique même, ce que Adorno appelle l’imposture de l’authenticité dans la société dominée par l’échange :

«L’imposture de l’authenticité remonte à l’aveuglement bourgeois à l’égard du processus de l’échange. Est authentique à leurs yeux ce à quoi peuvent être réduits les marchandises et les autres moyens d’échange, surtout l’or. Pourtant, de même que l’or, l’authenticité déduite abstraitement de la proportion de métal fin devient un fétiche. Les deux sont traités comme s’ils étaient le substrat, lequel est en réalité une relation sociale, tandis que l’or et l’authenticité n’expriment justement que la fongibilité, la comparabilité des choses ; celles-ci précisément ne sont pas là en soi mais pour autrui. L’inauthenticité de l’authentique vient de ce

8 Cf. Marx 1985, fin du 1er chapitre, sect. I, liv. I) commenté dans Labica 1982, pp. 368-370. 9 Adorno 2003, p. 305.

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que, dans la société dominée par l’échange, elle doit prétendre être ce à quoi elle sert de caution, sans jamais pouvoir être cela10.

En entrant dans le domaine de la valeur, l’objet se trouve du même coup dévalué. Ce que Fredric Jameson appelle « la consommation de la pure marchandisation en tant que processus » désigne aussi le stade de systématisation et de banalisation de cette contradiction, où le plus et le moins vont de pair, où la valeur s’autoproduit comme positivité, comme plus-value, à partir du processus même de dévalorisation auquel elle soumet le monde. Ceci peut constituer une définition provisoire de la marchandise de luxe mais renvoie également aux conditions plus générales qui lient la crise économique actuelle à la spéculation sur la faillite de pays entiers.

Cette communication s’est ouverte avec un extrait sur le voyage comme métaphore de la valeur. Elle s’est développée autour du sac Barbès en tant qu’objet métaphorique qui révèle les contradictions inhérentes au Kitsch devenu culture officielle et « patrimoine national ». Mais cette communication est aussi elle-même une métaphore sur la fonction et la valeur de l’acte d’évaluation esthétique.

En choisissant de focaliser sur l’industrie du luxe nous nous sommes positionnés d’emblée dans un terrain plus proche des Cultural Studies que de l’esthétique traditionnelle. Or, dans le débat qui oppose les deux disciplines, la question de la valeur occupe un rôle central : non seulement comme implication de la crise des critères du jugement esthétique qui tend à niveler les différences et fondre les particularités culturelles dans l’équivalence de l’économie de marché, mais aussi dans la mesure où le discours théorique lui-même y devient un moyen privilégié de création de valeur ajoutée.

En ce qui nous concerne ici, le rapprochement d’objets culturellement séparés a visé à révéler l’écart de l’expérience dont ils découlent et à laquelle ils renvoient. D’où l’exigence proprement esthétique, critique, à laquelle nous nous sommes confrontés d’éviter l’alignement du discours sur la réalité économique en montrant la disparité de l’objet et de la valeur, le fait que l’objet naît lui-même de cette disparité, défaire dans le discours la valeur qu’on aura fait par le discours. Un tel positionnement théorique retrouve dans l’objet sa propre inadéquation par rapport aux conditions qui régissent la « venue simultanée de l’intégration globale et de la fragmentation culturelle 11 » dans la conjoncture actuelle. Mais, plutôt que voir dans cette inadéquation la preuve de l’impuissance de la critique, il part du principe que, si la valeur naît dans l’échange, l’acte critique d’évaluation doit lui- même se déplacer avec son objet vers les régions d’intersection de l’esthétique, de l’économique et du culturel non pas pour restaurer des critères normatifs, ni pour constater leur disparition, mais pour comprendre comment l’objet change dans son échange et mettre le doigt sur les contradictions et les conflits ouverts qui le travaillent.

10 Adorno 2003, p. 210. 11 Benhabib 2003, pp. 78-79.

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Références

- Adorno, Th. W. 2003. Minima Moralia, trad. É. Kaufholz et J.-R. Ladmiral, Paris : Payot. - Benhabib, S. 2003. Renverser la dialectique de la raison : le réenchantement du monde. In : Renault E. et al. (dir.), Où en est la théorie critique ?, Paris : La Découverte. - Foster, H. 1999. Against Pluralism. In : Recodings. Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, New York : The New Press. - Fradin, A. 2010. Google (re)marque un point dans son procès contre Vuitton [page web]. http://www.ecrans.fr/Google-re-marque-un-point-dans- son,10399.html [15 juillet 2010]. - Jameson, F. 2007. Le Postmodernisme, ou, La logique culturelle du capitalisme tardif, trad. Fl. Nevoltry, Paris : ÉNSBA. - Labica, G. (dir.) 1982. Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, Paris : PUF. - Marx, K. 1985. Le Capital, trad. J. Roy, Paris : Flammarion. - Communiqué de presse de LVMH, 2008 [page web]. http://www.daily- bourse.fr/lvmh-ebay-condamnee-pour-pratiques-parasitaires-e-Feed- CN139507.php [30 juin 2008].

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Mixed pleasures, interpassivity, and the ethical dimension of art

Wolfram Bergande* Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

1. Plato’s pathology of the mimetic arts Plato’s almost complete banishment of poetry and other arts from his ideal polis seems to be something like a symptom of aesthetic discourse - symptom in the Freudian sense of a symbolic form which does not seem to make much sense if taken literally but which indeed carries an unconscious meaning and a hidden affective load that communicate themselves and that will keep on returning until they are analyzed and made conscious. For very much ink has been spilled on Plato’s notorious critique, yet it remains an ever-recurring topic in aesthetics and in political philosophy. So we might wonder if there is a hidden pleasure involved. If this was so, then indeed it would be a symptom also in the paradoxical sense of an enforced enjoyment, of a pleasure that is unpleasant in that it imposes itself upon us.

The major thesis of my talk today will be that with his attack on the arts Plato is the first to provide elements of a philosophical doctrine of a symptom in the psychoanalytic sense of the term - and that for the Plato of the Republic, the Philebus and the Laws mimetic art has a so to speak symptomatic structure particularly because it carries hidden affects, affects we tend to be unaware of. Towards the end of my talk I will emphasize that for Plato to say that there are symptomatic affects in works of art is another way of saying that in mimetic art there are necessarily mixed pleasures involved. Against this background, I will finally contrast Plato’s view on mixed pleasures in works of art with a postmodern defense of mixed pleasures as it can be found in the so called theory of

* [email protected]

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interpassivity by the Austrian Robert Pfaller. Thus I want to briefly point at what following Plato would be the ethical dimension of art or at least one fundamental aspect of it.

I come to my first point, Plato’s critique of works of art as being symptomatic of hidden affects. If we look at Plato’s modern commentators, we must acknowledge that they elucidated his critique of the arts in many respects and that they showed great erudition. However, what almost all of them also show is uneasiness and embarrassment. Somehow, it seems, one does not get to final terms with Plato’s critique of the arts, it appears to be a never ending story. Eric A. Havelock in his book Preface to Plato of 1963 speaks out for many when he wonders: „Why does Plato feel so committed to a passionate warfare upon the poetic experience as such?“ (Havelock 1963, p. 15, cf. 26) Another example is William Greene, who in an article doubts whether Plato “Does […] mean us to take it all seriously?“ (Greene 1918, p. 55) I won’t review the entire passionate warfare. Instead I will focus on one passage in the 10th book of the Republic, at Stephanus 606a-b, where Plato, as many commentators agree, anticipates Aristotle’s famous theory of catharsis, a theory laid out about 35 years later in the Poetics. It is in this passage of the Republic, I argue, that we find a key to a better understanding of Plato’s attack on the arts. It will also help us to understand his critique of mixed pleasures and thus serve us as a link to the theory of interpassivity. I won’t reconstruct Aristotle’s theory of catharsis either. Just let me refer to his famous statement that: „Tragedy is, then, a representation of an action […] and through pity and fear it effects relief to these and similar emotions.“ (Aristotle 1932, chap. 6, 1449b26) In other words: Tragedy arouses certain passions, particularly pity and fear, and by the same token frees the spectators from these passions.

Now in the passage in the Republic’s 10th book that I am referring to, Plato delivers an anti-cathartic theory. According to Plato, the spectator of a tragedy or a comedy is not at all cleansed from the passions that he witnesses on stage and that he identifies with. The exact opposite is true. The tragic passions set fire on the irrational parts of the soul. Why is that? It is because the spectator not only enjoys the tragic or comic passions performed on stage, as it were in a cathartic mode, getting rid of them as Aristotle would have it. In fact, he also contracts real passions which, going unnoticed, actually underpin the tragic ones. They feed on them. They are parasitic in the etymological sense of the Greek parasitos, who is literally one who eats at the table of another. Accordingly one German commentator has called this argument of Plato’s an „Ansteckungstheorie [contagion theory]“ (Franz 1999, p. 156) as Plato seems to hold that the spectators’ irrational passions, which ought to be disciplined by reason and thumos, get psycho-somatically infected.

Now let me give you the passage that I am referring to in full in the translation of Adam James of 1929. Please pay attention. It might be hard to follow the sentences as they have a change of syntax in them. You are listening to Socrates speaking to his sparring partner Glaucon: “[606a] If you would reflect that the

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part of the soul that […], in our own misfortunes, was forcibly restrained, and that has hungered for tears and a good cry and satisfaction, because it is its nature to desire these things, [and because it] is the element in us that the poets satisfy and delight, and [if furthermore you would reflect] that the best element in our nature, since it has never been properly educated by reason or even by habit, then relaxes its guard over the plaintive part, [606b] inasmuch as this is contemplating the woes of others and it is no shame to it to praise and pity another who, claiming to be a good man, abandons himself to excess in his grief; but it [the plaintive part] thinks this vicarious pleasure is so much clear gain, and would not consent to forfeit it by disdaining the poem altogether. That is, I think, because few are capable of reflecting that what we enjoy in others will inevitably react upon ourselves. For after feeding fat the emotion of pity there, it is not easy to restrain it in our own sufferings.” [606c] […] “[And] does not the same principle apply to the laughable, […]?“ (Adams 1929)

The bottom line of this passage is that spectators of tragedy enter into aesthetic identification, because they seek “vicarious”, substitutional pleasure. They speculate on a cathartic feeling, but they do so without realizing that they are buying into mixed pleasures - pleasures which turn out to be a losing bargain. They ignore that they perforce contract real passions which will weaken their rational self-control. So far, so bad. The point that I want to emphasize here is one which is not too obvious, but which is most important for a full understanding of Plato’s critique of the arts, in any case for his critique in the Republic, the Philebus and the Laws. It is the term „inevitably“ in one of the last sentences just quoted. I repeat what Socrates says there: “That is, I think, because few are capable of reflecting that what we enjoy in others will inevitably react upon ourselves.” The adverb “inevitably” here translates the impersonal phrase „anankē“ of the original text. “Anankē” or “anankē estin” here and elsewhere literally means: „it is necessary that“. The greek original of the sentence reads: “apolauein anankē apo tōn allotriōn eis ta oikeia” Literally: To enjoy forcibly from that which is from the other towards that which is one’s own. Of course there exist quite a few comments on this passage in the secondary literature, and I briefly want to introduce you to some of them. However, to my knowledge none of them – just like many translators who simply miss the point – none of them states let alone emphasizes or develops on the „anankē“, the necessity that is clearly marked in Plato’s argument. The German scholar Max Pohlenz is an exception to this rule (Pohlenz 1965, p. 471).

Here is the first of these commentators, Adam James, to whose translation of the Republic we just listened. He states that Plato’s argument must be understood as a critical anticipation of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis and he shows sympathies with Plato’s argument: „According to Plato, the emotion grows by what it feeds upon, and becomes more and more troublesome and deleterious in real life, the more we indulge it at the theatre; according to Aristotle, tragedy effects the ‚purgation’ of pity and its kindred emotions and tends to free us from their dominion in matters of more serious moment (Poet. 6 1449 b27). Aristotle hopes

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to effect by means of theatrical stimulation what Plato would attain by starving the emotions even in play.” And James concludes: “It is obvious that the Aristotelian theory of the drama was in this important respect developed in direct and conscious antagonism to the Platonic, to which […] it owes much. I think it may fairly be argued that Plato’s view is not less true to experience than that of Aristotle. […]“ (Adams 1929, pp. 415f, n 13) In a similar vein, another commentator, Stevens, states that: „[…] Aristotle is answering Plato’s objection in the tenth book of the Republic (606b) that tragic poetry by stimulating the emotions, and especially pity, tends to unfit a man for meeting his share of misfortune courageously.“ (Stevens 1948, pp. 183f.) By contrast, Havelock sides with Aristotle and claims that Plato’s “pathology of the audience at a performance of poetry” has “[…] a ring of mob psychology about” it. It “does not sound too much like the mood and attitude in which modern theatre-goers attend a play […]”. (Havelock 1963, p. 26) Greene paraphrases Socrates’ argumentation as follows: “ […] [P]oetry can harm even the good; few escape its evil influence. It calls forth our sympathy for imaginary woes, whereas in real life we restrain our feelings; and out of sentimental pity grows a real weakness. In the same way, the enjoyment of comedy tends to turn us into buffoons. In general, poetry feeds and waters the passions, instead of drying them; it enthrones the passions, rather than the reason.” (Greene, 1918, p. 53f.) These comments all disregard - or in any case underestimate - the necessity clearly stated in Platos’s argument and straightforwardly expressed in the term “anankē”, i.e. “inevitably”.

By the way, Plato’s ananke in this passage of the Politeia is obviously indebted to the sophist Gorgias of Leontini. Gorgias claimed in his Encomium of Helen that through poetry, through learning from the good and bad fortunes of other people, the soul experiences very own passions, in Greek: idion ti pathēma. (EH 9)

Precisely, Gorgias spoke of the necessity this poetic experience involves. According to Gorgias the soul feels these pleasurable passions even if reason knows that there is an artistically contrived force involved – and, like Plato, Gorgias uses in this context the term “anankē”. (EH 12) In my view, this necessity is the key to the understanding of Plato’s critique of poetry and the arts, at least in the Republic which, as you know, will end in its tenth book with an elaborate account of ananke, of Necessity with a capital N, as a supreme and all- encompassing cosmic force to which even the Gods bow.

And let me add that according to Hegel’s Lectures on the philosophy of religion this Ananke marked the limits of the self-reflection of the spirit of Greek antiquity. In the figure of Ananke the classical Greeks represented to themselves the fact that there is something not yet understood, unaccounted for in their lives. Something that, according to Hegel, was later reflected, conceived, aufgehoben, sublated, in Christian religion and philosophic science. In Plato, the result of this anankē is that the irrational impact of the mimetic arts can in no way be eschewed. There are passions, Plato seems to hold, which strike through any aesthetic medium

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whatsoever. This is why art is essentially dangerous. Among the passions that art arouses there are passions that cannot be contained.

Let me add another remark: From my psychoanalytical perspective this idea of Plato’s of a necessary affective blow that we receive whenever we engage with works of art seems to hint to a basic premise of Freud’s psychoanalysis and of Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. According to them, we must presuppose in subjectivity a primal repression in which a primal representation of the libidinal drive is constitutively repressed. Constitutively means: the repression of this primal representation, of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as Freud calls it in his text on Die Verdrängung of 1915, this repression is constitutive for the subject of representation. In other words: there must be presupposed the suppression of a primal representation in order to make possible representation as such. This is because only if human beings are thought of as having repressed their drives and in the first place the most vital, the sexual drive, only then can they establish a re- presenting relationship towards themselves and towards the social other and the world.

Now one interesting point about Freud’s theory of repression is that while the representation of the drive is repressed, its affect is not. The representation becomes unconscious. Yet the affect stays, and can have a variety of destinations: for example, it can attach itself to other, non-repressed representations or it can psychosomatically invest the body (as in hysterical neurosis) or it might eventually be sublimated. So from this psychoanalytic prospective it seems attractive to integrate Plato’s insistence on a radical affect in the mimetic arts as an early hint to the primal affect that, according to Freud, refers to the conditions of possibility of representation as such. Just like Freud’s primal affect Plato’s radically real affect could be thought to make its presence palpable not only in works of mimetic art but in any form of representation, in a dream or a daydream as much as in perception consciousness or referential language use. Be this as it may: when designing the ideal polis, Plato is perfectly serious. From his rationalist prospective, it is just consistent to throw out the baby with the bath water, namely to throw out the mimetic arts with the irrational passions, passions that they not only depict but also convey. For Plato this is in any case better than accepting the evil affective surplus enjoyment that almost all mimetic depictions of passions necessarily imply.

2. Plato as a critic of the mixed pleasures of perversity avant la lettre These findings also fully match with what Plato says in book IX of the Republic where he prepares the renewed attack on the mimetic arts of book X. In book IX he describes the tyrant, the most dangerous threat to the polis, as somebody who completely follows his irrational impulses. In doing so, he is like a sleepwalker. He lives in passionate dreams even though he is perfectly awake. He is enslaved to

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the imaginary pleasures that befall him at night through the shadowy images of his dreams. He saves them for the day: as a tyrant he is in a position to live them at the expense of his compatriots. Now with respect to the arts it is a fact for Plato that artwork and dreamwork share a characteristic shadowiness. To him there is no doubt that the scene-paintings of tragedy and comedy are no less vehicles of passionate desires than the shadowy images of our dreams. Both arouse the irrational appetite of the soul and nurture it. And we have just learned that in the case of the arts this happens in a necessary and also fairly unnoticed manner.

Since the pleasures which artworks yield are necessarily affected by real passions, they are necessarily mixed pleasures, and this is for Plato a character which they share with the vulgar pleasures of everyday life that he discusses in Book IX of the Republic. Unlike the pure pleasures that are proper to the rational part of the soul, they essentially imply their respective counterpart: The pleasure of drinking implies the pain of thirst. The pleasure of stilling one’s hunger is symbiotic to the pain of hunger. Similarly, poets contrive their plays in such a manner that they are made up of mixed pleasures. This is why, in his later dialogue Philebus Plato will call the mixed pleasures of everyday life the pleasures of the “comedy and tragedy of life” (Plato, Philebus, 50b). It is also in the Philebus that Plato discusses more in detail how it is that confronting the mimetic arts we are subject to mixed pleasures. His prime example here, at Philebus 48a following, is comedy. I want to reconstruct it in the following in order to get at what could be the ethical dimension of art according to this argument.

For Plato in the Philebus as later for Aristotle, the comic pleasure is based on a position of better knowledge. The comic protagonist is laughable in our eyes because he acts while not knowing things that we as spectators do know. However, while it would be just to enjoy the ignorance of an enemy, enjoying the ignorance of a friend or a sympathetic character on stage for Plato is unjust. For Plato, and in contrast to what Aristotle will later argue in his poetics – for Plato it is not admissible to even laugh at the seemingly harmless inferiority of a comic character on stage. The reason for this is that the seemingly harmless inferiority of the comic character, his lack of knowledge that we are aware of from a position of presumable better knowledge, that this staged lack of knowledge corresponds in us as spectators to a hidden affect of malice, that is an aggressive enviousness, which according to Plato pops up as a painful and necessary affect. This affect is a concomitant ingredient of comic pleasure in the very sense in which Plato had written in the Republic about the real affect which we necessarily enjoy from the other when watching a tragedy.

Now in what sense precisely is this malice a problem for Plato? It is problematic because our malice, our phtonos, can be interpreted as a proof of our own ignorance. When indulging in comic pleasure we ourselves fall short of the Delphic command gnōthi seauton, ‘Know thyself!’ Plato appears not extremely clear in this passage of the Philebus, but if I interpret his argument correctly, it must imply two dimensions, an epistemic and an ethical one, which in this case are

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two sides of the same coin. The epistemic dimension would be that the comic play, on a first level, glosses over the fact that our presumable better knowledge as spectators contains itself an ignorance – namely the ignorance of our “unconscious malice” (Stevens 1948, p. 180). We think we laugh at somebody who does not know, but in fact we ourselves do not know – namely about the malice, the evil pleasure that enters into the set-up of our comic enjoyment. So in this straightforwardly epistemic sense we ourselves are ignorant, it is us who ignore an underlying pain. On a second level, this underlying pain itself can be taken to be a proof of an even more profound ignorance of ourselves. For malice, which is a pain, becomes enjoyable in comedy precisely in the form of the mimetic ignorance of the other on stage. We believe that we enjoy somebody else’s ignorance (namely the represented anoia of the comic protagonist). But what we in fact enjoy is our own ignorance, since through comedy it is not mirrored to us, so that it would yield an insight, but staged as being the ignorance of an imaginary other about which we are supposed to laugh. Being glossed over, dissimulated, it becomes enjoyable. Comedy – this is Plato’s accusation – makes us enjoy our actually painful ignorance.

Of course we might say that Plato’s account is not the whole story and that following Aristotle we could think of artistic work as precisely yielding this sort of insights. In this line of argument Hegel, for example, held in his Lectures on Aesthetics that the truly comic necessarily implies self-consiousness on the part of the comic subject, so that the spectator may mirror his own self-consciousness in it. This mirroring would then deliver the joy of insight that is no mixed pleasure in the platonic sense of the term but a cathartic, sublimated, sublated, aufgehoben one. However, I believe that Plato’s critique of the arts hits a crucial point, if only because we cannot be sure that all mimetic art really accomplishes this insight. If it does not, then the second, ethic dimension becomes important, which resides in the fact that we also disavow the aggressivity of our malice. It is an aggressivity that may seem harmless, but Plato might say that we indulge in it here in comedy in a so to speak aesthetical distance, and with pleasure, so that later in real life we are prepared to be really aggressive against the social other.

That Plato really hit a point can furthermore be shown with regard to contemporary psychoanalytical discourse, and I thus come to the end of my talk. It actually is compelling to see how the Platonic topic of mixed pleasures pops up there again. It is particularly Robert Pfaller with his theory of interpassivity who indeed explicitly affirms the experience of mixed pleasures. It was Freud’s view, it is true, that human passions are essentially ambivalent. But Pfaller and to some extent also Zizek want us to freely live out this ambivalence. They want us to enjoy our mixed pleasures like Plato’s tyrant and like Plato’s spectator of tragedy and comedy, not only because they believe that pleasures are necessarily mixed, but particularly because they see the real danger in theories like Plato’s, in ascetic idealisms, where natural pleasures get repressed and repression becomes exploitable for the sinister political purposes of an ascetic priest. To Pfaller, for example, contemporary neoliberalism is the most refined form of such an ascetic

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idealism, having its roots in Plato. Pfaller calls perversity the kind of enlightened hedonism in which we intensify a pleasure by freely admitting its inevitable opposite, for example by admitting hate to mingle with love in a husband-wife- relationship. The advantage of such a perverse mixture of pleasures according to Pfaller is that the quantities of pleasures would not neutralize each other mutually, but rather add up. Hence we experience an extremely intensified pleasure. Loving and hating perversely would be a much stronger pleasure than, for instance, the pleasure that derives from hate that has been sublimated into love.

Pfallers prime example for the experience of mixed pleasures is the so called canned laughter, the pre-recorded sounds of laughter and joy that accompany so many television sitcoms. Canned laughter, according to Pfaller, allows the spectator to entertain an ambivalent position and to enjoy mixed pleasures. While naively enjoying the show, with canned laughter the spectator can also experience an additional pleasure: the perverse pleasure of a secret feeling of contempt for the show as well for himself, a feeling he may have as he knows that the sitcom is trash after all. Like Plato’s spectator of a comedy he thus undergoes a mixture of pleasurable with unpleasurable feelings. Or rather: he can enjoy pleasure and pain, comic relief and self-contempt, at the same time. The canned laughter allows him to be ambivalent because it allows him to make himself believe that it is not him after all who is laughing about this trashy show but rather an unidentified imaginary other, the contemptible other whose laughing he is listening to. Pfaller bases this idea on a passing remark of Jacques Lacan who, in his seminar on the Ethics of psychoanalysis, had stated that the choir in classical Greek tragedy might have had the function to absorb and assume a passion that otherwise might be too hard for the spectator to take.

However, I think that in the perspective of Plato we can see the both epistemological and ethical-political shortcomings of Pfaller’s indeed counter- enlightening view. If we straightforwardly adopt the mixed-pleasures-approach to things, we evidently skip the question of whether there are good or bad pleasures, an eminently epistemological and ethical-political question that we cannot avoid, a question so essential to Plato’s philosophy as a whole. Epistemological a question it is because we gloss over our own truth if we indiscriminately buy into mimetic representations of the other. Ethical-political is this question because we must not treat the social-political other like a character on the stage of our imagination. We gloss over our own truth, precisely because, as Plato had suggested in the aforementioned passage of the Philebus – precisely because the dangerous point about comedy and its possibly interpassive pleasure lies in the fact that it renders ignorance enjoyable. Far from yielding an insight, it is a pleasurable symptom of our own ignorance. So I conclude that Plato’s critique of the arts hit a crucial point, even if he throws out the baby with the bath water. This point is that there is a primal affectivity in our representations that cannot be accounted for with rational means. Art can be a privileged form of access to this primal affectivity as it hints to the conditions of possibility or representational subjectivity as such – but it can be that only if it manages to point out or even work through this affectivity

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and the unconscious meanings to which it refers, something that for example many contemporary situation comedies obviously do not achieve. If art does not achieve this, then it functions as a lure, a decoy – or rather as a bribe. Art then becomes a corrupting gift, as Plato says at Laws 656b, a mere vehicle of a so to speak “secret commission”. If we do not manage to fend it off, the false pleasure that art secretly passes on to us will corrupt us – “inevitably” (Plato1967, 656b).

References - Adams, James (Ed.) 1929. The Republic of Plato. Vol. II (Books VI-X), Cambridge/ London - Aristotle. 1932. Poetics, in: Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 23, translated by W.H. Fyfe. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1932, online at: www.perseus.tufts.edu - Franz, M. 1999. Von Gorgias bis Lukrez: Antike Ästhetik und Poetik als vergleichende Zeichentheorie. Berlin. - Greene, W. Ch. 1918. Plato’s view on poetry. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 29, 1-75 - Havelock, E. A. 1963. Preface to Plato. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. - Plato. 1925. Philebus, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., online at: www.perseus.tufts.edu - Plato.1967. Laws, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 10 & 11 translated by R.G. Bury. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1967 & 1968, online at: www.perseus.tufts.edu - Pohlenz, M. 1965. “Die Anfänge der griechischen Poetik.” In Max Pohlenz/ Heinrich Dörrie (Hg.), Kleine Schriften, Band II, Hildesheim, 436-472. - Stevens, E. B. 1948. Envy and Pity in Greek Philosophy The American Journal of Philology, 69, 2, 171-189.

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Art – Éthique – Politique

Gabriele Bersa* Lycée sc.d’État. Milano

1. Contre la coutume répandue d’enquêter sur le rapport de l’art avec l’éthique, tout en examinant la conception morale de l’artiste en tant que conflictuelle par rapport à l’éthique de sa société contemporaine. Certainement tout artiste a sa vision du monde et, sûrement, un point de vue social et politique. Peut-on dire alors que le choc caractérise l’art? Cattelan est-il un artiste? Ses œuvres sont- elles des œuvres d’art? Mais aussi les catastrophes, les crimes, les malheurs, les accidentes, la violence causent du choc; et même la publicité peut tendre à causer du choc afin de convaincre le public pour des raisons de marché. Je ne parlerai pas de la propagande politique ou belliciste. L’art ne peut pas s’identifier avec le choc.

2. Donc le choc ne définit pas l’art. Mais attention! On dit que l’art ne peut pas être défini. On ne comprend pas toutefois la possibilité d’explorer le rapport de l’art avec l’éthique, si nous ne connaissons pas qu’est-ce que c’est l’art. Les mots, le langage, ce sont des signes avec des signifiés; autrement aucun sens. Même ceux qui nient la possibilité d’une définition de l’art, Th. Munro, W. Morris par exemple, en rèalité ils nient la possibilité d’une définition absolue et définitive (mais on peut demander les fondements de cette négation), toutefois ils doivent adopter une définition provisoire, générale, générique, particulière, statistique si l’on veut, mais toujours une définition. De plus, on doit rappeler qu’au cours de l’histoire nous trouvons trois façons d’entendre la réalité de l’art: art comme technique, art beau et art en tant que tel (comme connaissance de et rapport avec la réalité en soi). C’est nécessaire de préciser l’art dont nous parlons, lorsque nous parlons de l’art. Certainement le caractère éthique de l’art ne s’identifie pas avec l’engagement pratique et la théorie éthique politique ou religieuse de l’artiste.

3. Si tout art est réflexion sur l’expérience et sur le monde, et si à la base de cette réflexion c’est le désir d’un monde différent, on peut dire alors que,

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indépendamment de l’idéologie, de la pensée et de l’action de l’artiste, aux sources de l’art il y a une intentionnalité précatégorielle, au sens husserlien, de changer le monde et cette intentionnalité constitue le caractère éthique de l’art; autrement dit l’art ne s’identifie pas avec l’éthique, mais en tant qu’intentionnalité de changer le monde présente dans sa réalité son caractère éthique et donc institue son rapport avec l’éthique. L’éthicité c’est alors une qualité de l’art, elle n’en constitue pas l’essence.

Le rapport de la politique avec l’art sera donc le rapport de la politique avec l’art comme aspect de l’ἦθος, c’est-à-dire le rapport avec le caractère fondamentalement éthique de l’art. La politique, ou bien les groupes sociaux dominants viseront à favoriser une éthique qui ne doit pas être en désaccord avec leurs intérêts de domination et de pouvoir et par conséquent réaliseront une politique culturelle favorable à garder ou contrôler, même avec une tolérance répressive, l’ordre établi.

1. Si un orateur brillant, invité à traiter de l’argument «Économie, éthique et politique», nous disait que de l’un parmi ces trois thèmes, par exemple de l’économie, c’est impossible de donner une définition, à cause de la réalité complexe qui la caractérise, et que par conséquent il se limitera à parler du rapport qui passe entre l’économie d’une part et l’éthique et la politique de l’autre, dont les concepts sont bien clairs et acquis; certes nous serions plutôt déçus, puisque nous ne comprendrions comment est-il possible d’établir une relation entre ces trois termes, si le signifié de l’un d’eux, de l’économie, demeure dans le vague et de l’économie on doit parler seulement sur la base de la multiple expérience commune, de l’idée générique, donc imprécise, que nous en avons chaque fois pratiquement. Ça signifierait qu’il y a un champ, le champ économique, qu’on donne pour sûr dans la réalité et dont en fait on parle (sans bien savoir toutefois de quoi l’on parle), duquel nous intéresse la relation avec l’éthique et la politique. Autrement dit: nous savons qu’est-ce que c’est l’économie; voyons alors sa relation avec l’éthique et la politique.

C’est ce qu’il arrive ces derniers temps. Est répandue en effet la coutume d’enquêter sur la moralité de l’art, plus précisément sur le rapport de l’art avec la morale, donné pour sûr le fait de l’existence indiscutable de l’art et tout en demandant sa relation avec l’éthique, c’est-à-dire avec les us et coutumes des différentes sociétés à différentes époques.

Eh bien, Dante lui-même déclare la mission morale de la Divine Comédie (Paradis, XVII): les vicissitudes de gens fameux dont il a rencontré les âmes au cours de son voyage supraterrestre sont exemplaires pour cette fin; le poète doit par conséquent révéler tout ce qu’il a vu. Tout le monde connaît le vers « et laisse gratter là où est la gale ». Sûrement le jugement de Dante procède de sa

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conception éthique, mais sa conception éthique, aussi que toute conception éthique de tout artiste, concerne la vision du monde de l’artiste, elle ne constitue pas le caractère, la qualité, la réalité ou l’essence de l’art. Autrement tous les discours et jugements éthiques seraient des œuvres d’art. Pareillement on peut affirmer que les questions théologiques abordées par le poète (justice divine, prédestination, Trinité, deux natures de Jésus-Christ, etc.), bref la théologie de la Comédie, si l’on peut dire ainsi, ne constitue pas l’art de la Comédie: elle constitue seulement un aspect de la structure de l’œuvre. Autrement tout traité de théologie serait une œuvre d’art. Le même vaut pour l’idéologie de l’artiste, de tout artiste, et donc pour son engagement dans la pratique et en politique.

Le jugement éthique et politique de Thomas Bernhard à propos du monde contemporain est, malgré quelques affirmations, sans équivoques. Mais ce n’est pas son jugement éthique, qu’on peut partager ou non, qui constitue la qualité ‘art’ de son œuvre; et lorsque nous confrontons la conception éthique de Bernhard avec l’êthos de la société contemporaine, nous instituons un rapport entre la conception éthique de Bernhard et la société dans laquelle il vit, aussi que nous pouvons l’instituer entre la conception éthique et donc la conduite professionnelle ou le comportement pratique d’un banquier, d’un ingénieur, d’un médecin, d’un avocat, d’un artisan, d’un employé, d’un ouvrier et ainsi de suite et la société dans laquelle ils vivent. Mais ça n’explique pas le rapport entre art et éthique, parce que nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’art; à moins que , lorsque nous parlons du rapport de l’art avec l’éthique, nous n’entendons le rapport de l’éthique des artistes avec l’éthique de leur société, c’est-à-dire de la société dans laquelle ils vivent. Mais dans ce cas, toutefois, le problème demeure ouvert parce que nous ne savons pas qui sont les artistes, pourquoi les artistes sont tels, pourquoi Dante et Bernhard sont des artistes; et, surtout, si nous ne savons pas qui sont les artistes, nous ne savons pas pourquoi nous intéresse le rapport de l’éthique des artistes avec la coutume sociale et ne nous intéresse pas le rapport éthique des banquiers et des employés et aussi de suite.

On insiste, d’autre part, sur l’effet choc, sur le trouble provoqué par l’art. Le problème, d’ailleurs, n’est pas nouveau et la réflexion sur l’art a déjà considéré par le passé, à plusieurs reprises et en des formes différentes, la question du rapport entre l’art et l’effet choc. Certainement tout artiste a sa vision du monde et, sûrement, un point de vue social et politique. Peut-on dire alors que le choc caractérise l’art? Cattelan est-il un artiste? La fonction choquante caractérise donc l’art en soi? Ou ne constitue-t-elle qu’une technique de l’expression, un artifice, aussi que par exemple le dépaysement, ou le montage, ou la dissonance (je pense à Th.W. Adorno)? Ses œuvres sont-elles des œuvres d’art? Je rappelle la déclaration de Cattelan au Corriere della sera le 28 février 2010: «…c’est important ce que tu réussis à ébranler dans les gens, mais je ne dis jamais: maintenant je dois inventer une provocation. Une fois l’œuvre exposée, moi-même je deviens un spectateur inconscient pour voir comment les gens la recevront. Je suis un intermédiaire de quelque chose qui n’est pas soumise à mon contrôle.» Mais aussi les catastrophes, les crimes, les malheurs, les accidents, la violence causent du

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choc; et même la publicité peut tendre à causer du choc afin de convaincre le public pour des raisons de marché. Je pense à certaines affiches publicitaires, par exemple de la firme Benetton ou Heineken. Dans la même interview Cattelan ajoute, tel quel: «Le succès pour moi ne représente pas une délivrance, mais l’indépendance économique qui m’a assuré que je ne dois plus tourner à faire des ménages.» Je ne parlerai pas de la propagande politique ou belliciste. L’art ne peut pas s’identifier avec le choc, le choc n’est pas la qualité exclusive qui caractérise et définit l’art.

2. Donc le choc ne définit pas l’art. Mais attention! On dit que l’art ne peut pas être défini. On ne comprend pas toutefois la possibilité d’explorer le rapport de l’art avec l’éthique, si nous ne connaissons pas qu’est-ce que l’art. Sans motivation et sans raisons on efface ainsi toute la sémiotique, selon laquelle les mots, le langage, ce sont des signes avec des signifiés: autrement aucun sens. Pour la sémiotique un discours fait de simples signes, de purs termes linguistiques, alphabétiques, n’est pas un discours; il est une séquence de signes arbitraires, donc de non-signes, dénuée de sens. Mais si nous ne daignons pas de considération la sémiotique, rappelons au moins M. Heidegger qui, dans l’Einführung in die Metaphysik, dit: «.. ‘k z o m i l’… Cette figure écrite est aussi une suite de lettres, mais qui ne nous donne rien à penser. Un mot vide, cela n’existe pas…» En réalité on parle de l’art sans savoir de quelle chose on va parler, si nous n’avons pas le concept de l’objet dont on parle. Linguistique et sémiotique abordent les problèmes du rapport signe-signifié-référent, mais elles ne nient pas l’exigence de la définition du signifié. Toutefois je ne désire pas insister sur la sémiotique et reprendre mes autres observations à ce propos.

Adressons nous alors à la question de la définition, à ce que je dirais la paranoïa de la définition, ou mieux de la non-définition; au fantôme de l’essentialisme. Mais on doit remarquer immédiatement que même ceux qui nient la possibilité d’une définition de l’art, en réalité ils nient la possibilité d’une définition absolue et définitive (mais on peut demander les fondements de cette négation) et lorsqu’ils parlent de l’art, dont ils continuent à parler, ils doivent adopter une définition provisoire, générale, générique, particulière, statistique si l’on veut, mais toujours une définition. C’est le cas, par exemple, de Th. Munro, qui, reconnaissant l’impossibilité d’un accord entre les nombreuses définitions de l’art, adopta une définition de compromis afin de continuer sa recherche à propos de l’interrelation entre les différents arts. Tatarkiewicz aussi, attendu l’impossibilité d’une synthèse unitaire des nombreuses définitions proposées, dut recourir à une définition de compromis. Morris Weitz rappelle les ressemblances de famille de Wittgenstein, mais nous avons ici une autre façon de compromis, sans considérer que Wittgenstein, à notre avis, tombe sur la question des universaux, aujourd’hui encore ouverte. Afin d’éviter les équivoques de la question absolue «qu’est-ce que l’art?» N. Goodman propose d’indiquer «quand est-il art?», mais cette solution aussi renvoie à la définition du terme ‘art’. Plus acceptable, parce que plus problématique, toujours à mon avis, J. Margolis qui analyse l’œuvre d’art dans le contexte historique.

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D’autre part, on doit rappeler qu’au cours de l’histoire nous trouvons trois façons d’entendre la réalité de l’art. Je dirai brièvement. De l’époque classique à l’âge moderne l’art c’est la technique, c’est-à-dire la production selon des règles. Certes, il y a une distinction entre arts liberales et arts vulgares, dits après mécaniques, même s’il n’y a pas d’accord sur la formation des deux groupes et sur leur constitution. Après, au dix-huitième siècle, plus précisément le beau caractérise l’art: ce sont les beaux-arts qui s’opposent aux arts mécaniques, même si la millénaire difficulté de la définition du beau n’est pas éliminée. Toutefois l’histoire de l’art n’est pas terminée; elle se complique avec la philosophie classique allemande, lorsque l’art se présente comme expérience directe et connaissance de la réalité dans son principe, dans l’absolu plus précisément, de la dialectique de fini et d’infini, etc. S’ouvre ainsi une nouvelle réflexion sur l’art, sur l’art en tant que tel, sur l’art en soi, sur l’art comme connaissance de et rapport avec la réalité en soi, et qui prend chaque fois les caractères de la réalité qu’il explique, expérimente et connaît: identité avec Schelling, volonté avec Schopenhauer, absolu avec Hegel.

C’est nécessaire alors de préciser l’art dont nous parlons, lorsque nous parlons de l’art. Sûrement le caractère éthique de l’art ne s’identifie pas avec l’engagement pratique et la théorie éthique, politique ou religieuse de l’artiste.

3. Disons tout d’abord que notre intérêt fondamental c’est pour l’art en tant que tel, pour l’art en soi. Nous croyons en fait que le problème fondamental c’est la relation de l’art en tant que tel, de l’art en soi, avec l’éthique et non le rapport de l’art comme technique ou de l’art beau avec l’éthique. Ajoutons qu’on peut considérer comme caractère de l’art la réflexion sur l’expérience et sur l’énigme du monde, le regard sur l’abîme, le chaos de l’existence, avec ses espoirs et ses échecs, ses vicissitudes imprévisibles et inexorables, essayant d’en comprendre le sens, s’il y a un sens. Plus précisément disons que l’art ne représente pas le chaos, l’art présente le chaos. Nous employons le verbe présenter parce que nous ne trouvons pas un autre verbe qui en peut exprimer le concept. En vérité le chaos ne peut pas être présenté en tant qu’origine et transformation continuelle et mouvement, d’où naît et procède dans un devenir sans arrêt le monde. Disons alors que l’art présente le chaos, mais dans un sens particulier, dans le sens que l’art naît et se déroule ne pas quittant le chaos des yeux; c’est pourquoi le chaos est présent dans l’art et sur cette présence injouable se bâtit la vision de la vie et du monde, l’interprétation, l’idéologie, l’éthique de l’artiste et s’articule sa pratique morale sociale et politique. Et sur cette fondation se bâtit l’œuvre par le procès de la technique et l’emploi des matériaux fonctionnels à l’expression artistique. On peut penser, par exemple, à la question non formulable d’Ernst Bloch. Le monde c’est une question unique toujours incessante à propos de son sens, dit Bloch. On peut, donc, penser l’art en tant que réponse continuelle à la question non formulable, c’est-à-dire à la question qui précède et devance la formulation de toute question.

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On peut affirmer alors que l’art, vis-à-vis du chaos, de la volonté aveugle, du dionysiaque, de l’échec et du naufrage, de la continuelle remise en question du monde et de l’existence, se présente comme recherche d’un cosmos possible, d’un ordre et/ou d’une coutume individuelle, sociale et politique. L’art ne doit pas être entendu alors comme un acte volontaire de la conscience, comme l’intention de créer l’œuvre d’art, mais comme intentionnalité qui vise à s’exprimer dans l’œuvre et à se continuer dans l’action pratique éthique sociale politique. Et si à la base de cette réflexion on reconnaît le désir d’un monde différent on peut dire que, indépendamment de l’idéologie, de la pensée et de l’action de l’artiste, aux sources de l’art il y a une intentionnalité précatégorielle, au sens husserlien, de changer le monde et cette intentionnalité constitue le caractère éthique de l’art; autrement dit l’art ne s’identifie pas avec l’éthique, mais en tant qu’intentionnalité de changer le monde présente dans sa réalité son caractère éthique et donc institue son rapport avec l’éthique. L’éthicité c’est donc une qualité de l’art, elle n’en constitue pas l’essence.

On explique ainsi l’œuvre dans son contexte et l’art dans le champ de l’action, dans lequel l’action doit être entendue comme pratique et comme êthos au sens le plus large du mot. Le mot grec ancien ἦθος (êthos) peut être valablement emprunté pour désigner le contexte. Êthos ne signifie pas seulement caractère, tempérament, nature du point de vue individuel. L’individuel rentre dans le social, le politique au sens le plus large. Êthos c’est même us et coutumes, habitudes, institutions, mais coutumes et institutions qui s’ancrent dans un siège: êthos signifie aussi demeure, séjour, habitation, siège d’hommes et de peuples. Une éthique n’est pas telle si elle n’est pas un êthos dans toute l’acception du mot. Dans ce sens l’art comme processus complexe qui va du chaos au cosmos, du moment esthétique au moment social, c’est en rapport étroit avec l’éthique, appartient à l’éthique, il est éthique. L’art comme réalité historique agit toujours dans le contexte éthique, social institutionnel politique de quelque façon que l’on veut appeler. L’art n’est pas au-delà du monde.

Le rapport de la politique avec l’art sera donc le rapport de la politique avec l’art comme aspect de l’êthos, c’est-à-dire le rapport avec le caractère fondamentalement éthique de l’art. Mais la politique, au sens étroit, ou bien les groupes sociaux dominants, viseront à favoriser une éthique qui ne doit pas être en désaccord avec leurs intérêts de domination et de pouvoir et par conséquent réaliseront une politique culturelle favorable à garder et contrôler, même avec une tolérance répressive, l’ordre établi.

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Références

- Alighieri, Dante. 1990. La Divine Comédie. Le Paradis. Tr. J. Risset. Paris : Flammarion. - Benjamin, W. 1991. Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire (1939), in Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt a.M. : Suhrkamp, Bd.I/2, pp. 605-653. - Bürger, P. 1987. Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. - Carter, Curtis L. (Ed.) 2009. Art and Social Change. “International Yearbook of Aesthetics”, vol.13. - Diosono, F. 2007. Collegia. Le associazioni professionali nel mondo romano, Roma : Quasar. - Goodman, N. 1978. Ways of worldmaking. Indianapolis-Cambridge: Hackett Pub.Co. - Heidegger, M. 1958. Introduction à la métaphysique. Tr. G. Kahn. Paris : PUF. - Le Goff, J. 1971. Travail, techniques et artisans dans le système de valeur du haut moyen âge (Ve-Xe siècles), in Artigianato e tecnica nella società dell’alto medioevo occidentale. Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, pp. 239-266. - Levinson, J. (ed.) 1998. Aesthetics and ethics. Essays at the intersection. Cambridge : Cambridge U.P. - Munro, Th. 1951 (1949). The Arts and Their Interrelations. New York: The Liberal Arts Press. - Russo, L. (ed.) 2010. Dopo l’Estetica. Palermo: Centro Int.Studi di Estetica. - Talon-Hugon, C. 2009. Morales de l’art. Paris: PUF. - Tatarkiewicz, W. 1979. History of Aesthetics. I: Ancient Aesthetics. Warszawa: PWN (1970). Trad.it.G.Cavaglià. Storia dell’estetica. L’estetica antica. Torino: Einaudi - 1980. A History of Six Ideas. An Essay in Aesthetics. Warszawa: PWN; The Hague/Boston/London: M. Nijhoff. - Vattimo, G. 1989. La società trasparente. Milano: Garzanti. - Weitz, M. 1956. The Role of Theory in Aesthetics. “JAAC” 15(1): pp. 27-35. - Zelle, Carsten. 2003. Schrecken/Schock, in Barck K.et al.(eds.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Stuttgart-Weimar: J.B. Metzler, Bd.5: pp. 436-446.

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El genio: ética y estética son una

Carla Carmona Escalera* Euro-Mediterranean University Institute

Es de sobra conocida la relación que Ludwig Wittgenstein estableció entre ética y estética, puesta en obra de forma ejemplar en la casa que aproximadamente una década después construyó para su hermana Gretl en Viena. En el Tractatus-logico- philosophicus proclamó: “Ethik und Aesthetik sind Eins” (Wittgenstein 1921, 6.421)1. Nada más dijo allí de esta relación. Dada la precisión formal con la que Wittgenstein cuidó de los contenidos del Tractatus (recordemos que daba tanta importancia a la forma en que estaba escrito como a los contenidos expresados en él), no se debe pasar por alto ni que la afirmación estuviese entre paréntesis, a modo de corolario, ni que, lejos de ser una proposición principal, supusiese tres subdivisiones. Tampoco es gratuito que el propio filósofo afirmase a M. O'Connor Drury que cada proposición del Tractatus debía ser entendida como el título de un capítulo (Rhees 1984, p.159). Eso debe darnos una idea de lo que él mismo creía que quedaba por decir. Wittgenstein consideró que era su deber hacer referencia a dicha relación, si bien no era el Tractatus el lugar indicado para desarrollarla. Es más, esta idea sufrió la misma suerte que algunos de sus conceptos más importantes y, con toda certeza, más fructíferos para la esfera artístico-estética, como el de “forma de vida”: nunca llegó a ocuparse de ella en su justa medida. Sin embargo, está algo más desarrollada en algunas entradas de los diarios que durante el periodo comprendido entre 1914 y 1916 le sirvieron para pulir las ideas contenidas en el Tractatus, sobre todo aquellas que más sorprendieron a

* [email protected]

1 A partir de ahora nos referiremos al Tractatus directamente mediante el número de proposición.

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Bertrand Russell, de corte ético-estético. Allí, relacionando tanto ética como estética con el punto de vista de la eternidad, escribió: “La obra de arte es el objeto visto sub specie aeternitatis; y la buena vida es el mundo visto sub specie aeternitatis. No es otra cosa la conexión entre arte y ética.” El lector no acostumbrado al discurrir wittgensteiniano podría quejarse: ahí no habla de ética y estética, sino de ética y arte. Es cierto, pero Wittgenstein acostumbraba a usar los términos arte y estética indistintamente, probablemente porque consideraba que la experiencia estética es el fundamento mismo de la creación artística, como ha señalado Isidoro Reguera (1994, p. 145).

¿Qué quiso decir? ¿Por qué esa referencia a la eternidad? Tanto la experiencia ética como la estética implican una determinada manera de ver el mundo. Y esa mirada no está sujeta al espacio y al tiempo. El ojo estético ve el objeto en cuestión con el espacio y el tiempo, pero no en el espacio y el tiempo. La actitud hacia la obra de arte puede iluminar cómo debemos enfrentarnos al mundo si queremos ser felices. El ojo ético extiende la mirada eterna al mundo. En ambos casos es nuestra mirada la que cambia el mundo mediante la simple transformación de nuestra actitud hacia él. Porque, como dijera Wittgenstein, el mundo del feliz es muy distinto al del infeliz.

Y este cambio de perspectiva también tiene que ver con la relación que estableció entre ojo estético y ojo feliz. Que la esencia de la contemplación artística radique en contemplar el mundo con ojo feliz significa entenderlo como un reino de equivalencias donde no cabe perder la cabeza por ninguno de sus componentes particulares. Es similar a servirse de una lupa: cambia nuestra percepción sin alterar el mundo. Después de todo, lo místico por excelencia, en términos wittgensteinianos, es el maravillarse ante la existencia del mundo (6.44). Pero esto implica ver el mundo como un todo-limitado (6.45). El mundo del valor flota sobre ese todo-limitado. Uno se sale del mundo y lo ve con el ojo del feliz, de repente cae en la cuenta de que la solución del enigma de la vida reside fuera del espacio y del tiempo. Porque lo cierto es que no hay enigma, no hay problema. Todo lo ponemos nosotros, nuestro modo de mirar, y es el cambio de perspectiva, en concreto la mirada eterna, la que nos hace caer en la cuenta de todo esto.

Sorprende el carácter indecible de la ética, así como el tono oracular al que tendía Wittgenstein cuando se ocupaba de estos asuntos. La ética no resulta expresable, volviendo sobre la proposición del Tractatus con la que abrimos nuestra ponencia: “Es ist klar, dass sich die Ethik nicht aussprechen lässt” (6.421). Es más, la ética es trascendental, es decir, una condición del mundo. Pero esto no sólo lo estableció en el Tractatus, sino también en los diarios mencionados, justo antes de identificar ética y estética, lo que parece indicar que lo mismo podría decirse de la estética: “La ética no trata del mundo. La ética ha de ser una condición del mundo, como la lógica. Ética y estética son uno” (Wittgenstein 1961, 24.7.16). El valor queda fuera del mundo al modo de un velo que le confiriese un determinado color. Eso sí, un color configurador. Ética y estética fundamentan el mundo en tanto miradas,

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aproximaciones, configuraciones. Por tanto, no cabía hablar de ética, sino actuar éticamente. Frente a la teoría ética, la vida ética.

Y en estética, al igual que en ética, no cabe teoría alguna. De hecho, esta opinión se desprende de sus irónicos comentarios acerca de la ciencia de lo bello en la que a menudo ha desembocado la disciplina. Como mucho, la explicación estética podía llegar a la persuasión del psicoanálisis. Sin embargo, era necesario no caer en su error. La estética no podía creerse una ciencia. Asemejando estética y crítica de arte, afirmó que la primera no puede hacer otra cosa que describir, que es, por otro lado, lo que, según Wittgenstein, hace el psicoanálisis. Y era precisamente en describir en lo que consistía la filosofía para él. Y, como en ética, en estética sólo cabe hablar en primera persona, haciendo uso de ejemplos variados y concretos (Wittgenstein 1965, pp. 38-43). Eso es lo que hizo el filósofo en las anotaciones recogidas en el heterogéneo Vermischte Bemerkungen (1998), y es el proceder que caracteriza las Lecciones y Conversaciones sobre estética del 38, donde incluso sus críticas a los equívocos procederes estéticos y seudocientíficos son un ejemplo paradigmático del discurrir en primera persona y donde siempre se razona a partir de ejemplos concretos y tremendamente sencillos, a veces tomados de la experiencia personal. Pensemos en la cantidad de nociones y de carga filosófica que giran en torno al ejemplo de una reacción estética ante una puerta demasiado alta en esas lecciones.

Pero la filosofía de Wittgenstein da cabida a otro paralelismo entre ética y estética, o entre ética y arte. Traigamos a colación aquello que afirmase el filósofo en relación a lo tremendo en el arte (una de las ocasiones en las que explícitamente recurrió a la ética para explicar sus opiniones estéticas) (1966, I, p. 23). Hay que tomar consciencia de la diferencia que existe entre decir que alguien se comporta bien y que alguien ha dejado en nosotros una profunda impresión. Wittgenstein extendió esta diferencia al terreno del arte. El filósofo pensaba concretamente en lo que sucede cuando escuchamos una sinfonía de Beethoven. Ciertamente, no cabe hablar en términos de corrección frente a una obra de arte de ese calibre. Probablemente esto esté relacionado con aquella afirmación del 43 en la que proclamaba que sólo donde desaparece el genio se vuelve evidente el talento (MS 127 35v: 4.4.1943). Lo tremendo en el arte no sólo no se puede evaluar, sino que poco más se puede decir de eso aparte de que deja una impresión profunda en el espectador atento y con la suficiente educación y sensibilidad estéticas. Como mucho podríamos intentar describir la obra. Una cosa es valorar un traje de chaqueta, saberlo apreciar, como decir, por ejemplo, que un sastre ha cortado una falda de manera correcta; otra, admirar una sinfonía de Beethoven, de lo que sólo cabe decir que nos ha causado una gran impresión. De hecho, lo segundo puede cambiar nuestra vida, pero lo primero, sencillamente, nos agrada. Y, una vez más, sólo cabría describir ese comportamiento. Pero eso no es lo que en general se entiende como ética.

Continuemos. Nos adentramos en el terreno de las lecciones sobre creencia religiosa. No sólo estableció vínculos Wittgenstein entre ética y estética. La

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religión tiene mucho que ver con ambas esferas desde su punto de vista. Una creencia religiosa puede guiar nuestro futuro comportamiento al menos en la misma medida que lo hace el impacto que el comportamiento ajeno pueda dejar en nosotros. La creencia religiosa también modifica nuestra actitud frente al mundo, nuestra mirada. No es gratuito que Cyril Barrett usase los escritos de Wittgenstein sobre la creencia religiosa a la hora de enfrentarse a su ética. Vivir de acuerdo a una creencia religiosa es como vivir de acuerdo a una imagen que guía nuestra vida (Wittgenstein 1966, pp. 53-54). En el 47 comparaba creencia religiosa y sistema de coordenadas, equiparando la primera a una forma de vivir, a una manera de juzgar (“beurteilen”) la vida (MS 136 16b: 21.12). De la misma forma que lo hace la creencia religiosa, una obra de arte puede convertirse en nuestro sistema de referencia. De ahí que el arte haya sido una manera de transmitir contenidos religiosos. Por ejemplo, podemos regular nuestra vida de acuerdo a un cuadro como el El Juicio Final de El Bosco, pero eso sólo puede ser puesto de relieve en nuestra forma de vivir misma. No tiene sentido hablar sobre ello. O, desde luego, no debemos pretender agotar lo que eso significa para nosotros quedándonos en el mero hablar, y por mucho que hablemos sobre el cuadro no nos acercaremos más a las imágenes vitales que encierra. Una obra de arte puede servirnos de guía de una forma muy explícita, a la manera de un western normal y corriente, o con la máxima sutileza. Pensemos, por ejemplo, en un cuadro de Rothko o de Mondrian. Las obras de estos dos últimos ofrecen un mundo de equivalencias que se asemeja sobremanera a la proposición 6.43 del Tractatus. Nos enseñan a mirar lo que nos rodea como una totalidad, cambiando nuestra perspectiva. Y aquí es donde volvemos a la mirada eterna, quizás en términos menos religiosos, ahora que curiosamente estamos metidos de lleno en el campo de la religión.

Pero volvamos sobre la relación entre ética y estética. Hemos llamado la atención en otro lugar acerca de los beneficios de hablar de la supuesta identificación wittgensteiniana entre ambas esferas en términos de una interacción de relaciones, haciendo uso del trabajo de Cyril Barrett y de Allan Janik (Carmona 2010, p. 82). Estamos de acuerdo con Janik en que debe hablarse de un momento ético en la estética y de un momento estético en la ética (Janik 2007, pp.11-19). El que nos interesa a nosotros es el primero. Pero no vamos a ocuparnos del espectador, sino del artista, del genio. La obra de arte nos invita a tomar la perspectiva de la eternidad y está en nuestras manos entregarnos a ella o no, para lo que hemos de estar dispuestos a distanciarnos de nuestro propio estar en el mundo. Con vistas a mostrar, la mirada del artista también ha de partir de ese acto de renuncia. Esto, sin embargo, no interfiere con el genio; es más, posibilita su manifestación.

¿Pero cómo mantenerse en la mirada eterna? Para ello el artista ha de respetar los límites de su propio lenguaje artístico. Todo artista desarrolla su propio juego de lenguaje. Esto no se hace de forma consciente –o, por lo general, cuando se trata de hacer conscientemente es raro que funcione. Pensemos, por ejemplo, en la pintura de Egon Schiele, donde apenas hay sombras. Partamos de uno de sus

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desnudos. Imaginemos esa misma obra con sombras. Está claro que no funcionaría. La línea chirriante del dibujo de Schiele no casa con sombra alguna que no sea pura línea. Porque si podemos pensar en sombras dentro de la pintura de Schiele no es por medio de manchas, sino precisamente de líneas. De repente, algunas de sus líneas que marcan huesos devienen sombras, o funcionan como sombras, a pesar de ser líneas estridentes de colores peliagudos. Hagamos una breve parada en la casa que Wittgenstein diseñó para su hermana. ¿Qué significa comprender la casa?: entender sus reglas. Dado que en ese juego de lenguaje un techo tres centímetros más bajo hubiera sido todo un estropicio, Wittgenstein se vio forzado a subirlo de una forma precipitadamente escandalosa poco antes de su inauguración. Bien podría entenderse lo que normalmente ha sido tachado de ascético en la casa como mero respeto a unas reglas de juego. No es gratuito que Wittgenstein tuviera en cuenta a la hora de disponer las baldosas del suelo las perpendiculares de las ventanas, las entradas y salidas de las habitaciones o el camino que debían seguir los invitados: todo juego de lenguaje ha de ser coherente. Los elementos que lo componen tienen que estar en armonía unos con otros, esto es, respetar las mismas reglas. Cézanne quizás fue uno de los artistas que más reflexionaron acerca de su propio lenguaje artístico, al menos de modo consciente. La pintura de Cézanne, como la de cualquier otro de los grandes, determina su propio campo de movimientos posibles. Dicho campo nos permite distinguir una obra del francés de una copia o de la de otro artista. Los límites de los lenguajes artísticos también están determinados desde dentro.

Ese respeto por los límites es lo que nosotros entendemos por la noción de silencio en Wittgenstein. Cuando uno se queda dentro de los límites de lo decible, lo no-dicho, lo que queda en la otra orilla, es puesto de relieve precisamente por el silencio. Como dijera Rilke, los versos de Trakl son como setos vivos tan bien colocados que la inmensidad de la llanura que los rodea goza de una nitidez total (Rilke 1926, p. 11). Esto implica que la imaginación tiene deberes. Pero para ello, previamente, hay que dejarle hueco. Wittgenstein lo indicó en varias ocasiones, como, por ejemplo, en esta anotación del 46: “La lección en un poema es exagerada si los puntos intelectuales están expuestos, no arropados por el corazón” (MS 133 6: 24.10). En ocasiones somos tan explícitos que traspasamos los límites del lenguaje artístico en cuestión. Las imágenes también pueden participar de la charlatanería. A veces los signos utilizados para comunicar lo deseado son tan obvios que rozan lo pornográfico, como cuando desde el arte contemporáneo se ha intentado tratar el problema del llamado terrorismo islámico acompañando de un fusil a una mujer vestida con un burkha. Jean Baudrillard (2005) ha tachado la tendencia al hiperrealismo del arte contemporáneo de pornográfica. En términos wittgensteinianos, la pornografía sería consecuencia de un exceso de decir. Pero bien podríamos haber llamado la atención sobre algún rasgo pornográfico en los cuadros de Hans Makart o en la misma Secesión, por no salirnos de nuestro círculo vienés. Estamos de acuerdo con Baudrillard en que la pornografía es un exceso de realidad. En el caso de la pornografía sexual, la más fácil de reconocer, el acto sexual se intenta comunicar en su totalidad, de tal modo que se dice más de lo que la propia realidad dice de sí

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misma, agotándola. Si uno no quiere participar de ella es necesario lograr mantener ese misterio de la realidad que le es característico y cuya posibilidad niega la imagen pornográfica.

Pero que sea necesario respetar los límites del juego de lenguaje en cuestión no implica que no quepa improvisar o la innovación. Ni que la raíz de todo gran arte no sea lo racional, sino la vida primordial y salvaje, lo animal. Recordemos que eso fue lo que Wittgenstein verdaderamente echó en falta en la casa de la Kundmanngasse (MS 122 175 c: 10.1.1940). Pero es como si hubiera dos tipos de animales: el profundo, entregado al silencio, a lo oscuro, y el dominado por los instintos más bajos. El genio participa del primero o, mejor dicho, está arraigado en él. En cierta medida, todos los seres humanos parten de ahí, incluso nuestras herramientas más desarrolladas, como el lenguaje2. Sin embargo, no todos le sacan el mismo partido. Así es como podemos entender aquella afirmación de Wittgenstein de alrededor de 1940: el hombre genial no tiene más luz que un hombre honesto cualquiera, pero el primero es capaz de concentrarla en un punto hasta incendiarlo, a diferencia del segundo (MS 162b 24r: 1939-1940). Pero la “indecibilidad” de lo místico del Tractatus parece haberse transformado en una “indecibilidad” aún más oscura: la de lo animal de sus últimos escritos recogidos en Sobre la certeza. De una metafísica mística a una metafísica animal, salvaje. Pero ambas cuasi religiosas. Intentemos, sin embargo, salir de esta “indecibilidad”, o mostrar qué significa, liberándola de todo posible velo metafísico, porque, después de todo, lo indecible en Wittgenstein no lo es por metafísico, sino por ético, aunque a veces él mismo, mediante su particular uso del lenguaje, cayó en enredos que generan confusión.

Cambiemos de terreno. Pensemos en la película de Claude Lanzmann Shoah sobre la “shoah”, literalmente catástrofe (el término judío para referirse al holocausto). Citemos a Lanzmann: “Crear imágenes a partir de lo real es hacer agujeros en la realidad. Cuadrar una escena es cavar. El problema de la imagen es que hay que crear el vacío a partir de lo lleno” (1990, p. 299). Lanzmann no quería poner, sino quitar, precisamente para mostrar. Pero mostrar mediante el silencio, mediante el vacío, mediante el silencio de la imagen. Desde la convicción de que sólo así se puede llamar la atención sobre lo otro, en este caso, sobre lo que no está, lo borrado. El cineasta dice los paisajes polacos, su tranquilidad y su hermosura, pero por su silencio, conseguido gracias a las imágenes-funámbulas de Shoah, siempre en la cuerda floja de los límites de lo decible, hace un agujero tal en lo real que levanta los campos de exterminio ya borrados: los prados donde baila la hierba se transforman en las cámaras de gas y las copas de los árboles se tornan chimeneas espeluznantes en el presente absoluto de la película. Por tanto, no se trata de crear lo real, o lo que fue real, sino que, conscientes de ese imposible, es necesario mostrar la ausencia, lo borrado, pero sin recreación, sin decir nada, sin

2 “Quiero observar al ser humano como a un animal: como a un ser primitivo al que le atribuimos instinto pero no razonamiento. Como un ser en estado primitivo. No nos hemos de avergonzar de una lógica que es suficiente para un modo primitivo de comunicación. El lenguaje no ha surgido de un razonamiento.” (Wittgenstein 1969, §475).

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añadir nada a lo que no está. Lo que trata de hacer Lanzmann y lo que efectivamente consigue es que la misma realidad, pura y en presente, muestre el vacío, la shoah, erigiéndola.

Pero probablemente lo más característico de Shoah sea que con el vacío, con ese cavar en la imagen, Lanzmann consigue vaciar de tiempo la historia: el presente de la película borra las décadas que separan los esfuerzos de los nazis por llevar a cabo su Endlösung der Judenfrage y nuestro presente. Y es quitando, cavando en los mismos supervivientes entrevistados en la película, que nos convierte en testigos de lo ocurrido y de lo que todavía es vivido en presente, al igual que nos hace testigos de la terrible ideología de la que todavía participaban los del otro bando aún vivos. Porque a veces tratando de decir la realidad vamos más allá de la propia realidad. Mientras que cavando, quitando, sin añadir nada, conseguimos que la misma realidad se muestre. ¿Por qué no interpretar de este modo la afirmación de Wittgenstein de que en arte “es difícil decir algo que sea tan bueno como: no decir nada” (MS 156a 57r: ca. 1932-1934)? Esto sigue concordando con la distinción entre el decir y el mostrar del Tractatus. Pero ese no decir nada tiene todo tipo de implicaciones éticas, es más, está arraigado en la ética. Ya lo dice Lanzmann: “No se puede ver, pero lo que no se puede ver debe mostrarse con imágenes” (Lanzmann 2000, p. 15).

No es gratuito que los supervivientes entrevistados no puedan hablar de la shoah, que les cueste tanto, que digan una y otra vez que no lo entienden, que no tienen palabras, que el lenguaje no les sirve. Por su parte, es radical Lanzmann cuando dice que si diera con algún documento de archivo de la “Endlösung” acabaría con él. Pero eso tiene que ver con su manera de entender el arte y el hacer arte. Se esfuerza tanto por mantenerse en el terreno de lo decible que estaría dispuesto a destruir todo documento que pudiera violar el silencio necesario para traer adelante la shoah. Y este gesto radical de Lanzmann tiene algo de la inclinación al silencio del Tractatus y de esa primera insistencia de Wittgenstein en la indecibilidad. Pero quizás no hubiera que esforzarse tanto por establecer lo indecible, sino insistir en que hay maneras y maneras de relacionarse con eso, algunas mejores que otras. Sin embargo, sin llegar a confundir lo indecible y lo irrepresentable.

Wittgenstein estableció en el Tractatus que hay cosas de las que no cabe hablar, entre ellas, la ética. Pero sí cabe mostrarlas. Todo depende de la representación. No hay nada irrepresentable, sino maneras más o menos adecuadas, en tanto más o menos silenciosas, de representar. Y en esto, desde el punto de vista del filósofo austriaco, teníamos que aprender mucho del arte. Ahora bien, no toda forma artística es lo suficientemente silenciosa. El lenguaje del arte puede ser callado, pero no siempre lo es. Ya dijimos en otro lugar que creemos que Wittgenstein estaría de acuerdo con la distinción de Peter Handke entre las obras de arte y literarias que echan a perder el callar y aquellas que sin conservar el callar lo transmiten (Handke 2010, p. 75). Es obvio que Shoah entra dentro de la segunda categoría. Y películas como Shoah precisamente ponen de relieve el

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sinsentido del término de lo “irrepresentable”, por no hablar de lo “inimaginable”. Porque Shoah, después de todo, es una representación ejemplar (que no figurativa) de la shoah. Pero además de ser coherente con las reglas de su propio juego de lenguaje artístico, el artista tiene que equilibrar, desde el punto de vista de Wittgenstein, la relación entre contenido y representación. El concepto de “Darstellung” jugó un papel fundamental en la totalidad de la filosofía de Wittgenstein: aunque todo puede ser explicado (presentado) de diversos modos, se ha de optar por uno u otro en función del par objetivo/receptor. Fue su empeño en hallar formas alternativas de representación el desencadenante de sus famosas funciones veritativas. Más tarde, como dejó claro en las Investigaciones, cayó en la cuenta de la mínima, por no decir ridícula, contribución de la lógica al esclarecimiento del lenguaje ordinario. Se necesitaban más herramientas, cuanto más variadas mejor, que facilitaran una mirada alternativa, cuasi primeriza, sobre nuestras costumbres lingüísticas. De ahí los ejemplos, las analogías o las preguntas dejadas sin responder a conciencia que caracterizan su etapa filosófica de madurez o la arboleda de metáforas de sus escritos de carácter más personal. Su interés por modos de representación alternativos es la base del diccionario que diseñó pensando en sus alumnos de educación primaria de los pueblecitos de la Baja Austria justo antes de transformar con su fulminante mirada los planos que Paul Engelmann había diseñado para la futura construcción de la casa de su hermana. También es de notar que literalmente echara mano de tijeras para poner orden en los aforismos agrupados en Observaciones sobre los colores, o que encontremos variaciones de un mismo aforismo repartidos en sus diferentes libros de notas.

Pero la representación no lo es todo. Contenido y representación han de casar. Wittgenstein los consideraba dos caras de la misma moneda. Esto lo puso de relieve de maneras muy diferentes. Una de las más interesantes, y quizás de las menos exploradas, es la metáfora del rostro de la obra de arte. El filósofo consideraba erróneo separar la expresión de un rostro del rostro mismo. Del mismo modo, creía una consecuencia de un cartesianismo insano separar obra de arte, en tanto representación, y contenido (Wittgenstein1958, pp. 204-205). Es erróneo pensar que por un lado está el lenguaje artístico y por otro su contenido moral. El lenguaje artístico guarda el silencio suficiente como para no interferir con el sentido de la vida. El lenguaje del arte es lo suficientemente silencioso como para mantener el velo que protege las cosas y precisamente esto constituye su dimensión ética. Y es silenciosamente, fortaleciéndose en esa callar no callado, volviendo a Handke, que el arte expresa sentimientos. Eso que hay en el mostrar no es separable del mostrar mismo: la forma de expresar el sentimiento y el sentimiento mismo coinciden, al igual que el rostro y la expresión.

Volvamos a Shoah. Dos ejemplos. Lo primero que hace Lanzmann para mostrar eso que no se puede ver es ofrecerle un lugar y un tiempo: el cine. Se localiza lo que pasó. Y se sitúa en un lugar absoluto y en un tiempo absoluto. No es sólo presente en cuanto a tiempo, sino también en cuanto a lugar se refiere: el lugar de la película, la propia película, el film, casi cada película a partir de ahora, lo otro que vemos, lo que tenemos frente a nosotros en nuestra propia casa, o en la sala

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de cine. Pero eso que no se puede ver se hace presente en la película y no es independiente de ella. Después, como Carles Torner pone de relieve, Lanzmann se sirve principalmente de dos movimientos de cámara para asegurarnos como testimonio: los travellings y la panorámica (Torner 2005, p. 31). Gracias a los travellings, Lanzmann consigue que nos situemos en la perspectiva del judío, que veamos aquellos campos polacos desde su altura. El movimiento panorámico, por otro lado, escruta todos y cada uno de los resquicios de esos paisajes de muerte de belleza cándida. No hay que olvidar que Jean-Luc Godard consideraba que los travellings son una cuestión moral: ese mostrar la realidad tal cual, ese mostrar la mirada del viandante común. Pero lo que la película pretende y sus contenidos no son independientes de esos movimientos de cámara. Todo es uno.

En cierta manera, tiene razón Lanzmann. Ciertamente, la difusión de documentos de archivo de la “Endlösung” puede caer en lo pornográfico. Sin embargo, no tendría que ser así, como es el caso de la película de Alain Resnais Noche y niebla, donde además de volver a los campos de exterminio, el cineasta introdujo imágenes de archivo. Ahora bien, cuando se manejan imágenes de ese calibre, tenemos que someterlas, y someternos, al análisis más meticuloso. Y quizás la naturaleza misma de la imagen pueda ayudarnos en nuestra empresa. Ya lo dijo Godard: “No hay imagen, sólo hay imágenes. Y hay una cierta forma de articulación de las imágenes (…) Es el fundamento del cine.” (Godard 1998, p. 430). Lo que hay que hacer es no olvidarse de esa falta de univocidad de la imagen.

Estamos de acuerdo con Georges Didi-Hubermann en que ya no se puede hablar de Auschwitz en los términos de lo indecible y de lo inimaginable (Didi- Hubermann 2004, p. 47) –si es que alguna vez tuvo sentido. Y, desde luego, no cabe hacerlo remitiéndose a Wittgenstein. Hemos visto que la invitación al silencio wittgensteiniana, lejos de incitar a la inacción, de lo que ha sido tachada en muchas ocasiones, demanda todo tipo de respuestas éticas, entre ellas, la artística. Volviendo sobre la shoah, no se trata de hablar de ella, sino de actuar en consecuencia con lo ocurrido, y de hacer arte en consecuencia. Precisamente movido por Shoah y por Wittgenstein, aunque más por Shoah y por la shoah, Gérard Wacjman ha propuesto una ética del arte o, en otras palabras, un momento ético en la estética a partir de la película: “Lo que no puede verse ni decirse, el arte debe mostrarlo” (Wacjman 2001, p. 154). Se trata de una variación de las últimas proposiciones del Tractatus: “lo que no se puede ver, hay que mostrarlo” (Wittgenstein 2001, 236). A pesar de la polémica que hubo entre ambos intelectuales, esto que dijo Wacjman tiene mucho que ver con la invitación de Didi-Hubermann a mirar a Medusa, paradigma de lo irrepresentable, de otro modo, a enfrentarse de todas formas a ella mediante la mirada (Didi-Hubermann, 2004, p. 260), y ambos puntos de vista, a su vez, están en sintonía con la insistencia wittgensteiniana en la necesidad del cambio de perspectiva: después de todo, lo que hizo Wittgenstein, fue invitarnos a mirar las cosas de otro modo. Y eso es lo que deben hacer los artistas: romperse la cabeza o, mejor dicho, la mirada, para facilitarnos maneras diferentes, enriquecedoras e iluminadoras, de

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entender lo que nos rodea y, sobre todo, de entendernos a nosotros mismos. Y nunca olvidemos esta sencilla máxima wittgensteiniana: “No pienses, mira”. Quizás en esta ocasión cabría poner entre paréntesis la primera parte de la expresión y decir, sencillamente: “Mira”. Miremos. De tantas maneras como sea posible, porque no hay una manera, sino maneras. ¿Acaso sea esto uno de los fundamentos del arte? ¿De la filosofía?

Referencias − Baudrillard, J. 2005. De la seducción, 10ª ed. Trad. Elena Benarroch. Madrid: Cátedra. − Carmona, C. 2010. Implicaciones de la ética de Wittgenstein en la concepción de la creación artística. ¿Ego o representación? En V. Sanfélix Vidarte, ed. Ludwig Wittgenstein: un pensador de la cultura occidental, Serie 7ª de libros de La Torre del Virrey. Revista de Estudios Culturales, Valencia, pp. 75-83. http://www.latorredelvirrey.es/libros/libros_2010_3/libros_noviembre_20 10/257.pdf. − Didi-Huberman, G. 2004. Imágenes pese a todo. Barcelona: Paidós. − Godard, J.L. 1998. Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, II: 1984-1998, A. Bergala, ed. París, Cahiers du Cinema. − Janik, A. 2007. Das Ästhetische Im Ethischen und das Ethische in Ästhetischen. En: W. Lütterfelds y S. Majetschak, ed. Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins. Wittgenstein Studien 15. Viena: Peter Lang. − Lanzmann, C. 2001. El objeto del siglo, Trad. Irene Agoff. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. - 2000. “Parler pour les morts”, entretien avec Guy Herzlich, Le Monde des débats 14, pp.14-16. - 1990. “Le lieu et la parole”. En Au sujet de Shoah. París: Belin. − Reguera, I. 1994. El feliz absurdo de la ética (El Wittgenstein místico). Madrid: Tecnos. − Rhees, R. 1984. Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. − Rilke, R. M., 1926. Briefen an den Herausgeber des „Brenner“ vom Februar 1915. En: Erinnerung an George Trakl, L. Ficker, ed. Innsbruck: Brenner-Verlag. − Torner, C. 2005. Shoah. Cavar con la mirada. Barcelona: Gedisa. − Wittgenstein, L. 1998. Vermischte Bemerkungen/ Culture and value, 2ª ed. corregida con traducción inglesa, ed. Georg Henrik Von Wright en colaboración con Heikki Nyman. Trad. P. Winch, 2006. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. - 1969. Sobre la certeza. Trad. J. L. Prades y V. Raga, 2000. Barcelona: Gedisa. - 1966. Lecciones y conversaciones sobre estética, psicología y creencia religiosa. Trad. I. Reguera, 1992. Barcelona: Paidós. - 1965. Conferencia sobre ética. Trad. Manuel Cruz, 1995. Barcelona: Paidós.

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- 1961. Diario filosófico 1914-1916. Trad. J. Muñoz e I. Reguera, 1982. Barcelona: Ariel. - 1958. Los cuadernos azul y marrón. Trad. Francisco Gracia Guillén, 1998. Madrid: Tecnos. - 1921. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 17ª ed. Trad. J. Muñoz e I. Reguera, edición bilingüe, 2000. Madrid: Alianza.

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Towards an aesthetic hermeneutics

Sixto J. Castro* Universidad de Valladolid

Barnett Newman famously claimed that "the impulse of modern art was the desire to destroy beauty”. For some of the artistic projects of the twentieth Century, the term "beauty" seemed too bland, anodyne and certainly too theoretically burdened with the weight of centuries; one could no longer use it to describe the new subversive art, as well as the art from non-Western cultures, that were being added to museum collections. The past was visualized as being a receptacle for beauty as defined and understood by the West; thus in order to develop a new form of art, it was seen to be necessary to separate art and beauty. Hence the call to destroy museums and similar proclamations.

Perhaps we can understand Ortega’s idea in this sense: "past art is not art; it was art”, so that we must conjugate the word 'art'. In the present tense it means one thing, and quite another in the past tense" (Ortega y Gasset, 1962, pp. 427-428). This view supposes a certain historical narrative of art that assumes that ars facit saltus (art makes jumps) and it is somehow close to a kind of extreme historicism, according to which it is not possible to find common elements in art throughout history. Beauty, that in many accounts happens to be the binding element, is one of those transcendental terms that raises immediate defence or rejection, probably because of its metaphysical remnants, which lack many other elements that have been proposed as constitutive of art (significant form, design, and so on).

The collapse of metaphysics has much to do with the end of beauty in art. It is a fact that in recent times art has become independent of this aesthetic property and beauty has fled to other regions less committed and less metaphysically burdened, like advertising, fashion, design, surgery, gardening, and even science.

* [email protected]

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The relationship between these two events can be seen if we establish a parallel with another major term to which the metaphysical tradition devoted much of its energies: the notion of substance. As metaphysics gave ground to the scientific method, substance lost its privilege in favour of accidents, which are the objects of empirical observation. Substance is then reduced to a dispensable support for accidents, and ultimately to an “I don’t know what”.

This brings to mind the persistent description of beauty throughout the history of art as a “nescio quid”, something indefinable, but at the same time, something that one may say is the substance of art. When substance disappears, accidents remain. Once substantial beauty is missing, that place is filled by the accidents of art: delighting, creating a worldview, conveying a political message, educating or whatever. Beauty, understood by medieval thinkers as a transcendental property, present in every being just by the fact of being, disappears from the critical vocabulary and is replaced with one of these categorical properties that applies just to the realm of art, which is thereby separated from other areas of life (despite the avant-garde proclamations to reunite art and life), and thus, enters under the judgement of those who can recognize significant form, the sublime, the abject, and much more theory-laden concepts than beauty.

The work of the formalists (Clive Bell, Roger Fry) is an example of this. To them, the question is no longer whether something is beautiful (and therefore art). They seek a more direct method to determine this, namely, whether or not it has the property x (significant form, design, etc...) which is necessary and sufficient for something to be art. In this way, this art achieves total autonomy from other areas of life and it can become something completely uninspiring, doomed to death, not theoretical anymore but practical.

The end of beauty in art can be seen as the last episode of the end of metaphysics. Yet, metaphysics has been come to life again, raising a number of issues that affect all philosophical disciplines. One of these particularly interests us specifically, for it regards the question of realism versus idealism and objectivism versus subjectivism with respect to beauty.

We must distinguish between realism and objectivism. Realism is opposed to idealism, arguing that beauty is a feature of reality that may or may not be independent of the beholder. So, one can be realist and either objectivist o subjectivist. Under this general rubric of realism Hilary Putnam considers several closely associated philosophical ideas about the relationship between language and reality, and between truth and knowledge or justifiable belief. Putnam characterizes metaphysical realism in terms of three other theses, of which he takes this feature to be a consequence: that 'the world consists of a fixed totality of mind independent objects', that 'there is exactly one true description of the way the world is' and that 'truth involves some sort of correspondence between words or thought, signs and external things, and sets of things'. Putnam attacks this kind of realism, advocating instead what he terms 'internal realism', that admits that to some extent the data of the realist is interpretatively polluted. But

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even in this sense we can maintain that beauty is a property of reality, or, to be more precise, beauty is real.

Objectivism, on the other hand, claims that beauty is a fact that does not depend on the subject. Our aesthetic responses would be responses to objective features, and so the judgement “this is beautiful” would be true if the object actually possessed objective beauty (described in terms of proportions, colours, form or whatever), and something will be beautiful regardless of the ability of any subject to perceive its beauty (something might be objectively beautiful even though no one perceived it as such, which seems absurd). If beauty is an objective feature, aesthetic experience is seen as something conceptually later than the aesthetic object. This approach ruled the thinking about beauty until the eighteenth century in general, although there were major exceptions in Greek thought already.

By contrast, subjectivism holds that beauty is "in the eyes of the beholder". Beauty is a fact that depends entirely on the subject, and in the end, there is nothing in the object that determines our judgement. Aesthetic experience depends on the subject adopting a special kind of attitude. Holding that something is beautiful would be equivalent to saying that the sound of a river is relaxing: it is difficult to say that things are relaxing in themselves, except if we find them relaxing. Obviously, for the sake of the argument, we make reference to pure types. Usually theorists advocate for a more nuanced thesis...

Ideal objectivism can explain spatial and temporal agreements on certain aesthetic judgments, but it cannot explain the differences. Ideal subjectivism cannot give an account of the concurrences, only of the differences. However, objectivism cannot definitively determine the qualities that are considered beautiful or –if one maintains a subvenient base– how we move or do not move from this to the aesthetic properties.

Clearly, not everyone, in their different times and different places, considers the same things to be beautiful. About this there is not much more to say. We could prove this thesis just by means of a poll of this room. To address this diversity of tastes, Hume’s explanatory model is the ideal judge, a theoretical device that involves removing from the actual individuals all flaws or adding to them anything missing, to turn them into “pure human natures”. We thus create the inerrant judge, a splendid ens rationis that justifies our aesthetic preferences. Ideal judges are counterfactual realities: if this and that were the case, then we would give a “natural” judgement of beauty. As other “natural” realities, so popular in the Enlightenment (natural religion, natural knowledge, etc...), this natural judgement ends up in the most artificial reality. Like in the Newtonian universe, or in the Cartesian world, in which God must constantly intervene to correct or guarantee, in the Modern world, the subject must constantly correct the natural to make it be really natural.

But along with these differences that the subject should explain in order to correct them, there are surprising coincidences that seem to support the

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objectivist thesis as defended by evolutionary aesthetics, as in the case of Denis Dutton. There would be a kind of "natural beauty" behind which there are a set of basic preferences related to survival, but that is so general that it can easily be overturned, as illustrated, for example, by the golden ratio.

As outlined, both approaches, take beauty as a datum that depends only on either the subject or on the object, without paying attention to historicity. Thus, beauty becomes vulnerable to contemporary criticism. To a large extent, the collapse of the great metaphysical concepts, the end of metaphysics, is due to the consciousness of historicity. Some realists tend to cover beauty with a univocal or fundamental conceptual status, with some Platonic remnants: beauty is an eidos of which beautiful things participate. And so it is easy to criticize it, precisely because it is a term that has no historicity. If the history of art is the art of history and beauty has no history, it is easy to conclude that one cannot associate both lines. But, actually, beauty (and surely any of the other properties called transcendental) has never been considered in such a way at any point in aesthetic reflection. Instead, the exception is fixism. Different authors have remarked the mutable and evolving nature of beauty. One of the clearest statements in this regard is that of Baudelaire, whom, following Madame de Staël's lead, sustained that the love of beauty is the generator of artwork, and whom, in his work The Painter of Modern Life, holds that “beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is expressively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions” (Baudelaire, 1995, p. 3).

There is something that links all beautiful things together, and there is also a specific element of every age, place, or passion. Beauty, then, is not a metaphysical absolute, and it certainly is not a purely contingent element: it has a kind of medial or analogue character. If it were fully determined by occasional time and place, could we recognize another form of beauty? Its being something not immutable is demonstrated by the work of discovery and expansion that art has made with regard to beauty over the centuries.

From the phenomenological point of view, we can say that beauty is present in things, whether in their form, structure, texture, their internal relations, etc. But we are the ones who feel and perceive beauty in an object and in the fact of judging something as beautiful, we recognize that favourable judgement is deserved and necessary. This characterization of beauty, beyond the objective and eternal, and the contingent and subjective, has been developed by hermeneutics, while also paying attention to something that cannot be included by these other approaches: the role of mood.

For hermeneutics, interpretation is not a process in which a given subject faces a closed object, but a tertium quid that gives rise to reality, that is, the interpretive process changes the nature of that which is being interpreted, however, not in the sense of forcing a nature to become what the performer wants it to be. This view would involve thinking about independent subjects and objects, both from an

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objectivist point of view, in which beauty exists even though no one judges it as such, or from a subjectivist one, in which the beholder determines what is beautiful in virtue of his own originating power. Beauty is not a physical object, but a cultural construction, whose being changes as it is interpreted. How else could we understand the different paradigms of beauty that have appeared all throughout the history of art? The hermeneutic proposal is neither objectivist nor subjectivist, but realistic. Beauty is something real, as real as mathematical entities can be.

Just by referencing classical authors, we see that it is a kind of eon that recurs again and again in history of thought. A paradigmatic case is found in pre-critical Kant. In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant delves into the hermeneutics of beauty. Although he links beauty to morality, his thesis is perfectly applicable to any perceiver’s experience: “One finds that those forms that on first glance do not have a marked effect because they are not pretty in any decided way usually are far more engaging and seem to grow in beauty as soon as they begin to please on closer acquaintance, while in contrast the beautiful appearance that announces itself all at once is subsequently perceived more coldly, presumably because moral charms, when they become visible, are more arresting, also because they become effective only on the occasion of moral sentiments and as it were let themselves be discovered, each discovery of a new charm, however, giving rise to a suspicion of even more”( Kant, 2011, p. 45). The experience of beauty, then, is essentially interpretive, and this is the reason for disagreements in judgments of taste.

This idea seems to disappear from the vocabulary of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where beauty is understood in terms of necessity, subjective universality and so on. To say “beautiful” and to say universal, necessary and without concept, is to make an analytical statement..., but that happens only in the Kantian world, as shown by Quine through his critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction. It is the same case as with the categorical imperative, that is rational, but only under Kantian rules so to say. Outside the Kantian structures, a person can be highly rational and defend that the categorical imperative is, in fact, a hypothetical imperative: if you are a subject of the kind outlined by Kant, you will act in such and such a way… Kant has hidden the protasis of the imperative. The same occurs in the aesthetic realm, where Kantian universalism declares something beautiful by virtue of the Kantian system, that is, only under all the constraints required by Kant.

Was, then, this interpretive reading missing in the critical Kant? Joseph Margolis is very critical of the Critique of Judgement and of Kant in general, for imposing any sort of ahistorical constraints upon the field of knowledge and aesthetic judgement. Notwithstanding, I think we can glean the essential elements for this hermeneutic reading in the Critique of Judgement, especially in his repeated insistence on the resistance of beauty to the conceptualization. The free play of imagination and understanding is a kind of hermeneutic circle in which subject and

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object come together to bring out the very conditions of possibility of knowledge, to show how the cognitive capacities, by means of the pleasure their free play produces, establishes a continuity between the subject and the world that is impossible to guarantee in the realm of pure reason, namely, the awareness that the world is not indifferent for the subject, that the individual cannot really see the world from a third person point of view.

For this reason, Kant is forced to play with contradictory pairs of concepts in the Critique of Pure Reason (subjective and universal aesthetic judgments, subjection to law (judgment) depending on a feeling, etc.), and to establish the distinction between free and dependent beauty based on the presence of a concept (something totally subject to interpretation). To make an aesthetic judgment is to implicitly declare that everyone should necessarily experience a certain subjective response, a response that should bring about the spontaneous agreement of all. It seems that certain subjective responses are invested with the strength of universally necessary propositions. But this statement involves overcoming the subject-object dualism, since the universal quality of taste cannot come from the object, which is purely contingent, or from some particular desire or interest in the subject, because these are limited as well. It must then arise from the subject’s own cognitive structure, which, in the pleasure underlying the aesthetic judgment, shows its accommodation in the lifeworld.

The same is true of what is humorous. If we apply to humour the four characteristics Kant assigns to the judgment of taste that discerns the beautiful, it fits: it is universal according to the quantity (we think everyone should laugh), it is disinterested according to the quality, necessary according to the modality and a finality without an end according to the relation. We can thus talk of laughter (to which Kant devotes so little space in the Critique) as the underside of beauty. As the judgment of taste does not give rise to concepts, neither does the “gelastic judgment”, whose equivalent to pleasure is laughter, and which also plays with all the cognitive mechanisms, without reaching a concept. One can maintain that laughter gives us a new understanding of reality (we laugh when we understand), but it does not follow from this that laughter provides us with a concept; rather we should speak of what Kant calls an aesthetic idea.

Hermeneutics interprets the lifeworld. An important part of the lifeworld is beauty, and “the beautiful is what makes happy”(Wittgenstein, 1998b, p. 86) something we find “natural” (Wittgenstein, 1998a, p. 20), something that belongs to the human world, beyond cultural distinctions. That is one of the reasons why the concept of beauty is being built as we interpret it, insofar as the aesthetic experience is, in terms of Dewey, a relationship between the individual and his or her environment.

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Conclusion The hermeneutic approach comes to our defence when we try to grasp what beauty is: beauty is not a measurable fact, but the very nature of beauty changes with being interpreted. We cannot even imagine what will be considered beautiful in 1000 years time. Nietzsche noted that the eighteenth century despised Gothic architecture, because the century had created its own taste. That’s the reason, he thought, why our century must recover those feelings which led to the building of those churches. Only the interpretation of (and in) that lifeworld makes them beautiful. We may or may not consider them as such, but it does not depend only on subjects or on objects. It depends on interpretation.

We may remember Susan Sontag’s famous thesis that "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art", a recovery of our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. But this only makes sense if we accept that erotics (eros and love of beauty) itself is already hermeneutics (Sontag, 1967, p. 14).

References - Baudelaire, Ch. (1995), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, London: Phaidon. - Kant, I. (2011), Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed by Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Ortega y Gasset, J. (1962), El arte en presente y en pretérito, en Obras completas, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, vol. III. - Sontag, S. (1967), “Against interpretation”, en S. Sontag, Against interpretation and other essays, Dell. - Wittgenstein, L. (1998a), Culture and Value, Oxford: Blackwell. - Wittgenstein, L. (1998b), Notebooks, 1914-1916, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Is aesthetization necessarily a moral flaw in a work of art?

Sabina Dorneanu* Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

A major theme of discussion within the recent philosophical aesthetics is concerned with the relation between the moral aspects, ideas, emotions in the works of art and their overall artistic value. While the ethicists hold that prescribing or arousing immoral – or undeserved – emotions in the audience accounts for immoral works of art, some of the opponents of this principle proposed that an emotion, or the choice to arouse a certain emotion in the audience on the part of an artist, may be appropriate, even if immoral. That is, if the context requires that specific emotion rather than a moral, but inadequate one, the immoral option is nevertheless viewed as appropriate. Therefore, an immoral element in a work of art may not always represent a moral flaw.

Another stronger view is that according to which a more perilous moral flaw in a work of art is for it to lie by means of aesthetization. That means that a certain work of art chooses to present a serious problem with aesthetic instruments, therefore facilitating an aesthetic experience, hence lying about the gravity of the matter. That is, a problem that is meant to be dealt with other types of instruments is approached in the form of an aesthetic experience, occasioning aesthetic emotions. My intention will be to point out that, following the line of the first argument invoked above against the ethicists, a lie may be sometimes appropriate, even if immoral.

There are two main views, that of the autonomists, according to which there is no pertinent correlation between the artistic value and the ethical or moral values involved in a work of art, and the ethicist perspective, that reclaims the

* [email protected]

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importance and viability of such correlation between the value spheres. I propose to set aside the autonomist perspective, as no longer being relevant for the current state of art and of the discussion within art theory. Some of the ethicists hold that it is immoral for a work to confuse our sentiments or our value hierarchy (Carroll 2001), and state that the aim of a work of art should be precisely that of decanting our mixed-up emotions. However, such confusion could prove in the long run a valuable source of insight, a Socratic learning experience (Alcaraz 2008). Another similar view is that prescribing or arousing immoral – or undeserved – emotions in the audience accounts for immoral works of art (Gaut 2002), which means we should expect the bad character to die and the hero to survive, or if that’s not the case, at least to be inspired to engage into positive feelings toward the good character and to be rebuffed by the evil one. Nevertheless, some of the opponents of this principle proposed that an emotion, or the choice to arouse a certain emotion in the audience on the part of an artist, may be appropriate, even if immoral (d’Arms and Jacobson 2000). That is, if the context requires that specific emotion rather than a moral, but inadequate one, the immoral option is viewed as appropriate. Consequently, an immoral element in a work of art may not always represent a moral flaw.

Another stronger view is that according to which a more perilous moral flaw in a work of art is for it to lie by means of aesthetization(Alcaraz 2008). That means that a certain work of art chooses to present a serious problem with aesthetic instruments, facilitating an aesthetic experience, hence lying about the gravity of the matter. That is, a problem that is meant to be dealt with other types of instruments is approached in the form of an aesthetic experience, occasioning aesthetic emotions. I wonder if it’s possible, following the line of the moralistic fallacy argument invoked above, to show that a lie may be sometimes appropriate, even if immoral.

Let’s start by saying that a lie may seem wicked out of the context, but that the context might imply it at times. I’m not saying there is no lie, neither that it isn’t critical. So for the moment I’m not denying it is a moral flaw, I’m only suggesting that it can aspire to benefit from mitigating circumstances. Let’s go back to the case of an immoral choice on the part of an author to arouse immoral, therefore underserved emotions in the audience. To deny that such choice is immoral because it’s appropriate, fit for the purposes and the setting of the work, is not the same thing with asserting that a lie can be appropriate. Why? Because in the first case we are referring to internal elements of the work, to choices of stirring certain feelings, choices to present a certain character in a certain manner, to describe a particular action in a particular way. It’s adequate, so it is not immoral, to believe that a negative character can have positive features, and therefore to allow the audience to accept or admire him. Consequently, the work no longer can be said to have a moral flaw. On the other hand, the author of an work that lies by means of aesthetization does not incorporate the lie as an inclusive element of the work, one to be judged and accepted or not by the audience. The lie is insidiously inbuilt and is actually a previous condition of presenting that

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particular content with aesthetic tools. The audience is therefore oblivious about the lie a priori seated at the origin of the work. The lie is not an element of the work, but its own prerequisite. In this case, can we still maintain that the moral flaw has been erased? Apparently not: the lie, either as a non-truth or as not telling the truth, persists as a moral defect, and its tolerability does not alleviate its gravity. Even if the work could lead to a positive, moral outcome, it remains basically spoiled.

Could we possibly consider the lie that the work is guilty of as playing the same part as the crime committed by the evil character? No, because the author of that character did not committed the crime herself, but is only describing it. Even so, we can presume that an author that makes an immoral, but adequate choice, is making use of a lie, maybe even a preliminary lie. She might as well be lying about her own beliefs or feelings toward the character. I couldn’t possibly admire such a character, feels the author, but I am going to lie about it and I am going to present it as a character that can inspire appreciation, just to see in what measure it is possible to arouse such feelings, in what measure it is possible to incite the immorality or weakness of the audience, or even mine. And this is no doubt possible precisely on virtue of the peculiarity of the aesthetics means that are capable of stirring tempestuous conflicts of the highest moral feelings. We can even maintain that such a lie is assumed, is a challenge the author herself puts up to. Lying however, as in aesthetization, appears to be the taking advantage of certain circumstances in order to create a work of art – its author may or may not be aware of the lie, may or may not be prejudiced, but in neither case is the lie assumed “in the first degree”.

However, to say that the aesthetization could qualify as a necessary lie would be like saying that we need to be lied as if we were little children, in order to be informed about certain matters. But I will come back to this point later.

Now, why would aesthetization be a lie? Why would we say that using other instruments than the “adequate” ones means lying about the gravity of the facts? And, furthermore, since when are the aesthetic instruments inadequate? Once upon a while, significant political or social episodes were conveyed with such instruments – Giordano Bruno’s death, the kidnapping of the Sabines. The simple fact that they were does not necessarily mean that it was a good thing to do, but maybe more important than deciding upon it would be to ask ourselves what do we mean by saying that “we aestheticize when we render something an aspect that it does not correspond it”? The question is, does not correspond it in virtue of what? Of the generally accepted definition for that something? Let’s take a film about infidelity, for example, that gives adultery a passionate and conflictive aura. We might be tempted to say that this is what we thought about infidelity. Another film might casts upon it an unappetizing and revolting light, and we could be tempted, again, to say that this is also what we thought about infidelity. More than one definition of infidelity is possible. But maybe infidelity is not the best choice, since it implies conflicting and opposing facets. Let’s take a clearly negative

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example that cannot possibly involve positive or interesting connotations: the rape. There are undoubtedly ways of presenting it with aesthetic instruments, without making it more attractive, and for sure impossible to make it uglier. Is Ana Mendieta’s performance, Rape, an aesthetization in the sense of giving the rape a representation that does not correspond it? Even if to fathom the manner in which it does not correspond it supposes more fine-tuning than detecting the obvious inequality of retouching a photo of a starving African child, one could say that this presentation of rape is an inappropriate aesthetization. Could it be because it instantiates in an almost grotesque or ridiculous manner a traumatizing experience that cannot be recovered with such self-evident means? Or maybe because it does not seem to adequate itself to its goal, being rather enticing than tormenting? At this point I think we are already on the floating territory of taste, or that from a point on the frontier becomes really hard to trace and the impossibility to give a strong definition for aesthetization is being felt.

My point here would be that the problem with aesthetization does not emerge when it presents morally severe issues with aesthetic instruments, but when it presents them with poor aesthetic instruments, or better said with poor instruments. An aesthetization – hence an aesthetic “setup” – of an issue ceases to be an aesthetization if it makes a strong case out of it, if it triggers “moral” outbreaks and sets in motion inner agony, “opening” the eyes to a truth that otherwise would have remained buried or not sufficiently explored. Experiencing a severe matter in aesthetic mode is not necessarily bad, what is appalling is experiencing it in a pitiable, feeble mode. We could say, in such cases, that aesthetization qualifies as an immoral inadequation.

Let’s get back to an idea mentioned earlier, that saying that aesthetization is a necessary lie implies that we are being reduced to the condition of a child that needs to be lied. Is it really so, or is it really so bad? When does a child need to be lied? Maybe when he refuses to do or accept something, because he is afraid or he is spoiled or he doesn’t really have the means to understand what is at stake. Don’t we have the same reactions sometimes, don’t we mobilize the same resistance when we believe it’s necessary, even if unconsciously? And wouldn’t be a lie, in such cases, that spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down? Works of art that soften things down, such as Bracha Ettinger’s delicately blurred images of suffering, might as well play this part of making the misery bearable, of overcoming a preliminary defiance, the same way we soften things down when we give bad news to a loved one. We do this not out of immorality, but out of love. I say this type of lying, this type of aestheticization, due to its healing effect, is far from being immoral.

We’re not rallying our resistance only in real-life situations, but also in our encounters with works of art. In these cases, some authors talk about the concept of imaginative resistance (Kieran 2001) – the decline of entering a work that we see as morally corrupt, and I think that we could relate to this concept many of the postmodern fears and doubts about imagery, especially photography.

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The trend started by Susan Sontag, of refusing to look at photographs that depict suffering, is maybe the best example. Of course, the basic idea behind refusing to look is that the eye is a sense organ and so it can foul us. However, we must rely on our senses if we are to receive information at all. A total refuse of contamination leads to a total lack of information. The distrust caused by digital technologies today adds to this fear and a fast return to postmodern skepticism is noticeable. W.J.T. Mitchell talks about a prevalent fear that he calls clonophobia, that is the dread of a possible multiplication or cloning of the terrorist threat, dread that is fueled by the excessive pervasiveness of images around (Mitchell 2008). The ensuing skepticism about what images could teach us is typified in his opinion by the paradoxical re-election of Bush in 2004, in spite of the terrifying images from the Abu Ghraib prison that circulated in press. This came as a regret that photojournalism lost its power, a power it still enjoyed during the Vietnam War, when it had been said that images of war had played a part in putting an end to it. But one could think that the equally terrifying images from 9/11 could have alternatively functioned as a propeller for Bush’ re-election. The saturation of media with sadistic unbearable images, that makes people not want to look, does not necessarily mean that it makes them immune to suffering. It makes them only promiscuous about looking. But concluding from here that not looking, or acting aloof to that kind of suffering portrayed in media accounts for an indifference towards what happens out there, seems like concluding that indifference when shown a picture of one’s dead mother is the same with indifference to one’s dead mother. The war of images, as Mitchell calls it, is also a war against images, against their purported evil power.

Can this fear be also regarded as similar to the interdiction of showing certain kind of imagery to children under a certain age? Does it have as much or as little justification? Kubrik’s film A Clockwork Orange, criticized for aestheticizing violence, holds a key: the violent felon is caught in the end and made to watch violence all day long as a treatment for violence. This means that watching violence does not lead to violence, but on the contrary. However, the experiment does not work. Apparently, violence is not a cure for violence, but the opposite isn’t true either, since the criminal was already violent before the experiment. My point is that the argument that a leads to a or to non a is simplifying. Is watching violence leading to violence, or to an indifference towards violence? Or to both? Saying that violence leads to desensibilization merely explains a certain defensive reaction mobilized by the psyche in order to cope with an upheaval of emotions, but this defensive reaction does not imply an actual eradication neither of the idea of violence neither of the revolt or anger provoked by it – it is only a coping reaction necessary when there is no possibility of immediate response.

Appealing to the argument that sentiments aroused by fiction are not like sentiments triggered in real situations is debatable (Friend 2003). An individual can react equally forcefully to violence in fiction and non-fiction, due to identifying and projection processes. The feelings are probably the same, only the ensuing (re)actions are different. Running the risk of a certain moral relativism, we might

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however notice that at times things are neither good nor bad, or better said beyond the good and the evil. The statement fits perfectly the case of emotions, and much of the ethicist conundrum can be put on the account of messing up feelings with actions. And even an action can sometimes be no more than an acting out, that is an involuntary reaction to something provoked by a momentarily uncontrolled affect. However, this view upon which the emotions we experience with immoral works of art are not the same we experience with immoral facts might have some psychological validity, in the sense that our values reflect our moral upbringing. Were I a savage like Mowgli, I might not be bothered by murder or rape, and not because I were immoral, but because I wouldn’t share the same set of values. There are reasons to believe that some sort of residual prehistoric nucleus lingers along our evolved identity, and it could be that that “caveman” individual is the one that finds an illicit escape when enjoying immoral courses of events in narrative art for example, while the other evolved one is promptly reacting when things get “real”. Fiction, or art in general, as many have said, allows us to enjoy emotions without any practical cost. I think that precisely this fear, of not realizing there are practical costs in the case of non- fiction art works, is the threat in the case of aestheticization. Because it would be immoral to live the thrills with no moral costs if the representation that conveys you that thrills is tied up to a real case scenario. The choice between being Platonic about it and see moral corruption in art, or being Aristotelian and see catharsis in it is not always an easy choice.

I think there is another type of aesthetization which I found more vicious, that of adding emotion to something or putting into emotional mode something that its author is lacking emotions for. The case is very frequent in today’s youth approach of revolutionary ideals, for example, and not because of an overexposure characteristic to aestheticized politics or neutralized imagery, but because it is an ideal frequently un-felt, un-interiorized, but copied and vehemently spoken out without a genuine passion. Maybe this could explain the prevalent fiasco of present-day riots – there is a lack of affective or emotional attachment that stops the riot short of becoming convincing, pungent. It is like a cabotine mimicking. Adding beauty or emotion where there is none, or very little, is what I qualify as being truly a lie.

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References - Alcaraz León, M.J. 2008. “Modos de estetización y valores morales en el arte” Disturbis [Online] 3. Available at: http://web.me.com/gerardvilar/Disturbis234/MA.html. - Carroll, N. 2001. “Art, narrative and moral understanding” In: Carroll, N. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 270-293. - D’Arms, J. and Jacobson, D. 2000. “The Moralistic fallacy: on the ‘appropriateness’ of emotions” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 61 (no. 1), pp. 65-90. - Friend, S. 2003. “How I really feel about JFK” In: McIver Lopes, D. and Kieran, M. Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 35-53. - Gaut, B. 2002. “Art and ethics” In: Gaut, B. and McIver Lopes, D. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 431-443. - Kieran, M. 2001. “In Defense of the ethical evaluation of the narrative art” British Journal of Aesthetics vol. 41, pp. 26-38. - Mitchell, W. J. T. 2008. “Cloning Terror: The War of Images 2001-04” In: Costello, D. and Willsdon, D. The Life and Death of Images. Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 179-208.

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Copias del arte y arte de la copia

Mikel Iriondo Aranguren* Universidad del País Vasco

Inconstante Heráclito, que es el mismo y es otro, Como el río interminable. Borges

1.-Copias del arte y gusto por el plagio La reciente exposición Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries, celebrada entre el 30 de Junio y el 12 de septiembre del 2010 en la National Gallery de Londres, no solo puso de manifiesto un comentario muy difundido en el mundo del arte y los museos, a saber, que muchas de las obras expuestas en las mejores pinacotecas del mundo son falsas, sino que también inauguró oficialmente una nueva era en la que los errores en la atribución y en la falsificación, simulación o copia dejan de ser considerados como un estigma. Incluso pueden dar lugar a una exposición sorprendente y exitosa. No cabe duda de que la brillante idea de presentar esta colección de errores y falsedades no hubiera sido posible hace unos decenios. La National Gallery evidencia un cambio de actitud no exento de cierto orgullo, algo así como gritar a los cuatro vientos: ¡Tenemos obras falsas, aleluya! Esta novedad, claro está, parece estar ligada al desarrollo de los mecanismos y tecnologías que permiten descubrir lo antaño indetectable. Aunque muchos

* [email protected] Este artículo ha sido posible gracias a la financiación del proyecto de investigación “Arte, emoción y valor”, FFI2008-00750/FISO (Micinn).

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expertos dicen confiar más en la intuición y el presentimiento, no cabe duda de que los avances tecnológicos ayudan en esta labor forense. En el caso de la National Gallery estamos ante una muestra de la profunda fe en la búsqueda de la verdad y el intento de erradicar cualquier truculencia. Conviene señalar el hecho de que si ciertas obras habían perdurado durante decenios entre las joyas de su colección y no han sido expurgadas hasta el día de hoy, a pesar de la tarea de los expertos, ello anuncia sin duda la presencia de valores otrora desconocidos, porque antaño cualquier descubrimiento de esta índole ponía en riesgo la credibilidad de un museo. Efectivamente, hoy en día se tiende a considerar que ciertas copias no son una bagatela pues su resistencia ante el examen minucioso encierra un indudable tesoro. El mercado del arte no desestimará semejante prodigio. Puede incluso que el capital se ponga en búsqueda y cotización de cualesquiera otras obras de ese artista menor confundido con su maestro, o del sagaz falsario, y se desarrolle un mercado legítimo de falsos originales que redunde en beneficio del espectáculo. En resumen, y sin ánimo de agotar la casuística del engaño, sea por error en la atribución o datación de la obra o, lo que aquí parece más grave, por haber sido los expertos museísticos engañados torticeramente, parece claro que la valoración social de estos asuntos ha cambiado. No se percibe ya como estafa lo que antaño era motivo de escándalo, máxime cuando el museo ha podido ser embaucado por un marchante habilidoso, colando gato por liebre. Puede que en la base de esta benigna percepción social de lo falso se halle aquello que Walter Benjamin anticipó al hablar de la emergente reproductibilidad técnica del arte, de ese nueva era repleta de copias y la consiguiente pérdida del aura original. Pero como desde entonces ha llovido un tanto, la ubicuidad de la copia y de lo falso se ha convertido en la quintaesencia del mercado y la sociedad de consumo. Así, por ejemplo, la fotografía y el vídeo permiten copiar el mundo y reproducirlo en el entorno doméstico, siendo sorprendente la reduplicación de lo real por parte de algunos adictos a la cámara que confían más en mirar el mundo a través de la lente que por medio de sus propios ojos. Esta acumulación de archivos, lo mismo que ocurre con la reduplicación de información, antes guardada en papel y ahora también en múltiples soportes informáticos, genera un mundo de sobreabundancia y pérdida entre tanta confusión informativa, con el consiguiente añadido del deseo más que inconsciente de borrar, de olvidar, de deshacernos de esta pesada carga. Inmersos en el universo de Internet y los archivos electrónicos, vivimos una modernísima esquizofrenia: el horror ante un minúsculo error que nos usurpa, arrojando al vacío de la nada, el documento original que sentimos como irrecuperable y, al mismo tiempo, la alegría de eliminar lo superfluo1, como si esta tarea fuera siempre posible. Me estoy refiriendo, claro está, al hecho de presionar la tecla Delete, tanto física como metafóricamente.

1 En este sentido es maravilloso el relato de Heinrich Böll (1981), El desechador, donde el protagonista tiene la importante tarea de arrojar a la basura la correspondencia superflua antes de que lleguen los demás trabajadores a la empresa donde trabaja.

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Asimismo, la citada era de Internet que nos permite acceder a esa base de datos inagotable, nos muestra también la cara de una reproducción ilícita que se extiende por doquier pese a los denodados esfuerzos de la Sociedad General de Autores. ¡Que levante la mano quien, inquebrantable, nunca ha fotocopiado un libro, descargado música o atentado de alguna manera contra el copy right! Aunque la copia intelectual, como sabemos en el mundo universitario, posee una cara supuestamente más benigna por su uso manifiesto: hacer pasar por propias ideas ajenas, no citando aquellas fuentes originales que, quizá, pecaron de lo mismo. Y para qué hablar del universo de la publicidad y de las marcas comerciales, que con sus indudables esfuerzos imaginativos dan lugar a éxitos reduplicados por doquier. Basta señalar reclamos publicitarios como I love New York, Just do it, Think different o Got Milk que han generado réplicas infinitas. El documental Art & Copy (Doug Pray 2009) muestra de manera brillante los entresijos del mundo publicitario, el recurso a cualquier elemento conocido del pasado y el trabajo de nueva reformulación o presentación tratando de cautivar a los consumidores. Y, claro está, la evidencia de que el éxito siempre tiene a su zaga a una legión de imitadores. Habitantes en este mundo de la duplicación, vemos por ejemplo que la resplandeciente pasarela de la moda cambia a cada instante enfrentándose a la cruda realidad del casi inmediato plagio, mientras no duda en recuperar y copiar a su vez estilos del pasado, rodando así en un eterno círculo de espejos, reflejos y oropeles. ¡Vuelve el pantalón campana o los calcetines altos! y son legión los que raudos se dirigen a su boutique de cabecera. No cabe lucir desfasado a riesgo de incurrir en descrédito social. Ahora bien, si alguien conserva en el armario las prendas del pasado es posible que pueda engañar al más rabioso snob. Finalmente, si nos acercamos a las ciencias, la genética aborda los apasionantes caminos de la clonación, quizá anticipándonos una inmortalidad engañosa a través de nuestros futuros replicantes2. Pero volvamos al arte y sus copias. La conocida película de Orson Welles (1973), Fake, ya mostró en su día centrándose en la figura del célebre falsificador húngaro Elmyr de Hory3, que muchos de los grandes museos poseían obras de dudosa procedencia y autoría, algunas de ellas creadas por el propio imitador húngaro, individuo que se había creado una leyenda a su alrededor, una biografía repleta de ficciones, realidades y equívocos que contribuyó a agrandar su figura. En sus últimos veinte años de vida residió en Ibiza y era un reputado maestro elaborando nuevos Modiglianis, Renoirs, Picassos y otros conocidos artistas.

2 Primo Levi (1988) ya anticipaba algo de esto al hablarnos de una máquina fotocopiadora capaz de duplicar seres humanos. Por otro lado, algunas películas de ciencias ficción han abordado este tema con mayor o menor fortuna cinematográfica. Desde Los niños de Brasil (Franklin J. Schaffner 1978) que presentaba la clonación múltiple de Adolf Hitler y la mítica Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982) abordando la inquietud existencial de los replicantes, quizá las más evidentes sean Godsend (Nick Hamm 2004), La isla (Michael Bay 2005), Los sustitutos (Jonathan Mostow 2009), o Moon (Duncan Hones 2009). 3 Uno de los míticos falsificadores en el mundo del arte pictórico junto con danés Hans van Meegeren y el británico Eric Hebborn, este último supuesto autor de varios Vermeer certificados como originales.

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Engañar creando un nuevo Modigliani, sin copiar uno existente, supone enfrentarse a una legión de forenses museísticos y pasar esta aparente rigurosa prueba. Sin embargo, para Elmyr la presencia de los expertos era una bendición: raramente lograban ponerse de acuerdo y, así, lo que uno calificaba como impostura otro lo alababa como hallazgo memorable.

En un viejo artículo aparecido en el New York Times, Peter Landesman (2001) analizaba con rigor e ironía las disputas entre los expertos a la hora de dictaminar la autenticidad de un cuadro u obra maestra. Mostrando primero cuáles son algunos de los rasgos que identifican la impostura (vacilación en el trazo, envejecimiento artificial, sustancias químicas inexistentes en aquella época, etc), Landesman nos hablaba de las presiones del museo Getty para ocultar ciertos descubrimientos y de los celos y malas relaciones entre el personal dedicado a esta labor cuasi detectivesca. Como resultado, y mezcladas las cuestiones personales, los enfados, enemistades y demandas, las conclusiones finales sobre la autenticidad de una obra pueden ser variadas y sorprendentes, obteniendo un claro beneficio aquel que consiguió vender la, supongamos, dudosa pintura4. Como señala el artículo,

…Los expertos ven lo que quieren ver. Tienen una visión de túnel. Quieren ver obras falsas cuando quieren desacreditar a su predecesor y quieren ver obras auténticas cuando así quieren creerlo

Todo falsificador es consciente de las necesidades de los museos, se mantiene atento a los rumores de la demanda de rarezas u obras de determinados períodos que dichas instituciones quieren poseer y, en consecuencia, el impostor se pone manos a la obra tratando de satisfacer dicho vacío. El citado Eric Hebborn era un reputado maestro en abastecer a los museos con falsos originales. Lo mismo ocurre con las obras de diferentes fases en la actividad de un pintor, pues al

4 Veamos una noticia de El País de 22/10/91, “Un pintor inglés residente en Italia, Eric Hebborn, asegura en sus memorias que durante 30 años estuvo pintando cuadros que luego vendía -provistos de documentación falsa- como obras de grandes maestros de distintas épocas. Según sus cálculos, más de mil de sus cuadros son atribuidos a pintores como Van Dyck o Jan Brueghel, y están expuestos en museos tan prestigiosos como el British Museum, la National Galiery de Washington o el Royal Museum de Copenhague. De ser cierta la afirmación del artista, sería la falsificación masiva más espectacular de todos los tiempos”. Hebborn afirmaba, "No existen los dibujos o las pinturas falsos: son sólo dibujos y pinturas. Los expertos que las atribuyen erróneamente son quienes crean la falsificación". Finalmente, para subrayar la disputa entre expertos, “A propósito de Anthony Blunt, relata una sabrosa anécdota. Blunt mantenía una controversia con un colega, Hans Calmann. Hebborn decidió pintar un Poussin e instó a Blunt a que no lo reconociera como auténtico; era de suponer que Calmann proclamaría que sí lo era. Sucedió al pie de la letra, gracias a la maestria de Hebborn”. Hebborn fue asesinado en Roma en Enero de 1996, su cráneo fue aplastado y destrozado. Ocurrió a los cinco años de haber publicado su autobiografía Drawn to trouble y a las pocas semanas de publicar The Art Forger’s Handbook, donde revelaba sus técnicas de trabajo. Su asesino no ha sido hallado.

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museo siempre le apetece completar su catálogo. De esta manera se adquieren piezas a todas luces dudosas. Valga citar el repetido chiste: Gauguin pintó unas 12.000 obras, 20.000 de las cuales circulan por los museos de Norteamérica.

En cualquier caso hay que entender que la labor de los expertos tratando de detectar obras falsas es sumamente difícil, pues aparte de lo ya señalado han de luchar contra factores insondables. Ya lo decía el pintor Lucian Freud, quien alguna vez se vio envuelto en problemas de autoría,

La gente que toma estas decisiones acerca de la autoría olvida que, como ellos mismos, los pintores pueden sentirse diferentes cada día. Es como si alguien dijera: no puedes ser tú porque no pareces el que eras la semana pasada. (Adams 2009)

Así pues, toda consideración acerca de una identidad pictórica contrastada e indiscutible presenta como contrapartida el dinamismo creativo del artista, quien puede ser capaz de sorprenderse a sí mismo y evitar cualquier tendencia a la repetición o estandarización. El buen artista evita copiarse, trascendiendo las etapas pasadas para afrontar nuevos retos. Y esta es una poderosa razón que puede confundir a los expertos a la hora de catalogar una obra como espuria o no.

La copia, como brevemente hemos visto, presenta pues numerosas vertientes, y es que como ya señaló Aristóteles, es tendencia natural humana imitar el mundo que nos rodea y muchas de las actitudes de nuestro prójimo. Como hoy en día sabemos, incluso la percepción interpersonal inconsciente, como por ejemplo oír conversaciones de nuestro entorno de manera aparentemente distraída, juega un papel importante en nuestra interpretación/construcción de la realidad. Cualquier tipo de aprendizaje recurre a la repetición de lo estimado valioso con el ánimo de alcanzar un camino propio y original. Aquello que nos agrada, lo que admiramos, lo que deseamos, lo que apreciamos, lo que envidiamos, etc., se nos presentan como objeto de réplica, y a través de este proceso intentamos encontrar nuestro lugar en el mundo. Seducidos por un entorno, podemos incluso trasladarlo a nuestra lugar de residencia, y construir una copia, (y) muy pronto, en un periódico local, quedé secuestrado por la noticia de que, mientras paseaba por las calles de Lyon con su esposa el pasado mes de Octubre, a Buti-Saeed al-Ghandi le había invadido una repentina y doble oleada de amor, por la ciudad y su mujer. De modo que Ghandi, empresario de cuarenta años, había decidido capturar la magia del momento construyendo un pequeño Lyon en su tierra, Dubai” (Citado por Enrique Vila-Matas (2010)

Pero no nos engañemos, lo que aquí se pretende copiar son las emociones de un momento de felicidad recurriendo a la duplicación del paisaje. Porque la melancolía tiene como referente más inequívoco la sospecha de la imposibilidad de la repetición pero, sorprendentemente, espera que ésta acontezca. Sin embargo, sólo nos quedan las trazas, la copia del decorado, mientras la estación de la felicidad se ha desdibujado. Todo tiempo pasado, como decía Paul Ricoeur,

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es tiempo humano. Aunque intentemos redoblar y copiar lo vivido, -tarea que al filósofo francés Clément Rosset5, sospechando de cualquier caverna platónica, le parece la esencia de la propensión a la complejidad y estupidez humanas-, lo importante sería vivir el instante como irrepetible, como original sin posibilidad de copia, pues no hay nada oculto que desvelar en las cosas y, como decía el heterónimo portugués Alberto Caeiro, porque el único sentido oculto de las cosas es que no tienen ningún sentido oculto (…) hay bastante metafísica en no pensar en nada. (Tomado de Iriondo, 1996)

2.-Copias identitarias Es habitual copiar historias foráneas para configurar nuestro común pasado, con un resultado, por lo general, heroico e intachable. El orgullo de pertenencia y el relato de nuestra tradición acostumbran a ser un pastiche de mitos y leyendas propias y ajenas duplicadas a conveniencia y asimiladas por repetición incansable. Así, la exaltación de la originalidad irrepetible, ya sea personal o comunitaria, acostumbra a ser un conglomerado de lugares comunes y réplicas identitarias mezcladas con invenciones y ocurrencias de todo tipo6. Basta recordar la patraña de los mitos Ossiánicos, el bélico Discurso de Gazimestan (1989) de Slobodan Milosevic recordando torticeramente la Batalla del Campo de los Mirlos7, o el

5 Citaré entre sus obras dos (1993, 2004) que están directamente ligadas a este asunto. De (2004) copio el siguiente texto, “El resplandor de la verdad supone, por un lado, un mundo de originales, y por el otro, un mundo de copias que sustituyen con mayor o menor habilidad a los originales: hay resplandor de la verdad cuando se perfila el original a través de sus copias –filosofía del Doble, filosofía metafísica, que considera la realidad cotidiana como una duplicación cuyo sentido y clave sólo podría entregar la visión del Original-.La densidad de lo real, por el contrario, señala una plenitud de la realidad cotidiana, es decir, la unicidad de un mundo que no se compone de duplicados, sino siempre de singularidades originales (incluso aunque se asemejen entre sí), y que, por tanto, no tiene que rendir cuentas a ningún modelo –filosofía de lo real, que ve en lo cotidiano y en lo trivial, incluso en la repetición misma, toda la originalidad que existe en el mundo-. No hay ningún objeto, a los ojos de la filosofía de lo real, que pueda ser considerado como original en el sentido metafísico del término; no hay ningún objeto real que no esté fabricado, que no sea artificial, dependiente, condicionado, de segunda mano. Aquí todo es postizo, si se quiere, al menos según la opinión de cierta sensibilidad metafísica; ahora bien, estos duplicados no copian ningún patrón y, en consecuencia, todos ellos son originales. Plétora de duplicados, plétora de originales: puede decirse indistintamente lo uno o lo otro desde el momento en que esta plétora es total, es decir, en tanto que ocupa de manera exhaustiva todo el campo de la existencia. Como no hay más que duplicados, no hay originales; a la vez, todos los duplicados son originales” 6 Obviamente estoy haciéndome eco de libros como el de Eric Hobsbawm (1983) o el de Benedict Anderson (1983) 7 El escritor albanés Ismail Kadaré (2010) se hace eco de ello, “Un ejemplo clásico es el de la instrumentalización de la historia de una batalla medieval en los Balcanes, la batalla del Campo de los Mirlos, entre una alianza interbalcánica y los otomanos. Es perfectamente sabido cómo fue utilizada esa vieja guerra para iniciar una nueva. Todo fue falsificado, transformado en un gran engaño por la propaganda de Milosevic. El recuerdo de la guerra de antaño ocasionó muchas más víctimas que aquella guerra misma.”

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cuento de la reconquista de España frente a los musulmanes iniciada en Covadonga (García Pérez 1994).

Pero si existe algo apasionante es el proceso que lleva a algunos individuos a calcar la identidad personal del prójimo, eso que denominamos suplantación, o a edificar una identidad ficticia a través de un pasado a todas luces inventado. Dejando de lado a aquellas personas que por motivos de seguridad necesitan ocultar su identidad, me centraré en algunos casos como los narrados por Rossellini, Kurosawa o Sciascia.

Los dos primeros ejemplos, cinematográficos, son El General della Rovere (1959) y Kagemusha (1980). La película de Rossellini narra el caso de un jugador y estafador, Victorio Emanuele Bertone, al que los nazis detienen para hacerle pasar por el general Della Rovere, militar enviado por los aliados para contactar con la resistencia y que había sido localizado y muerto. Bertone tiene que hacerse pasar por el general y localizar a los jefes de la resistencia, debe pues trabajar para los alemanes. Pero el falso general Della Rovere se toma tan en serio su papel que acaba dignificando su dudoso pasado engañando a los servicios secretos arios.

En Kagemusha, la trama es bastante parecida, pues un ladrón de poca monta es reclutado para suplantar, dado su asombroso parecido, al señor de la guerra Takeda, poderoso jerarca de un clan en lucha contra otros grupos rivales. El doble acepta su papel y lo desempeña con asombrosa maestría. El verdadero señor Takeda hace prometer a los suyos en el momento de su muerte que utilizarán al doble durante otros tres años, para evitar así el desánimo de sus huestes y el exterminio del clan por sus enemigos. Pasado ese tiempo vemos como el imitador es expulsado de palacio y también su desazón al retornar a su realidad miserable pues cree sinceramente ser el señor del clan. La máscara se le ha convertido en rostro y en la memorable escena final el doble asiste con estupefacción y dolor a la batalla en la que son exterminados los que todavía considera sus soldados.

Vemos pues, que la suplantación acaba por creer real el papel que desempeña, no existiendo aparente diferencia entre el original y la copia. El doble adopta las poses físicas, la vida y los valores morales del original y satisfecho con su labor se niega a reconocerse en lo que fue. Palpable muestra de la maleabilidad del ser humano y de la siempre posible emergencia de un ser distinto al esperado. Pero evidentemente, la suplantación no siempre ha de poseer una estatura moral intachable, puesto que también puede permitir situaciones de dudosa catadura ética. Este puede ser el caso de la historia real recreada por Sciascia (1981) en El teatro de la memoria.8

8 Esta obra tiene antecedentes en le famoso episodio de Martin Guerre del que habla Montaigne en el capítulo De los ojos de sus Ensayos, y un cierto parecido con aquellos personajes dados por fallecidos y sin embargo vivos -pero con la lacra de no poseer papeles legales de su real existencia, o sea, un pasado certificado-, El coronel Chabert (1832) de Balzac o El difunto Matías Pascal (1904) de Pirandello quien escribió también una obra teatral Como tú me deseas, inspirada en el mismo caso que detalla Sciascia.

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Sciascia nos habla del desaparecido, durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, Giulio Canella, y de cómo en el año 1926 aparece un individuo aquejado de amnesia que termina, después de muchas peripecias, reconociéndose a sí mismo como el dado por muerto Giulio. Identificado como su marido por la atribulada viuda Giulia que tenía dos hijos con el esposo que fue a la guerra, el reaparecido pasa a vivir con ella y tienen un tercer hijo. Aparece entonces una carta, en principio anónima pero en realidad escrita por la verdadera esposa del falso Giulio, diciendo que éste es Mario Bruneri. La ahora feliz Giulia se niega a aceptar los hechos y en esta pugna entre identidad y memoria los tribunales italianos dictaminan en 1931 que Giulio es Mario, o sea un embustero. La familia acabará emigrando a Brasil y el falso Giulio escribirá sus memorias con el sugerente título de En busca de mí mismo.

La obra de Sciascia tiene el valor de mostrarnos cómo un falsario puede ir poco a poco sofisticando su mentira. En efecto, la convivencia con la familia Canella le ofrece la oportunidad de depurar su representación, pues va conociendo día a día detalles e historias del pasado de Giulio, de sus relaciones, de sus gustos, de sus manías, etc., y, en consecuencia, se va nutriendo de originalidad para aquellos que le rodean, que son paradójicamente quienes alimentan esa falsa personalidad con su memoria. Sin embargo, habría que exceptuar de esta posible obnubilación a Giulia, quien sin duda encontró en la patraña un evidente consuelo y un futuro inesperado.

Más allá de la mera copia y cercanos a la ficción absoluta o invención de una personalidad sin referente previo, se hallan Jean-Claude Romand y Enric Marco. Sobre la vida del primero Emmanuel Carrère escribió El Adversario (2000) y sobre Marco tenemos el reciente documental de Santiago Fillol y Lucas Vermal Ich Bin Enric Marco (2009) donde el falsario trata de contar la verdad de su pasado.

El caso de Romand causó estupefacción en 1993 cuando se supo que era el asesino de sus padres, de su mujer y de sus hijos, después de haber llevado una vida de mentiras constantes, inventándose una profesión, un trabajo, relaciones con personalidades célebres y viajes por todo el mundo dado su supuesto trabajo para la OMS. En realidad pasaba sus días en parkings y hoteles baratos manteniendo unos elevados ingresos gracias al dinero que estafaba para supuestas inversiones bien remuneradas a sus familiares y amigos. Cuando el círculo se cerró a su alrededor, pues los parientes comenzaron a reclamar el dinero, Romand urdíó su criminal plan. Condenado a cadena perpetua, saldrá de la cárcel en el año 2015 a los 61 años de edad.

Conviene también recordar la película Zelig (1983) de Woody Allen, donde el protagonista va adoptando identidades diferentes, incluso con alteraciones en su físico, según las circunstancias.

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Historia terrible y fascinante que apunta al interior de cada persona, pues nunca alcanzamos a vislumbrar los secretos y motivaciones de los más próximos a nosotros, como también James Joyce dejó patente en su inolvidable Los Muertos.

El caso de Marco es menos sangrante, no hay crímenes por medio, pero no deja de resultar escandaloso. Protagonista durante casi 50 años de la memoria del Holocausto, este hombre hizo de su vida un ejemplo de lucha al dar testimonio de su estancia en los campos de exterminio nazis. Conocedor de innumerables detalles acerca de esta terrible experiencia, fue circulando por España y por el mundo como un afortunado y tenaz superviviente. El historiador Benito Bermejo lo desenmascaró hace unos pocos años, mostrando que toda su historia era falsa. En el documental citado, Marco realiza en una furgoneta el viaje que realmente hizo a Alemania durante la contienda mundial para trabajar en una fábrica en Kiel. Trata de rememorar la verdad de los hechos de su pasado, pero continuamente llegan a su memoria las vivencias fingidas, ahora ya grabadas en su mente como reales, y no logra desembarazarse de ellas, siendo el documental un maravilloso ejemplo de la compleja configuración de una personalidad, donde lo real y lo ficticio pugnan por hacerse un hueco. Asombra que un hombre como Marco, que no vivió la experiencia del exterminio, la haya contado como realmente vivida y, sin embargo, un superviviente de Auschwitz como el Premio Nobel húngaro Imre Kértesz haya recurrido a la ficción en su obra Sin Destino para relatar como ajeno el sufrimiento que vivió en sus carnes. En cualquier caso, como dijo Vargas Llosa, en Marco hemos perdido a un posible gran narrador de ficción.

3.-Arte de la copia. Las memorias y autobiografías Las memorias y autobiografías poseen un componente ficcional indiscutible. Es probable que muchas personas crean que escribir sobre nuestro pasado supone intentar ofrecer una especie de copia de lo realmente vivido. Los hechos acontecieron y sólo hace falta traerlos de nuevo a la memoria. Sin embargo, como ya escribió David Lowenthal dando título a uno de sus libros, El pasado es un país extraño.

Rememorar significa seleccionar y además, y afortunadamente, no podemos recordar todo. El transcurso del tiempo nos cambia, las circunstancias y experiencias nos moldean y como no podemos recordar más que desde el presente, si el tiempo nos ha transformado ello implica que percibamos los hechos pretéritos bajo una diferente perspectiva. Las nuevas experiencias alteran nuestra identidad pasada. Recordar significa establecer una cadena narrativa desde aquello que fuimos hasta lo que somos a día de hoy y este relato no puede estar exento de una deseada reconstrucción que usa de la ficción para dar explicación de lo que somos. Sin embargo, como ha señalado Philippe Lejeune (1975, 2005) haciendo referencia a las obras autobiográficas, es necesario confiar en un pacto autobiográfico entre el lector y el escritor, un compromiso que suponga confianza por parte del lector: el convencimiento de que no se le está mintiendo.

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El arte de la copia significaría pues mostrar los hechos de una vida ateniéndose a esta convención y, añado, tratando de no causar sufrimiento y desazón en el entorno de las personas mencionadas en el relato, máxime si se hallan indefensas. Y esto, claro está, supone seleccionar, olvidar y transfigurar ciertos hechos, trascender esa supuesta copia del pasado. El arte está en hacerlo con maestría, en seducir al lector con una historia de vida que normalmente se confronta con la ausencia de un relato semejante elaborado en la persona del lector. Pero incluso puede arrebatar a quien ya ha publicado una historia de su vida, pues al ser consciente de su componente reconstructivo gusta de confrontarlo con otras arquitecturas narrativas.

Hablar de nuestro pasado con cierta relevancia exige adiestrarnos en el relato, cosa que por otra parte es algo que con mayor o menor sofisticación hacemos todos los humanos como la moderna neurología atestigua. En efecto, la neurología nos habla de mapas neurales que recorremos una y otra vez, transitando por lo ya inscrito en nuestro cerebro, aunque modificando la cartografía original a través del dinamismo aportado por las nuevas emociones. Interactuamos con el entorno, caminamos sobre nuestra propia huella neural y alteramos dicha traza para ir generando narrativamente nuestra identidad autobiográfica. Este proceso sería, en rigor, algo radicalmente ajeno a la duplicación o copia falsaria, y lo reivindicaría como modelo para el buen arte de la copia o, dicho de otro modo, mímesis buena. Como señalan Kay Young y Jeffrey L. Saver (2001),

La moderna neurociencia ha demostrado que recobrar la memoria no supone el simple acto de acceder a un almacén de fotos-hechas en un álbum neural fijo preservado con completa fidelidad desde el momento de su formación. Al contrario, cada acto de rememoración es una recreación transitando sobre múltiples fragmentos modulares que cambian dinámicamente para conformar un nuevo mosaico.9 Así pues, las formas narrativas de construcción de identidad exigen verosimilitud y no certeza o verdad adecuada a hechos incontestables. Las diferentes recreaciones del pasado han de cotejarse en un sentido pragmático. Nos contamos a nosotros mismos para entendernos y hacernos entender, no hay otro sentido que el intentar copiarnos, recrearnos, desde la distancia, generando

9 Para saber más sobre estos asuntos vinculados a la ciencia neurológica me remito a la lectura del artículo, todavía inédito, de Jaime Aspiunza, Conciencia e inconsciente. Las intuiciones de Nietzsche a la luz de las teorías de Damasio. Entre otras cuestiones podemos leer, “El cerebro es una réplica mimética de todo lo que sea halla fuera del propio cerebro. No es, sin embargo, una mera copia: primero, porque lo que el cerebro representa son aspectos de la estructura de todo lo demás; segundo, porque lo que los sentidos producen supone una intervención activa del cuerpo” (…) ”Lo que no hay que olvidar en ningún caso es que los mapas cerebrales no son estáticos, sino dinámicos: están constantemente cambiando para reflejar los cambios que se van dando en el interior de nuestro cuerpo y en el mundo exterior que nos rodea.” (…) “La mente es el efecto de esa incesante elaboración dinámica de mapas”.

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una historia más rica y sugerente cada vez. Enriqueciendo el relato aprendemos a conocernos. Podremos ser engañados por otros, pero el descubrimiento de la ruptura del pacto autobiográfico supone el inmediato arrojo al olvido de la obra fraudulenta.

4.-Estrategias de la melancolía. El juego de la copia en la vida cotidiana Toda destrucción física, sea obra de la naturaleza o provocada por los humanos, deja un rescoldo de dolor, amargura y sufrimiento, mostrándonos una estampa de esa realidad cercenada, extraña a lo hasta entonces vivido. Sin embargo, esta desoladora impresión remite siempre a un saber más profundo: la inapelable labor del tiempo. Estamos hechos de tiempo y la consciencia de nuestra fragilidad desemboca a menudo en pesadumbre e insatisfacción. Como lo vivido no vuelve, recordar o tratar de recuperar los momentos pasados, envueltos en un aura de felicidad irrepetible, constituye el intento de copia o repetición más profundamente melancólico. Somos conscientes de la imposibilidad de la tarea y, lejos de aparentar una inquebrantable felicidad, alimentamos nuestra existencia con relatos, poemas o cantos que atemperan el tránsito por nuestra vida. La alegría, como aseveraba Spinoza, quiere permanencia y cuando constatamos su evanescencia recurrimos a la memoria, recreando imaginaria y melancólicamente esos momentos pretéritos elegidos. La imposibilidad de rescatar el pasado, de restañar el supuesto orden perdido, recuperar un amor, un familiar desaparecido, revestir de vida a tantas personas anónimas eclipsadas, hacer justicia con las víctimas de la guerra y la barbarie, etc., es una profunda herida abierta en la consciencia humana. Sin embargo, nuestras estrategias narrativas intentan luchar contra los imponderables del tiempo y la fragilidad de la memoria. La mirada retrospectiva anima a la imaginación proyectiva, y autores como el alemán W.G. Sebald10, recurriendo a datos de archivos, entrevistas, diarios de viaje, fotografías, curiosidades y relatos de ficción, tratan de ajustar las cuentas con el tiempo, sabiendo previamente de lo vano de su empresa. Aflora así nuestra dignidad, la negación a asumir el olvido radical como remedio pues sabemos que las aguas del Leteo acabarán a la postre por anegarnos. En el más extremo de los horizontes melancólicos, podemos diluirnos en la ficción del olvido de sí, experimentando vidas diversas y emociones contradictorias, creando un universo de heterónimos como en el caso de Fernando Pessoa. Se trata de jugar al juego de lo falso tratando paradójicamente de alcanzar una mayor transparencia, valorando y aceptando una representación de nuestra vida visiblemente equívoca o errónea para la común percepción ajena. ¿Se ha vuelto loco ese individuo que dice ser otros, que incluso se nos presenta distinto según se le antoje? ¿Puede trasvasarse este juego ficcional a la realidad?

10 Quizá el libro editado por Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2007) sea un excelente compendio de las preocupaciones de este escritor.

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Esto parece ser lo que también propone el realizador iraní Abbas Kiarostami en Copia Certificada (2010) estableciendo un juego entre el arte y la vida donde la pareja protagonista trata de satisfacer la demanda melancólica. Así, al ser identificados como marido y mujer por una tercera persona, se entregan acto y seguido a la representación de este rol matrimonial y, sumidos los espectadores en un juego de equívocos que nos hace dudar sobre la realidad o simulación de este papel, asistimos a la rememoración de una añorada plenitud pasada. La pareja juega a ser quienes probablemente nunca han sido y el gusto por lo falso, por el engaño autoconsciente, por el teatro del día a día, parece incluso permitir rescatar una felicidad huida. Si bien el cine trata de mostrar una verdad a través de la impostación, el equívoco juego al que asistimos remite toda experiencia vital al referente del artificio. Basta con prestar mayor atención al prójimo, tomar consciencia de su demanda de felicidad y estar dispuesto a fabular para suturar su herida. No otra cosa sería el amor, como bien atestiguaba el poeta Francisco Brines (1987), Quiero sólo advertirte que nada hay que entender de la infertilidad. Ni aun eso que es tu vida. Y puesto que nunca podrás dejar de ser el que eres, secreto y jubiloso, ama. No hay otro don en el engaño

Referencias

− Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities, Londres: Verso − Böll, H. 1981. La aventura y otros relatos, Barcelona: Bruguera. − Brines, F. 1987, El otoño de las rosas. Sevilla: Ed. Renacimiento. − Carrère, Emmanuel 2000, El adversario, Barcelona: Anagrama. − García Pérez, G. 1994. Covadonga, un mito nacionalista católico de origen griego. Oviedo: El Basilisco. − Hobsbawm, E. 1983. The invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. − Iriondo, M. 1996. Alberto Caeiro y Clément Rosset. De la percepción y el azar. Bitarte 8. − Kadaré, Ismail 2010. La cólera de Aquiles. Barcelona, Katz. − Kay Young, K. & Saber, J. L. 2001. Neurology of Narrative, “Substance”, University of Wisconsin Press. − Landesman, P. 2001. A crisis of Fakes: The Getty Forgeries, New York Times, 18 Marzo. − Lejeune, P. 1975. Le pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil. 2005, Signes de vie. Le pacte autobiographique 2, Paris, Seuil. − Levi, P. 1988, Historias Naturales, Madrid. Alianza,

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− Rosset, C. 1993. Lo real y su doble. Ensayo sobre la ilusión, Barcelona: Tusquets. 2004. Lo real. Tratado de la idiotez. Valencia: Pre-Textos. − Schwartz, Lynne S. 2007, The Emergence of Memory, Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York: Seven Stories Press. − Sciascia, L. 1981. Il teatro della memoria, Turín: Einaudi − Vila-Matas, E. 2010. Perder teorías, Barcelona: Seix Barral. − Wieseman, M. E. 2010. A closer look. Deceptions & Discoveries, London: The National Gallery.

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The art of politics, or the politics of art? Conceptualizing aesthetic commitment from within a Ricoeurian framework

Candess Kostopoulos* University of Johannesburg

It is certainly possible, and usually uncontroversial, to claim that art has values that transcend or reach beyond the so-called “autonomously” aesthetic. Making philosophical sense of what we may call, for brevity’s sake, “aesthetic heteronomy” however entails grappling with both the nature of aesthetic autonomy itself and with the exact relationship between autonomy and heteronomy. In this paper I explore the conditions of aesthetic commitment1, in particular, by asking what aesthetic autonomy and its relation(s) to the socio- political sphere would have to be like for authentic political art to be possible at all. I submit that Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical bequest has made “new adventures in thinking” (Ricoeur as quoted by Jervolino, 1990, p.134) on aesthetic commitment possible, and my exploration is placed within the framework of his philosophy of the imagination.

My paper has three main parts: (1) first, I stipulate the theoretical impasse in which the debate on aesthetic commitment finds itself, after which I argue that the nature of, and role played, by the imagination is pivotal to conceptualizing aesthetic autonomy; (2) secondly, I explicate the main features of Ricoeur’s philosophy of imagination; (3) and, finally, I elaborate those selected aspects of his account which can be used to flesh out a viable theory of aesthetic commitment.

* [email protected] 1 Committed art can be defined as the selection, arrangement and foregrounding of certain elements from (largely socio-political) “reality” as perceived by the artist which can either illustrate how corrupt, unjust or immoral a specific political, social or economic system or community is, or portray an idealized version of an alternative system or community either by implication or by expressed opinion.

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1. Imagination and the debate on aesthetic commitment When it comes to aesthetic commitment, one question is particularly salient: does committed art signify the transformative potency of the aesthetic, or does it signal art’s sacrifice on the altar of politics?2 Due to the constraints of this paper, I will not elaborate on this question beyond stating that the debates ensuing from it seem characterized by an impasse. Accounts of aesthetic commitment are most often weighted towards either autonomy or heteronomy in such a way as to reduce the one to the other; or, at the extreme ends of the theoretical spectrum, to expunge art from the socio-political realm and vice versa3. Two options of escape from this dead end are left: we can view the relationship between aesthetic and non-aesthetic values as fundamentally aporetic; or, we can try to situate the relationship itself in a broader, more fundamental context. I want to argue that the latter option provides us the theoretical elasticity needed to bear the tension between autonomy and heteronomy in a productive manner. I want to place both the idea that art has a special type of value and that it has a type of political value in a more constitutive category, namely that of the imagination. This shift allows us to see that autonomy and heteronomy, as we’ve come to understand these concepts, rest on the same foundation4.

Due to the constraints of this paper, I will not able to give a detailed exposition of the idea-historical development of the concept of imagination. I will therefore only highlight the elements that are most crucial to my own argument. Firstly, we need a skeletal definition of imagination. Defining imagination is notoriously difficult, and we will see that Ricoeur takes seriously Kant’s claim that the imagination cannot be comprehended directly, and that it is an “art concealed in the depths of the human soul”5. If we forget about conceptual mastery for a moment and concentrate on the actual usage of the concept, we can, however, construe a minimal or working definition with which to guide our discussion: imagination is something between pure thought and pure sensory experience.

My contention is that the “filling-in” or fleshing out of this minimal definition is linked, in a constitutive way, to conceptions of the aesthetic. Various options

2 A “twin” question, usually set in a more normative context, is also possible from the vantage point of the political itself, namely whether politics should strive towards rational neutrality and impartiality or incorporate the sensuously particular and/or the mythical- symbolic. 3 I am thinking here of the extreme formalism of Clive Bell and the extreme political aesthetics of Soviet socialist realism. 4 Jacques Rancière also speaks of this “same foundation” in The politics of aesthetics (2006). He describes it as “… bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the visible and the visible” (2006: 19), in short, as the “distribution of the sensible”. I think that the distribution of the sensible can be fruitfully connected to, and even explained by the more fundamental concept of imagination. 5 This is with regards to the “schematism”, see the Critique of pure reason, B: 138.

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present themselves. We can flesh out the minimal definition by postulating a negative relationship between imagination, as a “third thing”, and either thought or sensory experience (or both, in a really comprehensive account). If we view imagination as a weak form of thought, we are liable to construe art as a cheap version of profound ideas; and if we view it as a weak form of sensory experience, we are liable to construe art as a merely superficial and, essentially superfluous, cultural pastime6.

Those who flesh out the minimal definition of imagination in a positive manner, on the other hand, are likely to view art as important, and even as fundamentally important. Imagination, positively correlated to thought, presents us with a view of the artwork as something that possesses a special type of truthfulness, not attainable via logical thinking alone. The positive correlation of imagination to sensory experience then presents us with the view that art is a special way of perceiving reality7.

It is important to note here that this conceptual charting has not solved the problem of the impasse in the debate on aesthetic commitment. In fact, it has exacerbated it to a certain extent due to the fact that the concept of imagination may be equally, or even more, troublesome8. Yet, I maintain that addressing the problematic status of political art is something that one can do with much fruit via this detour through imagination. An account that can give a positive but balanced portrayal of the power of imagination will allow us to make philosophical sense of aesthetic commitment. I would now like to explicate one such an account, in the hope that it may illuminate our way forwards toward a theory of aesthetic commitment: the account of imagination presented by Paul Ricoeur.

2. Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of imagination Paul Ricoeur never wrote a systematic treatise on the imagination, making it necessary for his readers to construe this theory for themselves. It is, off course, problematic that a first encounter with Ricoeur’s vast and divergent body of work leaves the reader with the impression of a “forest” one could readily get lost in. Yet, on closer inspection his work follows coherent lines of development, which can be picked out by readers. The “destiny of the idea of subjectivity” is, by his own admission (1990, pp. xi), the recurring problematic addressed by his work;

6 One may think here of the strict rationalist’s and the strict empiricist’s views on art. Both Plato and Hume, for instance, essentially view artists as “liars”. 7 Although these accounts make a constructive aesthetic possible, there are also extremities that may pertain to them: the limits of the aesthetic may be grossly overextended, leaving the world exposed to types of freedoms which are dangerous. One may think here of the Romantic and Idealist conceptions of art, and also of certain phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophies that overestimate the creative abilities of human beings. 8 Cf. Kearney’s The wake of imagination (2001); and also Anderson’s “Imagination and ideology: ethical tensions in twentieth-century French writing” (2001).

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Ricoeur also, however, stipulates two other important features which combine to produce the coherence of his work, namely: an emphasis on method and a particular vision (Ricoeur in Jervolino, 1990, pp. xi-xiii).

When reflecting on the role played by “imagination” in his philosophy, one must therefore keep in mind that imagination is tied up with all three themes: it is an integral part of what makes us human; central to Ricoeur’s dialectic method of “phenomenological hermeneutics”; and, most importantly, a fundamental condition of his vision, described as “the elaboration of a hermeneutics of human praxis within the horizon of a poetics of freedom” (1990, pp. xi). One cannot, however, reflect on all three themes at once; and therefore I will start from method, since the various shifts he affects throughout his work are easily readable instances of deeper-lying conceptual developments.

Ricoeur started his life-long project of writing a “philosophy of the will” with an “eidetics”, by which he meant a “pure description” (in the Husserlian sense9 of the word) of the voluntary and the involuntary. Although eidetics has the advantage of presenting us with the fundamental possibilities of humankind’s existence as incarnate being (by presenting us with the pure structures of willing), a pure description must exclude or “bracket” both transcendence and fault. In order to deal with the “actual, immediate ethic” (Ricoeur, 1966, p. 22) implied by fault and transcendence, Ricoeur proposes a methodological shift from eidetics to “empirics” and, finally, to “poetics”. “Empirics” is meant to deal with radical evil and the rupture of the will to which the “fault” is correlated; and Ricoeur applies it in two parts, namely to deal with the possibility of fallibility first and, secondly, to deal with the actual manifestation of evil. The second “volume”10 of his “philosophy of the will” thus includes both Fallible man (1965) and The symbolism of evil (1967). Ricoeur’s “empirics” therefore includes both the existential description of that fallibility which is possible in actuality and the hermeneutics of the symbol needed to deal with the concrete human being who has committed an evil act. Although there are important references to the imagination in his study of the voluntary and the involuntary, his philosophy of the imagination gets its first real airing in these two works of empirics. In Fallible man Ricoeur establishes a correlation between the imagination and the intentionality of language. He is especially influenced by Kant’s notion of the “productive imagination”, which functions as a “synthesizing act” or, as Ricoeur puts it, as “… a fragile and hidden mediation [of disproportion] in a third term …” (as quoted by Evans, 1995, p. 67).

9 Ricoeur is influenced and inspired by Husserl’s notion of intentionality, but his interpretation of intentionality is distinctive in a subtle manner. Ricoeur expresses “it differently by saying that consciousness constitutes itself by the type of object to which it projects itself” (Ricoeur, 1966:6). Husserl associated the notion of intentionality with the reflective acts of pure consciousness instead of the dynamism of the will pointed to by the centrality of the notion of the “project” in Ricoeur (see Rasmussen, 1971: 31). 10 The two parts of the second volume appeared simultaneously in France, but separately in English translation. Philosophie de la volonté, vol. I: Le Volontaire et l’involontaire appeared in 1950 and Philosophie de la volonté, vol. II: Finitude et culpabilité: 1. L’homme faillible, 2. La symbolique du mal appeared in 1960.

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To this notion of imagination as mediation he adds the Husserlian notion of intentionality, thereby replacing the Kantian terms “understanding” and “sensibility” with “meaning” and “appearance”; or with the dialogue between “seeing” and “saying”. What we see points to our “finitude”, for we are “riveted to appearance and perspective” by the sense data delivered to us through perception. Our ability to use language, to say something about what we see, however points to our “infinitude” since the words we use for things transcend our particular perception of things. Imagination thus holds together that which is seen and that which can be said (1965, pp. 37-44).

For Ricoeur this implies that the self is expressed through “things which are human works”; and this, in turn, implies that knowledge of the self is only available to us in an indirect manner. Knowledge of radical evil is therefore also only available to us through our reflection on the “human works” which stand as the objectified mediations of what can be seen and said of actual evil. These “human works” are then the symbols and myths of evil which are the topic of The symbolism of evil. Here Ricoeur utilizes Kant’s notion of the creative imagination as it is set out in the third Critique (of Judgement-power) and starts developing and applying his hermeneutic theory.

Ricoeur is, as he phrases it, “enchanted” by Kant’s aphorism, “the symbol gives rise to thought”11; and he argues that when it comes to limit conditions, such as radical evil, we are driven into the opaque and obscure but rich realm of symbolic and mythical (or, “religious”) discourse. Philosophical reflection does not start from itself but from what is given to it by the world of the concretely human; mythic-symbolic language is therefore not an impediment to, but a necessary condition for the elaboration of a full philosophical anthropology12.

From this basic “wager”, Ricoeur sets out to develop his phenomenological hermeneutics. His emphasis on imagination as mediation allows him to develop a way of reflecting on concrete human works by “grafting” phenomenology onto hermeneutics. This results in a unique method: the “dialectic of distanciation and belonging”, or “the dialectic of phenomenological distance and hermeneutical understanding”13. By employing a critical and creative combination of Husserl’s “imaginative variations” and Kant’s distinction between “reproductive” and “productive” imagination, Ricoeur is able to formulate a theory in which imagination is understood as a meaning-receiving meaning-creating collection of activities that we come to understand by means of a properly hermeneutic account of the works of imagination.

Of these “works” the semantic innovation central to metaphoric utterance becomes paramount for Ricoeur. Because metaphors – on Ricoeur’s account –

11 See The symbolism of evil (1967: 347). 12 Cf. Rasmussen’s Mythic-symbolic language and philosophical anthropology: a constructive interpretation of the thought of Paul Ricoeur (1971). 13 This is H.I. Venema’s apt re-naming of Ricoeur’s methodology. See his Identifying selfhood: imagination, narrative and hermeneutics in the thought of Paul Ricoeur (2000: 37).

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involve, not a deviating use of nouns, but a deviating use of predicates, it is ruled by “predicative impertinence”, as Ricoeur (1991, p. 124) calls the clash produced between different semantic fields by the use of “bizarre predicates”. In order to respond to this challenge, we produce a new “predicative pertinence”, which is the metaphor. “It is”, Ricoeur writes, “in the moment of the emergence of a new meaning from the ruins of literal predication that imagination offers its specific mediation”. The imagination is thus the apperception of pertinence within impertinence, or a “predicative assimilation” which enables a specific “seeing as …” – an imaging “competence” generated in and through language. The works of imagination are works in the strong sense implied by the labour connotations of the word; and imagination itself is not a weakened form of perception, but the unique activity of “seeing” something “as” something else.

In order to “see as …” the imagination must do two seemingly opposed things: it must suspend the real and it must refer to the real. Here, Ricoeur introduces the idea of split-reference – an idea he also using to describe the productive functions of fiction. According to this principle, the neutralizing function of imagination with regard to the real is the negative condition for the release of a second-order referential power (Ricoeur, 2007, p. 174). What is abolished, according to Ricoeur, is only the reference of ordinary discourse applied to objects which respond to our first-order interest in manipulation and control; this abolishment allows a second-order reference in which our belonging to the life-world and our ontological ties to other beings and to being is allowed to be said. A new “reference-effect” is thus produced by the imagination’s “double valence with respect to reference”, namely the power of works of the imagination to re- describe reality (2007, p. 175).

It is this power which also comes to figure prominently in the social imagination, where the “imaginative practices” of ideology and utopia become the primary instances of the imagination’s figuring and its re-description of the socio-political landscape. These imaginative practices display a “double ambiguity”, one arising from the polarity between the two practices and one arising from the polarity within each of them, which consist of the opposition between a positive and constructive side to a negative and destructive side in each (2007, p.181). Both polarities are structural features of the imaginative core that constitutes both ideology and utopia before simply being “obstacles” to overcome. According to Ricoeur (2007, pp.182-185), ideology functions in a way similar to a picture of a societal/political grouping, or as an instance of the reproductive imagination; and its specific pathology is manifested in a reinforcement and repetition of social ties in situations that are “after-the-fact”. A utopia functions similarly to fiction (that is, as an instance of the productive imagination) and its specific pathology is degeneration of viable imaginative variations of society into “a mad dream” following the logic of schizophrenia. This means that the crisscrossing of utopia and ideology is the result of two fundamental directions of the social imaginary; and that you cannot have one without the other, for even the most reduplicative ideology produces a gap or distance for imaginative variation and even the most

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erratic form of utopia remains a desperate effort to represent humanity as it fundamentally is.

“This is why”, writes Ricoeur (2007, p. 186), “the tension between utopia and ideology is insurmountable”. The insurmountable tension between utopian and ideological imaginings underlines the importance of fragility in Ricoeur’s thought. It is necessary to stress the important methodological, anthropological and visionary role that Ricoeur attributes to human fragility. Without this concept Ricoeur’s account of the imagination can very easily be read as a rather conservative, “all- ends-well” account where difference can be and is successfully subsumed by the unifying and colonializing force of Imagination. The fragility of imagination therefore forms an integral part of the “Ricoeurian” account of aesthetic commitment.

3. A Ricoeurian account of aesthetic commitment I would now like to elaborate on what a Ricoeurian account of aesthetic commitment would look like. In the first place, such an account stresses the fundamentality of imagination. It is the imagination that acts as the foundation on which both aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic heteronomy are conceptually constructed. The imagination, on Ricoeur’s account, can be understood as a hidden and fragile language-like mediation of differences that effects a double movement of reference. How does this flesh out the minimal definition of imagination we started off with? The first important aspect of Ricoeur’s account of the imagination is that he emphasizes the mediating function of the imagination to such an extent that it becomes possible to speculate whether the imagination might just be the concept we use to explain/describe types of “mediations”. This would also explain why Ricoeur does not present us with only one version of imagination, but presents us with different versions: metaphoric imagination, social imagination, etc. What is salient about the different types of mediations, though, is that creative mediations are privileged “works” of imagination for Ricoeur. In fact, when one remembers the “double movement” of reference imagination is capable of effecting on Ricoeur’s account, it becomes clear that imaginative mediation qua mediation is itself capable of establishing new insights. Therefore, Ricoeur’s emphasis on mediation does not place his account “somewhere in-between” a negative and a positive definition of imagination. His “placement” of imagination as something “in-between” has a powerful constitutive effect: the mediation itself makes certain things possible, or acts as a condition of possibility for creativity.

One needs, however, to admit that Ricoeur’s account is slightly weighted towards the idea that imagination (as fragile, hidden mediation) is more cognitive than perceptual. Although his account gives a very nuanced portrayal of imagination as an expression-and-condition of a “merely human freedom”, it may be interpreted as equating the imagination to a special type of cognition. More research needs to be done on this aspect of his account of imagination, though.

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I will therefore conclude by highlighting those aspects of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the imagination that are most advantageous to a constructive construal of aesthetic commitment. In the first place, the fundamentality of imagination implies that what we understand as the autonomously aesthetic is something that is made possible by the work of the imagination. The work of the imagination also acts as the condition of possibility of what we’ve come to understand under “aesthetic heteronomy”, meaning that the potential for the politically transformative or the liberating elements of art become recognizable because the political realm itself contains something “imaginary”.

The autonomy of the artwork can be understood, in this context, as a product of the imagination’s aesthetic labour and, therefore, as a condition of possibility for engagement. The political artwork is still an artwork and not an election poster or a party manifesto. What the autonomous political artwork allows us to do instead is to imagine and to re-imagine a possible socio-political “world” via the double movement of reference of which the imagination is capable. Art is a specific, fragile mediation that is expressive of and, at the same time, constitutes a “merely human freedom”.

References - Anderson, K.H.R. 2001. “Imagination and ideology: ethical tensions in twentieth-century French writing”, in The modern language review. Vol. 96, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 47-60. - Evans, J. 1995. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the imagination. New York: Peter Lang. - Jervolino, D. 1990. “The cogito and hermeneutics: the question of the subject in Ricoeur”, Contributions to phenomenology, Vol. 6. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. - Kearney, R. 2001. The wake of imagination. New York: Routledge. - Rancière, J. 2006. The politics of aesthetics. London: Continuum. - Rasmussen, D. M. 1971. Mythic-symbolic language and philosophical anthropology: a constructive interpretation of the thought of Paul Ricoeur. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. - Ricoeur, P. 1965. Fallible man. New York: Fordham University Press. - Ricoeur, P .1966. Freedom and nature: the voluntary and the involuntary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. - Ricoeur, P. 1967. The symbolism of evil. Boston: Bacon Press. - Ricoeur, P. 1991. “The function of fiction in shaping reality”, in Valdes, M.J. A Ricoeur reader: reflection and imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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- Ricoeur, P. 2007. “Imagination in discourse and in action”. In Paul Ricoeur, From text to action: essays in the hermeneutics of action, II. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. - Venema, H.I. 2000. Identifying selfhood: imagination, narrative, and hermeneutics in the thought of Paul Ricoeur. New York: State University of New York Press.

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Can Art for Art’s Sake Imply Ethics? Henry James and David Jones

Martin Potter* University of Bucharest

As pointed out by Habermas in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Habermas, 1990, pp.17-19) modernity is characterized by an understanding of the spheres of ontology, aesthetics, and ethics, as separate, and Kant’s assertion that art can be seen as ‘purposeless purposiveness’ was followed by the late nineteenth-century aestheticist movement declaring the motto ‘art for art’s sake’, developments which on the surface could be taken as indicating that there is no connection between aesthetics and ethics. I shall be arguing, however, that it is possible not to reject the ‘art for art’s sake’ stance, but, nevertheless, to understand artistic activity as having ethical implications. To do this I shall concentrate on the sacramental theory of art, as expounded by the twentieth- century modernist poet, post-impressionist artist, and theorist, David Jones. I shall introduce my analysis of Jones’ theory by suggesting, through a novel of Henry James, The Tragic Muse, that ‘art for art’s sake’ rhetoric can, if ambiguously, imply an ethical and even religious stance, and shall follow my section on Jones with an attempt to show how his theory of art can be understood in the light of the neo- Aristotelian theory of ethics propounded by contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. My aim will be to argue that a view of art as a non-utilitarian activity does not preclude an ethical understanding of its role in life.

In his novel, The Tragic Muse, first published in its entirety in 1890, Henry James writes about one of the themes, which constantly preoccupied him, about what art is and what it is to be an artist. The novel could be described as a Künstlerroman (a novel about an artist, or artists), and is one of many he wrote.

* [email protected]

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His interest often focuses more on the artistic way of life than on artistic production, as, for example, the extreme case of The Sacred Fount, in which the protagonist, who is a novelist, is shown, not producing any work, but imagining, and possibly intervening in, social relations at a country house party. Out of the three heroes in The Tragic Muse, one, Nick Dormer, a practicing painter and one, Mirian Rooth, an actress, the third, Gabriel Nash, is an aesthete, who has written one book, and then given up any obviously productive artistic activity, but becomes a theorist of art, and functions as the theoretical mouthpiece of the novel, mentoring the other two, and encouraging them to live the artistic life to the best of their abilities. While many critics have seen Gabriel Nash as a caricature of the late nineteenth century aestheticist, or ‘art for art’s sake’, movement,1 I would argue that Nash represents James’ own view that the purest artistic life need not be productive, especially if production implies compromising on aesthetic ideals for the sake of an audience. Nash’s art resides in his style of living, rather than in any production.2 On the other hand, Nick Dormer and Miriam Rooth both finish the novel as productive artists (in painting and the theatre), but the art they produce seems compromised by social factors, and to prevent them from developing personally at a high artistic level – Nick Dormer ends the novel painting society portraits, and Miriam finds herself exhausted by endless repeats of the same play.3 Nash’s theorizing on art, expressed especially in conversation with Dormer (the painter, whom Nash persuades to pursue painting rather than politics), is characterized by religious and ethical language used to present art as a religious cult. For example, Nash talks of persuading Dormer to pursue painting as ‘saving’ Dormer: ‘We shall save him yet’, he tells Dormer’s sister (James, 1995, p.360), and early in the novel he describes the location of the Salon as a ‘temple’ of the ‘gods’ (James, 1995, p.30).4 Eventually this kind of language spreads beyond Nash himself, with Miriam Rooth, the actress, describing her admirer Peter Sheringham’s dilemma, over whether to dedicate himself to supporting the theatre (and her) or to his diplomatic career, in the following Biblical terms: ‘He’s trying to serve God and Mammon’ (James, 1995, 418). So in the novel the language used to describe the artistic life presents it as a kind of religion, and the decision as to whether to follow one’s artistic calling is talked of as a kind of ethical decision. While the seriousness of this language in the context of the novel is open to dispute, given the possibility that it is meant as a parody by James, and the meaning of art as religion is ambiguous, even if seriously meant (it is not clear what spiritual meaning, if any, is implied), nevertheless the possibility that an aestheticist attitude to art could imply a consciousness of some sort of duty of the artistic individual in relation to art, is raised, and thus the conceivability of a kind of ethics arising from an ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude to art. In the case of The Tragic Muse, aesthetic ethics, if it exists, comes into conflict with an alternative, social ethics, the ethics of getting on in society of the time −

1 See, for example, Winner, 1970, pp.46, 123. 2 Winner, 1970, p.122, sees Nash as cultivating himself as an art object. 3 Treitel, 1996, pp. 54-8 describes the ways in which Dormer’s and Rooth’s artistic activity is presented as unsuccessful. 4 See also Horne, 1995, pp. xiii-xiv on religious language used about art in the novel.

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Dormer and Rooth compromising with the social ethics, while Nash stays true to the aesthetic ethics − but the ethical and religious rhetoric present in the book is all in the service of the aesthetic ideal.

David Jones was an early and mid-twentieth century poet, who wrote two major works: In Parenthesis, about his experiences on the Western front during the First World War, and The Anathemata, a kind of cosmic epic poem, describing the cultural history of Britain in a European and also soteriological context. He also engaged in visual art, such as water-colour painting, engraving and calligraphy, as well as writing essays on subjects such as the early history of Britain, and art theory. Drawing particularly on his essay ‘Art and Sacrament’, but also on other writings of his, I shall try to show how his theory, while partly admitting the premises of the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement, finds a way to explain art as a basic human activity, one which is defining of what it is to be human, and which human beings must engage in if they are to live as humans. The fundamental points of Jones’ theory are that art is a non-utilitarian sign-making activity, and that as such it is analogous to religious sacrament.

In his essay ‘Art and Sacrament’ Jones lays the philosophical groundwork for the argument he is going to make by introducing the distinction, from ancient and medieval philosophy, between transitive and intransitive activity, transitive activity being activity immediately directed to an external end, and intransitive activity being independent of an immediate external end. Transitive activity is thus utilitarian activity, whereas art comes under the heading of the intransitive (which he also describes as gratuitous). In declaring art’s belonging to the category of intransitive activity, Jones is able to endorse the aestheticist position to the extent that the ‘art for art’s sake’ doctrine is understood as meaning that art is an intransitive activity, not directed to any immediate external end, while he suggests that the aestheticist formula is more ‘open to misinterpretation’ (Jones, 1973a, p.149) than the ancient-scholastic distinction. He goes on to make the argument that art, which he understands as sign-making, is the defining activity for human beings, the activity which only they, and no other kind of creature, can perform – animals cannot perform it due to their lack of ability to engage in intransitive, gratuitous activity, and incorporeal beings (angels) cannot because of their lack of a physical nature (Jones, 1973a, pp.149-50). Part of Jones’ argument is to introduce the notion of the virtue ‘prudentia’, that virtue which allows practical but non-determined decision-making, to associate this quality with art-making, and to view it as definitive of humans in contrast to other animals (Jones, 1973a, pp.145-50, 167). Jones asserts that sign-making, or sacramentality, is natural to humans, or how God created them to be (Jones, 1973a, pp.165-6) – thus any kind of human being, with any philosophical or religious affiliation, cannot help committing sacramental, or sign-making acts (‘But sign and sacrament are to be predicated not of some men and their practices but of all men and their practices’ Jones, 1973a, p.166), even if it is making a cake for a birthday, or sending a rose to a beloved (Jones, 1973a, pp.164, 167). Jones’s argument culminates, in ‘Art and Sacrament’, with a description of a how a painting (he uses Hogath’s Shrimp Girl as

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his example) makes a reality in the artist’s mind really present in the painting under the form of paint, in a way analogous to the Catholic theory of sacraments, in which a spiritual reality is really present under material forms. However, in terms of the possibility of an ethics deriving from his view of art, Jones explores the idea that art is connected with a kind of obligation, which he describes as ‘religio’ (Jones, 1973a, p.158), but it is an obligation which implies a freedom at the same time, and which gives rise to the possibility of judgment, ‘and the ‘virtue of art’ is said to be ‘to judge’.’ (Jones, 1973a, p.160) He is talking here of a kind of obligation internal to art, however, as he stresses, in contrast to any considerations of the uses to which the art might be put (Jones, 1973a, p.161) – the obligation is one towards ‘the excellence of the art, or fitting together’ (Jones, 1973a, p.151), which he talks of earlier in the essay. Jones expresses the fear, towards the end of the essay, that in modernity, humans are exposed to social, cultural and technological conditions which militate against their natural urge to intransitive activity, and lead them to be less able to interpret such activity, and therefore art, leading to alienation (Jones, 1973a, p.178), a fear he expands on in the follow-on essay to ‘Art and Sacrament’, ‘The Utile’, which explains the qualities of those utilitarian, non-signifying objects, which he sees as characteristic of contemporary ‘technocracy’ (Jones, 1973b, pp.181-2).

In the preface to his long poem The Anathemata, Jones mentions another aspect of his understanding of art which could be seen as bringing with it ethical implications. This is the ‘bardic’ role of the poet (and this conception could be extended to the role of other kinds of artist), who creates works which embody the culture of the society within he/she operates, works which are an anamnesis of that culture, in which it is really present (cf. Jones, 1972, pp.20-1). Jones sees this role as still being the role of the poet even in a society which does not specifically recognize it, and which inclines towards utilitarian rather than symbolic concerns. However, the bardic role leads to a responsibility on the bard, more difficult to exercise in a utilitarian society, and that is a concern to discover the ‘valid sign’ (Jones, 1972, p.27), the sign which conveys associations shared by the artist and his/her audience – ‘And’ writes Jones ‘that desire is ... incumbent upon all who practice an art.’ (Jones, 1972, p.27) Jones’ long poem, The Anathemata, for example, can be seen as his own attempt to fulfill the bardic role for British society, making its culture present to it in a poetic work, using the material that he can, the material familiar to him. It may be due to a sense of a kind of ethical responsibility, in relation to the validity of the signs he uses in the poem, their capacity to signify to his audience as well as to him, that he provides his own extensive footnotes for the poem.

So David Jones’ theory of art can be seen as opening up the possibility of ethical concerns following from what art is in a number of ways. One way is through the fact that for Jones artistic activity is what is distinctively human about humans, therefore, to be what they are meant to be, or to fulfill their nature, human beings must practice art. A second way is that art is an activity which contains its own standards and excellences, and which demands a kind of virtue, identified by Jones

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as the practical virtue of prudence (in the ancient or medieval sense), of the person practicing art. A third way is that art is a social function, and the artist produces works which contribute to the making real and present of a society’s culture, a task which entails a responsibility to perform it validly, using signs which accomplish the task, achieving a remembrance, or anamnesis, of cultural associations, for the artist and the society. Jones did not write extensively about moral philosophy, so I would like to continue the argument by showing how the suggestions in Jones’ work on the ethics of art could be made sense of within a moral philosopher’s framework. I shall use the philosophy of the contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre. Jones’ and MacIntyre’s conceptual frameworks are compatible, drawing as they both do, in part, from the scholastic, and especially, Thomist, tradition.

MacIntyre’s project has been to revive virtue ethics, the virtues being the basis of, for example, Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ treatments of ethics. He began this project with the famous 1981 study After Virtue, in which he argued that all attempts to establish a basis for ethics since the Renaissance had been unsuccessful, therefore the traditional virtues-based system needed to be re-established. MacIntyre’s understanding of the virtues is that they are those qualities required of a person to participate in and contribute to the development of a specific activity, or practice, which has its own standards, and that the pursuit of excellence in all these activities adds up to human flourishing (see, for example, Chapter 14 ‘The Nature of the Virtues’, MacIntyre, 1985, pp.181-203) – in After Virtue MacIntyre discusses, as examples of practices with their own internal standards and telos, and which require virtues of its participants, chess playing and portrait painting (MacIntyre, 1985, pp.188-9). So MacIntyre’s understanding of ethics is teleological, and the excellences internal to specific practices are subsidiary telos to the overall telos of human flourishing. MacIntyre also argues that ethics is a practical rationality with its own rational discourse (see, for example, Chapter VIII ‘Aristotle on Practical Rationality’ and Chapter XI ‘Aquinas on Practical Rationality and Justice’, MacIntyre, 1988, pp.124-145, 183-208).

MacIntyre’s ethical scheme fits into Jones’ artistic theory in a number of ways. Jones’ art is a specific practice, with its own internal standards, of the type MacIntyre talks of, and Jones even mentions a specific virtue, prudentia, which is prominent in the Aristotelian account, as discussed by MacIntyre, in the form of phronesis, the intellectual virtue which judges as to when the other virtues are to be exercised (see Jones, 1973a, pp.154, 182-3) – for Jones it is the virtue which allows the artist to judge as to what excellence in a particular art work requires. Both MacIntyre and Jones think teleologically, in that virtue is directed towards excellence in practices. Both believe that virtues are accompanied by a process of practical reasoning, which leads to choices as to what it is right to do in pursuit of excellence in the domain of a practice. Jones theory however has an extra element compared with MacIntyre’s, in that for MacIntyre an assembly of diverse practices in which humans engage, and aim for excellence, constitutes the human good, and the flourishing of these practices is human flourishing, whereas Jones

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privileges art as being the characteristic human activity, therefore for Jones, flourishing in a truly human sense is the pursuit of artistic activity, artistic activity for Jones subsuming any gratuitous signifying activity.

In this paper I have explored whether the seeming contradiction between the ‘art for art’s sake’ doctrine, and a vision of art connected with ethics, can be bridged, and have suggested that it can be bridged, depending on the type of ethics with which one attempts to connect art. An aestheticist attitude has a tendency to portray art in religious terms, as a way of life, as I have used Henry James’ arguably parodic portrayal of such an attitude to illustrate. This attitude could be understood as replacing religion and morality with art, but need not be. I have used David Jones’ writings to show that the aestheticist doctrine can be regarded more as a protest against the subordination of art to utilitarian priorities, than as a proclamation that art is outside any kind of morality. Jones emphasizes the gratuitous, non-utilitarian nature or art, but, in his account, the very fact that art is an autonomous field of activity, or a form of life, implies that it has its own internal aims and excellences, its own standards which imply an ethics of its own, springing from inside its own complex, not imposed from the outside. This ethics internal to art takes on all the more importance if, as Jones argues, it is art, understood broadly as sign-making activity, which is the characteristic activity of the human, that which allows humans to be fully human. I have introduced MacIntyre’s theory of the virtues to show that an overall theory of ethics exists (and is contemporary), which views virtues arising from specific activities as a large part of what ethics, in general, is, such that the ethics arising internally to art is not a special case, being not normal ethics, but is a case of what ethics is. I would thus conclude that an ‘art for art’s sake’ theory of art, to the extent that it is a theory which regards art as an intransitive, non-utilitarian human activity, is compatible with an ethics, if it is a virtue-based ethics, which describes ethics as springing from within a human practice.

References − Habermas, J. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. C. Lehnhardt and S. W. Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. − Horne, P. 1995. ‘Introduction.’ Henry James. The Tragic Muse. London: Penguin. vii-xix. − James, H. 1995. The Tragic Muse. London: Penguin. − James, H. 1983. The Sacred Fount. New York: New Directions. − Jones, D. 1973. ‘Art and Sacrament’. In: H. Grisewood ed. Epoch and Artist. London: Faber, pp.143-79.

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− Jones, D. 1973. ‘The Utile.’ In: H. Grisewood ed. Epoch and Artist. London: Faber, pp.180-5. − Jones, D. 1972. The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing. London: Faber. − MacIntyre, A. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP. − MacIntyre, A. 1985. After Virtue. 2nd Ed. London: Duckworth. − Treitel, I., 1996. The Dangers of Interpretation: Art and Artists in Henry James and Thomas Mann. New York: Garland. − Winner, V. H. 1970. Henry James and the Visual Arts. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

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Aesthetics and emotions according to William James

Nuno Miguel Proença* Universidade Nova de Lisboa (CHC-UNL)

To my knowledge, there are two fundamental writings on emotions by William James. One is from 1884 and the other is from 1890. The first is an article published in the 9th volume of the magazine Mind, whereas the second is the Chapter XXV of the Principles of Psychology. The article tries to answer a simple question, which is also its title: «What is an emotion?», while the chapter entitled «Emotions» in the Principles of Psychology develops the core hypothesis of James' first writing on the matter. Both were written in reaction to the insufficiency of former neurophysiological researches, as these have ignored what he calls «the aesthetic sphere of the mind, its longings, its pleasures and pains, and its emotions»1. They stress the physiological and embodied reality of our lives linking it to our aesthetic dimension and making us realize «more deeply than ever», through a description and an analysis of emotions, «how much our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame, in the strictest sense of the term».2 To say that emotions are physiological is not to deprive them from their importance or to state that what we live through them is nothing but an illusion deprived of any value. There is as much neurophysiological reality in our aesthetic approach to the world as there is a physiologic reality in our scientific statements about the neurophysiological dimension of our aesthetic experiences. And such reality does not deprive any of them from their sense or their value. «Our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual facts on any conceivable theory of their physiological source, they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensational theory. They carry their own inner measure of

* [email protected] 1 James, W. 1884, p. 188. 2 Ibid., p. 201.

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worth with them; and it is just as logical to use the present theory of the emotions for proving that sensational processes need not be vile and material, as to use their vileness and materiality as a proof that such a theory cannot be true»3.

Volitional and cognitive aspects of our existences, shows James, whether perceptual or mental, as long as they are related to real or virtual objects, are always intertwined with an emotional dimension, and our body's resonance, its changes are always called upon by any of the first. In other words, more neurologic, «the emotional brain-processes no only resemble the ordinary sensorial brain-processes, but in very truth are nothing but such processes variously combined»4. What is an emotion, then? «My theory [writes James] is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion»5. Emotions are the feeling of the very subtle bodily motions that result from the excitement by objects. Each one of them, though typified, is always unique. «The various permutations and combinations of which these organic activities are susceptible make it abstractly possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself. The immense number of parts modified in each emotion is what makes it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood the total and integral expression of any one of them ».6

Consequently, there are no feelings of our body accompanying the perception of external or internal events, as these produce changes in our bodies, which are not emotional. Our organism «may be called a sounding-board, which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate»7. It is through our living body that we feel every change in our environment, as its perceptual content has within it an emotional response that composes simultaneously the immediate sense of what happens and of ourselves. «Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him»8. The absence of this bodily dynamic presence would be nothing but a rough sketch of a series of abstract perceptual qualities, whatever that might be. «Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth»9, and if that might be the case for pure spirits, it is impossible for us. Emotions and instincts, excited by perception, are essential components of our life forms. They are also a phylogenetic inheritance allowing preserving them:

3 James, W. 1890, p. 453. 4 James, W. 1884, p. 188. 5 James, W. 1890, p. 449. 6 Ibid., p. 450. 7 Ibid, p. 450. 8 Ibid., p. 450. 9 Ibid., p. 450.

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«A purely disembodied human emotion is [therefore] a nonentity. I do not say – writes James– that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives; but I say that for us, emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable»10.

Emotions and instincts are both impulses, in James' terms, and they are inseparable.

«In speaking of the instincts it has been impossible to keep them separate from the emotional excitements which go with them. Objects of rage, love, fear, etc., not only prompt a man to outward deeds, but provoke characteristic alterations in his attitude and visage, and affect his breathing, circulation, and other organic functions in specific ways»11. Still, there is an important difference between them that shows the specificity of emotions. Instincts are followed by external transformations, caused by action, while emotional changes do not lead necessarily to it. In other words, to put it like James: «When the outward deeds are inhibited, these latter emotional expressions still remain, and we read the anger in the face, though the blow may not be struck, and the fear betrays itself in voice and color, though one may suppress all other sign»12.

Therefore, and even though instincts and emotions shade imperceptibly into each other: it is true that «every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well [, e]motions, however, fall short of instincts, in that the emotional reaction usually terminates in the subject's own body, whilst the instinctive reaction is apt to go farther and enter into practical relations with the exciting object»13. If instincts can mould our practical actions, emotions give shape to our expression, and, in this simple sense, are our immediate understanding of the world. «Emotional reactions are often excited by objects with which we have no practical dealings. A ludicrous object, for example, or a beautiful object are not necessarily objects to which we do anything; we simply laugh, or stand in admiration, as the case may be»14. And James stresses the fact that we can use the word «object of emotion indifferently, to mean one which is physically present or one which is merely thought of»15. That, of course, is of most importance for representational art forms.

The basic, or should we say, the core element of expression, its self evident sense, is our body's emotional response to what happens, not necessarily in the outer world. «The class of emotional [reactions], is thus rather larger than that of instinctive impulses, commonly so called. Its stimuli are more numerous, and its expressions are more internal and delicate, and often less practical»16.

10 Ibid., p.452. 11 Ibid., p. 442. 12 Ibid, p. 442. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.

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Nevertheless, writes James, «the physiological plan and essence of the two classes of impulse, however, is the same»17. This impulsive reaction is an evaluation. Not only are emotions, like instincts, directional, but they also immediately value what happens, that is to say, they give a living sense to their object, as they are rooted in primitive forms of affirmation and negation, acceptation or refusal, that allow the perpetuation of a living form. «To the animal which obeys it, says James, every impulse […] shines with its own sufficient light, and seems at the moment the only eternally right and proper thing to do. It is done for its own sake exclusively»18. And the same goes with man, who «possesses all the impulses that [other animals] have, and a great many more besides»19. What might these evaluative components of emotions be, if they are the very first qualitative ways of being in the world? James extended hypothesis concerning emotions is that any of them, from the coarser, to the subtler, that is to say «the moral, intellectual and aesthetic feelings»20 follow upon the bodily affective expression. Therefore, not only can we recognize «coarser emotions such as grief, fear and rage, [as having] a strong organic reverberation», but we can also say that «rapture, love, ambition, indignation, and pride, considered as feelings, are fruits of the same soil with the grossest bodily sensations of pleasure and of pain».21

James gives some examples of what he calls emotions by analogy that show how impulsive reactions based on pleasure or displeasure are perpetuated in more complex social valuation forms, be they moral, aesthetic or simply logical. They also cast some light in the origin of values and on the way social realities, our being in the world with others, are permanently intertwined with emotional and instinctive reactions. «The ordinary gesture of negation — among us, says James, moving the head about its axis from side to side — is a reaction originally used by babies to keep disagreeable from getting into their mouth, and may be observed in perfection in any nursery. It is now evoked where the stimulus is only an unwelcome idea. Similarly the nod forward in affirmation is after the analogy of taking food into the mouth»22. Another example of what he calls emotions by analogy shows

17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 337. 19 Ibid., p. 337. 20 Ibid., p. 468. 21 James, W. 1884, p. 201. 22 James, W. 1890, p. 481. It is interesting to notice that we find a similar approach to the genesis (in this case, an ontogenesis conditioned by phylogenesis) of affirmation and negation in one of Freud’s “epistemological” texts. The Darwinian inheritance to which James makes explicit references, is also present in Freud’s text in a less evident way, as the physiological aspects of affectivity and emotion cease to be the central concern of his research by the end of the XIX century, although his more important hypothesis on these points are not invalidated by his further research, and remain even as a tacit and unquestioned ground for its development. In 1925’s ‘The negation’ (Freud, S. 1925), the psychoanalyst establishes a line of continuity between oral drives and logical statements, through which we value the represented objects. The logical forms of predication (‘O is P’ or ‘S is not P’) take the form ‘there is an O that is P’ or ‘there is not an O that is P’, in which stating affirmatively is to accept the existence of an OP (a given object ‘O’ that has the

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«the connection of the expression of moral or social disdain or dislike, especially in women, with movements having a perfectly definite original olfactory function, is too obvious for comment»23.

Of course, the fact that emotions are intertwined with any of our bodily-living activities has a great importance to our appreciation of the moral and aesthetic aspects of our existence, as both of them are therefore rooted in the way we feel our body and in its qualitative changes towards external objects. Beauty and morality themselves can express a physiological reality of pleasure or displeasure. To determine to what point affective responses are or are not always present in our aesthetic or moral experiences, James establishes a difference between the pure and simple aesthetic emotions and secondary pleasures that are a repercussion of other sensations consequently aroused by the first. «We must [...] insist that aesthetic emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary»24. This kind of pleasure propriety ‘P’) and stating negatively is to reject its existence, for acceptance and refusal are immediate ways of valuing OP as being good or bad. Good object are the ones that the child wants to keep in her, bad objects the ones she moves aside. The movements of the head, upon which James calls our attention, seem to be the result of these two basic drives of affirming or denying rooted in the oral drives. Following the vicissitudes (or maybe the metaphors, in what concerns the talking mammals that we are) of these drives and their displacement from a primitive object to more complex forms of reality, we can understand that objects are accepted when they arouse pleasure (and are said “good”) and they are rejected when they arouse displeasure (and are said to be “bad”). The original «pleasure-I» wishes to introject everything that is good and to reject out of him everything that is bad. Oral drives remain predominant, and valuation remains a pure expression of them, as long as judgment does not become independent from pleasure, that is to say, as long as “bad” objects cannot be accepted and assimilated (as they remain alien to the I). In other words, as long as emotional and affective responses linked with a pleasure principle, continue to be the main force that moulds perception and representation… and as long as objects are not recognized as being independently of the emotional experience we have of them. But even after the ‘I’ has acquired an independence and a “distance” from the objects (and can therefore recognize the difference between internal representations and external objects that does not depend upon the difference between pleasant and non-pleasant, good or bad), an affective and emotional remain will always be attached to the second, simply because the cognitive activity that links the ‘I’ and the real world, as it is rooted in the living drives of the body, stimulate the traces of past perceptions and of objects, deeply charged with the primitive forms of acceptance or of rejection that anchored their experience in the ‘pleasure-I’! It goes without saying that the primitive forms of love and hate inherent to this motions of acceptance and of rejection are deeply present in the constitution of the relational net of an individual as they shape its “objectal” world, immediately valuing as good or bad the (existence of) others. Pleasure or displeasure will therefore be, also in Freudian terms, original forms of more complex ethical valuation.

23 Ibid., p. 482. 24 Ibid., p. 468.

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comes from the form itself, as it is perceived and, «to this simple primary and immediate pleasure in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations of them, there may, it is true, be added secondary pleasures».25 What are those pleasures, and in what sense do they interfere in our experience of beauty? The first seem to be related to the simple form of the objects that arouse them. Its content form, to say so, the way it presents itself. «Concords of sounds, of colors, of lines, logical consistencies, teleological fitnesses, affect us with a pleasure that seems ingrained in the very form of the representation itself, and to borrow nothing from any reverberation surging up from the parts below the brain».26 In this sense, «a mathematical demonstration may be as 'pretty,' and an act of justice as 'neat,' as a drawing or a tune, although the prettiness and neatness seem to have nothing to do with sensation»27. On the other hand, «secondary emotions themselves, writes James, are assuredly for the most part constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang in the breast, a shudder, a fullness of the breathing, a flutter of the heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be felt the moment the beauty excites us»28.

James' distinction between the two sorts of pleasures takes as example two different artistic and somehow antagonistic trends: classicism and romanticism. This difference allows us to grasp also what emotions can be in terms of reverberation of our being, including its temporal dimension. «Classicism and romanticism have their battles over this point. Complex suggestiveness, the awakening of vistas of memory and association, and the stirring of our flesh with picturesque mystery and gloom, make a work of art romantic».29 On the contrary «the classic taste brands these effects as coarse and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the optical and auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage. To the romantic mind, […] the immediate beauty of these sensations seems dry and thin. I am of course not discussing which view is right, but only showing that the discrimination between the primary feeling of beauty, as a pure incoming sensible quality, and the secondary emotions which are grafted thereupon, is one that must be made»30. A concrete illustration of what can be the expression of the emotional reverberations produced in a subject by a simple perceptual experience, in a kind of romantic taste, is given by James in the footnote 22 of the chapter on emotions of his Principles of Psychology. «A flavor may fairly shake us by the ghosts of 'banquet halls deserted,' which it suddenly calls up; or a smell may make us feel almost sick with the waft it brings over our memory of 'gardens that are ruins, and pleasure-houses that are dust.' "In the Pyrenees," says M. Guyau, "after a summer-day's tramp carried to the extreme of fatigue, I met a shepherd

25 Ibid., p. 468. 26 Ibid., p. 468. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. p. 470. 29 Ibid., p. 470. 30 Ibid., p. 470

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and asked him for some milk. He went to fetch from his hut, under which a brook ran, a jar of milk plunged in the water and kept at a coldness which was almost icy. In drinking this fresh milk into which all the mountain had put its perfume, and of which each savory swallow seemed to give new life, I certainly experienced a series of feelings which the word agreeable is insufficient to designate. It was like a pastoral symphony, apprehended by the taste instead of by the ear".31

Despite the difference that can be made, the two kinds of pleasures seem to be permanently intertwined. If it is true that «the more classic one's taste is, [...] the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures felt to be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it comes in»32, it does not mean the secondary pleasures are absent. Any emotion has a bodily reverberation. Primary and secondary emotions hardly exist without each other, and we shall not make confusion between the familiarity of aesthetic emotions that blunts them, and their non-existence. The surprising effects, the wonder and curiosity frequently aroused by aesthetic experiences, might be inferior for those that are used to them, but that does not mean there is a mere intellectual aesthetic enjoyment of the works of art independent of shivering emotions. It comes from a long frequentation of art forms and, by means of it, of these surprising emotions, called secondary pleasures. «[W]here long familiarity with a certain class of effects, even aesthetic ones, has blunted mere emotional excitability as much as it has sharpened taste and judgment, we do get the intellectual emotion, if such it can be called, pure and undefiled»33. These refined emotions, that appear to be purely intellectual, come from what most people feel at first when surprised by the effects of aesthetic experiences. «In the practical enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind these secondary pleasures play a great part»34. What is true of aesthetic emotions, in these matters, is also the case for moral ones. «These symptoms also result when we are excited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the struggling chest, or the nostril dilates and the fingers tighten, whilst the heart beats, etc., etc»35.

Is it true, then, that, if aesthetic or moral values are to have any sense, they must express or be expressible in terms of the changes they bring to our embodied existences, that is to say, to our emotional being-in-the world? Is it true that they can not just be rational, or intellectual? «In all cases of intellectual or moral rapture we find that, unless there be coupled a bodily reverberation of some kind with the mere thought of the object and cognition of its quality [...] our state of mind can hardly be called emotional at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual perception of how certain things are to be called - neat, right, witty, generous, and the like. Such a judicial state of mind as this is to be classed among awarenesses of

31 Ibid., p. 469. 32 Ibid., p. 468. 33 Ibid., p. 457. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

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truth; it is a cognitive act. [But James points out that:] As a matter of fact, however, the moral and intellectual cognitions hardly ever do exist thus unaccompanied»36. We laugh at the neatness of a demonstration or witticism, we thrill at a case of justice, we tingle at the act of magnanimity. «The bodily sounding-board is at work [in each of these cases], as careful introspection will show, far more than we usually suppose». Emotions seem therefore to be the unsurpassable consequence of our affected openness to the world and of the way we are surprised from within by what happens in it, may that be “intellectual or cognitive”. «Yes! In every art, in every science, there is the keen perception of certain relations being right or not, and there is the emotional flush and thrill consequent thereupon»37.

Art forms, says James, have a tremendous importance in revealing us the emotional responses engaged in our perception of the world. Through art, we are placed in the surprising evidence of the affective roots of our relations to inner and outer realities and aesthetic experiences make us understand that particular perceptions and events do produce wide-spread bodily effects by a sort of immediate physical influence. «In listening to poetry, drama, or heroic narrative we are often surprised at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the heart-swelling and the lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at intervals. In listening to music the same is even more strikingly true».38 And, of course, this is even truer as art expresses the (emotional) life of others. If the descriptions of emotions we find in psychology books are terribly tedious, says James, so much that he would rather read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on a New Hampshire farm as toil through them again»39, art forms, like literature, for instance, give us an access to the subtle variety of feelings and to our capacity of understanding them. Despite individual differences in terms of emotional response to events, we should be able to understand the emotions of others, through the changes they bring to our body. «As emotions are described in novels, says James, they interest us, for we are made to share them. We have grown acquainted with the concrete objects and emergencies which call them forth, and any knowing touch of introspection which may grace the page meets with a quick and feeling response».40 It seems, therefore, difficult to state convincingly any form of indifference or of profound incomprehension between people. Despite differences, their emotional structure lies upon the same simple forms of pleasure and pain expressions that each one's own life shares and declines in its single way. The emotional feeling of ourselves is clarified by the feeling of others, and the feeling of others, for each one of us, is clarified by the emotional feeling of oneself.

Through their emotional reverberation, art works and aesthetic experiences show us the empathetic and inter-subjective dimension of our emotional life allowing us

36 Ibid., pp. 470-471. 37 Ibid., p. 472. 38 Ibid., p. 457. 39 Ibid., p. 448. 40 Ibid.

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to recognize and to discover each other as emotional living beings. Aesthetics and emotions have therefore a deep moral and political role, and not only do they allow us to feel that others feel pleasure or displeasure, but their virtual and imaginary dimension make possible a transformation of the instinctual reactions of a subject, having therefore the capacity to change his form of life and the values that express it. In this sense, the emotional compounds of aesthetic emotions have a greater role that reason in the shaping of human action and in its moral education. Aristotle, Schiller and Freud among many others, each one in his own way, had already told us that artistic emotions have a role in the metamorphosis of human passions and in the increasing of human freedom. James does not talk about it directly in his psychological writings on emotions, but his characterization of instincts and impulses allow us to make this final statement. «Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal; and any one of these impulses, taken in itself, is as 'blind' as the lowest instinct can be; but, owing to man's memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with a foresight of those results».41 Experience of emotions and inference of results can transform the associative chains that go from excitement to action by giving us this foresight. The emotions aroused by virtual objects, such as artistic ones, have the power to create a memory of what can be, before it has actually taken place, or before it happens again. «As with instincts, so with emotions, the mere memory or imagination of the object may suffice to liberate the excitement»42. What happens in terms of emotions can therefore change the impulsive structure of our behavior, making us understand the consequences of our possible actions. «Some expectation of consequences must in every case like this be aroused; and this expectation, according as it is that of something desired or of something disliked, must necessarily either reinforce or inhibit the mere impulse».43 There is no reasoning about right or wrong that can be indifferent to an emotional experience, even imaginary, about our values or effects of our actions as they are inseparable from our bodily reality. «Reason, per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may, however, make an inference which will excite the imagination so as to set loose the impulse the other way; and thus, though the animal richest in reason might be also the animal richest in instinctive impulses too, he would never seem the fatal automaton which a, merely instinctive animal would be».44

I would like to end up quoting an example that allows us to cease the importance of the emotional understanding of living expressivity. All along our reading of some of James' arguments concerning emotions we have noticed that, aesthetic emotions, as grounded in the feelings of pleasure or pain, do not separate human from other living beings, but rather give them an empathetic power that goes far beyond the anthropic world and allow us to realize that we share the same

41 Ibid., p. 390. 42 Ibid., pp. 442-443. 43 Ibid., p. 390. 44 Ibid., p. 393.

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expressive life with any living being. It is this profound sympathy for the living, emotionally experienced, that can transform our way of life and change our values.

«If a boy sees a fat hopping-toad, he probably has incontinently an impulse (especially if with other boys) to smash the creature with a stone, which impulse we may suppose him blindly to obey. But something in the expression of the dying toad's clasped hands suggests the meanness of the act, or reminds him of sayings he has heard about the sufferings of animals being like his own; so that, when next he is tempted by a toad, an idea arises which, far from spurring him again to the torment, prompts kindly actions, and may even make him the toad's champion against less reflecting boys».45

References - James, W. 1884. « What is Emotion? », in Mind, 9, pp. 188-205. - James, W. 1890. Principles of Psychology, volume 2, (1950), Dover Publications. - Freud, S. 1925. ‘Negation’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIX (1923-1925), pp. 233- 240.

45 Ibid., p. 390.

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Art, art des affaires et affaires d’or : le cas de l’art de masse

Mélissa Thériault* Collège Montmorency

Cette présentation portera sur un sous-ensemble qui regroupe des pratiques peu étudiées en philosophie de l’art, à savoir, l’art de masse. Dans un contexte comme le nôtre où il est mal vu de faire un lien entre valeur artistique et considérations financières, les œuvres d’art de masse, souvent définies comme de simples produits de consommation, seront presque systématiquement dévaluées pour cause de manquement à l’éthique implicite du monde de l’art. En effet, ces œuvres sont souvent vues comme des productions visant d’abord et avant tout un profit financier (ou une fonction pratique telle que le divertissement), contrairement au grand art qui serait, lui, l’expression désintéressée d’une individualité créatrice destinée à l’élévation de l’esprit. La poursuite d’intérêts financiers attribuée aux producteurs d’art de masse est l’un des critères fréquemment évoqués pour justifier non seulement la dévaluation artistique, mais aussi la distinction ontologique opérée dans les débats en philosophie de l’art entre un art véritable et un pseudo-art. Mais les raisons évoquées pour asseoir une telle distinction sont-elles fondées ? Cette présentation entend montrer que non, en insistant sur les failles que présentent ses présupposés. Nous verrons au contraire que la dévaluation de l’art de masse repose plus souvent qu’autrement sur des critères qui ne résistent pas bien longtemps à un examen minutieux.

On peut comprendre, à la lumière de ce qui vient d’être exposé, que le lien entre le l’art de masse et sa dimension commerciale comporte, aux yeux de bien des théoriciens, un caractère suspect en raison d’habitudes de pensée bien ancrées. Nous ne pouvons en revanche conclure à partir de là que l’art de masse serait, par définition, une catégorie de seconde zone, ce sur quoi cette présentation entend insister en effectuant quelques remarques sur la perception courante du rapport entre art et commercialisation. Certes, l’idée que nous nous faisons de l’art est fortement conditionnée par une tradition qui définit l’art comme une pratique désintéressée et autonome, indépendante de toutes considérations financières. Mais sommes-nous de ce seul fait pour autant autorisés à conclure

* [email protected]

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qu’un art véritable est, par définition, incompatible avec les exigences de la production de masse ?

La représentation que nous nous faisons de l’art est fortement influencée par une tradition qui définit celui-ci comme une pratique désintéressée et autonome, indépendante de toute considération financière. L’art véritable apparait alors comme l’expression désintéressée d’une individualité créatrice éventuellement apte à générer un certain plaisir esthétique mais qui doit d’abord et avant tout avoir la vertu de permettre une véritable élévation de l’esprit. Nous tâcherons ici d’analyser ce présupposé à l’aide d’un sous-ensemble d’œuvres peu étudiées en philosophie de l’art, à savoir, les œuvres d’art de masse. Cela nous permettra de faire quelques remarques provisoires qui, espérons-nous, permettront de dénouer certaines idées reçues à ce sujet ou, à tout le moins, de susciter un débat sur cette question d’actualité.

C’est leur dimension commerciale prépondérante qui comporte, aux yeux de bien des théoriciens, un caractère suspect : souvent définies comme de simples produits de consommation, les œuvres d’art de masse sont presque systématiquement dévaluées pour plusieurs raisons d’ordre esthétique certes, mais aussi souvent pour cause de manquement à l’éthique informelle du monde de l’art (motifs qui sont par ailleurs souvent entremêlés ou implicites). Mais peut-on de ce seul fait conclure qu’un art véritable est, par définition, incompatible avec les exigences de la production de masse ? Nous tenterons de répondre à cette question à l’aide d’une analyse du rapport entre art et commercialisation basé sur un corpus précis : le cinéma commercial québécois des dix dernières années1. Ce choix de corpus est justifié par le fait que cette industrie culturelle contredit la conception habituelle qu’on se fait de l’art de masse et nous oblige de ce fait à remettre en question la distinction rapide qu’on fait entre art « véritable » et l’art de masse (conçu comme un pseudo-art) qui ne comporte que des retombées culturelles néfastes.

Classes et catégories La poursuite d’intérêts financiers attribuée aux producteurs d’art de masse est l’un des critères fréquemment évoqués pour justifier non seulement la dévaluation artistique, mais aussi la distinction ontologique opérée dans les débats en philosophie de l’art entre un art véritable et un pseudo-art. Mais les critères évoqués pour asseoir une telle distinction méritent un examen attentif, vu la complexité du problème et les failles que présentent ses présupposés. En portant un regard sur le statut des œuvres d’art de masse dans le discours en esthétique contemporaine nous arrivons sans grande surprise à un constat quasi-trivial : étant définies comme de simples produits de consommation à la suite notamment des critiques exprimées, par exemple (pour prendre un exemple bien connu) par

1 Nos remerciements à Christian Poirier (INRS-UCS, Montréal) pour son support, ses commentaires éclairants et sa contribution importante aux idées développées ici, de même qu’aux participants du colloque Images, médias et politique tenu à Paris en novembre 2010 pour leurs remarques utiles sur une version précédente de ce texte.

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l’École de Francfort, les œuvres d’art de masse seront systématiquement dévaluées pour cause de manquement à l’éthique implicite du monde de l’art mais aussi pour leur piètre valeur esthétique. Il résulte de cet état de fait un décalage entre les pratiques réelles de « consommation » (ce qui est vu, lu, écouté par un public) et le corpus artistique qui est pris en compte dans le discours théorique. Contrairement à des disciplines comme la sociologie ou l’anthropologie, qui documentent et analysent ces pratiques omniprésentes de notre paysage culturel, on trouve peu d’analyses philosophiques récentes sur ces questions. Car ce qui plait au grand nombre est souvent ignoré en philosophie, tel que le déplore le philosophe américain Richard Shusterman :

« Depuis la thèse de Kant […], l’esthétique a poussé l’expérience de l’art dans la voie d’une spiritualisation désincarnée, où la réjouissance vigoureuse et collective s’est épurée en appréciation anémique et distance, privilège d’un petit nombre de connaisseurs. Tandis que les plaisirs légitimes du grand art sont devenus éthérés, ascétiques et inaccessibles à la plupart des gens, les formes d’expression qui procurent le plaisir le plus commun et le plus intense sont symptomatiquement déclassées comme simple divertissement. » [nous soulignons] (Shusterman 1992, p. 85-86)

Mais que peut-on reprocher exactement à l’art de masse, qui justifierait qu’on lui conteste, justement, son statut d’art ? La poursuite d’intérêts financiers attribuée aux producteurs d’art de masse est l’un des critères fréquemment évoqués pour justifier non seulement la dévaluation artistique, mais aussi la distinction ontologique opérée dans les débats en philosophie de l’art entre un art véritable et un pseudo-art, étape presque inévitable dans toute entreprise définitoire : l’œuvre d’art de masse est produite pour générer un profit, dit-on, elle ne peut donc avoir, en soi, de valeur artistique. N’est-ce pas là une raison suffisante ? On pourrait le penser à première vue. Mais il manque à ce raisonnement sommaire la prémisse indispensable qui rendrait celui-ci acceptable : il faudrait que l’on démontre (plutôt que de postuler) l’incompatibilité nécessaire entre ces deux caractéristiques. Bien sûr, dans les faits, l’une et l’autre cohabitent souvent au détriment de la qualité artistique, mais on ne peut de là conclure à une incompatibilité sur le plan logique : il semble alors que, conceptuellement parlant, de là qu’il faut partir pour arriver à une analyse correcte du concept d’art de masse. Certes, l’idée que nous nous faisons de l’art est fortement conditionnée par une tradition qui définit l’art comme une pratique désintéressée et autonome, indépendante de toutes considérations financières : nul besoin de revenir ici sur l’histoire de l’art occidental et celle du discours critique qui l’accompagne. Mais sommes-nous de ce seul fait pour autant autorisés à conclure qu’un art véritable est, par définition, incompatible avec les exigences de la production de masse ? Cela demande à être étudié de plus près2.

2 Nous avons soutenu ailleurs que la dévaluation de l’art de masse repose plus souvent qu’autrement sur des critères qui ne résistent pas bien longtemps à un examen minutieux et qu’il existe en cette matière des zones grises qui invitent à revoir la question sous un autre angle. Il y aurait également lieu de contester la pertinence de cette attitude qui

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En effet, si on peut à juste titre déplorer les dérives de la marchandisation de la culture et de l’art, il n’en demeure pas moins que tracer une ligne de démarcation (sur le plan de la valeur ou du statut ontologique) entre le « grand art » et le reste (c’est-à-dire le pseudo-art que serait l’art de masse) sur la base du simple rapport à sphère commerciale pose quelques difficultés sur le plan théorique, qu’il convient de rappeler brièvement ici :

1) Certes, les œuvre d’art de masse sont produites pour être commercialisées et sont, à cet égard, des marchandises. Mais on ne saurait les réduire pour autant à cette seule catégorie, car le succès commercial de ces marchandises dépend de l’appréciation qu’elles obtiennent auprès d’un public : elles doivent donc présenter un minimum de qualités esthétiques et d’intentionnalité afin de conquérir le public. 2) On ne peut conclure à l’absence intrinsèque de valeur artistique pour un artefact sur la base de son statut de marchandise. Considérant que tout artefact peut être vendu, l’art de masse n’est pas le seul à être soumis à des contraintes d’ordre commercial. 3) Loin d’être nécessairement nuisible, ce qui découle du processus de commercialisation peut parfois être bénéfique à la pratique artistique elle- même ainsi qu’aux procédés créatifs sur lesquels elle repose3.

C’est ici que notre étude de cas sera utile pour illustrer notre propos.

L’industrie cinématographique québécoise prend de l’expansion mais peine toujours à être rentable vu la taille du marché, la population québécoise étant d’à peine 8 millions de personnes. C’est donc à la fois pour des raisons commerciales, politiques et culturelles que ce secteur de l’industrie culturelle est soutenu par des fonds publics. Toutefois, créateurs, public et dirigeants ne s’entendent pas sur le type de cinéma qui devrait être subventionné : est-il artistiquement et socialement préférable de soutenir le cinéma dit « d’auteur » ou le cinéma dit « commercial » ? Et est-il possible de véritablement départager ces deux catégories ? On accuse le cinéma dit « commercial » de manquer de contenu et de substances, d’avoir une valeur culturelle et artistique pauvre : c’est le genre de critiques qui, depuis des décennies, est régulièrement revampée au goût du jour, mais qui en substance, demeure du même ordre. On entend différents points de vue dans les médias et cette controverse qui dure depuis quelques années est intéressante non seulement de par sa pertinence sociale, mais aussi par ce qu’elle révèle sur le plan philosophique. consiste à discréditer artistiquement des œuvres sur la base d’un jugement à caractère éthique. Certes, on peut critiquer sévèrement la valeur artistique des œuvres d’art de masse. Mais si on ne peut de ce seul fait faire en bloc une critique sur la base d’un procès d’intention : or, c’est ce que les philosophes de l’art font constamment, y compris chez ceux qui ne se présentent pas comme des pourfendeurs de l’art de masse. 3 Cet aspect a été développé en détail dans une thèse de doctorat déposée en 2008 (en cours de réécriture) et qui consistait en une analyse historique et conceptuelle des notions d’art de masse et d’art populaire.

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Il y a quelques années, le philosophe français Roger Pouivet affirmait -dans une optique légèrement différente, car il ne refuse pas le statut d’art à l’art de masse, mais en fait un type distinct- que les œuvres d’art de masse sont conçues pour pouvoir circuler planétairement grâce à une « simple » traduction (Pouivet 2003, p. 25-27). La langue dans laquelle on les « consomme » ou l’endroit où on le fait importeraient alors peu, puisque que leur particularité résiderait justement dans leur capacité à «être intelligible et appréciable à Paris, Bombay, Johannesburg ou Manille » (Pouivet 2003, p. 23). Ces œuvres, affirme-t-il, gommeraient autant que possible les spécificités culturelles relatives à leur lieu d’origine, ce qui leur permettrait d’être diffusées largement (le cas paradigmatique cité en exemple est le film Titanic). Il va sans dire que de telles œuvres ne peuvent qu’avoir une fonction de divertissement et a fortiori, ne sauraient avoir le moindre contenu ou message à caractère politique.

Toutefois, il n’est pas clair que cette caractéristique soit bel et bien le propre du cinéma de fiction commercial. Souvent identifié comme le véhicule d’une idéologie capitaliste dominante qui sacrifie le contenu aux impératifs économiques, le film « hollywoodien » peut pourtant se prêter à l’expression de récits politiques potentiellement conflictuels4. En effet, les films commerciaux ne constituent pas une catégorie homogène et nombre d’entre eux se prêtent à une interprétation résolument politique, leur conférant du coup une légitimité culturelle et un statut d’œuvres d’art à part entière, et ce, indépendamment de leur valeur artistique, c'est- à-dire indépendamment de la question à savoir si ce sont de bonnes œuvres d’art ou non (ce qui est une toute autre question). Ainsi, contrairement à l’idée reçue selon laquelle l’art et le profit sont incompatibles, il nous est apparu que même parmi les films de fiction les plus commerciaux, on pouvait déceler l’expression des préoccupations éthiques, politiques et artistiques. Cela met non seulement à mal l’idée préconçue évoquée plus tôt selon laquelle l’art de masse ne serait pas véritablement de l’art en raison de ses piètres qualités esthétiques et de de son incapacité à exprimer un contenu critique, mais permet également d’envisager quel peut être l’intérêt culturel que revêtent les œuvres d’art de masse.

Un exemple sera utile pour appuyer notre propos et nous avons choisi à cet effet le mégasuccès Bon Cop, Bad Cop (réalisé par Éric Canuel en 2006), comédie d’action qui a littéralement provoqué un raz-de-marée sur le marché québécois5 en présentant un mélange inédit de genres : action, comédie, horreur, romance. Le succès du film s’explique à la fois par l’efficacité des techniques de promotion qui ont accompagné sa mise en marché et les choix esthétiques internes au récit, puisque le mélange de genres permettait de ratisser un public très large. Plusieurs cinéastes et personnes impliquées dans le milieu du cinéma se sont empressés de dénoncer les procédés « racoleur » et de souligner le caractère pernicieux (sur le

4 Voir à ce sujet : Poirier, C 2004, Le cinéma québécois: à la recherche d’une identité? Tome 1. L’imaginaire filmique. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 289 p. 5 Détail intéressant : le film a obtenu une assistance de 1 320 394 personnes et des recettes de 8 973 867 $, se classant ainsi devant des mégaproductions telles que Spiderman 2, Harry Potter et la coupe de feu, Da Vinci Code ou Pirates des Caraïbes : Le coffre du mort (OCCQ 2010, p. 89).

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plan culturel) des productions qui emploient ces techniques et on ne saurait trop insister sur les dangers (réels ou potentiels) qui accompagnent l’usage de ces techniques6. Mais ce qui doit attirer notre attention ici est comment ce succès sans précédent a fait de Bon Cop, Bad Cop l’archétype du film commercial québécois et a instauré une nouvelle façon de faire du cinéma au sein de cette petite industrie. En s’inspirant des techniques de commercialisations agressives de nos voisins du sud, les promoteurs ont pu, à grands renforts de publicité, de promotion par l’image et d’interventions médiatiques diverses, imposer le film en tant que succès de l’été avant même qu’il ne paraisse sur les écrans. Sa popularité n’est donc pas entièrement due aux qualités artistiques à proprement parler (et cet aspect a été sévèrement critiqué). Mais ce qui est intéressant, c’est comment, au-delà des qualités esthétiques et dramatiques qui ont fait son succès, ce film purement commercial peut comporter un propos politique sous-jacent, ce qui met à mal les raisons qu’on évoque habituellement pour refuser à l’art de masse son statut d’art véritable.

Aux yeux des détracteurs de l’art de masse, Bon Cop, Bad Cop ne serait qu’une comédie d’action sans valeur culturelle et qui présenterait de surcroît une menace pour la société en avilissant l’intelligence et le sens critique de son public. Mais une écoute attentive révèlera au contraire que tout « commercial » qu’il soit, le film est chargé de références à la situation politique canadienne et québécoise. Par exemple, la campagne publicitaire fait référence à une expression bien connue, celle des « deux solitudes » (du romancier de Hugh McLennan, qui désignait ainsi le profond clivage entre la culture québécoise et celle du reste du Canada). Par ailleurs, le titre sur l’affiche officielle est en fondu sur les drapeaux juxtaposés du Québec et du Canada (image simple qui illustre le fossé entre les protagonistes : deux policiers, l’un Québécois, l’autre, Ontarien, qui doivent malgré leurs inimitiés apprendre à collaborer pour résoudre une affaire de meurtre puisque le cadavre a été retrouvé… sur la frontière québéco-ontarienne). La plupart des gags et effets comiques du film renvoient aux clichés culturels relatifs à chacune des deux cultures et on trouve plusieurs citations directes ou parodiées des slogans utilisés par les partis politiques lors de campagnes électorales ou référendaires dans les dialogues : à défaut d’être un film politique, Bon Cop, Bad Cop est un film qui présuppose certaines connaissances relatives à la situation politique québécoise et canadienne, car c’est sur la référence à celles-ci que repose l’essentiel de l’effet comique. C’est donc plutôt dans ce qui entoure le film que l’on peut déceler un propos politique, propos qui est intimement lié aux contraintes économiques propres au marché québécois et à ses industries culturelles. Ainsi, non seulement le cinéma commercial n’est pas nécessairement une menace à une véritable cinématographie nationale, mais il peut y contribuer indirectement en contribuant à développer l’autonomie de ce secteur de l’industrie culturelle : négligeables il y a quelques années à peine, les recettes liées aux productions québécoises ont

6 Pour une analyse synthétique de la question, consulter : Poirier, C 2005 « Politiques cinématographiques et groupes d’intérêt : de la relation ambivalente du cinéma québécois avec ses institutions » in Nouvelles vues sur le cinéma québécois. no. 3 (printemps), disponible à l’adresse suivante : cinema-quebecois.net/edition3/pdf/Poirier_no3.pdf

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explosé durant les dernières années au point d’occuper une place enviable sur le marché7.

Avec les retombées positives des techniques publicitaires employées lors de la mise en marché de Bon Cop, Bad Cop, plusieurs producteurs et cinéastes québécois ont intégré ces pratiques dans les stratégies de promotion des films subséquents et parmi ces stratégies se trouvent des arguments pour le moins surprenants. Parmi les motifs invoqués pour « vendre » le cinéma québécois, on fait appel à la fois aux aspects politiques, économiques et esthétiques en vue de convaincre les cinéphiles d’opter pour les films « made in Hollywood PQ » plutôt que l’équivalent américain. Notons que l’enjeu de cette offensive promotionnelle est de viser l’autonomie financière de ce secteur de l’industrie –afin de pouvoir ensuite diversifier l’offre culturelle, ce qui aurait également des répercussions sur le cinéma dit « d’auteur ». Si une partie de l’élite culturelle voit principalement des effets négatifs à l’appropriation québécoise des stratégies rhétoriques et commerciales hollywoodiennes, le critique Bruno Cornellier soutient en revanche que « la distribution de masse des films québécois dits « populaires », leur réception, leur couverture médiatique locale, ainsi que leurs stratégies de commercialisation inspirées du modèle hollywoodien, participent activement à la redéfinition du peuple et du populaire au Québec » (Cornellier 2008, p. 4). Les performances de Bon Cop, Bad Cop au guichet montrent à tout le moins que l’on peut faire concurrence à Hollywood avec un film dont le thème central comporte une saveur politique.

Le réalisateur Ken Scott (à qui l’on doit les succès Les doigts croches en 2009 mais surtout La grande séduction en 2003) affirme même qu’il « est possible de vaincre la machine américaine »8 car les choix des consommateurs contribuent, ne serait-ce qu’indirectement, à renforcer l’industrie cinématographique québécoise, industrie nécessaire dans la mesure où elle est dépositaire d’une culture dont la survie n’est pas assurée. Par conséquent, l’acte de consommation peut comporter en lui- même des implications politiques. Ainsi, pour ces réalisateurs, faire un art « commercial » ne les empêche pas d’exprimer des visées culturelles, mais c’est en plus le principal moyen dont ils disposent pour le faire, vu la petitesse du marché du « film d’auteur ». Ce n’est donc pas uniquement du côté des « films d’auteur » que l’on peut dégager un point de vue politisé et culturellement engagé : l’art « commercial » y contribue également en explorant des thèmes à

7 « Ce sera donc, selon Canuel et Huard [réalisateurs de Bon Cop, Bad Cop], la culture populaire et commerciale qui sauvera non seulement la cinématographie nationale, mais aussi la culture nationale, sa spécificité, en jouant directement sur le terrain du populaire et du commercial de l’ennemi intime : l’Amérique capitaliste et ses industries culturelles. » (Cornellier 2008, p. 14-15). 8 L’anecdote suivante est révélatrice : sachant qu’elle fera vibrer une corde sensible, une jeune réalisatrice lance ainsi dans une conférence de presse une invitation directe : «Venez voir notre cinéma. Il est bon et diversifié. C’est un combat de tous les instants que nous menons contre le géant américain. […] Quand on se compare, nous arrivons à faire des choses exceptionnelles avec nos maigres moyens ». Source : « La contre-attaque du cinéma québécois », Journal de Montréal, le 16 mai 2009. En ligne sur le site Canöe : http://fr.canoe.ca/divertissement/cinema/nouvelles/2009/05/15/9470521-jdm.html [page consultée le 23 janvier 2010].

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incidence politique comme les fossés générationnels ou de genre, les enjeux propres aux minorités sexuelles ou culturelles. C’est donc, ironiquement, dans les films commerciaux qu’on en trouve les illustrations les plus efficaces, qu’on pense par exemple à des productions récentes telles que J’ai tué ma mère de Xavier Dolan (2009) ou Crazy de Jean-Marc Vallée (2005).

Bien que ces sujets relèvent en apparence de la sphère privée, les enjeux sociaux qui s’y rattachent contribuent à insuffler une certaine consonance politique aux productions concernées et ce, même si les cinéastes n’avaient pas à première vue l’intention de présenter un point de vue politique. S’il faut éviter de sur- interpréter une œuvre en la détournant trop radicalement de ses intentions primordiales, il s’impose tout autant d’éviter les lectures superficielles qui réduisent l’œuvre son statut de marchandise. Certes, le film d’action ou la comédie légère peuvent sembler simplistes à première vue, mais une interprétation valable se doit aller au-delà du préjugé et du snobisme et surtout, se doit de situer l’œuvre dans le contexte de production qui lui permet de déployer pleinement son sens. Considérant que ces films sont vus par un public nombreux, nous croyons par conséquent que la portée culturelle de cette forme d’art n’est pas, en soi, nécessairement pernicieuse et peut au contraire être positive dans certains cas.

Conclusion Il serait évidemment naïf −et surtout malhonnête− de tenter de nier que bien des œuvres « de masse » sont produites en fonction d’exigences de commercialisation qui peuvent affecter leur contenu et par conséquent leur valeur artistique. Nul besoin de rappeler que nombre d’œuvres d’art de masse ne méritent effectivement pas qu’on s’y attarde : plusieurs se réduisent à des produits de consommation qui ne durent à peine que le temps d’une mode ou ne doivent effectivement leur existence qu’à l’appétit de gens d’affaires et la science des publicitaires. Ceux qui apprécient ces œuvres font effectivement dans bien des cas preuve d’un flagrant manque de goût, de sensibilité esthétique ou de connaissances artistiques. Cela étant dit, on ne saurait toutefois réduire l’ensemble du phénomène à cette pointe d’iceberg, puisque affirmer qu’une œuvre d’art de masse ne peut pas être intéressante artistiquement parce qu’elle est destinée à des fins commerciales tient plus souvent qu’autrement du procès d’intention ou du double standard.

Références

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- Carroll, N. 1998. A Philosophy of Mass Art, Oxford : Oxford University Press. - Cornellier, B. 2008. « Éloge du nombre : Cinéma national, industries culturelles et (re)configurations du populaire », Nouvelles « vues » sur le cinéma québécois, n° 9 (automne). En ligne : www.cinema-quebecois.net [page consultée le 21 janvier 2010]. - Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec (OCCQ)/Institut de la statistique du Québec (ISQ) 2010, Statistiques sur l’industrie du film et de la production télévisuelle indépendante. Édition 2010, Québec, Gouvernement du Québec. - Poirier, C. 2007. « Cinéma et politique. Perspectives pour une analyse filmique du politique », dans Bolter, T. Cinéma anglophone : la politique éclatée, Paris : L’Harmattan. - Poirier, C. 2005. « Politiques cinématographiques et groupes d’intérêt : de la relation ambivalente du cinéma québécois avec ses institutions », Nouvelles « vues » sur le cinéma québécois, n° 3 (printemps). En ligne : www.cinema-quebecois.net [page consultée le 21 janvier 2010]. - Pouivet, R. 2003. L'œuvre d'art à l'âge de sa mondialisation. Un essai d'ontologie de l'art de masse, Bruxelles : La Lettre volée. - Shusterman, R. 1992. L'art à l'état vif, Paris : Éditions de Minuit.

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Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668)

Dr Constantinos V. Proimos* Hellenic Open University

Harmensz van Rijn Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668) is a famous life- sized oil painting by the artist, 262X205 cm, in the collection of Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia. It is a history painting, belonging to the last phase of Rembrandt’s artistic production and crowning his evolution. The artist illustrates in his own unique way the well known biblical parable of the prodigal son from the Gospel of St Luke (Luke 22: 54-57) working with a palette knife with thick and broad layers of rough impasto, exploiting rich color and the bright-dark factor in order to increase the dramatic intensity of the event. Critics of the painting have pinpointed the popularity of the subject in 16th and 17th century Netherlands, Rembrandt’s debt to a woodcut by Maerten van Heemskerck and his relation to theological disputes between Catholics and Protestants that involved the interpretation of this specific parable. My task in this paper is to investigate the extent to which the problem of forgiveness and forgiving, having to do with Rembrandt’s life and career, preoccupied the artist in a way that reflected in the actual architectural arrangement of the painted scene. The set of secondary figures for whose identification there is no agreement among Rembrandt’s critics, functions as an auxiliary for the artist’s extensive meditation on forgiveness within the horizon of the unforgivable. Rembrandt portrays the meeting of father and son off center to give considerable space to a standing figure looking disapprovingly at the whole event that Christian Tümpel identifies as the older brother. The prodigal son’s father spontaneously forgives his son without any

* [email protected]

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terms and conditions under the eyes of his older son who rather seems to be unforgiving. I would like to argue that such coupling of forgiveness and the unforgivable by Rembrandt allows a powerful and introspective insight into one of the perennial issues of human existence. I also argue that philosophy of art, which informs my approach to Rembrandt’s painting combines philosophy and art history, and may illuminate painting from an angle that enhances its value and contribution to contemporary culture.

(Rembrandt, Return of the Prodigal Son, c. 1668, oil on canvas, 262X205 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg) Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn’s

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Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668) is a famous life-size oil painting, 262X205 cm, in the collection of Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia. It is a history painting, belonging to the last phase of Rembrandt’s artistic production, crowning his evolution and widely admired for its introspective insight into forgiveness, one of the perennial issues of human existence. Therefore, it best represents Rembrandt’s reflective stance in life, conveying the spirit of Christianity in its most enlightened form and considered to bear a strong connection to his biography and his years of prodigality when newly wedded to Saskia. Despite the popularity of the subject Netherlandish drama and art in 16th and 17th centuries. (Haeger 1986, p. 129) Rembrandt illustrates, in his own unique way, the well-known biblical parable of the prodigal son from the Gospel of St. Luke (Luke 22: 54-57) exploiting color and chiaroscuro in order to increase the dramatic portrayal of the event.

The artist depicts the final and culminating point of the story: the prodigal son is portrayed on his knees, having just returned home and having just met his father, in front of the dimly lit arched doorway of the house. The two main protagonists are placed off-center at the left, while the right part of the composition is reserved for two other figures, one standing and another seated, observing them. The aged, nearly blind father is portrayed frontally, bending over his son and gently placing his hands on his back, while the son is seen from the back, slightly turning his head to the right and resting it on his father’s chest, full of repentance and guilt. The father’s glowing red cape and rich outfit contrasts with the son’s ragged garments full of holes, his worn sandals and his scarred feet. The warm tones in the clothing of both father and son contribute to a harmonious whole but also mark with poignancy the contrast in roles. The father is compassionate, for he is strong and still sovereign despite his age, as the red cloak, a sign of majesty and power, does not fail to indicate. He is thus able to forgive the wounded son who, in his weakness and humility, is asking for forgiveness. The short, expensive sword on the right side of the prodigal son is the only remaining marker of the status he once entertained, as a son of a noble landowner, and a sad reminder of his arrogance that once led him to question his father’s rule. It is practically the last and only equipment distinguishing him from common beggars of his time.

Rembrandt seems to wish to give emphasis only to what is essential in the picture. This is the reason why the entire scene is immersed into the dark from which the figures of father and son are emerging, along with the standing figure on the right hand side, looking at the event with disdain while leaning on his stick. This standing figure is almost in the foreground and is carefully painted, particularly with the regard to his facial expression. The standing man is younger than the father but older than the prodigal son and like the father wears rich garments and a red cloak. The rest of the figures can barely be seen. The picture is painted with a palette knife, applying thick and broad layers of rough impasto on the canvas. Bob Haak has argued, also based on the odd signature on the work that the secondary figures are inferior in quality because Rembrandt never completed the painting and another artist worked on them. (Kuretsky 2007, endnote 3, p. 31) In

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what follows I shall attempt a philosophical reading of the painting that focuses on forgiveness and forgiving with the hope to illuminate it better and contribute to resolving some of the issues on which literature about this work is divided.

Painting and the Bible In his Return of the prodigal son, Rembrandt departs from accuracy in the biblical parable depiction since, according to the Bible, as soon as the father realizes the prodigal son’s return, he runs to meet him halfway to the house. Rembrandt depicts the father just outside his house. Christian Tümpel claims that the elder brother is most probably the standing figure to the right (Tümpel 2006, p. 275) but Susan Donahue Kuretsky identifies him with the young person in the back, looking at the viewer. (Kuretsky 2007, p. 23, p. 24) In any case, whoever, the elder brother is identified with, his inclusion in the picture is also a departure from the Bible as, according to it, he was in the fields at the time of the prodigal son’s arrival.

The set of secondary figures in the picture are given a lesser role and are depicted accordingly. A young man sits on a chair with legs crossed next to the standing figure and looks at the scene sympathetically. A woman who also appears to be following the event in the background is either a maid or the prodigal son’s mother. However, historians claim that it is part of the pictorial tradition to which Rembrandt belongs, especially in his mature period to have a number of secondary figures unspecified in the painting (Haeger 1986, p. 131)

A great number of sources are listed for Rembrandt’s painting of the prodigal son. First, the subject of the prodigal son had been very prominent in 16th and 17th century Netherlands as works by Lucas van Leyden, Peter Paul Rubens and others testify. Then, Kuretsky argues, a 1525 woodcut depiction of the prodigal son’s return by Maerten van Heemskerck presents similarities with Rembrandt’s work, as the latter possessed a collection of Heemskerck’s prints. (Kuretsky 2007, p. 25) It is probably under Heemskerck’s influence that Rembrandt ignored the Bible as well as Calvin’s commentary on Luke’s parable that places an emphasis on the fact that the father met the son at a distance from home, in order to demonstrate God’s readiness to meet and forgive sinners. Finally, Barbara Hager claims that the heated Reformation debates of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Netherlands, depart from the prodigal son’s parable in order to preach on the conditions of salvation, the importance of repentance, penance and confession and the necessity of church ritual, from both Catholic and Protestant points of view. Kuretsky briefly delineates the differences of these two religious points of view:

In the impassioned Reformation debates of the later sixteenth century over the conditions necessary for salvation, Catholics used the parable to argue for the importance of repentance and the church Sacrament of Penance, or Confession, while Protestants found it an equally vivid example of God’s mercy toward

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remorseful sinners, and therefore support for the doctrine of Justification through Faith without church rituals. (Kuretsky 2007, p. 25)

While these points are markedly different if not contrasting in the theological interpretation of the prodigal son parable, in painting, according to Haeger

Representations of biblical themes rarely reflect differences in interpretation. The burden of interpretation rests with the viewer and his knowledge of the subject’s significance as defined by his Church. (Haeger 1986, p. 138)

The unforgiving older brother However, religious disputes, which may have had their share of influence on Rembrandt, will not preoccupy us in this paper. Besides his well-documented biblical interests, Rembrandt must have had a personal interest in the parable of the prodigal son for it had repeatedly preoccupied him in the course of his career. His sudden success after moving to Amsterdam in 1632 was reflected in the famous 1636 oil painting Prodigal Son in the Tavern. Self Portrait with Saskia, now in Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, followed by an etching of the return of prodigal son in 1636, a drawing with pen and brush, around 1642, now in Teylers Museum, Haarlem and a pen drawing of the prodigal son among pigs in 1645, now in the British Museum. Considering the 1632 painting with Saskia in the tavern in association with his frequent return to the subject of the prodigal son indicates how Rembrandt cherished the biblical story, probably because he thought it bore a resemblance to his own biography.

What interests me here however is not the artist’s biography; I do not wish to show how the artist’s biography determines the work but the opposite, namely how the work can illuminate the artist’s biography, to the extent of course that biography is important. In Rembrandt’s painting, in particular, I am interested in the interpretation that Rembrandt gives to the biblical story of the prodigal son without hesitating to take a distance from the Bible. He specifically gives a great prominence in the composition not only to the two main protagonists, father and son but also to a third standing figure at the right hand side of the foreground, who occupies a substantial part of the picture, is carefully painted and causes a left placement of the main scene of father and son. I agree with Tümpel’s identification of the elder brother with the standing figure to the right for he clearly differs from the set of secondary figures emerging from the dark, he is carefully painted and he is placed in the foreground. He is given equal consideration as the two main protagonists of the picture, the father and the prodigal son, for almost the entire right half of the composition is devoted to him. Likewise, the light cast on his face and revealing his expression is the same in quality to the light revealing the father and son and we know that Rembrandt casted light only to the figures he considered essential for the meaning of the picture. He would not have been given such great consideration if Rembrandt had not considered that his role in the picture is somehow equally vital to the other two. His fine and elaborate costume,

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Dr Constantinos V. Proimos Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668)

his red cape, his hat and stick indicate someone close to the master of the house whom Rembrandt also presents with an ostentatious cape. It is clearly somebody who occupies the second order in rank of authority, after his father and as somebody who contributes to this authority, he shares it with him too. The unforgiving son’s expression indicates a disapproval for what unfolds in front of his eyes and perhaps anguish for the fact that he is put in a position to have to disagree with his father’s decision to unconditionally accept back his younger brother. If indeed, the standing figure belongs to the older brother who according to the Bible was at the fields the time of his brother’s arrival, we have a clear indication by the painter that he wishes to interpret the biblical story in a way that places emphasis on the older brother’s role. Thus the biblical story of the prodigal son’s forgiveness is becoming a lot more complex in Rembrandt’s depiction as it does not really involve two, the one who asks for forgiveness and the other who grants it, but rather three, the third person who denies forgiveness altogether or still judges his brother as unforgivable.

The older son was indeed far from impressed by his brother’s return and according to the Bible, he became angry because the father ordered the fattened calf slaughtered for a celebratory meal while he complained he was never given a goat to celebrate with his friends, despite having never disobeyed his father’s commandment. The older son clearly thinks in terms of law, merit and reward rather than in terms of love and forgiveness. For Luke himself as well as most theologians he is compared to the Pharisees. For he stays at home and obeys his father, maintaining all proper appearances but is, in fact, self-righteous and resentful, his behavior is uncharitable and he trusts excessively the efficacy of works. (Haeger 1986, p. 129) These are the grounds on which Luther as well as orthodox theologians criticized him. On the contrary, some Catholic theologians present the older brother as “an admirable individual and a model of good behavior.” (Haeger 1986, p. 129)

Forgiveness and the unforgivable Rembrandt chooses to present the older brother as maintaining a disapproving distance from his father’s warm welcome to his prodigal son. To his prodigal son’s confession of sin “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee” (Luke 15:18), the father responds eagerly and compassionately by running to the son, and by immediately forgiving him, restituting him to the position and standing he enjoyed before running away. The question is inevitable what does the father, by his very gesture, really hope to achieve to the extent that he hopes to achieve something. Arguably he wishes reconciliation with his son and would like to bring him back into the right track of life. However someone could very well argue that he grants his forgiveness without any expectation, without any terms of conditions. The second hypothesis seems to be most likely. For the father runs towards the son without any second thoughts, spontaneously without the slightest concern to check whether the prodigal son has changed his ways. Furthermore,

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Dr Constantinos V. Proimos Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668)

Rembrandt clearly portrays the father and the older son as holding opposite views. The older son is not ready to forgive his brother. He is as unforgiving as forgiving is his father.

The prodigal son does not offer the viewer any indications of his change or moral transformation. We see him in rugs but cannot fail to observe his expensive sword to which he steadfastly held all along his adventure away from home and which distinguishes him from common beggars of his time. Despite his worn shoes and clothes, he preferred his rugged state rather than selling the last item that made him part of the patriarchal authority as a son of a noble landlord and younger brother to the second in rank of the house. He apparently returned home out of despair and excessive poverty but his attitude bespeaks of a person not willing to change his ways or abandon his privileges. This small sword is indicative of the prodigal son’s steadfast interest in power and authority running counter to the collective interests of family and seniority which would legitimately ascribe him the status of the third in the patriarchal order. Moreover, the prodigal son’s confession of sin is not accompanied by an explicit quest for forgiveness.

The older brother is therefore right to view the whole episode with distrust. In his eyes, his father has committed an injustice and he is probably right for the father has indeed failed to honor him, his hard working son, and most probably because he takes him for granted. It is nonetheless very interesting that Rembrandt chooses to portray the story of the prodigal son in a manner that involves three persons and not just two. His depiction of the unconditionally forgiving father goes hand in hand with the unforgiving older brother and by pairing forgiveness and the unforgivable, he places the viewer in an obvious and tormenting moral dilemma. Nobody doubts about the sincerity of the father but all can also accept and understand the older brother’s views as equally justifiable. For what is to take place now, the full restitution of the younger son’s privileges and rank he once entertained before quitting the family, is completely unfair and morally inappropriate as Jean Hampton would argue (Jeffrey G. Murphy and Jean Hampton 1990, pp. 14-34). The older brother seems to understand this very well for no conditions were attached to his younger brother’s forgiveness, and no forgiveness was asked in the first place.

What Rembrandt seems to wish to articulate in his picture by siding the father’s forgiveness with the older brother’s unforgivable attitude, by essentially splitting the patriarchal authority into forgiveness and the unforgivable, is that forgiveness is being granted and ought to be granted without conditions. Either it is unconditional or it is not forgiveness. (Derrida 2001, p. 31, p. 32) Moreover, forgiveness never aims that which is forgivable.

If one were only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the church calls “venial sin,” then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there were something to forgive, it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm. From which comes the aporia, which can be described in its dry and implacable formality, without mercy: forgiveness

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Dr Constantinos V. Proimos Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668)

forgives only the unforgivable. One cannot, or should not, forgive: there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable. That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. (Derrida 2001, p. 32, p. 33)

In portraying forgiveness along with the unforgivable, Rembrandt seems to claim that forgiveness escapes all conditional logic of exchange, that it is not an economic transaction, that it is not “proportionate to the recognition of the fault, to repentance, to the transformation of the sinner who then explicitly asks for forgiveness” that it even lacks a meaning, in the sense that it cannot really be justified, that it does not amount to reconciliation and finally that it escapes judgment. (Derrida 2001, p. 35, p. 36, p. 41, p. 43) If the prodigal son had explicitly asked for forgiveness, he would have tried to prove that he is no longer the same person as that who abandoned the family home. But he did not. He remained the same person and Rembrandt wants us to keep this in mind and this is the reason why he paints him still clinging to his expensive sword. The prodigal son is not someone else who asks for the past to be forgotten. He is the same person that was found to be culpable; he is still the guilty person and in the eyes of his older brother probably someone capable of repeating his evil, without transformation, without amelioration and without repentance. Do we have reasons to believe that the old father might not share some of his older son’s concerns? Surely to an old and wise man as himself some of these thoughts must have crossed his mind. And yet, he does not hesitate for a moment. He forgives that one who is unforgivable and commits an act that neither his older son, nor us, the viewers, can entirely understand. For “pure and unconditional forgiveness, in order to have its own meaning, must have no ‘meaning’, no finality, even no intelligibility. It is a madness of the impossible.” (Derrida 2001, p. 45)

It is therefore appropriate that Rembrandt devotes almost one half of the picture to the older brother departing from biblical accuracy, if he indeed wishes to procure a reflection on forgiveness together with the unforgivable or in the horizon of the unforgivable. Father and the two sons are there to encourage us to think whether forgiveness is indeed unconditional as Derrida argues or if is inevitably linked with terms and conditions as Grisvold maintains (Grisvold 2007, p. 63, p. 64). We, spectators of the early twenty-first century live in a “culture of apology and forgiveness” characterized by a sheer pervasiveness of the language of apology and forgiveness and a proliferation of scenes of forgiveness in politics and in everyday ethics, on a global level. (Grisvold 2007, p. 63, p. 64) There are obvious benefits in this culture as well as inherent risks and one of these risks is trivializing the concept of forgiveness. It is against this trivialization that Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son works, attempting to restore the dignity and depth of forgiveness, for us, contemporary viewers.

Aesthetics in my view is relevant today only as philosophy of art, in its Hegelian denomination. Its task would be to illuminate the conceptual apparatus of pictures and artworks so that we, contemporary viewers may gain hermeneutic access to

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Dr Constantinos V. Proimos Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668)

them and value them in the same way as we need to value history and our past. I would even go so far as to say that aesthetics ought to be a branch of art history, provided that the latter has a proper epistemological status aligning it with its great forerunners, Hegel again, Wollflin, Riegl, Panofsky who did not distinguish themselves from philosophers. Needless to say, I agree with the complaints that we often hear about aestheticians, namely that we employ a self-referential language having increasingly less to do with living or past art. Some tendencies in aesthetics seem not to bother about art busing themselves with polishing their conceptual tools as if these were a-historical or irrelevant to artistic practice. Such conceptual tools however need to be historically relevant to art, otherwise they are useless, oversimplified, schematic, coarse and redundant, to use some expressions by John Hyman (Hyman 2006, p. 105). I think that the epistemological status of aesthetics is extremely important today and needs to be carefully scrutinized.

References - Derrida, J. 2001. Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Transl. Mark Doodley & Michael Hughes, London: Routledge. - Griswold, C. L. 2007. Forgiveness. A Philosophical Exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Haeger, B. 1986. “The prodigal son in sixteenth and seventeenth century Netherlandish art: depictions of the parable and the evolution of a Catholic image” Simiolus, 16, pp. 128-138. - Hampton J. & Murphy J. G. 1990. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Hyman, J. 2006. “Art History and Aesthetics” In: Art History Versus Aesthetics, ed. James Elkins, New York: Routledge. - Kuretsky, S. D. 2007. “The Return of the Prodigal Son and Rembrandt’s Creative Process” Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, XXVII, pp. 23-37. - Tümpel, C. 2006. Rembrandt. Images and Metaphors, London: Haus Publishing.

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Dr Constantinos V. Proimos Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668)

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Las técnicas pictóricas de la desencarnación en la obra de Mark Rothko

Antonio García López y Francisco J. Guillén Martínez* Universidad de Murcia

1. Introducción En la obra de Mark Rothko hay una deriva hacia una representación que trata de superar los límites físicos de la superficie pictórica. Es un lugar común el reconocer que sus cuadros no son eso: cuadros; o, más bien, que algo más que cuadros. El propio pintor pertenece a la larga tradición de artistas grafómanos, y es él mismo, el que desvela muchos de sus intereses religiosos y estéticos, y que nos acercan a la percepción del hecho religioso, en una época pos- teológica1.

La producción artística de nuestro autor nos revela, que bajo su preocupación filosófica por dotar de significado a una pintura a-icónica, late toda una técnica artística basada en los procedimientos pictóricos, sin cuyo proceder habría sido imposible alcanzar la materialización de su obra, y aún habría sido más difícil, por no decir imposible, el haber ampliado el campo de la experiencia del espectador. Nuestra tesis está emparentada con la idea de que la obra de Rothko -desde su fase inicial a su etapa final- se desarrolla en paralelo a como se ha ido configurando la conciencia religiosa a lo largo de la humanidad, especialmente en Occidente. Pero creemos que esta línea de investigación no se podría sostener si

* [email protected] [email protected]

1 La idea de insertar a Mark Rothko en la estela de artistas que elaboran la emoción religiosa del espectador, parte de la tesis de Amador Vega Esquerra, quien propone a Rothko como un artista a partir del cual deambular desde los procesos rituales de la religión en sus estadios más arcaicos, hasta el arrebato místico desvinculado ya de lo explícitamente religioso.

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no fuese por los indicios que se han revelado en su obra fallida de los paneles de Harvard, y cuyo proceso de restauración nos han servido para argumentar que si la obra central y final de la producción de Rothko llegan a entroncar con un paradigma estético-religioso, se debe a su peculiar forma de reinterpretar los procedimientos pictóricos clásicos, que durante cuatro siglos permanecieron inalterados. Esta peculiar aportación al canon de la imprimación de los soportes pictóricos es lo que, a nuestro entender, permitió a Rothko llevar a la pintura a los límites de la contemplación.

2. La pintura vacía de imágenes como un precursor y una vía estética A lo largo de la historia, los paradigmas de representación referidos a presencias cuya condición era la de estar ausentes, han acarreado –cuando menos- enconadas controversias que han dejado su huella a lo largo de la historia de la cultura occidental, especialmente durante la Edad Media; aunque esta dicotomía a la hora de representar lo que se consideraba secreto, misterioso o divino, traía aparejado un correlato vinculado a lo inefable, que acrisoló todo un corpus doctrinario de amplio espectro en todo el Antiguo Oriente. Esta ausencia de verbo llevaba aparejada una ausencia de imagen, un aniconismo, que, a su vez, planteaba una serie de conflictos que chocaban frontalmente con las configuraciones teológicas al uso, principalmente debido a que, si bien eran unas formas garantes de la revelación primigenia que toda religión administra, no podían resolver el conflicto de la imposibilidad de la manifestación sensible que cualquier estructura teológica brinda a la religión a la que ampara2. El binomio formado por lo inteligible y lo sensible fue desde el principio el frontispicio que configuró diferentes modelos de entender la realidad, según se viesen como elementos que se pudiesen conciliar, o no, a la argumentación teológica; debate del que no se libraban ni el arte, ni la filosofía ni la ciencia. Es más, en los propios relatos fundacionales, no resulta fácil saber en qué momento se empieza a distinguir entre la esfera divina y la humana3.

El cruce de tradiciones y de culturas –cada una con sus ciclos y con su propio modelo idiosincrásico- dificulta la comprensión de este evento y es necesario tomar un canon unificador como lo fue el bíblico en relación con los modelos culturales del Oriente de la Edad Antigua4. Independientemente del acerbo poético, filosófico o artístico, hay un dato espectacular en lo que atañe al tema de la representación divina, ya que puede o no tener un veto según se trate de una representación plástica o lingüística - a las que se les permitía licencias literarias de carácter antropomórfico- mientras que a las representaciones de orden material se les sometió a unos estándares que han dado lugar a una vasta tradición, y a unos no menos fértiles márgenes de creación.

2 Taylor, 2011, pág. 27. 3 Zambrano, 1991, pág. 30. 4 Campbell, 1992, pág. 49.

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Este podría ser el primer estadio de esta espiral levógira que es la representación a-icónica, y que no volvió a ser foco de atención hasta el Oriente medieval del Bizancio de finales del primer milenio de nuestra era, cuando de nuevo, los guardianes de la ortodoxia se dieron de bruces con las corrientes iconoclastas, que pusieron en crisis los programas iconográficos del momento, precisamente por su fuerte carga teológica y el fuerte poder que ejercían más allá de lo religioso, en lo político, lo científico, lo social y lo artístico5. Este nuevo giro, puso en evidencia y confrontó a los iconófilos y a los iconoclastas, sacando a relucir la koiné con la que tenían tramado sus discursos, entreverados de estructuras hebraizantes, formas del pensamiento heleno, nuevas aportaciones islámicas, retazos gnósticos, dualismos arcaicos, etc. Y, donde de nuevo, la fuerza de las imágenes frente a una inerte teología, sacó de escena la vida de las imágenes a- icónicas y su capacidad de emocionar hermenéuticamente, y por lo tanto de dar respuesta a lo secreto, entendido como elemento configurador de lo religioso.

En el siglo VI es el propio papa Gregorio Magno, el que interviene en esta polémica, a la que le da un nuevo giro, al calificar a las artes plásticas como el modelo hermenéutico para aquellos que no saben leer. El debate ya no es entre defensores y detractores de la imagen icónica, sino el servicio de la imagen en general al modelo literario; siendo las metáforas a cerca de lo inefable las que recalan en los aspectos técnicos de la pintura, para hacer a ésta más luminosa y etérea, mientras que los repertorios iconográficos del arte se asentaban en la fácil lectura de su imaginería. El aspecto técnico del arte al que ya nos hemos referido anteriormente no fue un asunto trivial. Los teólogos del momento debatieron intensamente a cerca de ello, encontrado similitudes ventajosas entre algunas cuestiones tectónicas de las iglesias susceptibles de ser tenidas en cuenta como parte de la representación pictórica. El caso más debatido fue el de las ventanas del ábside, trasunto de la deidad, así como la luz que de ellas emanaba. La ventana, fue una de las constantes entre la dialéctica entre espíritu y materia que hubo en aquella época, y que dieron una amplia combinatoria entre lo real y lo simbólico, así como a un disfrute de los valores materiales, tanto de los naturales como de las obras de arte.

Es entre los siglos X y XIV, cuando se empieza a gestar la idea de subjetividad, a partir de los modelos de la mística femenina –representados por Hildegard von Bingen- y de la escuela teológica alemana, donde destaca el Maestro Eckhart, cuya famosa sentencia “ruego a Dios que me vacíe de Dios” es un claro exponente crítico a la idolatría imperante de la época. Los sermones que los místicos germanos escribían para poner en tela de juicio el apego a las formas plásticas de la religión, tenían una peculiar disposición retórica: en los pasajes de amonestación de estas figuras literarias, se recurría a una solución entre pares irreconciliables que permitía ofrecer una solución al problema planteado, de tal manera que produjeron un discurso crítico que aunaba tradición y renovación; como dos partes inseparables de la vida espiritual a cerca de la cual se estaba disertando; y todo ello, con una lógica interna prácticamente irrefutable. Digamos que se fue en

5 Tomás-Ferré, 1991.

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esta época cuando se normalizó una vía de áccesis positiva, y una negativa para comprender lo religioso, y que se insertaba nada menos que en una tradición abierta en el siglo VI , con el “Corpus Dionysacum”, conjunto de textos en los que ya se planteaba un sistema dual para comprender la divinidad: una forma afirmativa, por la que atribuir propiedades precisas a la divinidad; y una forma negativa, la cual reconocía la imposibilidad de alcanzar un conocimiento objetivo y conceptual de Dios.

Si en la época moderna se pudo llegar a formular una conciencia subjetiva como la que definieron las filosofías racionalistas, fue gracias a este substrato argumentativo, que pervivió en la tradición reflexiva, y que dio también un modelo particular en el Romanticismo alemán y en las filosofías nihilistas del desencanto, como nos ha hecho ver el proyecto iconológico que desarrolló Warburg para poder desarrollar una hermenéutica de la imagen, más allá del poder hegemónico de las doctrinas.

Este modelo dionisíaco es el que nos ha permitido rastrear las formas plásticas de la subjetividad a lo largo de la historia del arte. Porque reconocer los frutos de aquella vía negativa de pensamiento en el arte a partir del siglo XX es de obligado reconocimiento; pero reconectarla con su propia tradición, es algo más complejo. En efecto, la ruptura con el lenguaje de las imágenes que llevaron a cabo las vanguardias europeas, comienza con Cézanne, pero el primer giro de calado lo produce Kandisky, no sólo al disolver las formas de la realidad en una abstracción pictórica, sino también al depositar en dicha abstracción, el legado espiritual anterior; conectado con las corrientes teosóficas de Rudolf Steiner. Este proceso de descomposición de la imagen toma un sesgo fenomenológico con el fauvismo y el vorticismo; y alcanza todo su apogeo semántico con el cubismo. Y no deja de sorprender como estos movimientos artísticos han puesto de manifiesto por primera vez de una forma elocuente, el orden interno de figuración-desfiguración, característicos de la estructura del cristianismo y de su fase secularizadora; así como la capacidad de este mismo arte para hacer soportable la tensión entre lo sagrado y lo profano; lo visible y lo invisible, y ponerlos al servicio de un proyecto de más amplio espectro, desplazando así los contenidos de orden teológico.

3. Mark Rothko, el pintor de cuadros en permanente epifanía Si ha largo de la tradición artística, nos encontramos con una nutrida serie de artistas que han creado diferentes gramáticas visuales entorno a la tensión entre la configuración de lo humano y lo divino, en Rothtko se da un giro definitivo en la apropiación emocional del arte como vía de acceso a lo oculto, y al parangón que esto implica con lo intrínsecamente religioso. Este aspecto que emana de su obra en su etapa de madurez, entraña una cuestión de procedimiento técnico que hemos encontrado en una pieza fallida suya, y la cual le hemos tomado el pulso para constatar si en su obra se produce un intento de dar respuesta a la idea de lo

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secreto -sin destruirlo en el intento de mostrarlo- del mismo modo en que los humanos han desarrollado un modelo de acercamiento a lo misterioso y a su comprensión, a través de la configuración de cualquier religión.

Desde luego, la obra inicial de Rothko no nos da esta dimensión. Ocupado en tareas de aproximación a la pintura, sus temas primeros son de acercamiento a la comprensión de la realidad a través del paisaje, el bodegón y el retrato; aunque muy pronto da un cambio donde une los tres géneros en una suerte de pintura de entorno -en su serie suburbana-donde los sujetos pasan a significar como material inerte, lo inanimado cobra condición subjetiva, y el espacio adquiere ambas cualidades a cambio de despojarse de la condición de paisaje. Son obras influenciadas por un surrealismo desafectado del psicoanálisis. De corte figurativo, comienza a notarse la tensión de los colores a los que él llama “actores”. Aunque, francamente, sintió que aquello no le conducía a ninguna parte. La dificultad en encontrar unas formas que le tomasen el relevo al arte europeo, los efectos de la guerra o el propio rigor moral del arte, que empezó a incorporar el abandono artístico como parte de la experiencia creativa, le llevó a un año sabático plagado de lecturas filosóficas y literarias.

Fruto de esta inmersión en los textos de Esquilo, Nietzsche y Kierkegaard, comenzó a interesarse por la condición humana, apercibiéndose que la iconografía pictórica en torno a los temas de su interés estaban francamente desgastados. Quería trabajar con unos materiales tan elementales como la tela y los pinceles, pero lo cotidiano de su entorno iba demasiado deprisa, y, aunque aparentemente la fotografía era el medio adecuado para esos tiempos, pronto se dio cuenta que el instante fotográfico hacía, si cabe, más difícil de sondar el misterio de las verdades más profundas. Fue el primer iconoclasta contemporáneo en sentido estricto. De hecho, opinaba que, solamente un lenguaje visual completamente nuevo podría despertarnos del estupor moral. El gusto por lo trágico se concretó en una serie de telas, a modo de frisos, donde representó temas mistéricos de índole órfica.

Posteriormente surgieron una serie de obras de carácter biomórfico, realizadas con una grafía automática y una textura cada vez más ligera, y mientras los pintores de acción alcanzaron una fórmula para machacar el ideal de vida americano, Rothko se centró en la idea de volver a humanizar el mundo mediante la crítica al carácter narcotizante de la vida cotidiana. A partir de 1945, su producción se licúa en una serie de formas elementales plagadas de luz y resplandor. El encuentro en 1949 con la “Habitación roja” de Matisse fue providencial. Durante tiempo fue un espectador incondicional de dicha obra, y al final extrajo la lección: Matisse había reinventado el espacio pictórico mediante un recurso simplificador: pintar todas las superficies de la estancia de un hipnótico mismo color, que lejos de restar dramatismo a la composición, lo había potenciado. Este estado de pre-disolución de los objetos le entendió Rothko como una posibilidad de recrear su concepción misteriosa de la naturaleza humana sin necesidad de representar el cuerpo humano ni su fragmentación: “No

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era que hubiera eliminado la figura […] sino los símbolos de las figuras, y a su vez las formas de los lienzos posteriores eran sustitutos de las figuras”. No obstante, se enfrentó con un importante problema compositivo que le ponía en evidencia, ya que era muy difícil reducir la tensión entre libertad creativa y aleatoriedad. La solución vino al integrar controladamente ambos elementos dicotómicos; con lo que vino a fraguar la primera sintaxis entre las formas emergentes y los límites del cuadro. Sin duda había encontrado una forma a-icónica a la vez que narrativa con la cual pudiese crear la emoción material que desde hacía tiempo perseguía. De nuevo aquí se produce una nueva concomitancia con los procesos de elaboración de la religión, al subsumir los pares de opuestos a una relación de orden mayor.

Técnicamente estaríamos ante su etapa de madurez, pero Rothko tenía una necesidad imperante de comunicarse y parte de su pintura gira en controlados movimientos para que el público se vinculara mentalmente a él. Probablemente sea el artista que más haya elaborado este encuentro, matrimonio entre mentes, como él lo llamaba. De ahí que para él, la pintura continuara otra fase creativa tras la última pincelada: era la fase de la recepción, que ya había iniciado selectivamente al decantarse por el formato vertical como medio para controlar las multitudes de las salas de exposiciones. El segundo nivel de captación lo establecía con una luz de sala muy tenue, evitando lo que él llamaba iluminación romántica, para que pudiera salir al encuentro del espectador el dramatismo de la luz interior de sus cuadros. La disposición en la pared era otro factor que también cuidaba personalmente, instalando sus cuadros sin marcos lo más próximos al suelo, recreando la disposición en fueron creados en su estudio, en un continuo devenir. No en vano el se consideraba un pintor de muros, y aunque no pintaba murales, sus piezas tenían unas dimensiones que hacían que la pintura deviniese en espacio. Probablemente, cuando se refería a sus cuadros como “cosas”, estaba tematizan do la posibilidad de expresar las emociones a través de la profundidad de un espacio pictórico distorsionado por el tamaño y la reverberación del color. Era una constante suya el montar las piezas de mayor formato en las salas más pequeña de la galería, creando una especie de intimidad a través de la monumentalidad: hablaba de sus cuadros como “retratos del alma”, ventanas abiertas a un interior imperceptible visualmente. Una fenomenología como la que recreaban los pintores-místicos al colocar directamente las cosas frente al conocimiento.

En el fondo, no hay que olvidar que lo que estaba buscando era el crear un sitio de mediación, como lo eran para él la Villa de los Misterios, de Pompeya, y su mezcla entre el hedonismo y lo sublime; las estancias de San Marco de Fra Angélico, con esa luminosidad acumulativa, o la Biblioteca laurenziana de Miguel Ángel, con esas ventanas ciegas, que captaban la luz en vez de emitirla. Sus últimos diez años de su vida los dedicó en parte a materializar esa idea de una capilla para su obra. Llegó a diseñar un proyecto de diferentes capillas a lo largo del territorio nacional para solazar al viajero. La idea se llegó a proyectar para un lujoso restaurante de Nueva York, pero el artista renunció al final.

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La oportunidad le llegó de mano de la Universidad de Harvard, en 1962, donde se instaló la única sala “Rothko” montada personalmente por él. La colección donada a esta institución, constaba de cinco lienzos recreando la Pasión de Cristo entre el viernes santo y el domingo de resurrección, donde predominaron los colores rosa oscuro y carmín; aunque en menos de cinco años ya empezaron a decolorarse. La razón es que en la elaboración del carmín la llevó a cabo con una mezcla de ultramar sintético, azul cerúleo, blanco de titanio y una mezcla de dos modernos colores orgánicos: rojo de naftol y rojo de nitol. Casualmente, el primero, a pesar de ser un pigmento azo ha perdurado, mientras que el rojo de nitol, sensible a la luz, ha virado los tonos rojizos a un azul claro.

Marjorie B. Cohn , testigo de excepción durante el primer montaje en 1963, el desmontaje en 1979, su desembalaje en 1987 y su posterior restauración y primera exhibición en 2001, nos apercibe de la complejidad de esta pieza, donde posiblemente se acrisolan muchos de las incógnitas que todavía quedan por desvelar en torno a la obra de Rothko. De este fracaso técnico del que el artista llegó a tener noticias, hemos sacado un material que nos plantea la hipótesis de que Rothko fue un artista que buscó explicar los misterios insondables de la vida hasta el punto de poner en riesgo su reputación. Rothko fue un experimentador moderado, lector de los tratados de pintura de Cenini y de Doerner. El motivo por el que le llevara a experimentar con los medios de imprimación del lienzo todavía nos es desconocido, pero está claro que en ese aspecto es un innovador: utilizó la gelatina de cola de conejo para hacer exudar el color, cuando técnicamente está indicado para proteger el pergamino y la tela delas putrefacciones que producen los vehículos del pigmento, como son los aceites. Este procedimiento está en la estructura interna de sus imágenes, que ya no están creadas a base de veladuras como en los cuadros de sus admirados Rembrandt y Turner, sino que se filtran con cierto grado de opacidad a través de dicha gelatina. Además utiliza el pigmento con una base de temple al huevo, un procedimiento pictórico recomendado en el texto de Doerner para imitar los trazos al fresco de los primitivos italianos y que fue Otto Dix el primero en experimentar, pero en superficies pequeñas, más fáciles de controlar. Esta manera de trabajar permitía laminar el color y controlar su dispersión de una manera más atmosférica que lo hacía Morris Louis, y por supuesto, muy alejado del empastamiento de Barnett Newman –que lo acusó de plagiar sus formas.

Si en la elaboración de los rojos intensos que ideó para los paneles de Harvard, del cual nos queda constancia por alguno de los bocetos previos que realizó en acrílico sobre papel, hubo un pigmento fácilmente oxidable, no nos resulta del todo plausible que fuera al desinterés de Rothko por la composición química de los colores, como se asevera. Bien es cierto que él decía que el color no era lo importante, pero no era menos verdad que en su búsqueda estuviera el encontrar una manera de suplir el cromatismo por una escala de valores tonales de baja saturación que pudiesen emocionar de la misma manera que lo hiciera el color más intenso. No hay que olvidar que estaba muy interesado en hacer visible lo invisible; buscaba una materialidad de lo inaprensible por medios ópticos.

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También nos resulta extraño que sea sólo esta obra la que haya sido pasto de la oxidación, y que posteriormente iniciara una etapa pictórica alejada de la luminosidad de los colores por los que fue conocido, y que bien se cataloga como un periodo de madurez; o como una etapa de marcado sesgo anímico, o, también como una etapa de distorsión propiciada por una incapacidad comunicativa. Para nosotros, en cambio, esta obra bien podría ser a partir de la cual pudo haber experimentado el silencio a partir de la pérdida del color.

Volviendo a la experiencia que nos comunica Marjorie B.Cohn, en relación al estado lamentable en que se encontraban los murales de Harvard a finales de los años ochenta y su posterior conservación que no permitió la reintegración cromática, comenta la restauradora que tras su exhibición en 2001 y con una apariencia totalmente diferente a su etapa original, no dejó de sorprenderle la vida que había tomado la obra. Este dato es muy curioso porque ella vivió la meticulosidad con la que Rothko instaló esta pieza; y ahora, en unas condiciones de exhibición totalmente diferentes, sin respetar la disposición ni las condiciones de luz ni la altura, todavía le parecía que esta obra había tomado un rumbo nuevo, una mutación que ponía de manifiesto el interés de Rothko por crear una obra que pudiese explicar los avatares de la condición humana; y que como ésta, pudiera estar en permanente manifestación.

Este error de cálculo es el que nos ha interesado a nosotros, porque demuestra que el procedimiento pictórico utilizado a lo largo de sus etapas de esplendor y madurez ha sido el auténtico vehículo de lo que Martin Seel llama estética del aparecer. Rothko alteró el procedimiento pictórico de la imprimación del lienzo, usada desde el Renacimiento y establecida canónicamente por Cenini, y que consistía en dar al lienzo crudo un aparejo caliente de cola de conejo –obtenido a partir de ligamentos y fibras animales- con el fin de preservarlo de las putrefacciones de las grasas de la pintura al óleo. Posteriormente, se imprimaba sobre esta capa, otras películas - a base de creta, yeso o caseína- para dar mayor luminosidad al pigmento que se vendría a depositar posteriormente y que adquiere una tonalidad parecida al fresco. Este sistema de capas garantizaba la estabilidad de la tela y la luminosidad del color. La técnica rothkiana vino a alterar este canon por otro, consistente en depositar capas de cola de conejo caliente con pigmento diluido. Así pues, Rothko produjo una técnica que vitrificaba el pigmento; lo que posibilitó eliminar la huella de la pincelada, al disolver el color y suspenderlo entre la materia traslúcida de la cola; hecho que le permitió investigar el peculiar impacto sobre la visión humana que produce esa forma atmosférica de suspender el pigmento, muy alejado de las veladuras de sus admirados Rembrandt y Turner, y mucho más próximo a la luminosidad de los frescos pompeyanos y a las pinturas de Fray Angélico. En los paneles de Harvard también se puede observar como esa pérdida del cromatismo no acaba por destruir el sentido de sus imágenes, abriéndolas a otros ámbitos de la percepción. Este hecho es muy notable, porque nos hace constatar que Rothko no era un pintor interesado únicamente por el color, sino que su preocupación fundamental era la luz; y, en este sentido, hay que advertir, que la merma cromática abre este

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político a un paradigma de valores que nos permite interpretar con mayor rigor la nocturnidad de su posterior obra monocroma.

4. Conclusiones La principal intención de este trabajo es la de referenciar a Mark Rothko como a un pintor iconoclasta, siendo para nosotros secundaria la categoría de pintor abstracto, si queremos tener su apuesta pictórica como un proceso de búsqueda y a la vez como un parangón con los procesos religiosos y su evolución. Si únicamente valoramos el periodo abstracto de este pintor, estamos cercenando la valía de una obra que solo se puede entender en profundidad teniendo en cuenta toda su producción: es decir; la clasificación de pintor abstracto infravalora el sentido de su obra, y lo reduce a estándares de originalidad basados en lo reconocible.

Consideramos que los procedimientos pictóricos que él utiliza son una valiosa aportación al canon pictórico y como tal deben incorporarse a la enseñanza de esta disciplina.

No menos importante, es la capacidad para hacer madurar el mundo de la imagen pictórica, emancipando a la pintura de los efluvios narrativos que arrastraba desde la prehistoria – en términos antropológicos-. Y como consecuencia de todo ello, podríamos afirmar que Rothko ha sido capaz de generar imágenes exentas de iconicidad, a la par que ha entroncado con el arte religioso, desde un punto de vista a-teológico; lo que ha posibilitado que el conjunto de su obra aporte una nueva hermenéutica a la experiencia estética.

Referencias - Alarcó, P, Sedano, U. 2008. Otto Dix. Retrato de Hugo Erfurt. CCP21. Madrid: Museo Thyssen (cat.) - Ball, P. 2001. La invención del color. Madrid: Turner/ Fondo de Cultura Económica. - Bovey, A. 2002. Monstruos y grutescos en los manuscritos medievales. Madrid: A y N ediciones. - Braque, G. 2001. El día y la noche. Barcelona: El Acantilado. - Campbell, J. 1992. Las máscaras de Dios. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. - Didi-Huberman, G. 2007. La pintura encarnada. Valencia: Editorial Pre- textos. - Doerner, Max. 1998. Los materiales de la pintura y su empleo en el arte. Barcelona: Editorial Reverté. - Gómez de Liaño, I. 1998. El círculo de la sabiduría. Madrid: Editorial Siruela. - Harpur, P. 2006. El fuego secreto de los filósofos. Gerona: Atalanta.

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- Rothko, M. 2004. La realidad del artista. Filosofías del arte. Madrid; Editorial Síntesis. - Rothko, M. 2007. Escritos sobre arte (1934-1969). Barcelona: Editorial Paidós. - Schama, S. 2006. El poder del arte. Barcelona: Crítica. - Seel, M. 2010. Estética del aparecer. Buenos Aires/ Madrid: Katz editores. - Taylor, M. 2011. Después de Dios. Madrid: Editorial Siruela. - Vega, A. 2010. Sacrificio y creación en la pintura de Rothko. Madrid: Editorial Siruela. - Zambrano, M. 1991. El hombre y lo divino. Madrid: Editorial Siruela.

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La couleur comme passion chez Paul Klee

Sondès Hébiri* Université de Tunis - A.T.E.P.

Il n’y que les grandes passions qui puissent élever l’âme aux grandes choses.

Diderot

La passion est toute l’humanité.

Balzac

Quelle identité peut-on délimiter pour l’être du nommé Paul Klee? Etait-il un artiste plasticien né, ou est-ce qu’il a bénéficié, tel un Ghazali, d’une certaine lumière? Est-ce une lumière mystique ou une lumière naturelle venue d’un ailleurs oriental que l’occident ignore ? Paul Klee est-il un européen ou un « petit arabe »?

À la lumière de la métamorphose vécue passionnellement par Klee, suivie d’une fondation glorieuse d’une théorie des couleurs, notre propos est de penser la question de l’affect, de la passion et de la sensation dans son rapport avec l’action, voire avec l’acte créateur.

Tout notre effort sera focalisé sur le souci de démontrer que la découverte révolutionnaire kléenne en Tunisie, fut non seulement l’aboutissement d’un travail laborieux et réfléchi, mais essentiellement une configuration de son processus créateur dialectisant le passionnel et l’actionnel, l’inconscient et le conscient, s’épanouissant en un style et en une personnalité proprement kléennes : la couleur se vit comme passion.

* [email protected]

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Lors d’une tentative frustrée et frustrante par Wittgenstein, devant un décevant essai pour définir la couleur, nous nous trouvons, face à face, devant ceux qui vivent la couleur comme passion.

Wittgenstein constate que sa : « capacité à expliquer la signification des mots "rouge", "bleu", "noir" et "blanc" ne va pas plus loin»! (Wittgenstein 1983, p. 18). Parallèlement, on trouve que Paul Klee est prédisposé à aller loin, même très loin, pourvu qu’il devienne « Tout Klee ». Il a pris la peine de voyager, de Berne à Tunis-Carthage, juste, à la recherche de soi-même, comme un Autre1. C’est par le billet de la découverte de la couleur, que Klee se découvre soi-même, comme peintre et comme un être au monde.

Certes, la couleur est l’un des concepts les plus malaisés à définir : préoccupant l’homme de science, le philosophe et l’artiste, dont les tonalités et les objectifs sont très différents. Si l’homme de science ne s’intéresse à la couleur que pour satisfaire les exigences de ses recherches positivistes, le philosophe, quand à lui emploie le concept « couleur », soit par métaphore soit par analogie. Dans le meilleur des cas, il devient l’émule du poète et dans le pire castrait, incapable de franchir même un pas en avant.

En revanche, Paul Klee, le peintre coloriste, décide d’apporter son corps-animé, pour vivre une expérience pathétique et pour s’aventurer charnellement, dans le monde de la couleur : un monde qui l’interpelle!

Dans quel sens peut-on affirmer que seul l’artiste infère de son esprit, de son corps et de son cœur, puisque son commerce avec la couleur est un acte de vénération et de culte sacré?

Pourquoi choisissons-nous un artiste moderne tel un Paul Klee ? Par quel moyen la philosophie moderne a-elle pu exhausser la notion de passion de toute connotation négative? Klee était-il un artiste- coloriste né, ou est-ce qu’il a bénéficié, tel un Ghazeli, d’une lumière mystique ou d’une lumière naturelle venue d’un ailleurs oriental que l’occident ignore?

Dans quelle mesure, la couleur, à elle seule, peut-elle être un vecteur d’affect, de passion, d’émotion et de fusion avec l’acte créateur ; pris dans sa dimension spatio-temporelle?

Tout notre effort se focalise sur la question de l "affect" dans son rapport avec le "percept" et le "concept"2, démontrant que la découverte révolutionnaire de la lumière dans la matrice de la couleur (en Tunisie), fut non seulement l’aboutissement d’un travail long et réfléchi, dont l’émotionnel, le passionnel et le raisonnable sont rongés du côté du « conatus », mais essentiellement pour démontrer que cette expérience fut une configuration de son processus créateur,

1 Klee, du 05 au 22 Avril 1914, a entrepris un voyage à Tunis et à Kairouan, accompagné de Louis Moilliet et d’August Mache . 2 Deleuze et Guattari 1993, précisément au chapitre 7. Percept, affect et concept, pp. 182-224.

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dialectisant le passionnel/actionnel, l’inconscient/conscient, et l’invisible/visible, s’épanouissant en un style et en une personnalité proprement kléennes.

Pour résoudre notre problématique, nous proposons deux axes de recherche, dont le premier n’est qu’une prémisse pour déduire le second.

Le premier axe, déflagre, exp(l)ose des questions cruciales, inédites, non réfléchies par les commentateurs de Klee, que nous essayerons de formuler comme suit: sans ce voyage, Klee aurait-il eu la confirmation de sa vocation de peintre et de coloriste?

Aurions-nous le droit de parler de la couleur comme action et comme passion impulsive, s’il été resté en Europe? Est-il un pur hasard, que Klee n’arrive à établir sa théorie de la couleur qu’après son hôte en Tunisie.

La deuxième question (objet du deuxième axe) se formule comme suit : comment peut-on comprendre l’expérience artistique de Paul Klee comme recentrement de son projet sur l’examen de sa sensibilité créatrice de la couleur et de son être au monde?

Le premier axe: Les Temps modernes et la passion d’un « Petit Arabe »

Tout d’abord, il, faut attendre les Temps modernes et précisément Spinoza pour que la notion de la passion acquière sémantiquement, une dénotation positive. Le mérite de Spinoza consiste dans le fait qu’il a réussi l’organisation et la conceptualisation du sémantisme du "Pathos"3. Dés lors, les passions sont anthropodicées et neutralisés : elles affectent simultanément le corps et l’âme. Klee en tire profit. Sa passion est dorénavant « une puissance » créatrice une « essence même du mode fini ». L’être de puis Spinoza, est devenu un être de désir infini.

A cet égard, ce n’est plus un manque de raisonnabilité ou de rationalité logique qu’on reproche aux passions, mais plutôt un manque d’actualisation. L’homme de passion n’est pas nécessairement un homme d’action, le passionnel est toujours virtuellement passible d’une non manifestation. In contrario, "le génie de passion", tel Paul Klee, est capable de modéliser, d’assumer ses virtualités et de

3 Etymologiquement, "pathos", du grec. Le Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophes (pp. 902- 906) renvoie au latin qui veut dire, "perturbation" et au français "passion ou émotion": « avec Cicéron devrait se changer en "morbus" ou maladie » [qui voulait dire] « restituerait le sens de ce qui vous tombe dessus et vous met dans un état malsain de souffrance» ; ce n’est qu’avec Augustin que la notion "affectus" apparait : « parce que c’est neutre ».

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transgresser ses tendances en actes. Klee, génialement enthousiasmé dirige son « conatus »4 stricto sensu vers la Tunisie.

Par nécessité logico-artistique ou par nécessité intérieure, intentionnelle et intuitive, Klee ne suit que « les battements de son cœur », il se trouve in concreto, dans sa terre matricielle la Tunisie!

Or, ce qui est le plus connu et le plus répandu, c’est que Klee a entrepris un voyage en Tunisie. Voyage qui est devenue célèbre dans l’histoire de l’art et l’histoire du colorisme. En revanche, et ce qui est le moins connu, l’inédit, l’oublié dans une chambre noire, est désormais éclairé par un des commentateurs de Klee. Dès la première page de son livre, G.D. Lazzaro dénomme Klee par une périphrase expressive, « Le petit Arabe ».

Loin d’établir une autobiographie de Klee, une nécessité méthodologique s’impose: « Fils d’une suisse et d’un allemand […]. Pourtant de lointaines interférences méditerranéennes l’avaient intellectuellement et spirituellement marqué. Ses photographies d’enfant nous montrent curieusement le visage sensuel et secret d’un petit arabe. Avec l’âge, il sera de plus en plus attiré par la méditerranée […] les lèvres gonflées, les yeux sombres et pénétrants sont d’un africain. Cette ascendance lointaine de la famille de sa mère (aurait eu des alliances en Afrique du Nord). On peut facilement supposer à partir de la dernière œuvre de l’artiste qui semble né des sortilèges de l’Afrique, que loin d’être insensible à une telle origine, il se plut à en nourrir son rêve. » (San Lazzaro 1975, pp. 1-2).

Si nous décryptons cette déclaration, nous comprenons mieux l’intérêt de son voyage. Loin d’être un simple « voyage d’étude »5 ou un voyage touristique, c’est plutôt une réponse authentique, et effervescente à un appel « de la lune du sud, fréquemment dessinée par Klee, jusqu’a l’incarnation et l’identification. Klee n’a-t- il pas dit : « Je suis la lune du sud, à son lever » (Klee 1956, p. 274).

La célébrité de ce voyage remonte à ce que Klee arrive pertinemment à découvrir le secret de la couleur. Il renverse l’équation sur laquelle repose la théorie de la couleur en tournant ses asseoirs ; à savoir, l’objet perçu, l’œil percevant et la lumière éclaircissante.

Qu’arrive-t- il au juste à découvrir?

Klee arrive à prouver que la couleur est une qualité, ensuite une densité, aboutissant à la valeur : une valeur non seulement chromatique, mais essentiellement une valeur lumineuse. (Klee 1977, p. 20).

4 Spinoza (Spinoza 1954, p. 26) définit le conatus comme « l’effort par lequel chaque chose s’efforce de persévérer dans son être, n’est rien en dehors de l’essence actuelle de cette chose ». 5 Klee (1956, p. 265), Avril 1914, intitule son voyage comme : "Voyage d’Etude en Tunisie".

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La couleur est une lumière; elle réside au sein des choses et non en leur extériorité!

Certes, la théorie de la couleur remonte aux impressionnistes, tels que Robert Delaunay6 et Paul Cézanne, et aux paysagistes tels que Monet et Manet. C’est à l’époque de l’impressionnisme qu’on découvre la force génétique des couleurs. Selon eux, la couleur est une énergie captée à même l’atmosphère, vibrant le tableau. La « Montagne de la Sainte Victoire », de Cézanne, reste un prototype, reflétant l’intentionnalité artistique, rêvant de saisir la profondeur de « la choséité de la chose », dont la « différence et la répétition » restent pour toujours enrichissantes.

Dans la même perspective, Klee poursuit profondément ses recherches. Par le billet de son clavier chromatique, il cherche la profondeur, en creusant sa propre profondeur. Klee utilise des techniques, des matériaux et des produits chimiques qui ne se livrent que dans le laboratoire-atelier de Paul Klee. Maitre de ses techniques et de ses passions productrices du sens -sens de l’art et sens de l’art de la vie- Klee, l’artiste-philosophe, est capable d’exprimer le conscient pour la recherche de son équivalent fantasmatique- inconscient. L’inconscient qui concerne notre propos est " la psychologie de la forme" qui est également la psychologie de son imagination créatrice.7

Appuyer, guider et modeler par l’intuition et par le rêve, Klee devient très proches de C. G. Jung, concevant l’inconscient comme une disposition psychique individuelle, mais qui devienne collective « de nature créative » (Jung 1985, p. 192). Désormais, elle est destinée pour un "peuple à venir", paradoxalement manquant.8

De ce fait, le conscient et l’inconscient, le rêve et la réalité, l’imagination et la raison , le regard et la vision-visionnaire, sont tous des couples conceptuels qui s’entrelacent et s’entremêlent pour amener Klee à convertir "la perception" en "percept", l’"affection" en "affect" et l’"affect" en une production artistique . Toujours en "génèse", abstraite, réside au "delà de toute re-présentation".

En effet, la persévérance de Klee dans le monde des couleurs transcende son ‘’je ‘’ qui peint en un ‘’soi’’ équivalent à « un égale infinie »9.

6 Klee, dans Der Sturm en 1912, traduit l’un des articles de Robert Delaunay sur la couleur. Il le considère : « Un des meilleurs esprits se l’époque » (Klee 1977, p. 12). 7 Klee connait la Gestaltthéorie. Il considère: « La forme au sens vivant (Gestalt) est une forme, avec des fonctions sous-jacentes: en quelques sortes, une fonction de fonctions » (Klee 1977, p 58). 8 D’après notre lecture de Klee, nous comprenons que son art est destiné essentiellement à un peuple à venir. Désormais manquant à l’instant du Klee au Bauhaus. Disant :" il nous manque cette dernière force. Faute d’un peuple qui nous porte ", p 33. 9 Klee : Egal infini, 1932, Moma, New-York, 1932, est l’un des tableaux d’huile sur toile montée sur bois.

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D’une identité complexe et d’une ipséité – Idem, Klee est à la fois l’européen- arabe, croit à la spiritualité et à "la nécessité intérieure", chère à Kandinsky mais aussi à Klee10. Ces deux maitres de l’art moderne, amis et voisins, sont fascinés par les écrits de Goethe11 et de son projet de la « psychologie de la vision ». Cette influence permet à tous les deux une approbation et une application de la « Gestaltthéorie » à l’intérieur de Bauhaus. : « Là se confirme l’intime ana dialectique – la couleur comme sensation (mystique), la couleur comme substance production […]. Couleur/perception, Couleur/matière que nous constatons dans le laboratoire commun de Kandinsky et Klee »12. Grâce à son esprit dialectique mais aussi synthétique, Klee approfondit les grandes acquisitions des théoriciens de la couleur. Théoricien de la forme comme formation for-matrice, visionnaire de sa jeunesse et de sa force cosmique, compositeur de ses tissus embryonnaires, Klee heurte derrière un mystère croyant que toute chose possède une vie inorganique.

Ce que Klee découvre en Tunisie, pendant son séjour à Kairouan, c’est que tout lieu, toute chose porte en elle-même sa propre lumière et sans doute les conditions de sa métamorphose. Issu d’une pratique artistique, la théorie et la pratique s’imbriquent pour perfectionner ses compositions plastiques, en répondant à une structure cachée de l’art. Dans cette structure se love une nouveauté par rapport à ses contemporains artistes et savants ; il n y a pas de couleur en soi qui colore une chose en soi. La couleur est une lumière lumineuse. Elle dépend du conatus de l’être de la chose : mou ou solide, sec ou humide, chaud ou froid. Précisément, Klee découvre que le corps ne reçoit pas passivement la couleur du rayon du soleil, tel que les impressionnistes l’ont toujours cru.

La couleur est celle de l’être et de son état ! De quel être s’agit-il?

D’après la formule lapidaire de Matisse, un centimètre carré de bleu n’est pas équivalent à un mètre carré du même bleu. Insistant à plusieurs reprises sur ce paramètre : la composition « se modifie avec la surface à couvrir ».

Si la couleur chez Matisse dépend de son étendue, tenant compte des dimensions ou de l’échelle, chez Klee, elle hante la choséité de la chose, qui ne reçoit pas passivement la couleur13. Pas de couleur sans valeur et sans forme, pas de valeur sans limite et pas de forme sans forme formatrice : l’être de la couleur est sa

10 De Janvier 1921 au 1er Avril 1931 Paul Klee enseigne au Bauhaus. Ce n’est qu’en 1922, que Kandinsky est au Bauhaus. 11 Klee dès 1901, il considère dans son Journal que: " Goethe est l’unique allemand supportable ; dans ce sens là, je serais peut-être volontiers allemand moi-même" (Klee 1959, p 93). 12 Brusatin 1986, p. 149. 13 Duvignaud 1980, p. 48 : « Bien avant d’aller en Tunisie, Klee est obsédé par une chose : toute forme sécrète sa propre lumière. Mais c’est une hypothèse, presque une rêverie…»

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matrice ; "le point gris". Or, ce point n’est-il pas à son tour, un « symbole de ce non-concept », un être néant ? Ce concept gris n’est il pas le chaos véritable?14

A partir de la « Note sur le point gris » (Klee 1977, p. 56), peut-on objecter à l’endroit de la prétention de Gilles Deleuze? L’artiste pouvait être l’émule du philosophe! Effectivement? Notre artiste est capable de créer le concept et de battre le chaos! Semblable au philosophe et à l’homme de sciences, Klee nous rassure qu’il : « peut réussir le saut du chaos à l’ordre » (Klee 1977, p. 55). Peut- être, Gilles Deleuze a toujours raison étant donné que Klee est philosophe, même s’il se présente modestement : « philosophe à son insu » (Klee 1977, p. 28). Ainsi donc, le concept n’est il pas une ‘’sensibilia’’ (Deleuze et Guattari 1993, p. 9). A priori, la sensibilité n’a jamais quitté l’artiste, elle le hante à fortiori comme sensation colorante.

Le deuxième axe : la couleur comme sensation colorante

Il n’ya que les grandes passions qui élèvent l’âme vertueuse aux nobles choses. L’expérience artistique kléene de la couleur en Tunisie est semblable à une expérience amoureuse/mystique, puisqu’elle est euphorique, envahissante et envoûtante. Ce qui permet de la considérer comme une véritable expérience esthétique, phénoménologique voire existentielle.

Esthétique est cette expérience selon plusieurs volets.

Premièrement, elle est libre, singulière et créatrice d’une énergie durable permettant à Klee de peindre ses impulsions précieuses et ses sensations fiévreuses, soit d’emblée (au sein de la Tunisie) soit après coup15. Klee l’esthète a su comment il devait prolonger son extase. Heurtant, de Tunis-Carthage à Berne, avec une « charrette trop chargée», les yeux fermés par crainte de dissiper le trésor de la grande chasse.16 L’esthétisme de Klee ne peut que nous apprendre comment nous devons prolonger nos sensations même une « petite sensation » qu’elle soit et comment nous pouvons nous partager le sensible même s’il est équitablement impartageable. Sensation et sensibilité, Klee souhaite les transmettre intactes telles qu’il les sent au niveau du récepteur-créateur, pourvu que ce dernier sache comment brouter un tableau.

Deuxièmement, de Van-Gogh, Klee apprend le choc de la ligne, tandis que de la Tunisie, il extirpe le choc de la couleur-lumière. Travaillant ce principe avec des techniques et des matériaux inédits, Klee, l’avant-gardiste, maitre du Bauhaus de

14 Klee nous dicte la genèse de son travail, disant, « je commence logiquement à partir du Chaos, voilà ce qu’il y a de plus naturel, […] qu’il m’est permis tout d’abord d’être moi- même chaos.» (Klee, 1977, p. 178).

16 "Ma charrette est trop chargée, il me faut aller au travail. Finie la grande chasse. Le moment est venu de dénombrer le gibier." (Klee 1959, p. 285).

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Weimar, élabore non seulement une théorie de l’art moderne mais aussi une théorie esthétique, dont l’improvisation, le choquant et l’inattendu-surprenant seront les maitres mots du nouveau paradigme et des critères annonciateurs de l’esthétique contemporaine et actuelle.

Phénoménologique est aussi cette expérience de colorisme, puisqu’elle colore l’être tout entier de Klee, ainsi que sa chair: Klee plonge dans un univers sensuel. C’est par le corps tout entier que « le peintre apporte », qu’il s’engloutit dans le Maghreb profond.

Par principe typiquement phénoménologique, Klee fait « un retour à la chose même », il se voit : « le primitif d’une nouvelle sensibilité ». Les graffitis sur les murs chaulés et blanchis, les tatouages sur les corps féminins et le soubassement ensorcelant du monde arabe, les pénètrent doucement, et les envahit profondément, parce qu’il est déjà complice. Klee arrive à voir l’invisible, et à vivre le fonctionnement de la Vie des formes, dans un pays, d’une culture construite d’autant de rêves que de réalités. Un pays qui s’apparente à ses fantasmes enfantins et libidinaux. Klee n’a-t-il pas avoué: c’est un « pays qui me ressemble » (Klee 1977, p. 282)?

Existentielle est aussi sa découverte de la couleur. Klee n’a-t-il pas cessé d’écrire son Journal dès son retour de Tunisie. Ne se livre t-il pas à écrire que ses notes prolongeant sa recherche plastique? Klee, le sait bien, qu’il est « possédé » parce qu’il s’est mis à l’écoute de l’inconnu/connu quelque part. Il déclare enthousiasmé : « La couleur et moi sommes un. Je suis peintre.».17

Conclusion

Que conclure quant à la question de la part de la passion de l’affect et de l’impulsion interne dans l’action créatrice? Qu’ils sont toujours impliqués dans un corps animé ou que, s’il n’ya des passions sans une âme prédisposée pour les sentir, il n’y en aurait pas non plus, pour une âme désincarnée. Du même genre et de la même nature, l’âme de Klee, sa chair et sa peau, que celle de la chair tunisienne. L’ « appel de la couleur » et/ou l’« appel du Sud » ne sont qu’une seule opération ; à savoir l’appel à rejoindre la terre matricielle ; terre de ses ancêtres méditerranéens arabes.

A passer en revue sa vie, on se rend compte qu’il a accusé une forte réceptivité à la donnée géographique arabo-africaine. Dans son extrait de naissance, ne reste qu’à inscrire: peintre né à la lumière tunisienne!

Il s’avère que cette lumière du soleil africain participe d’une sensibilia créatrice et d’un être au monde sur un fond de toile organique où se pétrit une osmose

17 "Trop forte, l’expérience que je venais de vivre. Et il fallait partir, aussi pour me ressaisir." (Klee 1959, p. 282).

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charnelle, passionnelle et poétique: la lumière, la couleur et la forme sont l’identité de notre peintre.

Dans l’être de Klee se tissent des métissages producteurs d’un vecteur d’affect qui fait de l’orient, de l’occident, de la lumière, de la couleur une identité, une texture conçue sur un fond de recoupement mystique, donnant lieu à une nouvelle phénoménologie de l’affect.

La plus belle chose que Klee souhaite rencontrer, c’est qu’il coïncide avec soi- même, avec « la Nature-source » de lumière, avec « la Nature-naturante » perpétuellement en genèse et avec « le monde de la vie » promettant un futur meilleur.

Or, rares sont ceux qui arrivent à réaliser ces rêves utopiques, puisque rares sont ceux qui disposent de la saveur d’exorciser la malédiction de leurs passions négatives.

Désormais, rares sont ceux qui puissent entreprendre et comprendre, ce que c’est qu’une relation charnelle avec le monde des couleurs, puisque rares sont ceux qui veulent et qui savent changer la couleur et la forme de leurs vêtements, de leurs habitudes et de leurs manières d’habiter le monde.

Certes, ce savoir-faire ne manquent ni aux artistes ni aux esthètes puisque l’art et la philosophie cultivent simultanément, depuis les grecs jusqu’à nos jours, et sur le même pied d’égalité, "la passion" qui se vit selon toutes ses formes et de toutes ses couleurs.

Références

- Brusatin, Manlio. 1986. Histoire des Couleurs, Paris : Champs Flammarion. - Cassin, B. (dir.). 2004. Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophes, Paris : Seuil/Le Robert. - Deleuze, G. et Guattari, F. 1993. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie, Tunis : Editions Cérès. - Duvignaud, Jean. 1980, Klee en Tunisie, Tunisie : Edition Cérès. - Jung, Carl Gustav. 1985. Psychologie et orientalisme, Paris : Albin Michel. - Klee, P. 1959. Journal, Paris : Grasset et Frasquelle. 1977. Théorie de l’art moderne, Paris : Denoël/Gonthier. - San Lazzaro, G.D. 1975. Klee, la vie et l’œuvre, Paris : Fernand Hazan. - Spinoza, B. 1954. Œuvres complètes, Ethique III, Paris : Gallimard/La Pléiade. - Wittgenstein, L. 1983. Remarques sur la couleur, Mauvezin : Ter.

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Espacio receptivo y emoción estética. El espectador ante la obra de Jorge Oteiza

Jon Echeverria Plazaola*

Universität der Künste Berlin

La práctica artística del escultor Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003) se desarrolla en paralelo a su reflexión estética. Esta interrelación entre praxis y reflexión dota a su proyecto estético de una inusitada coherencia, que alcanza su punto culminante cuando en 1959 abandona la práctica del arte al considerar que su lenguaje plástico ha alcanzado su punto final. A partir de ese momento Oteiza se lanza al activismo político y cultural, un activismo que en no pocas ocasiones ha contribuido a la consolidación y divulgación de un nacionalismo vasco de corte esencialista (Atxaga, citado por Kortazar 2006, p. 138). A pesar de que durante muchos años la figura de Oteiza se ha asociado casi exclusivamente a este activismo político-cultural posterior a 1959, este artículo se centrará en el período comprendido entre los años 1929 y 1959, en los 30 años en los que Oteiza desarrolla su actividad escultórica y propone el grueso de su proyecto estético. El arte y el pensamiento de Jorge Oteiza están totalmente determinados por una crisis religiosa de juventud. Tras esta crisis Oteiza demanda al arte aquellas respuestas que antes buscaba en la religión, lo que explica su actitud religiosa y existencial hacia el arte (Pelay Orozco 1978, p. 35). Tomando en cuenta esta actitud, no hay contradicción cuando Oteiza se define a sí mismo como “ateo religioso” (Badiola 1988, p. 33). El término “ateo” proviene del griego atheos, que significa “sin Dios”, y actualmente se utiliza para nombrar a aquel que rechaza la

* [email protected]. La investigación que ha dado pie a este artículo ha sido financiada por el programa de “Ayudas para formación y perfeccionamiento del personal investigador en el extranjero”, Departamento de Educación, Universidades e Investigación, Gobierno Vasco-Eusko Jaurlaritza.

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existencia de Dios. Pero este “sin Dios” también puede ser interpretado desde otro ángulo y servir para nombrar a alguien que ha sido abandonado por Dios. Esto último guarda relación con la idea del “Dios ausente” [Deus absconditus], muy frecuente en algunas culturas antiguas y en la tradición mística y que vuelve a cobrar importancia a comienzos del siglo XX de la mano de los movimientos filosóficos de la muerte de Dios y la experiencia del nihilismo religioso (Vega 2002). Pero esta ausencia de Dios no implica necesariamente un declive de la cuestión religiosa o una falta de interés por estas cuestiones. Al contrario, puede decirse que la auténtica búsqueda religiosa da comienzo cuando Dios desaparece (Eliade 1999, p. 96). Esto es evidente en el caso de Oteiza, basta con leer algunos de sus poemas, recopilados en su libro Existe Dios al noroeste, para confirmarlo (Oteiza 1990). Como se ha dicho, tras su crisis religiosa el arte se convierte en el único medio de dar respuestas a aquellas cuestiones que anteriormente se resolvían dentro de un marco religioso institucionalizado, que en las actuales sociedades secularizadas ha perdido su capacidad de crear sentido. Oteiza lo explica así: «La madurez del arte contemporáneo no coincide por azar con la crisis religiosa del hombre y su alejamiento de las religiones, porque lo que el hombre busca y trata de renovar no es la religión sino sensibilidad religiosa que es de raíz estética y se fabrica y repara desde arte. La religión no construye, no tiene, sensibilidad religiosa» (Oteiza, 1984a). De este párrafo se pueden extraer varias conclusiones. La más importante de todas ellas es que para Oteiza la religión nada tiene que ver con ideas predeterminadas o dogmas metafísicos, sino que lo que él denomina “sensibilidad religiosa” es un efecto o un producto del arte. Esta idea hace necesario superar la tradicional concepción metafísica basada en una separación dualista de la realidad que es puesta en duda por la idea de la muerte de Dios. Desde una perspectiva metodológica, la idea de Oteiza de que la sensibilidad religiosa es un producto del arte exige comenzar por destacar las características principales de su lenguaje escultórico, que desde 1929 a 1959 pasa de la figuración a la abstracción y de la materia al vacío, con el objetivo de identificar los elementos formales que sirven de base al pensamiento estético de Oteiza.

Análisis formal de la obra escultórica de Jorge Oteiza Inmediatamente después de su crisis religiosa Oteiza realiza su primera obra, Maternidad (1929), una pequeña escultura de cemento donde se perciben claramente las influencias del arte no-occidental y de las tallas religiosas de la Edad Media. Hasta 1935, la gran mayoría de esculturas realizadas por Oteiza (Adán y Eva, Figura comprendiendo políticamente, Paulino Uzkudun, etc.) comparten las mismas características formales, materiales y expresivas de esta primera obra. Unidad triple y liviana y Figura para el regreso de la muerte, ambas de 1950, determinan un cambio de orientación en el lenguaje plástico de Oteiza. Estas esculturas son la consecuencia de sus reflexiones sobre la relación entre la materia, que en sus obras de cemento rebosa de expresividad, y el espacio vacío.

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El objetivo declarado de Oteiza es crear espacios vacíos llenos de energía. Estas ideas se reflejan por vez primera en su artículo «Del escultor Oteiza. Por él mismo», donde dice: “El hueco se nos revela en nuestro análisis como el concepto eje de una lógica para la renovación formal. […] En la próxima etapa experimental el hueco ha de ser objeto de un nuevo razonar plástico. Hasta ahora no va siendo más que la descomposición natural de los factores naturales que integran la estatua. Y el hueco deberá constituir el tránsito de la estatua-masa tradicional a la estatua-energía del futuro, de la estatua pesada y cerrada a la estatua superliviana y abierta, la Transestatua” (Oteiza 1947, p. 2). Aunque pueda parecer paradójico al tratarse de un escultor, su intención es invertir la manera tradicional de entender las relaciones entre materia y espacio para crear esculturas donde la prioridad principal sea la de dar forma a un espacio vacío. Este espacio vacío adquiere una importancia central en las esculturas abstractas que Oteiza hace entre 1956 y 1959. El primer paso en esta dirección se produce en el grupo de obras que Oteiza presenta en 1957 a la IV. Bienal de Sao Paulo, que van acompañadas por un texto, titulado “Propósito Experimental 1956-57”, donde el escultor explica sus intenciones. Al comienzo de este texto Oteiza dice: “Me planteo la naturaleza estética de la Estatua como organismo puramente espacial, exactamente, la desocupación activa de la Estatua por fusión de unidades formales livianas” (Oteiza 1957). La clave de este párrafo radica en el término “desocupación”. Pero este término podría conducirnos a error, pues parece sugerir la idea de dejar libre un lugar, de «ahuecar» quitando materia. Pero no es esto lo que Oteiza tiene en mente cuando acuña este término. El escultor establece una clara diferencia conceptual entre “espacio vaciado” y “espacio vacío”. El primero es consecuencia de quitar materia, una acción que deja tras de sí marcas o trazos, con el objetivo de mostrar que ese espacio ha estado anteriormente ocupado. El segundo es el resultado de un tratamiento del espacio por parte del escultor que, por medio de un vaciamiento formal, recibe su energía. Oteiza define este último tipo de espacio vacío como “la presencia de una ausencia formal” (Oteiza, citado por Fullaondo 1976, pp. 21-22). De acuerdo con esta distinción, el procedimiento seguido por Oteiza es el de construir el espacio vacío rompiendo la neutralidad y la indeterminación del espacio real. Para cumplir con este propósito Oteiza define las “Unidades Malevich”, cuadrados irregulares de metal diseñados específicamente para suprimir cualquier autorreferencia material y expresiva (Oteiza 1957). Por medio de la combinación lógica y racional de estas unidades Oteiza erige sus últimas esculturas abstractas, entre las que destacan las agrupadas en las series Cajas vacías y Cajas Metafísicas (1958-59). La diferencia entre las Cajas vacías y las Cajas Metafísicas consiste en que las primeras son abiertas, llenas de aire y luz, mientras que las segundas están virtualmente cerradas. El espacio vacío interior que se vislumbra entre las comisuras es oscuro y misterioso, lleno de un aura numinoso, que Oteiza define como un imponente y receptivo silencio espiritual (Oteiza 2007, p. 203). Estas

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enigmáticas esculturas son las últimas de Oteiza, ya que después de realizarlas abandona la práctica del arte. Explica este abandono de la siguiente manera: “El arte no es para siempre, la vida sí. El arte no es razón suficiente ni para la vida misma del artista (fuera de su indagación puramente experimental). Su razón última es desembocar (para todos) en la vida con una imaginación instantánea como servicio público (político) desde la sensibilidad” (Oteiza 2007, p. 97). Es evidente que Oteiza establece en este párrafo una clara distinción entre “arte” y “vida”. El arte sería un paso preparatorio previo a la vida que en un momento concreto de su desarrollo debería de concluir. Para entender esta distinción y sus implicaciones para la cuestión del espectador que se enfrenta a estas obras es necesario volver sobre nuestros pasos y, recogiendo las características formales destacadas hasta este momento, analizar desde una perspectiva conceptual el proceso que lleva a Oteiza desde la figuración a la abstracción.

Estética Negativa Como hemos destacado, el arte de las culturas no-occidentales ejerce una importante influencia en las primeras esculturas de Oteiza. Pero esta influencia no se limita a los aspectos formales. Entre 1935 y 1948 Oteiza reside en Sudamérica, lo que le permite estudiar el arte de las culturas precolombinas de San Agustín y San Andrés (Colombia). Estas investigaciones se plasman en el primer libro de Oteiza, Interpretación Estética de la Estatuaria Megalítica Americana, publicado en 1952 (Oteiza 2008). Este estudio muestra la profunda función religiosa que Oteiza atribuye al arte y contiene las semillas de las ideas que luego pondrá en práctica en sus esculturas abstractas. Según concluye Oteiza tras su estudio de estas esculturas precolombinas, la necesidad del arte, y por tanto también del artista creador, surge cada vez que se rompe el vínculo emocional y espiritual entre el sujeto (entendiendo sujeto en su doble significado individual y colectivo) y su realidad y le invade “el terror a la nada, el miedo a desaparecer sin haber ganado la eternidad” (Oteiza 2008, p. 29). Por este motivo, Oteiza pone especial énfasis en destacar que estas estatuas precolombinas son formas sagradas, “dioses de piedras”, instrumentos creados por los artistas para luchar contra su destino mortal, fusionando en ellas lo permanente con lo transitorio. Desde esta función simbólica, de la que emana también su función social y política, Oteiza extrae su primera noción del arte como salvación o curación espiritual. Esto le permite diferenciar dos soluciones frente al problema de la muerte que determinan su actitud básica frente al arte y la vida: “la solución religiosa tradicional”, que descansa en la creencia en otra vida, y lo que denomina “solución estética”, que define así: “ante el dolor de desaparecer, una determinación suprema y difícil de quedar. Ante el disparate de la muerte, el disparate creador de la salvación, el de la fabricación estética de lo perdurable (…) La angustia creadora del artista es la desesperación metafísica por hallar los medios y la forma de ese producto artístico de suprema validez en el que se instala el hombre con sus cosas fuera de la acción de la muerte” (Oteiza

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2008, pp. 29-30). Este anhelo de vencer a la muerte es el vector creativo que estaría en la base de todo arte y por eso, Oteiza define la Estética como una teoría de la Inmortalidad (Oteiza 2008, pp. 58-59). Esta interpretación estética, donde se perciben claras influencias del pensamiento del primer Nietzsche (2001) y de Worringer (1997), se define enteramente desde la perspectiva del creador, destacando especialmente su necesidad expresiva, y deja de lado la cuestión del espectador. Es más, el interprete estético, Oteiza no habla aquí de espectador, es aquel que se sitúa en el curso de la misma continuidad creadora de aquellos escultores del megalítico: “El intérprete estético se sitúa al lado de la estatua y reconstruye la situación existencial del creador y sorprende los orígenes y los derroteros de la pasión creadora y su final instalación en el objeto artístico” (Oteiza 2008, pp. 21-22). Es evidente que lo que aquí está en juego no es en modo alguno la producción de una obra bella sino la vida y la muerte del artista, o como mínimo, su salud espiritual. Esto hace que la del arte sea siempre, desde una perspectiva existencial y religiosa, una experiencia necesaria, en ningún caso desinteresada. Siguiendo la línea trazada en esta investigación, Oteiza sustenta su proyecto estético en la idea de que el arte del siglo XX debería recuperar esta función simbólica y religiosa, reflejando o haciendo suyo el contexto cultural, social y espiritual del hombre moderno. Al recuperar estas funciones el arte sería capaz de cumplir aquello que Oteiza define como su finalidad, “la salvación espiritual del hombre” (Oteiza 2007, p. 273). Para ello, “necesitamos no limitar nuestra capacidad de asombro para no apagar emocionalmente nuestra ilusión (…) así hemos llegado, digo, no sólo a limitar la imaginación plástica en la creación, sino a suprimir el servicio religioso del artista: el arte siempre ha servido a este anhelo social de la salvación” (Oteiza 2008, pp. 152-153) Pero la característica principal de las sociedades modernas es su “nihilismo religioso” (Vega 2002), la ausencia de Dios y la falta de respuestas religiosas, por lo que Oteiza traduce a un lenguaje negativo las ideas estético-religiosas analizadas hasta ahora. Figura para regreso de la muerte inaugura el lenguaje de la negatividad que caracteriza el pensamiento de Oteiza en la fase final de su trabajo escultórico. Esta negatividad se traslada a su propio lenguaje plástico en forma negación y destrucción, como se observa en el proceso que se sigue desde Figura para regreso de la muerte hasta las últimas obras abstractas. Mientras que en la primera el espacio vacío está aún relacionado con la figura humana y la materia, en sus últimas esculturas abstractas el espacio vacío viene a presencia eliminando cualquier referencia a la figura y a la realidad. Este proceso de negaciones o eliminaciones aboca a Oteiza al abandono de la escultura: “En 1958-59, a los 30 años de entrega total al arte, me encuentro con una escultura espacialmente igual a cero, con un vacío, nada. No sin nada: concretamente con Nada. Intento proseguir y me doy cuenta de que la línea experimental en la que trabajaba está cerrada, concluida” (Oteiza 1984b, p. 76).

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El concepto clave aquí es esa Nada que Oteiza considera como resultado de esos procesos de negación. Para clarificar sus implicaciones resulta necesario recurrir a la tradición mística, donde este concepto encuentra un claro precedente. Según la definición de B. McGinn, la mística es un proceso dinámico o una forma de vida que atañe a la preparación para, la conciencia de y la reacción ante lo que los místicos definen como la presencia inmediata o directa de Dios (McGinn 1991, p. xvii). Pero como los místicos consideran a Dios como una “alteridad radical” y como una Nada que ninguna definición o imagen puede captar, el proceso místico se lleva a cabo por medio de sucesivas negaciones de la realidad, incluido del propio sujeto, que avanza hacia la abstracción y el silencio. Pero estas negaciones concluyen de forma afirmativa, puesto que adquieren su pleno significado en unión con la Nada de Dios, el objetivo final de todo el proceso que finaliza con el renacimiento del alma humana y su salvación. Es importante señalar que sobre esta noción de “la Nada” se funda la “teología negativa”, que es una teología basada en la idea de la “ausencia de Dios”. Como ya he señalado, esta “teología negativa”, que algunos estudiosos consideran como germen del ateismo contemporáneo (McGinn 1991, p. xviii), vuelve a adquirir protagonismo a lo largo del siglo XX en importantes expresiones del arte y la filosofía (Vega 2002 y 2005). Es más que evidente que Oteiza se aproxima a estas ideas en su concepción del espacio vacío y la Nada que en ella se haría presente. Puede decirse que la paradójica intención de Oteiza de invertir el modo tradicional de aproximarnos a la materia y al espacio va en paralelo a la también paradójica aproximación que hace la mística a ese Dios que describe como “una Nada”. El ejemplo más obvio de esta apropiación que Oteiza hace del lenguaje y los procedimientos de la tradición mística es su concepto de “estética negativa”, que acuña precisamente para describir el proceso seguido desde Figura para el regreso de la muerte hasta su últimas esculturas abstractas vacías: “Aquí el término negativo (estética negativa, teología negativa, política, digamos, negativa) se refiere al procedimiento de actuar creadoramente por sucesivas negaciones, en una serie progresiva de eliminaciones, fenomenológicamente, reduciendo entre paréntesis todo aquello que debemos apartar para aislar el objeto verdadero o la acción que perseguimos. Así, sabemos de la teología de los místicos, que alcanza por una serie de eliminaciones, de nadas, esa Nada final (en San Juan de la Cruz) en que se entra en descubrimiento directo y en contacto, en comunión, con Dios. El arte está entrando en una zona de silencio (yo terminé en un espacio negativo, en un espacio solo y vacío). En esta Nada el hombre se afirma en su ser” (Oteiza 2007, pp. 171-172). La noción de renacimiento y salvación espiritual como resultado último del proceso de negación que está implícito en estas palabras ayuda a clarificar el motivo por el cual Oteiza abandona la práctica artística en 1959. Una vez más es necesario volver a su obra Figura para el regreso de la muerte y centrarnos en la idea de “regreso” que se menciona en el título. Esta idea tiene unas evidentes connotaciones religiosas y está presente en todas las tradiciones religiosas como

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una experiencia visionaria que implica el tránsito entre dos estados espirituales diferentes. En este contexto, el regreso es una ruptura, una destrucción del curso normal de los acontecimientos que inaugura una nueva vida. La importancia de esta idea en el pensamiento de Oteiza se hace evidente en el último párrafo de su escrito “Propósito Experimental 1956-57”: “Puedo decir ahora que mi escultura abstracta es arte religioso. No busco en este concepto de la Estatua lo que tenemos, sino lo que nos falta (…) No es minuto de silencio. Es la imagen religiosa de la ausencia civil del hombre actual. Lo que estéticamente nace como desocupación del espacio, como libertad, trasciende como un sitio fuera de la muerte. Tomo el nombre de lo que acaba de morir. Regreso de la Muerte. Lo que hemos querido enterrar, aquí crece” (Oteiza 1957, p. 14). Pero la “solución estética de la muerte” que Oteiza extrae de sus investigaciones del arte precolombino y que está en la base de estas palabras no resuelve la tensión entre afirmación y negación que hemos mencionado anteriormente. Como conclusión afirmativa de un proceso de negaciones, esta solución a la muerte exige una negación más, la negación del propio lenguaje plástico como modo de evitar la idolatría de las mediaciones que el artista ha creado: “Cuando el artista concluye de desocultar la realidad, desoculta su propio lenguaje, su propio mecanismo mental. Esta es la última tarea del artista responsable dentro del arte, para pasar, finalmente, a la vida” (Oteiza 2007, p. 183). Como deducimos de estas palabras, la estética de Oteiza concluye planteando la cuestión de la función del arte y la responsabilidad del artista. En su opinión, lo principal del arte no es su práctica ilimitada y desinteresada, sino la transformación o “estructuración espiritual” que su práctica produce en el artista y que le empuja a un activismo político y cultural. El arte no cambia la sociedad, el arte transforma al artista que es quien transforma la sociedad. En este sentido, el arte es una herramienta espiritual creada por el artista para su propia transformación que posteriormente le permite actuar en sociedad. Estas ideas no sólo explican los motivos por los que Oteiza abandona el arte en 1959, sino también su rechazo durante muchos años a exponer sus obras al público. La primera gran exposición de la obra de Oteiza tuvo lugar en 1988. Lo expuesto hasta ahora nos lleva a plantear cuál es la posición del espectador ante lo que Oteiza define como la naturaleza vacía, silenciosa, inmóvil, protectora, receptiva y conclusiva de sus últimas obras. Este silencio y la mudez de las formas impide la emergencia de un significado que alivie el peso de estas presencias misteriosas, lo que parece invitar al espectador a un proceso de introspección. Aunque como hemos visto la parte sustancial de la estética de Oteiza se basa en la figura del artista creador, el espectador ocupa parte de sus reflexiones a partir sobre todo de 1958.

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El espectador ante la obra Las reflexiones de Oteiza sobre el espectador van en paralelo a las características de su lenguaje plástico. Sus primeras ideas que tratan específicamente del espectador datan de 1958. Según Oteiza, el carácter expresivo del arte, que se pone de manifiesto en sus primeras obras de cemento, somete al espectador a un papel receptivo, es decir, pasivo y secundario. La obra habla y el espectador calla, debido a que el arte expresivo “recubre de estímulos exteriores la visión agobiada del hombre como espectador” (Oteiza 1958). Ante esto, Oteiza invierte la posición tradicional del espectador ante la obra, del mismo modo que invierte la relación entre espacio y materia a partir de sus esculturas de 1950. Sólo el silencio y el carácter receptivo de las formas es capaz de producir “auténtica emoción estética” en el espectador: “Lo receptivo ha de ser la obra de arte, neutralizando el tiempo de las formas, silenciándolas, esto es, desocupando el espacio. De este modo en la actitud contemplativa del hombre, se le obliga a una reacción activa de su intimidad personal. Y resulta que es precisamente esta actitud la que corresponde a la verdadera actitud religiosa que como vemos debe ser prevista desde un planteamiento estético de naturaleza receptiva para el arte y el espacio de la arquitectura que pretendan ser religiosos” (Oteiza 2007, p. 272). La experiencia espectador y la idea de emoción estética, que Oteiza vincula con una especie de activación de la estructura religiosa de la conciencia, no puede separarse de su propuesta de estética negativa y de su apropiación del lenguaje y los procedimientos de la tradición mística, donde lo sagrado se define precisamente como un elemento estructural de la conciencia. Este tipo de experiencias “emotivo-estético-místicas” que activan esa interioridad del sujeto requieren de una presencia inmediata, desnuda de cualquier mediación (Nancy 1993; Gumbrecht 2005), como ese espacio vacío, desnudo y silencioso de sus obras abstractas. Oteiza alude a esa inmediatez cuando señala que “la función del arte es el tratamiento espiritual del hombre, es función religiosa, protección espiritual, en términos visualmente inmediatos y trascendente en cálculo rigurosamente espacial” (Oteiza 1958). En cuanto a esa “presencia” que se haría presente en su obras vacías, dice: “La creación del espacio interior que planteo en mi estatua, intenta ser el resultado de un rompimiento del muro visual ocupado por la creación formal exterior y equivale a la recuperación de un espacio absoluto, anterior a toda experiencia de la realidad, una Nada activa como pura presencia (…) de Dios” (Oteiza 1958). Vemos cómo la idea de Oteiza del arte como curación del sentimiento trágico o salvación espiritual, que justifica su abandono del arte, está también en la base de su propuesta sobre el espectador. Podríamos decir que el espectador ideal de las obras de Oteiza sería aquel que, por medio de la experiencia emocional de tipo estético-religioso que le proporcionan estas obras, reconoce en ellas un modo de hallar respuestas a sus necesidades existenciales. Es decir, no es un espectador desinteresado, como propugna Kant, sino alguien necesariamente interesado. La posición y la actitud que según Oteiza un espectador debe de adoptar ante su obra queda resumida en las siguientes palabras recogidas de su interpretación de

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la estatuaria precolombina: “Yo no he ido donde estas estatuas con los ojos pastoriles del turista o los ojos de aritmética del arqueólogo y excavador, yo he estado ahí para aprender, para reconocer (…) Yo no he venido a medir estatuas, sino a abrazarlas, a permanecer un tiempo a su lado, para saludar y reconocer a los que las construyeron. (…) Ahí me he sentido en tierra firme y me he afirmado en mi propia afirmación humana de escultor. Ahí he sabido cómo era el alma audaz y gigantesca de esos hombres: su desesperación metafísica, su rabia creadora, el sentimiento trágico de sus vidas” (Oteiza 2008, pp. 47-48). Este interés, esta búsqueda de respuestas, que hace del arte una práctica existencialmente necesaria, iguala en un mismo plano al artista y al espectador.

Referencias - Badiola, T. 1988. “Oteiza. Propósito Experimental”. En Oteiza, Propósito Experimental. Catálogo de exposición, Barcelona: Fundació Caixa de Pensions, pp. 29-63. - Eliade, M. 1999. Mito y realidad. Barcelona: Kairós. - Fullaondo, J. D. 1976. Oteiza y Chillida en la moderna historiografía del arte. Bilbao: La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca. - Gumbrecht, H. U. 2005. Producción de presencia. Lo que el significado no puede transmitir. México D. F.: Universidad Iberoamericana. - Kortazar, J. 2006. «Jorge Oteiza eta gaurko euskal poesía». En Jorge Oteiza. Poesía. Edición crítica a cargo de Gabriel Insausti, Alzuza: Fundación- Museo Jorge Oteiza, pp. 121-140. - McGinn, B.1991. The Foundations of Mysticism. Origins to the Fifth Century. New York: Crossroad. - Nancy, J. L. 1993. The birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press. - Nietzsche, F. 2001. El nacimiento de la tragedia. Introducción, traducción y notas de Andrés Sánchez Pascual, Madrid: Alianza. - Oteiza, J. 1947. Del escultor Oteiza. Por él mismo. Revista Cabalgata, Buenos Aires. - Oteiza, J. 1957. Propósito experimental 1956-1957. IV Bienal de Sao Paulo. Escultura de Oteiza. Catálogo de exposición, septiembre de 1957. Reeditado como Jorge Oteiza. Propósito Experimental 1956-57. Edición facsímil, Alzuza: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, 2007. - Oteiza, J.1958. “Hacia un arte receptivo”, recopilado en Oteiza. Espacialato. Catálogo de exposición, sala García Castañón, Pamplona, 2000, págs. 123- 124. - Oteiza, J. 1984a. “Aizkorbe, nuevo escultor en escuela vasca. Carta de Oteiza al escultor navarro”, recopilado en 40 años de arte vasco 1937- 1977. Historia y documentos. Edición de J. M. Arribas, San Sebastián: Erein, p. 139.

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- Oteiza, J. 1984b. Ejercicios espirituales en un túnel. En busca y encuentro de nuestra identidad perdida. San Sebastián: Hórdago - Oteiza, J. 1990. Existe dios al noroeste. Pamplona: Pamiela. - Oteiza, J. 2007. Quousque tandem…! Ensayo de interpretación estética del alma vasca. Edición crítica del libro original de 1963 a cargo de Amador Vega en colaboración con Jon Echeverria Plazaola, Alzuza: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza. - Oteiza, J. 2008. Interpretación estética de la megalítica americana / Carta a los artistas de América. Sobre el arte nuevo de la postguerra. Edición crítica a cargo de María Teresa Muñoz en colaboración con Joaquín Lizasoain y Antonio Rubio, Alzuza: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza. - Pelay Orozco, M. 1978, Oteiza. Su vida, su obra, su pensamiento, su palabra. Bilbao: La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca. - Vega, A. 2002. Zen, mística y abstracción. Ensayos sobre nihilismo religioso. Madrid: Trotta. - Vega, A. 2005. Arte y santidad. Cuatro lecciones de estética apofática. Pamplona: Cuadernos de la Cátedra Jorge Oteiza - Universidad Pública de Navarra. - Worringer, W. 1997. Abstracción y naturaleza. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

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The art of telling history: Christian Boltanski

Emanuela Saladini* Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

At the end of the sixties, in Europe, was necessary to create a new language in art to represent the recent past. This language was supposed to be different from the political pamphlet and from the simple testimony. Art can recover the memory of the forgotten, in spite of dead tradition and in spite of the History of the victorious. The artist can reinterpret the History and so should the critic and the historian do, as Walter Benjamin had imagined. They should not forget that nothing must be lost about our past.

Between the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, many artists have explored the topic of the individual and the collective memory. In France this trend was defined as "art of the memory ", and it was present in the section "Personal Museum" in Documenta V. Christian Boltanski was represented in this section.

Art has always investigated the big topics of the existence but its role of moral judge “in real time” is more recent. Photography and video have provided new languages for artists to explore history. Those languages have a presumption of putative reality. Hence, the artists must value correctly the tension between fiction and truth in his creations.

In the past, the territorial memory, the genius loci, has influenced the forms of art. In the 20th century, the vanguards have chosen a strategy of supranational experimentation but in 80´s artists recovered the value of the memory. The

* [email protected]

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problem today is to define the limits between a simple presentation of the history and a work of art.

Chantal Maillard affirms that our sensibility has turned into a simple thermostatic system. Thus, our sensibility adapts our emotions to reality. Art then, has to make us see not only what we have not see, but also to reinterpret what we see.

Nowadays Christian Boltanski continues investigating the topic of the memory, using old photographs and clothes to tell stories about our past. Nevertheless, the tension between document and fiction has been solved in the creation of the French artist. Boltanski seems to have chosen the metaphor instead of truth.

When in 1929 Walter Benjamin was writing on the surrealism, presenting it as one of the last instantaneous of the European intelligence (Benjamin 1980), the end of the world the philosopher had portrayed was already approaching. Finally, the exile of many Europeans artists and intellectuals to the United States had changed the mother land of the contemporary art, though it will not erase the recent drama lived by the old Europe. The art could not be the same after the abolition of all freedom and, especially, after the holocaust.

At the end of the sixties, the European art obtains a species of parity of opportunity with regard to the art of the USA. The events of the Parisian May symbolized this new displacement of the intellectual horizon, in which generic Utopias were mixed by more definite political positions.

From 1969-70, one part of the European art it seems to return to tradition, evoking the past and the memory, using a few emotively charged images, in apparent reaction against the abstract painting and the minimal art (Lascault 1998). This interest for the past and the memory, for time and his flow, is evident in Christian Boltanski. The artist has lived not only the contradictions of the France of the post-war period but also the intellectual renaissance of a new internationally recognized intelligence, capable of drawing a new cultural panorama (see Aboucaya 1997, p. 45). In his Monuments1, a series of interventions that he begins in 1984 seems to wonder if a given photography can safeguard the memory of a past time. Initially, the artist uses a photography taken to his class when he was seven years old. The portraits of the children were illuminated by a few bulbs.

Afterwards, the 1931 photography of the class of the last course of a private Jewish high school, The Licée Chases, is the central topic of an exhibition in the Kunstverein of Dusseldorf in 1987. The artist uses the faces of the pupils portrayed in the photography, enlarging them until they become unrecognizable and spectral. The topic of the death, of the time transforming the entities, is so central in Boltanski's work that his monuments look like altars to the memory,

1 It is a series of installations that the artist begins in the eighties and in which it uses old tin of cookies, photographs, bulbs, etc. to create a few ephemeral monuments to memory.

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real memento mori. Photographies, as well as the objects and the clothes very often used in the intervention of the artist, always refer to an absence.

Some artists can reveal the significances of a few “hollow” objects, forgotten objects for a society which is capable of multiplying and successively emptying the sense of virtually anything.

The western culture depends not only on different and even contradictory memories, but also on big and small amnesias (Passerini 2003). The 20th century has prolonged the trend to the repression of memory, a trend that according to Walter Benjamin derives from the crisis of the concepts of memory and experience, a crisis that is typical of the modernity (Rossi-Doria 1998).

The history, as the memory, seems to read the world with a magnifying glass, favouring the detail when it cannot interpret or describe the force of the significant content of the set. Nevertheless, the force of the fragment, of the work of art, is sometimes so relevant that it manages to propitiate a general interpretation of an epoch or even of a culture.

Therefore, the found object has to be an object that differs from the others, because “it” has been “chosen” by an artist. Its texture, colour, form, and resemblance with another object, indicates the singularity of the found and designated object. In our society of consumption, which also seems to anticipate beforehand a near catastrophe, Boltanski gathers in the street, around his study in Malakoff, all the objects that can be useful for the creation of his works.

In this respect, art has to be ethical; it has to assume the commitment to reveal our own history (Benjamin 1982). From this point of view, Benjamin's conception of history turns out to be very useful to imagine a different, finally Utopian, but fascinating way of writing history. The historian, according to Walter Benjamin, has to be conscious of the need to wake up and re-live the past. History, thought as “salvation”, has to substrate the past to the conformity that can interpret it incorrectly (Benjamin 1984, nº 9, 4). What the artist, as the collector, can reveal to the historian is the intrinsic contradiction in the objects: the contrast between function and aesthetic values, the value of an intimate historical document, the possibility that a fragment re-intensifies a memory. This type of history does not necessary have a line organisation (Courtine 1998).

The most common criteria that define the value of an object are its rarity, its preciousness, and its artistic or aesthetic value. These values are very often born from a historical narration that reconstructs time according to a linear sense. In this line, before and later define the value of the objects. A utensil of simple forms of the archaic Greece takes a particular value for its antiquity and for its value of testimony of a lost culture, whereas an object found in the beach that “looks like” a utensil of the archaic Greece, does not have any interest according to the canons that stresses linear time as principal measure. Nevertheless, by considering other criteria, as the fortuitous character of an encounter or others similar ones,

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the found object in the beach probably acquires more value than the archaeological finding.

The study of a fragment seemingly without interest approaches Walter Benjamin's idea of an interpretation of history that witnesses the memory of the oppressed, an interpretation of history that does not celebrate the big victories (Benjamin 2008). When Christian Boltanski discovers in an old album the photographies of an unknown artist called Geo Harly (Boltanski 1988), the findings return to speak about a fragmentary and discontinuous time, about a minor history that has the beauty of the whisper phrases (Courtine 1988).

Let us suppose that the transformation of a common object in a work of art has introduced the famous dilemma of the difference between art and reality. Philosophers, historians of art and critics have started dealing with this phenomenon as if it was a problem, according to the cases, of fundamentally cognitive, linguistic, or also institutional nature. According to Jean Marie Schaeffer (1996) nevertheless, the question is much more complex since the aesthetic conduct is irreducible to other cognitive conducts: in case of the aesthetic conduct, the cognitive attention depends on the index of internal (in) satisfaction, that is to say, if the aesthetic object provokes pleasure or displeasure. Any type of aesthetic conduct relates, following Goodman (1990), to the topic of knowledge and, following Kant, to the topic of pleasure. According to Schaeffer nevertheless, and in contraposition to Goodman, it is necessary to underline the non adventitious character of the relation between the aesthetic conduct and the pleasure / displeasure. Likewise, and in opposition to Kant, it is necessary to insist on the cognitive character of the aesthetic relation. The typology of the found object can be understood only analyzing the formal characteristics and the cognitive relations that, intermingled, provoke pleasure (or displeasure). To my understanding, the cognitive relations that the found object stimulates belong to the world of the individual memory and private history.

Walter Benjamin mentions Theodor Adorno's letter of 1935, in which Adorno refers to the Benjamin’s own philosophy2. According to Adorno’s interpretation, things are objects of desire or fear, of pleasure or displeasure, when they lose their usefulness; and it is at that time when the relation between the subject and the objects becomes more intense. Its value, always subjective, depends on many factors. The objects can be considered to be beautiful, curious, rare, or to support a special relation with our experience, our past. From my point of view, the latter value of the object, its value of remembrance, is particularly relevant

2 “[…] while in things dies his value of use, the mentally ill ones are hollowed and transport with it, as codes, significances. Of them one empowers the subjectivity in the measure in which it deposits in things intentions of desire and fear.” Benjamin, W. 1935, In: Oyarzún Roble, P. Fragmentos sobre teoría del conocimiento y teoría del progreso, N 5, 2, in La dialéctica en suspenso, Fragmentos sobre la historia, Santiago de Chile, Universidad Arcis, Ed. Lom, (translation is mine)

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and can be interpreted only imagining, thinking about the time and the history in a fragmentary way.

As Courtine remembers, in On the Concept of History, Benjamin affirms that it is necessary to interpret the present as another face of the eternity, as the hidden part in history, and to finally reveal the trace of this secret face (Courtine 1998). Eternity, thanks to the present of the historical instant, gets registered in time. Jean-François Courtine affirms, analyzing Benjamin’s thesis (Courtine 1998), that the historical structures can draw, in filigree, an invisible eternity. This means to capture the “present”, or better, the “a- present” (Jetztzeit) underlying historical conscience. This dialectical conception of history can be represented using the image of the “awakening”, as Marcel Proust indicates (Benjamin 2005).

Finally, the operation of salvation of history and memory on the part of the artist can assimilate Marcel Proust’s conception of time. Time, according to the writer, is defined as a power that constantly transforms the entities, a metamorphosis that prevents from reducing the entities to an abstract, logical identity. In the experience of time, man experiences the transformation of spaces, institutions, men, in an independent way from his desire and activity (Proust 1954).

The experience of time overwhelms any person who finds a person that has aged, a construction that is ruined, or a flower that fades. Time demonstrates the metamorphosis, the non originality of the entities, and forces us to ask ourselves whether it is possible to reach the image of an original world in the constant transformation of reality. According to Ernesto Grassi (1990), Proust tries to indicate the essentially metamorphic and metaphorical character of everything appearing to us: it is a question of the metaphysics of reality that imposes the thesis of the originality and the pre-eminence of the poetical word and, for extension, of the work of art in general. In the end, Grassi wonders whether we have managed to safeguard that which time destroys.

In the Transcendental Aesthetics, Kant transfers the essence of space and of time from the area of nature to that of intuition or of knowledge of the subject (Chieregin 1998). Space and time appear before everything in the intuition as a priori forms of arrangement of phenomena. Time depends, in addition, on the internal sense, since “[…] time cannot be felt as anything exterior, neither space cannot be felt as anything in us” (Chieregin 1998, p. 135). The only and real structural difference between space and time is that “[…] different times are not simultaneous, but successive (in the same way that different spaces are not successive, but simultaneous)” (Chieregin 1998, p. 136). Nevertheless, it is difficult to speak about temporary events residing in memory, according to Kant's definition, as exclusive events, since the events in memory seem to coexist simultaneously or, somehow, they seem not to respect the successive order.

In consequence, McTaggart’s (1927) interpretation of the “unreality” of time turns out to be illuminating the fact that time belongs exclusively to the existing thing: “[...] if anything is in time, it must exist.” (McTaggart’s 1927, p.29) The philosopher

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asks himself what things exist in Don Quijote's adventures and reply that none, since the story is imaginary. Nevertheless, stages of the mind of Cervantes exist when he was inventing the narrative the same way stages of my mind exist when I think about Cervantes composition.

I think that the fascination of certain artists for the childhood and for the past is due to this confusion between reality and imagination, between memory and representation. Art explores the distance that exists between the present and all the events that form a segment of more or less distant past. Nevertheless, the past represented by works of art is so powerful because it does not need to be “real”. The objects of art represent our memory as if they were tales. Picasso's Guernica shows the tragedy of the war in a different way a given photography shows, because its story assembles fragments that do not have been necessary real. Art is not concerned with a trustworthy reconstruction of an event or of a distant time, with, let us say, an archaeological reconstruction of the past. Art would not have to look for allegedly “scientific” aims but symbolical (Zecchi 2005). In this respect, the concept of time is fundamental to understand many of the creations of contemporary art. The crisis of the imagination, the loss of a direct reference to the exterior reality, the pre-eminence of technical and scientific methodology as opposed to humanistic studies for the analysis of reality, the disability of the world of art to support his symbolic load, and the inability to establish a set of values, are probably the reasons that might explain a certain recovery of the topics of memory and time in Art.

Christian Boltanski recovers objects without seemingly symbolic value, indifferent objects, and displaces them to the area of art. This metaphorical capacity approaches the demiurge power that Proust attributes to Elstir in La recherché (Proust 1954). This invented character near to Whistler's personality, is capable of representing the world, the reality that surrounds us, in order for it to regain our attention. So, the famous yellow spot of Vermeer's View of Delft unleashes Elstir's dramatic reflections on the capacity of art to reveal what has gone unnoticed. Art, so understood, evokes and enhances reality to be reborn from the deepest darkness (Grassi 1990).

The fundamental difference between an operation of archaeological recovery and an operation of an artistic recovery resides in the metaphorical language, in the poetical capacity that is thereby revealed, thanks to the style of the artist. It is possible to restore a parallelism between the writing and the pictorial language, taking again Grassi's words and his Proust's quotation (Grassi 1990, p. 86) Therefore, thanks to the style, the artist can reveal his vision of the world and allow that the secret of this revelation could be shared.

Arthur C. Danto, the critic and philosopher who proclaimed the end of the art (Danto 1981), the end of the evolution of art according to the story of history, devaluating Christian Boltanski's work for using a few tins of cookies that, according to him, could thrill only the Frenchmen who had known these particular

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sweets in his childhood but, on the contrary, they turn out to be enigmatic for all the others (Danto 2003)

Danto's critique seems to be born from the supposition that “universal” works of art exist and that such a narrow relation with a certain tradition, the Proust´s interpretation of art, was annihilating the transcendence of the work of the artist. The “tradition” was seen as the original sin of the European artists. Curiously, Danto himself re-admits Boltanski among the big artists of the 20th century for being the only one, according to him, to be capable of portraying the horror of the Holocaust (Danto 1989).

As it will be shown latter, Christian Boltanski has referred always in an indirect way to the drama of the Jewish extermination. The definition of “artist of the holocaust” given by many of the American critics, will turn out to be an inconvenience for him all along his life (Gumbert 1998).

When in 1989 Boltanski uses, in one of his works, a T-shirt with the logo of the Batman film, he wishes to deny a direct reference of his work to a concrete drama that has taken place in the past (Gumbert 1992). In his investigation the accumulation of old, left clothes, refers to a disappearance with no date, nor name. In his 1988 installation Canada, the artist alludes to the euphemism used by the Nazi to designate the stores where the Jews had to leave his personal effects (Gumbert 1992, p. 118). Nevertheless, his work does not want to be a monument to the Holocaust.

The temporary, historical references in Boltanski are "interrupted" and the artist does not wish to apply a linear time to his stories. The drama of the disappearance is so present today as it is in a remote past. So his memento mori stays out of time, in a time that always comes back. The artist works with the fragments that can wake up our memory.

According to Serge Lemoine (1984), by regarding the aims and methodology of this artist his investigation belongs to the domain of the Human Sciences. The oldest brother of the artist, the sociologist Luc Boltanski, collaborator of Pierre Bourdieu, had to have had a certain influence on the artist, particularly in the seventies. The showcases created by Boltanski that contain spheres of clay, knives, boxes, fragments of different origins, etc., quite carefully tied and labelled, remember the universe of the Museums of Ethnography and of popular traditions. Evidently, Boltanski is not the only one that uses these references: this world has inspired Daniel Spoerri in the ideation of his Musée Sentimental, which has had different versions from the year 1975. At the same time, Claes Oldenburg was presenting his Michey Mouse Museum, and Marcel Broodthaers his Musées des Aigles in the same "Documents V" of Kassel (1972). Therefore, the topic of the "Museum" and the topics of collection and memory, as we have already seen, were at the centre of the artistic reflection of this period. Curiously, remember Lemoine, the same Szeemann, the director of "Documents V", dedicated an exhibition to his grandfather, a craftsman- barber inventor of the "permanent", in

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Switzerland. In the apartment of the grandfather, the grandson was showing his personal effects, his intimate writings, his furniture, his professional utensils, etc.

Nevertheless, Boltanski will work much more with anonymous, seemingly insignificant objects. In 1995, in the Central Station of New York, Boltanski exhibits in a few racks, all the objects lost in the station in the last year. Travellers, said the artist, were themselves recognized in the lost objects (keys, umbrella, etc.) even though these objects already did not concern to anybody, they were just the symbols of an absence.

In other projects of the seventies, Boltanski was presenting the objects as belongings of concrete individuals, underlining that these things had belonged to a woman of Bois-Colombe, or to a young man of Oxford. The artist was raising the value of the objects from a simple document of the tastes of an epoch to “marks” of a concrete person. These objects could not be replaced by others being equal without a lost. The furniture of the apartment of the woman of Bois-Colombe seems to reveal nothing about her personality because they witnessed the tastes of a certain society in a certain epoch. Nevertheless, the same furniture had also witnessed the experiences of this woman. In some sense, the operation of Boltanski's "exhibition" reactivates the concept of “aura” of Walter Benjamin, but without the idea of hic et nunc that the philosopher was associating with it.

The value of the object of the work of art depends, in this case, neither in its uniqueness nor in its belonging to a specific place. Its value does not depend on having been created and thought for a place and time, but from his belonging to a concrete person, even though this person is a stranger to us. Boltanski's objects have been classified and arranged behind a few showcases or exposed on top of a base in a museum, thus already lacking a context and being transformed into documents of a life.

From the beginning, Christian Boltanski works to create Boltanski's own myth, where the objects, such as, photographs, contribute to its definition. The life of the artist, affirms Boltanski, has to be an exemplary life, as the life of the saints. If in the medieval times the cities wanted to obtain saints' relics, today the museums want to have a Mondrian (Lemoine 1984, p. 23). Lynn Gumbert has written a sharp text on Boltanski’s work Archives of C. B. 1985-1988. According to Gumbert, this work is a real monument to its own author, which is in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art of Paris, and which summarizes the operation of deification that Boltanski began time ago (Gumbert 1992, pp 140-143).

In a hundred of tins of cookies, all the objects that belonged to the artist up to date and were found accumulated in his study and in his house are gathered. His letters and his recollections remain finally gathered for the posterity though all these documents have a casual order thus preventing any possible historical reconstruction.

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If Christian Boltanski has always investigated on the concept of time, the implication of the spectator on this question is possible for a certain type of stimulation for the memory, let us say, a site-specific stimulation. The stories Boltanski tells us are common stories, but every person has to live it in a different way. We all have, or have had, a fetish object; we all have our “sponge-cake”, nevertheless, we all live through the experience of “recalling” in a different way. The exhibition Compra-venta (García Cortés 1988, p. 31) is paradigmatic of this type of investigation. In this case, Boltanski obtains a great number of objects that different persons in Valencia and its surroundings were ready to sell. He exposes the objects in the space of the Almudín, in order that they could be observed and acquired by any person. Every object has a small label that offers more information on it and allows the organization and classification of this great quantity of things. The room of the Almudín is transformed this way in a department store where a diffuse light of low intensity illuminates a series of unlike things. In between the objects of the exhibition Compra-venta we also find several dozens of tape recorders and loudspeakers that report different personal stories related to the own objects. Finally, the site-specific character of this installation resides in the fact that the Almudín of Valencia, a building of rectangular plant constructed from the 14th century, was used as store and place for the sale of the wheat, whereas later, until the moment of his reform in recent years, it hosted the Archaeological Museum of the city (García Cortés 1988, p. 33). So Boltanski reinterprets the history of this place and presents it both as a store and as museum; a store of anonymous objects for sale and museum of unique objects for his relation with a unique history, for his value of individual memory3.

In the exhibition Compra-Venta a particularly fascinating object was included: a box of automata4.

3 “This is the mirror that has been in the buffet of the house of my grandmother. I remember some photography of these infantile ones that we all have done sitting in the buffet doing a game with the reflection in the mirror, I believe that all the Spanish children have an equal photo and all the Spanish grandmothers have had a buffet like this one. [...]”, In García Cortés, J. M. 1988, (translation is mine) 4 “My mother brought this box of the automaton, or of the wizard, from Costa Rica. She lived there a few years with his uncle who was a priest and had an estate with plantations of bananas or coffee fields. Also he has had ultramarine where the box has been. Actually it is a retailer of chewing gum and simultaneously it was predicting the future. It is a box of American manufacture, Kola-Pepsin Gum.... These names seemed to me to be so exotic when I was a child. And the cartels and the predictions of the future are in Spanish. If you put a coin, a bolivar, the mechanism of the automaton still is driven. When his uncle died the whole estate remained to the church and my mother only still had some few revenues, so she returned, as an Indian without fortune, to embark herself in full Spanish Civil war [...] When I see the box of the bewitching automaton sometimes I think about the whole chain of chances that have happened in order that I am here. In all the randoms that happen when suddenly appears a person who changes your life, your feelings, your destination, or maybe that appears in order that precisely your destination is fulfilled.” García Cortés, J. M. 1988. (translation is mine)

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The box works as a species of catalyst of times and different occurrences, putting in relation a few individual stories with History, with the phenomenon of the emigration in America of the last century and the Spanish Civil war. This use of the found object remembers me, once more, the Walter Benjamin's interpretation of history and, especially, the image of the automaton that the philosopher uses to explain his theory. The philosopher refers to the history of the doll of von Kempelen, a simulated automaton that was hiding a dwarf and was defying the players of chess in the second half of the XVIII century (Oyarzún 2004). This was the century that develops the technical modernity. Nevertheless, in this case technology is to the service of the illusion because the automaton is a dwarf chess-player hidden in between mirrors. The doll of von Kempelen was successful in a border epoch between the tekhne and the mekhane: technology did not have a practical application yet but it was used for the astonishment.

Benjamin raises an analogy and moves the image of the device of von Kempelen into Philosophy. The doll is the “historical materialism” and in its interior it hides the dwarf who represents the theology. The interpretation of History is in the border between historical materialism and theology. The end of History is, then, happiness. Happiness is the end both of the individual history and of the “universal” history. Nevertheless, it is not possible to understand history as a mere chain of events that follow a linear progress because it is necessary to interpret history as discontinuity.

In this respect, the final affirmation of the story of the box of the automaton in Christian Boltanski's exhibition brings about the inability to understand the chain of the events. It seems an interpretation of history closer to the image of Walter Benjamin's automaton. It is a question of a fragmentary history that, far from being able to be interpreted according to aprioristic laws, it seems to depend rather on the destiny or on an inscrutable justification. In spite of it, the found object of Christian Boltanski remembers us that the past never disappears, though it remains forgotten in a train station or in a rusty box.

Conclusion The artist has to find the most suitable means to tell a story. The relation between the used means and the story defines the style of an artist. Christian Boltanski has been purifying their language to reach a necessary relation between form and story. The found object has been a fundamental element in his art. The unreal time (McTaggart 1927) in which the story of works of art develops is the time of our memory. The children found in a photo by Boltanski will not remain forgotten in a distant time, in a fragment of the history forever lost and incomprehensible, but they will live in the infinite and fragmentary time of art.

Nowadays the work of art can recover part of the symbolic value of the monuments to safeguard a memory and an identity to share. Art can overcome the sterile limits between individual memory and collective memory using objects

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and documents as witnesses of our history. There is no collective memory that can escape to the easy rhetoric of the power or to the demagoguery. There are nevertheless remembrances to share and to contrast among everyone.

The work of art has to support this latter memory, the most fragile and the most precious, to avoid destruction of every vestige of truth from our contemporary world, a world harassed by hurry and amnesia. The truth of our history is the one provided by remembrance articulated in the fragile documents that, thanks to the sensibility of the artists, remain recorded in our retina. The symbols of this recent past manage to re-live when the language of art is sufficiently powerful.

Nevertheless, the contemporary art of the “memory” seems to be divided between “art of file” and “art of testimony” but it rarely reaches the necessary power to differ from the mere document. The work of art cannot be confused, evidently, with the journalism or with the militancy.

Artists must escape from the trap of the document or from the mere presentation of the object through the use of poetry. The metaphor, the aptitude to move an image from one area to another, to the world of the poetry, allows that his stories should live in a time that comes out of an historical concrete moment. In this way the artist obtains what the Faust of Goethe would like to obtain: to stop the instant. The instant of an individual history is transformed in the unreal and eternal time of art.

Christian Boltanski insists that artists cannot change anything; they can only put questions and wake feelings up. Boltanski's affirmation that the “small history”, the individual history, is very fragile, remember me the suspicion that Benjamin projects on History and its tradition5. For Benjamin, time has to be the result of an experience of the present that interlaces the past and the future. Therefore, any present action does not have value if it is not capable of keeping the recollection of the past alive and to penetrate it and project it into the future in order for it to continue being something alive in us. The philosopher defends an ethical - political responsibility that is opposed to a history interpreted as constant and linear progress.

History actually represents a fight that always has to restart. No aim has been reached forever; no experience belongs to our memory as a dead thing, without implication in our present and without possibility of influencing our future.

Contemporary art seems to reflect the hysteria of our society of information, its fear of losing memory and the temptation of transforming all the past into a file.

5 “From whom are phenomena to be saved? Not only, and not so much, from the discredit and contempt in which they have fallen, but from the catastrophe that very often address the phenomena to the exposure that makes a certain type of tradition, “honouring them as heritage". – They are remembered showing in them discontinuity. There is a tradition that is a catastrophe”, in Benjamin, W. 2005, Libro de los Pasajes, N 9, 4, Madrid: Akal. (translation is mine)

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In reaction to the proliferation of information we search someone who selects the most relevant information, someone who does the job for us; or, simply, we try the short-cut of storing it all.

Christian Boltanski transforms himself into a preacher who teaches something of our past, and also into a clown that acts to satisfy our forgetful memory.

Only the time of History will confirm the importance of Christian Boltanski in the development of art. Nevertheless I am sure that in the memory of many persons who have been lucky to be able to contemplate his creations, Boltanski already have a place in their memories. The infinite and fragmentary time of the individual memory will have then to redeem the possible mistakes of the official History.

References - Aboucaya, M. 1997 “Interview” In: Boltanski, C. Voyage d’Hiver. Paris. - Benjamin, W. 1980. El surrealismo. La última instantánea de la inteligencia europea. Madrid: Taurus. - Benjamin, W. 1982. Das Passagen-Werk. Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. - Benjamin, W. 2005. Libro de los pasajes. Madrid: Akal. - Benjamin, W. 2008. Sobre el concepto de Historia. in Obras, I, vol. 2, Madrid: Abada. - Benjamin, W. 2008. “La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica”, in Obras, Book I, Madrid: Abada. - Boltanski, C. 1988. Geo Harly: Danseur parodiste. Dijon: Adac. - Coutine, J. 1998. “Temporalità e storicità. Shelling-Rosenzweig-Benjamin” in Ruggiu, L. Filosofia del Tempo. Milan : Bruno Mondadori. - Chieregin, F. 1998. “Spazio e tempo nell’Estetica trascendentale di Kant”, in Ruggiu, L. Filosofia del Tempo. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. - Danto, A. C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. - Danto, A. C. 1989. “Christian Boltanski” in The Nation, February 15. - Danto, A. C. 2003. Más allá de la caja Brillo. Madrid: Akal. - García Cortés, J. M. 1988. Christian Boltanski. Compra Venta. Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana - Goodman, N. 1990. Languages de l’art. Paris: Jacqueline Chambon. - Grassi, E. 1990 La metafora inaudita. Palermo: Aesthetica edizioni. - Gumbert, L. 1988. “The Life and Death of Christian Boltanski” In: Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art. - Gumbert, L. 1992. Christian Boltanski. Paris: Flammarion. - Kant, I. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 23/B38 (68). - Kant, I. KrV, A 31/B47 (75).

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- Lascault, G. 1998. Boltanski, Souvenance. Paris: L’Échoppe. - Lemoine, S. 1984. “Les formes et les sources dans l’art de Christian Boltanski” in Boltanski, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. - McTaggart, J. M. 1927. The Unreality of Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Oyarzún, R. P. 2004. “Cuatro señas sobre experiencia, historia y facticidad. A manera de introducción” in La dialéctica en suspenso, Fragmentos sobre la historia, Santiago de Chile: Arcis-Lom. - Passerini, L. 2003. “Memorie tra silenzio e oblio” in Memoria e utopia. Torino: Bollati Borlinghieri. - Proust, M. 1954. Á la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Gallimard. - Rossi-Doria, A. 1998. Memoria e storia: il caso della deportazione. Rubbettino: Soveria Mannelli. - Ruggiu, L. 1998. Filosofia del Tempo. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. - Schaeffer, J. 1996. Les célibataires de l’art, Pour une esthétique sans mythes. Paris: Gallimard. - Zecchi, S. 2005. “¿Existe una belleza moderna?” in Espazos de creación contemporánea. Santiago de Compostela: Auditorio de Galicia.

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Morality and architecture: evaluation of contemporary architectural practice within the scope of the ontological hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer

Helen Tatla* Technological Educational Institution - TEI of Athens

Within Western tradition, there is a close relation between morality and architecture, which could be traced further back from Classical antiquity in the Homeric and the Mycenean age. The moral justification of Western architecture was grounded mainly on religious, political and philosophical terms during Greek and Roman antiquity, medieval times and Renaissance, which shifted into social, political, rational and technological within the limits of Modern architecture.

In philosophical terms, we could argue that the Platonic conception of the particulars (aestheta) as expressions of cosmic unity among reason, morality and beauty, underlie the form of the works of architecture up to the modern times. The interruption of this unity accomplished by Kant during the Enlightenment endows aesthetics with an autonomous operation, disinterested to both, reason and morality alike. We should keep in mind that – in contrast to the Greek all embracing concept of reason as logos, which implied a unity between man and nature, the Kantian separation is well preserved inside human consciousness. As a consequence, architecture enters the threshold of the twentieth century suffering an inner contradiction between its aesthetic self claiming total independence and a moral, engaged into a social mission, self.

In the last three decades, Western avant-garde architecture shows two principal attitudes towards morality. The one is connected with the interpretation of values of the past and can be philosophically founded mainly upon Plato, Hegel,

* [email protected]

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Heidegger and Gadamer, while the other is referred to a critical attitude towards knowledge which departs from the Nietzschean critique of values and is related principally to philosophers as Lyotard, Derrida and Deleuze. The aesthetic implications on architectural form of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of morality will be examined here, in connection with the role of architecture within the contemporary cultural-political situation. In order to elucidate our argument further, we will make a short reference to contrasting attitudes to morality deriving mainly from Nietzsche, as mentioned above.

We will start our discussion with the polemic of the art historian David Watkin against any attempt to ground architecture on morality, expressed in his book Morality and Architecture, first published by Oxford University Press in 1977. Watkin maintains that the claim of architecture to morality undermines individual imagination as well as the aesthetic value of the work carried on by artistic tradition. Watkin’s approach is not only very close to Kant’s concept of aesthetic autonomy but, more than that, it rigorously defends the supremacy of the aesthetic factor in architecture. On this ground, Watkin proceeds to a critique of the architectural theory of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. He classifies architectural theory in three categories:

The first category focusses on the attempts to explain the principles of architectural form in terms of religion, sociology and politics. According to Watkin (1977, pp. 3-4), it is the nineteenth art theorist Pugin he who initiates architecture’s claim to morality in the modern era. In his Contrasts (1836), Pugin claims that the same principles that underlie religious truths should underlie the form of a building. Engaged in the legacy of Pugin’s claim to truth, Modern architecture has to defeat religious doctrines with some other kind of truth, Watkin argues.1 Thus, in order to be morally justified, Modern architecture has to become a rational instrument of social policy. Furthermore, it has to express the “true” nature of the materials.

The second category of architectural theory related to the moral foundation of contemporary architecture, against which Watkin is skeptical, is that based on the concept of the Zeitgeist, which implies the Hegelian conviction that all human creation is subject to “the inevitable process of an all-pervasive spirit” (Watkin 1977, p. 6). It is closely linked to the art-historian tradition represented by

1 Within the limits of Modern Avant-guard architecture, the religious foundation of architecture retreats in favour of social, moral and philosophical principles. In Le Corbusier’s words: “A man who practices a religion and does not believe in it is a poor wretch; (…) We are to be pitied for living in unworthy houses, since they ruin our health and our morale”(Le Corbusier 1987, p. 14). As Giedion states “contemporary architecture takes its start in a moral problem … (and where it) has been allowed to provide a new setting for contemporary life, this new life has acted in turn upon the life from which it springs. The new atmosphere has led to change and development in the conceptions of the people who live in it”(Giedion 1971, p. 705; discussed in: Watkin 1977, p.4).

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Burckhardt, Wolfflin, Giedion, Riegl and others. Watkin accuses the historian of modern architecture Pevsner that with his persistence on a historicist and Zeitgeist inspired belief, he forces modern artist to deny a tradition of his own in favour of externally dictated new political and economic conditions. In so doing, Watkin condemns any attempt to apply to present political organizations mentally constructed holistic patterns of interpretation of the past. In the same spirit, Watkin rejects Alois Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen, as far as it implies that art carries an inherent teleology against which the will of the individual is powerless (Watkin 1977, p. 8).

The third category of architectural theory dealing with the principles underlying Modern architecture, which Watkin despises, is the rational-technological one. It originates in the 18th century French theorists and is related to Classical, Gothic or “modern” architecture. As Viollet-le-Duc (1889, vol. I, p. 448)) puts it, giving a mechanistic interpretation of the Gothic, “we must be true in respect of the programme, and true in respect of the constructive processes.” (Watkin 1977, p. 8). The programme, concerning the organization of human functional needs in space, as well as the structural needs of the work, constitute - in moral terms – the source of form of modern architecture. Truth and morality are defined on the basis of universality implied by a new collectivist society. We can gather, Watkin assumes, that individual taste and imagination are immoral and false as far as architectural form is concerned (Watkin 1977, p. 14; Pevsner 2005, pp. 110-11).

Hans-Georg Gadamer is related to the second of Watkin’s categories of architectural theory, as far as his philosophy is built upon the tradition of the Zeitgeist and the historical articulation of the self. Gadamer transcends the Hegelian philosophy of history, and, on the basis of Heidegger’s ontology, he replaces the Cartesian subjectivity of consciousness by the operation of understanding: being which understands himself within a temporality. The revelation of truth carried on by tradition is the principal task of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, developed thoroughly in his seminal work Truth and Method (Gadamer 2004).

Rejecting the application of the scientific method, which - deriving from the field of the natural sciences - has been extended to all fields of knowledge, Gadamer looks for truth in the experience of art, on the basis of a phenomenological understanding of the Platonic and the Aristotelian philosophy. He claims an affinity between his idea of a universal hermeneutics and Plato’s theory of beauty. He considers his philosophy as part of the continuity of the Platonic tradition, from antiquity to the present times. Ιf Platonic tradition is fragmentary, Gadamer (2004, pp. 480-481) insists, it is because it resembles an undercurrent, which permeates the philosophy of Aristotle and the Scholastics, and sometimes comes to the surface as in Neoplatonic and Christian mysticism and in theological and philosophical spiritualism.

Launching an attack on Kant’s disinterested pleasure, separated from truth and morality, Gadamer attempts to restore the ontological status of the thing. Only

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from the moral standpoint can be interest in the real, factual existence of the beautiful. In Plato, morality (agathon) is interwoven with beauty (kalon). In fact, “the beautiful reveals itself in the search for the good” (Gadamer 2004, p. 475). In Philebus, aletheia “is part of the nature of the beautiful” while “beauty is not simply symmetry but appearance itself” (Gadamer 2004, p. 477). Furthermore, the essential element of the beautiful is aletheia (non-forgetfulness, truth). The Platonic concept of participation (methexis) indicates that beauty mediates between ideas and appearances. In Phaedrus, Plato uses the example of the beautiful to manifest the “parousia” of the eidos. According to its ontological function, beauty has a special advantage compared to morality: it makes itself immediately evident. Following Plato, Gadamer (2004, p. 476) asserts that beauty is the way in which goodness acquires appearance.

The Pythagorean and Platonic concept of measure is the basis of the close relation between the beautiful and the teleological order of things. Measure, appropriateness and right proportions are the constituent parts of the beautiful for Plato, while Aristotle states that the eide of the beautiful are order (taxis), right proportion (symmetria) and definition (to orismenon). The cosmos is the supreme example of the mathematical orders of the beautiful. This kind of definition of the beautiful is a universal ontological one and implies unity between art and nature, with the priority of nature, claims Gadamer (2004, p. 474).2 Man will ultimately understand all beauty in terms of the work of his own mind.

The meaning of a return to Plato, Gadamer explains, is not the reviving of an “aesthetics of perfection” of the18th century. Arguing that Kant “convincingly proved the untenability of aesthetic rationalism” Gadamer insists that “it is incorrect to base the metaphysics of the beautiful solely on the ontology of measure and the teleological order of being” (Gadamer 2004, p. 475). The principal ontological function of the Platonic beautiful is, for Gadamer, its mediation between idea and appearance towards the achievement of unity (methexis). Although morality alone has not the power of appearance, it stimulates the operation of the beautiful.

As far as the relation between morality and practical needs is concerned, Gadamer (2004, pp. 472-3) states that the Greek word for beauty, kalon, is in antithesis to the chresimon (useful). Kalon is part of paideia and not of the necessities of life. It does not have an instrumental value. It is desirable for its own sake and not for the sake of something else. Following Gadamer, we could insist that morality and consequently beauty are alien to the practical needs architecture

2 Gadamer (2004, p. 474) relates the ontological value of measure and harmony in Plato and Aristotle to the concept of form as Gestalt in modern times, and he criticizes the use of Gestalt by modern science (especially in living nature, biology and psychology), as a subtle way to dominate being. He also argues that science accepts the beauty of nature, the beauty of art and the disinterested pleasure only to the extent that beauty serves science’s purpose to dominate nature.

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has to fulfill. This is totally contradicting with the foundational principles of Modern architecture, where morality is connected to practical needs.

Through the hermeneutic experience, being presents itself as language (Gadamer 2004, pp. 587ff). Dialectics as an open-ended activity constitute the core of language. This activity is meaningless without the involvement of praxis. Gadamer proposes his hermeneutic circle: from understanding to interpretation and then to application. Phenomenological understanding of tradition becomes the basis for its interpretation, from the point of view of the interpreter’s particular social-cultural situation. In this way, the prejudices of the interpreter are preconditions for the truth of interpretation (Gadamer 2004, p. 267). Application comes out as the result of interpretation, just in order to keep the interpretative procedure in action. The work of art and architecture can come to light through this procedure and enjoy existence as form of appearance of knowledge within the limits of a unified, all-embracing logos. Despite the fact that through the interpretative procedure the work is in a constant flux, it constitutes always a coherent, harmonic whole. It is the potentially endless series of different each other works that can come out through the same procedure, that express the event character of the work as an embodiment of morality within the realm of Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics.

Renaissance architecture seems to be an excellent example of understanding and interpretation of past values according to Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy. In the Quattro libri dell’ architettura, first published in 1570, Palladio maintains that the practice of architecture as a manifestation of virtue is a moral obligation for the architect (Palladio 1965). He attempts to recreate classical Roman architecture interpreted through the teachings of the Platonic and the Aristotelian philosophy. In his work, he points to virtue in several ways: by imitating the colonnades of the classical agora as the quintessence of the political space in Greece and Rome, by formulating the entrance of his villas in such a way as to resemble the entrance part of classical temples, by using rules of proportion and symmetry in order to achieve unity of form in itself and with cosmos (Wittkower 1973, pp. 577-145).

Nevertheless, seeking to clarify the concept of historical consciousness, Gadamer refers to Palladio in a negative way: “The aim of historical consciousness is not to use the classical model in the direct way, like Palladio or Corneille, but to know it as a historical phenomenon that can be understood solely in terms of its own time” (Gadamer 2004, p. 290). Gadamer considers that Palladio’s architecture is merely a historical reconstruction of the past. Within hermeneutic theory, it is fundamental that understanding retains the consciousness that we belong to the historical world of the work, and that the work belongs to our world, too. In Palladio, architectural form does not come forth through the understanding of a particular historical period as a whole - as Gadamer suggests - but through a procedure which implies fragmentation and selection, as far as he mainly merged Roman forms on the one hand and classical Greek philosophy on the other.

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In fact, Palladio exerted an immense influence not only on the Classical but on the modern and our contemporary architecture as well. The historian of architecture Colin Rowe, in his book “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other Essays”, where he investigates the classical origins of the Modern, asserts that Le Corbusier’s villas echo Palladio’s appeal to Roman virtue by means of mathematical harmony (Rowe 1988, pp. 8ff).

Gadamer is opposite to a mathematical expression of virtue as far as the application of the ideas on the particulars is concerned. Thus he has one more reason to be skeptical against Palladio’s architecture. His position departs from the Aristotelian ethics as a discipline independent of metaphysics. As he explains (Gadamer 2004, p. 312), the hermeneutic problem is a problem of applying something universal to something particular, time and again, in different ways. Proceeding on the basis of the Socratic teachings, Aristotle maintains that knowledge is an essential component of moral being.3 Knowledge is meaningless for Aristotle without application. This is what gives the problem of method a moral relevance. In opposition to Plato’s conception of the good, it is not only impossible but also inappropriate for ethics to achieve the extreme exactitude of mathematics (Gadamer 2004, p. 311). Therefore, we could argue that, as a consequence, a work of architecture may express truth even without mathematical harmony.

The concept of application within Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy codetermines understanding from the beginning. Far from concerning the imposition of something pregiven universal upon a particular situation, application rather deals with the understanding of the universal within the particular hermeneutical situation of the interpreter (Gadamer 2004, p. 321). As far as architecture is concerned, we could discern between the use of classical architecture in the service of Hitler’s political ideals for instance, and the interpretation of classical tradition at the urban villas on Rauchstrasse at Berlin, by Rob & Leon Krier, Aldo Rossi, Mario Botta, Hans Hollein, Giorgio Grassi.

“Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition” claims Gadamer (2004, p. 291). In this spirit, contemporary architects like Leo & Rob Krier (1979), Aldo Rossi (1982), Carlo Scarpa, Dimitris Pikionis, Demetri Porphyrios (1982) may express a comprehensive understanding of tradition according to Gadamer’s meaning of the term. They all reject forms related to science and technology and appeal to tradition as a continuum of

3 As Gadamer discusses, Aristotle makes a distinction between moral knowledge (phronesis) and theoretical knowledge (episteme). Episteme is provable knowledge represented by mathematics. Human sciences are related to moral knowledge. Their object is man and what he knows of himself. Man knows of himself as an active being. For the Greeks, art (techne) is an exemplary form of action governed by knowledge. As such, it is related to moral and consequently to practical knowledge (Gadamer 2004, pp. 312- 313).

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human existence with the world within its temporality. We can argue, in Gadamer’s terms, that their architecture, more than an expression of the idea of the good as an empty generality through the reproduction of classical forms and harmonic mathematical relations, is the outcome of a moral action departing from and returning to the phenomenological understanding of the past.

Gadamer admits that his endeavor to unify man and the world within history and outside metaphysics as a continuous, never ending process, despite its Hegelian resonances, is in fact greatly indebted to the Nietzschean concept of interpretation as opposite to metaphysical truth. Nevertheless, if we assert along with Nietzsche’s critique of morality that history is nothing but a parade of religious, political and other forces disguised behind forms, and that knowledge – not only rational but logico-philosophical as well - since Plato and Socrates, has as its aim to conquer and destroy things, the unity and the coherency of the whole construction of Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics is put under question (Nietzsche 1998).

The concept of application in Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle does not intend to give form per se any particular significance. Form is not meant to be understood by itself. Thus Classical form for Gadamer is not carrier of goodness and truth by its own merit. In this sense, Hitler could not regenerate Roman ideals by building a Pantheon at Berlin, as he intended to. The interpreter has to deal with the understanding of the particular socio-cultural situation of the work, while he is conditioned by his own historicity. Thus, instead of a single horizon of the present, we have fusion of historical horizons in the light of the present. Pre- understanding as well as prejudice are involved in the interplay with tradition (Gadamer 2004, pp. 267-73). Pre-understanding is what Heidegger called the fore- structure of knowledge. It implies that we always interpret on the basis of some conceptualizations which form the ground of our understanding. Prejudices are conditions of understanding (Gadamer 2004, pp. 277-98). There can be no understanding and no knowledge without them. Gadamer asserts that only through our openness to the truth of tradition we can constantly test our prejudices. The generation of form serves as a medium towards the achievement of moral knowledge, through a never ending, open procedure of understanding, between the interpreter and tradition. This is probably the sense of Gadamer’s reference to Palladio: continuity does not mean resemblance.

We discussed above contemporary western architecture’s attitude towards morality in relation to Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics. Next, we are going to give a brief account of the opposite attitude, which derives from the Nietzschean critique to morality and has been expressed by philosophers as Lyotard, Derrida and Deleuze, in relation to architecture.

Rejecting any historicist attempt to achieve unity and consistency between the present and the past, Lyotard asserts that the Zeitgeist mourns, as far as it cannot open up new perspectives for man. The only it can do instead, is to express itself through reactionary attitudes or utopias. The disappearance of the idea of

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progress interwoven with rationality and freedom can only be expressed by postmodern architecture as a bricolage, Lyotard argues: quotations of elements from previous periods and styles, conceived as in a dream. He refers to architects as Paolo Portoghesi or Vittorio Gregotti (Lyotard 1986, pp. 6-7). His conception reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s description of Klee’s “Angelus Novus”: The angel of history is contemplating, staring at the ruins of the past, while a storm moves him backwards, to the future (Benjamin 1969, p. 257).

Within the limits of Derrida’s philosophy of Deconstruction, the relation of contemporary architecture with tradition is founded on the Nietzschean notion of destruction of identity, which indicates the rejection of the archetype, in favor of disguise or interpretation (Derrida, 2004; Derrida & Peter Eisenman). The work ceases to be a coherent and homogenous whole. Stability, measure and harmony dissolve. The limits diffuse. The gathering of fragments which do not compose a whole and react to any imposition of order, constitute the architectural metaphor of Deconstruction. Allegory substitutes for mimesis and the archetype is replaced by montage (Owens 1984, pp. 203-35). The works of architects as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, the team Coop Himmelblau, are closely connected to the philosophy of Deconstruction (Johnson & Wigley 1988; Papadakis 1989; Tschumi 1996).

Under the influence of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, contemporary avant- garde architecture becomes an allegory for the infinitesimal structure of our consciousness (Deleuze 2007; Cache 1995; Lynn 2004). Synthesis and unity concern the fusion of simple heterogeneous components into continuities, while they retain their status. Liable to the action of powers, to interpenetration and fusion, contemporary architecture ends up as fluid architecture, architectural geography, interactive architecture, architecture of surface consciousness, neoplasmatic architecture (Wiley 2002, 2004, 2008).

We started our discussion with a critique of the architectural theory of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century by David Watkin. Watkin maintains that modern architecture, despite its claim to aesthetic autonomy, is well anchored on morality, in social, political, rational and technological terms, as well as in terms of the Zeitgeist. In this way, morality undermines individual imagination as well as the aesthetic value of the work carried on by artistic tradition.

Launching an attack on Kant’s disinterested pleasure, Gadamer attempts to restore the ontological status of the thing through a unity among aesthetics, morality and reason, on the basis of the Platonic and the Aristotelian philosophy. He proposes his interpretative circle which operates inside dialectics as an open- ended activity. An endless series of works can come out through a continuous procedure of understanding-interpretation-application. Nevertheless, the unity and coherency which architecture enjoys within Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics is severely disrupted in works related to an opposite attitude to

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morality, departing from Nietzsche. The need for a continuous dialogue between the two, opposing attitudes discussed above, in relation to architecture, the one represented by Gadamer and the other by philosophers as Lyotard, Derrida or Deleuze, is fundamental. Furthermore, contemporary Avant-guard architecture is greatly indebted to philosophy for providing it with means of communication and interplay with other fields of human expression and action within our society.

References - Benjamin, W. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In: H. Arendt ed. 1969. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. N. Y.: Schocken Books. - Cache, B. 1995. Earth Moves. The Furnishing of Territories. Transl. A. Boyman. U.S.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Deleuze, G. 2007. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). Transl. T. Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. - Derrida, J. 2004. Dissemination (1972). Transl. B. Johnson. London: Continuum. - Derrida, J. & Eisenman, P. Chora L Works. Kipnis, J. & Leeser Th. eds. N. Y.: The Monacelli Press. - Gadamer, H.-G. 2004. Truth and Method (1960). Transl. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. London: Continuum. - Giedion, S. 1971. Space, Time And Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941). Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Johnson, P. & Wigley, M. 1988. Deconstructivist Architecture, Exhibition Catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art. - Krier, R. 1979. Urban Space. Foreword by Colin Rowe. London: Academy Editions. - Le Corbusier. 1987. Towards a New Architecture (1921). Transl. F. Etchells. Reprinted from the 1931 edition. London: The Architectural Press. - Lynn, G. guest ed. 2004. Architectural Design: Folding in Architecture. London: Wiley –Academy. - Lyotard, J.-F. Defining the Postmodern. In: Appignanesi, L. ed. 1986. ICA Documents 4. London: The Institute of Contemporary Arts. - Nietzsche, F. 1998. On the Genealogy of Morality. Transl. M. Clark and A. J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. - Owens, G. 1984. The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism. In Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis, New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, pp. 203-235. - Palladio, A. 1965. The Four Books of Architecture (1570). Transl. I. Ware. USA: Dover Publications.

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- Papadakis, A. et al. eds. 1989. Deconstruction, Omnibus Volume. London: Academy Editions. - Pevsner, N. 2005. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936). Intr. R. Weston. Yale: Yale University Press. - Porphyrios, D. 1982. Sources of Modern Eclecticism. London: Academy Editions. - Pugin, A. W. N. 2011. Contrasts. Facsimile of 1841 edition. U. K.: Spire Books Ltd. - Read, H. 1971. Anarchy and Order, Essays in Politics (1954). Boston: Beacon Press. - Rossi, A. 1982. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press. - Rowe, C. 1988. The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (1976). USA: MIT Press. - Tschumi, B. 1996. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Viollet-le-Duc. 1875. Discources on Architecture (2 vols, 1858–72). Transl. H. V. Brunt. New York: Grove Press. Available at: http://www.archive.org/stream/discourcesonarc00violgoog#page/n36mode /2up [Accessed: 30 November 2011). - Watkin, D. 1977. Morality and Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Wiley, J. ed., Rahim, A. guest-editor. 2002. Contemporary Techniques in Architecture. Magazine: Architectural Design. London: Wiley. - Wiley, J. ed., Taylor, M. guest-editor. 2004. Surface Consciousness. Magazine: Architectural Design. London: Wiley. - Wiley, J. ed., Hensel, M. et al. guest-editors. 2004. Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies. Magazine: Architectural Design. London: Wiley. - Wiley, J. ed., Cruz, M. and Pike S. guest-editors. 2008. Neoplasmatic Design. Magazine: Architectural Design. London: Wiley. - Wittkower, R. 1973. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. Great Britain: Academy Editions.

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The concepts of symmetry and eumetry in Panayotis Michelis’ thinking

Nefeli Kyrkitsou* University of Patras

Panayotis Michelis (1903-1969) is the most significant Greek theoretician whose work focuses on the aesthetics of architecture. His thinking became known from his literary and academic work as a professor in the National Technical University of Athens from 1941 until 1969. He was highly influenced by the 19th century philosophical thinking in Germany; the romantic idealism of that era as explored in Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s scripts on Art played an important role in the formation of his own Theories of Aesthetics.

This paper will focus on two specific concepts of Michelis’ thinking: the concept of symmetry and eumetry. Symmetry refers to the existence of two isomeric elements and is the result of a strict mathematical procedure. Order and harmony which arise from the study of symmetry, led Michelis to the introduction of the concept of eumetry in his theoretical thinking. Opposite to symmetry, eumetry refers to the existence of equivalent elements, neither equal nor identical, while it requires different procedures in order to be achieved. Eumetry became part of his thinking because he realized that there are asymmetric forms which are characterized by the same or greater order and harmony than other symmetric ones. Eumetry is actually a latent symmetry, because it carries all the high values of symmetry without being formed by the same mathematical rules. Therefore, eumetry can derive from asymmetric forms, while symmetric forms will always embody eumetry. In his book Architecture as Art, Michelis states that although symmetry indicates order, it is not capable of delivering the optimum aesthetic outcome while he considers eumetry to have the maximum aesthetic value.

* [email protected]

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Michelis uses examples of Greek architecture to study the dynamics of the aforementioned concepts, in an attempt to find diachronic values governing the architectural form. The analysis of these specific aspects of his thinking will augment a deeper understanding of Greek architecture and of those elements that affected Greek architectural thinking of his era as well as how they have reached nowadays.

Introduction The means and ways through which architects elaborate with the form vary depending on the social and political circumstances of each era. The parameter, however, which remains unchangeable, is the intention of the architect to achieve an effective dialogue with the recipient. The manipulation of form becomes a means of conveying ideas because the visual effect of an architectural project constitutes the initial contact between a building and a person. Therefore, given that the architect aims to stimulate the recipient's mind, the form is not reduced to an exclusively optical parameter. The senses and intellect, as the two means through which the individual perceives and processes the world, constitute the basis on which an argument on the form is initiated. The aim of this research is to highlight the importance of form, as a visual and conceptual parameter in the architectural language.

An important chapter on the subject was Panayotis Michelis’ work, a Greek architect of the last century. Michelis sought techniques through which the form of an architectural object is moving from the recipient’s perception to his logic and emotion. In his studies, the form is not treated as an image therefore his analysis is based on its conceptual implications: the form is detached from any operational requirements to become the communicational tool of the architectural language. Additionally, the rythmological variations of the form as studied by Michelis are always placed within the broader historical context that they occur, and therefore the link between architecture and society becomes evident.

The theoretical discussions on architecture in Greece during the late 19th and early 20th century were directed, for many reasons, towards the adoption of the principles of an outlandish Neoclassicism. The next few decades, from the '30s until the '50s, were characterized by the ideological debate on tradition and innovation, which was expressed as a conflict between attachment to the local characteristics of a place and the doctrines of Modernism. Influenced by his era, Michelis embraces many elements of Neoclassicism as noble values of architecture but is also investigating patterns to interrupt the strictness of the form.

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The present study deals with the concepts of symmetry and eumetry as a key element in Panayotis Michelis’ thinking.1 Through the analysis and use of these two concepts, Michelis attempts a comparison of logic and emotion in architecture. To determine this relationship and define the notion of a piece of art, Michelis studied influential philosophers of the 18th and 19th century, such as Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and others, and incorporated some of their thoughts into his theoretical work. Influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer's reflections on the concept of the Idea and Miloutine Borissavlievitch’s optical observations, Michelis framed his own theory on the characteristics that the form should bear in order to produce a "great architecture" and communicated his ideas to the Greek architectural community through his teaching and publications.

Biography2 Panayotis Michelis (1903-1969) was born in Patras in 1903. He graduated from the School of Architecture in Dresden, Germany in 1926 and then worked in architectural offices in Dresden, Patras and Athens. Soon after he stopped working as a freelancer to concentrate on his writing, research and teaching. For several years he was the Professor of the Theory of Architecture in the Department of Architecture in the National Technical University of Athens. He participated in international councils, gave lectures at universities across Europe and the U.S. and taught at Harvard University as a research scholar. His rich auctorial work includes books such as "Architecture As an Art" (1940), "An Aesthetic Approach to Byzantine Art” (1946), "The Aesthetics of Reinforced Concrete Architecture" (1955), "Aesthetic Considerations" (1962) to name but a few. Part of his work has been translated into several languages such as English, French, Italian, Serbian, Romanian, Korean and Japanese.

Symmetry and Eumetry Panayotis Michelis’ work focuses on the aesthetic approach of architecture, which he considers equally through its visual, conceptual and philosophical dimension. Michelis’ develops his arguments in detail through logical correlations in an attempt to avoid arbitrary conclusions. Embracing, in general, Vitruvius’ principles on the three dimensions of architecture: «firmitatis, utilitatis, venustatis» (Vitruvius 1997, p. 56), he approaches architecture by analyzing it in three dimensions: the functional, the technical and artistic (Michelis 1951, pp. 12- 15).

1 In Greek syn as a word prefix indicates a correspondence between two parts, while eu gives a positive meaning to the word following, like for example the words euphoria, eutopia, etc. 2 Further details of Michelis’ biography at Hellenic Society for Aesthetics website at www.hellenicaesthetics.gr

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The functional dimension is constituted of elements aiming at specific needs of the individual. The technical dimension relates to the construction of the architectural object and the integrity of materials and modern technology, in accordance with the purpose that the project is supposed to fulfill. The artistic dimension is characterized by an aesthetic autonomy achieved through the harmony of proportions (Michelis 1951, p. 18). The functional and technical dimensions are not by themselves capable of producing a piece of art (Michelis 1951, p. 18). These dimensions are generated by the imminent and utilitarian human needs and therefore cannot distant themselves from the narrow materialistic framework by which they are defined. On the contrary, the artistic dimension relates to an intellectual process. Harmony is achieved through the eumetry and eurhythmy of forms on a visual and conceptual basis. The artistic dimension may well contain the functional and constructive dimension, whereas a form narrowed to the human or constructional needs, therefore an exclusively functional or technical dimension, cannot achieve the artistic dimension (Michelis 1951, p. 18). The power of the artistic dimension lies in its capability to dematerialize, because the aesthetic criteria by which it is modulated are based on the intellectual stimuli of the observer or user. Michelis’ critical approach on these three dimensions of architecture is set under the angle of architecture as an art. So even the functional and technical dimensions of the architectural object are obliged to serve the artistic dimension, otherwise they lack value.

In order to define the artistic integrity of an architectural object, Michelis introduces and compares the concepts of symmetry and eumetry. He quotes (Michelis 1951, p. 74) the example of dichotomizing a vertical line on the horizontal axis, and notices that if the dichotomy is done empirically without the use of any geometric instruments, then the lower part because it bears the carriages and in order to achieve a perfect aesthetic outcome, will be bigger than the upper part. For example, in the ancient Greek architecture, the Doric columns show an intense thickness from top to bottom and in the historian of architecture Haralambos Bouras’ (1999, p. 201) view this is in order to increase "the impression of stability of the column".

Symmetry constitutes a mathematical relationship between two similar elements. On the contrary, eumetry exhibits the existence of a proportional relationship among the parts of the whole, and therefore implies the equivalence rather than equality. Therefore eumetry appears as a result of the human imperfection which is however based – and therefore controlled, by the perception of symmetry. Eumetry virtually carries all the noble values of symmetry but is not formed by the same mathematical rules. In his book Architecture as an Art, Michelis (1951, p. 75) claims that while eumetry may carry an asymmetric form, "symmetry is not enough without eumetry". Therefore, symmetry, as a sign of order, is not capable of delivering the optimal aesthetic result, while eumetry produces the maximum aesthetic value. The superiority of eumetry lies in the combination of visual and conceptual integrity. Symmetry represents solely a visual balance while eumetry also satisfies the conceptual

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balance of the whole. The conceptual symmetry is a condition beyond the appearance associated with the conceptual value of the parts of the project.

In the example of the church of Panaghia Kapnikarea in Athens (11th century), Michelis states that the conceptual symmetry prevails over the spatial symmetry, because the symmetry of the church is determined by the conceptual significance of the parts: the two domes, which are the most important element of the building, redefine its the symmetry, not by their form but by their conceptual gravity, shifting the aesthetic center of gravity. A similar example is the Palace of the Doges in Venice. According to Michelis’ theory of eumetry, the mathematical dichotomy on the horizontal axis observed in the elevation of the building is opposed to the rules of harmony, as the height of the base is not bigger than that of the upper part of the building. However, the permeability of the lower part of the palace and thus its unification with the city redefines the conceptual significance of the lower part. Therefore, the symmetry of the building shifts compensating for the lack of visual harmony of the individual parts. This complete and dynamic relationship between the parts and whole, Michelis defines it as harmony.

Points of convergence in the theories of Panayotis Michelis and Miloutine Borissavlievitch Michelis’ definition of harmony has been influenced by the thinking of Miloutine Borissavlievitch, Serbian architect and theorist of the 20th century who formulated his own architectural design theory and which relies on the visual and aesthetic perception. His writings were published in Serbia and France in the time period between the two World Wars, and were widely distributed mainly in the Anglo-Saxon countries up until the 1960's.

Borissavlievitch’s theory refers to the relationship between the parts and whole, defining harmony as the mutual dependence of the individual components of a whole (Borissavlievitch 1925, p. 9). Harmony derives from diverse elements which manage to give the impression of one (Borissavlievitch,1925, p. 22). Similarly, harmony means the analogy of the parts and therefore he considers the distinction between harmony and analogy to be artificial (Borissavlievitch 1925, p. 9).

Borissavlievitch however, remains mainly restricted to the visual identification of the form as the primary stimulus of vision. The visual observations and aesthetic effects stand on the basis of his analysis. Limited by the perception of the visual outcome and its direct impact on humans, he does not extensively investigate the architect’s intention when attempting to represent an idea in his work. Thus, in his writings, he focuses neither on the conceptual implications, that the form may bear nor on the revelation of the idea as a necessary expression of human nature.

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Michelis, who had closely studied Borissavlievitch’s thinking, seems to have been strongly influenced by it, as in his writings he espoused a big part of the Serbian architect’s theories on the harmony of form. In order to define harmony more thoroughly, Michelis introduces the concept of the rhythm in his analysis. The rhythm is a typological arrangement of the form (Michelis 1951, p. 69), a method of classification related to the recognition and simultaneously the separation of similar elements. Therefore, the rhythm differentiates and categorizes the individual components and thus is an external "tautology" of the form (Michelis 1951, p. 69). Through the categorization of the components, a type – i.e. a rhythm – can obtain many forms and exhibit intense morphological variations, whilst respecting the principles forming the rhythm it belongs to. It is a methodological tool with which the architect categorizes and then elaborates the possible developments of the form, which Michelis confronted not as a simple morphological shift but as an alteration in the conceptual approach deriving from the architect’s transformations of thinking which eventually are reflected on the form.

Similar to Borissavlievitch’s thinking Michelis’ definition of harmony unites the different components, i.e. different rhythms. Harmony is interpreted as the unity of the parts and Michelis borrowing Borissavlievitch’s phrase «unité dans la variété», states that harmony is "unity in variety”3. Thus harmony does not mean uniformity, but coexistence of contrasts. Therefore, the individual components do not constitute multiple diversities but an inseparable unit. So if the rhythm indicates a quantitative classification of similar items, harmony is the qualitative coordination of contradictions in a coherent whole.

Michelis’ analysis on the form does not derive exclusively from a visual analysis, like Borissavlievitch’s. Rhythm and harmony are not defined solely through visual criteria. In Michelis thinking the morphological outcome is generated primarily by a conceptual approach to the form: the form in order to obtain meaning and value must constitute the reflection of human thinking. Michelis’ influences from Borissavlievitch’s theory on the visual perception of the form are enriched by Schopenhauer’s philosophical analysis on the Idea.

The influence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s thought on Panayotis Michelis Michelis read Schopenhauer during his first years at Dresden. According to Schopenhauer, aesthetics is a timeless and spaceless concept. The aesthetic experience requires the absence of both individuality and will (Diffey 1990, p. 141) therefore the aesthetic perfection is placed beyond one’s individual taste. According to Schopenhauer, the aesthetics of a piece of art is linked to the Platonic Idea, without, however, giving it a negative connotation as Plato did.

3 The term “unity in variety” used by Michelis in order to define harmony is a translation from Borissavlievitch’s definition on harmony: unité dans la variété.

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Schopenhauer regards the piece of art as the reflection of thinking and not as a double representation of a pure Idea, whose value has been deducted due to this double imitation. For Schopenhauer, it is in the representations of art that the essence of the world is revealed (Krukowski 1992, p. 54), as they manifest human thinking. Beauty is detached from the practical, the specific and clear reality (Knox, 1978, p. 136). If aesthetics remains the expression of one’s personal taste, then it is ruled by the expectation of visual harmony, and is therefore unable to communicate with the world behind the appearance, and thus remains a visual and not a conceptual process.

The concept of Schopenhauer’s timeless Idea as a prerequisite for art is respective to the eternal values which, according to Michelis, are inherent in the piece of art and determine Beauty and harmony. Michelis (1951, p. 5) argues that art "while bound to the conditions of a specific place and time in order to serve us, gives its work a value beyond place and time". So the architect as an artist while influenced by his era and extracting his information and stimuli from society, manages to produce a piece of art only when he manages to overcome the strict frame of space and time surrounding him and creates a timeless and spaceless piece of work. The philosophical issues that art may stimulate are related to the eternal meditations of the individual as an entity and not related to each era. This fact is reflected on the work patterns produced by the different arts and explains the reasons why "an amazing similarity of forms of different eras and different cultures" (Michelis 1951, p. 5) is observed, since art reflects and comments on the common and eternal values, adapting them to contemporary social reality. The architect as an artist in order to respond to his society, needs to put aside his individuality and become a "measure of the society" (Michelis 1951, p. 307), thus to eliminate his personal will.

Schopenhauer while referring to architecture as one of the arts treats symmetry as a mathematical condition that is associated with the appearance rather than the idea of the form and therefore cannot by itself constitute a noble value of art. Schopenhauer’s formalism and ideology are related to a type of balance and equalization of the opposites, a relationship of action and reaction and not a regularity, a proportion or symmetry (Borissavlievitch 1926, p. 134). Similarly, according to Michelis, the austere geometric compositions fail to convey the real meaning of art. The typical implementation of the rules deprive from the form its artistic value because they fail to create a unified whole that does not permit any division or alteration (Michelis 1951, p. 36). These forms aim at the functional organization of space and at serving the users. Actually however, they achieve nothing, since they lack of conceptual content and therefore the result does not satisfy the user neither aesthetically nor practically (Michelis 1951, p. 36).

Michelis considers the imitation of forms as an act devoid of meaning. The essence lies in the inner "language" used by the architect in order to convert the architectural object into a piece of work that surpasses the narrow constructive frame, a piece of work that eventually goes beyond the material world and

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reaches noble values. Specifically, he notes that "the technical work is a cold and silent mental outcome reminding the cylinder as a geometric body, while the architectural object is imprinted as a live creature not allowing you to make any thoughts on the existence of the geometric form" (Filippidis 1984, p. 200).

Despite however, the strong theoretical explorations of the world behind the appearance and the criticism on the superficial visual perception, Michelis did not actually go into as much detailed analysis as Schopenhauer. He embraces the theory of the German philosopher on the concept of the Idea and strongly rejects the meaningless repetition and imitation of forms, but he does not analyze the specific characteristics that determine the value of the Idea. Schopenhauer’s reflections on the Idea, his detailed analysis on the lack of will, time and space, appear vaguely in Michelis’ thinking. Although his visual observations and analysis are quite extensive and he does indeed devote a significant amount of his written work on the analysis of the form, he remains closer to Borissavlievitch’s approach on the piece of art than to Schopenhauer’s theories. It is not because he does not embrace the importance of the Idea beyond the form, but because he does not specify clearly the characteristics that the Idea should have in order to generate a piece of art. On the contrary, his analysis on the form states quite clearly the morphological characteristics required to create a piece of art. For example, in his book Architecture As an Art, he extensively uses mathematical equations in order to argue on the reasonable stability and integrity of the forms established by the golden section or by the rules of symmetry, whereas he does not deal thoroughly with the evaluation of the Idea lying beyond the concept of symmetry as a well established morphological pattern.

Epilogue From the visual analysis of the form to its conceptual implications, Michelis’ reasoning is searching for the mechanisms lying beyond the concept of eumetry, i.e. a state of detachment of the mater from the strict mathematical rules. By incorporating the concept of imperfection, eumetry may lead to a mental and emotional stimulation or as Le Corbusier would state “a touching upon the human axis”.

Concluding, Michelis’ work still remains important and up to date as he attempted to give answers to questions that even today we have dealt with in this conference. By recognizing the importance of emotion in art, he illustrated his personal opinion on the means and ways that this may occur. Through logical reasoning and mathematical meditations, he sought for the methods and means through which architecture can escape from the pure geometry and dematerialize. The conceptual relation between symmetry and eumetry as studied by Michelis, is one not merely based on appearance, but on the communication of human thought indicating the conflict between logic and emotion, and therefore the desired transition from an architectural object into a piece of art. Symmetry

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expresses the argumentation of rule and logic on the form. Eumetry reveals the intention to surpass the austere rational thinking of the Enlightenment. According to Michelis, in order for architecture to pass from the field of science to that of art, it has to embody in its characteristics, the anthropocentric variables of eumetry. The breaking or exception to the rule, the imperfection, and the noncompliance to the strict application of theory, allows the architect to pass from the context of objectivity promoted by science, to that of artistic subjectivity. Symmetry and eumetry constitute for Michelis the two fundamental concepts through which he manages to create a firm basis for his architectural theory.

References - Borissavlievitch, Miloutine. 1926. Essai Critique sur les Principales Doctrines Relatives à l'Esthétique de l'Architecture, Paris : Payot. - Borissavlievitch, Miloutine. 1925. La science de l’harmonie architecturale, Paris : Fischbacher. - Filippidis, Dimitris. 1984. Modern Greek Architecture, Athens : Melissa. - Knox, I. 1978. The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, New Jersey : Humanities Press. - Krukowski, Lucian. 1992. Aesthetic Legacies, Philadelphia : Temple University Press. - Michelis, Panayotis. 1951. Architecture as an Art, 2nd edn., Athens : Technical Chamber of Greece. - Mpouras, Charalampos. 1999. Lessons on History of Architecture, Athens : Symmetria. - Papageorgiou, N. Alexandros. 2010. The Idea of Architecture through P. A. Michelis’ Thoughtful Teaching, Athens : Panayotis and Effie Michelis Foundation. - Vitruvius, M. 1997. On Architecture, Volumes I-V, Greek edn., trans. Lefas Pavlos, Athens : Plethron. - Journals Diffey T. J. 1990. British Journal of Aesthetics, volume 30, no 2. - Websites www.hellenicaesthetics.gr

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The secret diaries of a music lover: associating emotions to music

Vítor Moura* University of Minho

Introduction When trying to describe the relation between music and passion so that an interest in the passion will ipso facto be an interest in the music, one should avoid what Malcolm Budd calls “the heresy of the separable experience”: “the separation of [the experience] of what gives music its value (…) from [the experience of] the music itself.” (Budd 1985, p. 123) Or as Richard Wollheim puts it, it is hard to accept an explanation of art that places its essence outside the object of art itself. A heretical description “represents a musical work as being related in a certain way to an experience which can be fully characterized without reference to the nature of the work itself.” (Budd 1985, p. 123) Some emotional responses are more prone to this heresy than others. In order to avoid the heresy, one needs an explanation of the listening experience that keeps unified the expressive and non-expressive aspects of it so that they are the objects of one single act of attention.

Also, throughout the listening process, listeners are engaged in trying to make sense of the unfolding and progression of their musical experience. Those who can make sense of the progression of the experience correspond to what Leonard Meyer (1956) describes as the listener who is capable of understanding the style of the music. According to Meyer, hypothetical and evident meanings are formed by “purely musical events” and these don’t include expressive musical events. Expressivist philosophers of music, of course, disagree and argue that one you cannot entirely grasp the ‘purely musical’ without grasping the expressive. The

* [email protected]

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“purely musical” is often modified by the expressive, which is demonstrated by the performance of “excerpted chunks of music”.1

Philosophers tend to believe that what causes our emotional reaction to music falls under one of at least five main categories. They shall be considered respectively.

The cognitive response First we have what Aaron Ridley calls the cognitive responses to music, i.e., our immediate response to the character or to the formal characteristics of a given piece of music: Richard Strauss’s music may be said to be uplifting and Schumann’s songs depressive and a famous character in one of Woody Allen’s movies once said that he couldn’t be too much exposed to Wagner’s ferocity without feeling the urge to conquer Poland. We may respond cognitively to a number of qualitative and quantitative aspects in the music - the sensuality of timbres and textures, its speed, duration, volume, etc. – and a number of technical qualities such as its tonal complexity, or the intricacy of its harmonic structure.

Cognitive responses escape the heresy of the separable experience: their objects are always aspects of the music itself.

The axiological response Second, there are emotional responses involved in our critical appraisal of the work’s composition or interpretation: we are overwhelmed by the harmonic complexity of a Bruckner movement, or become irritated with the chitarrone of an Italian opera. I propose that we name these as axiological responses.

The empathetic response Third, music can elicit from us an empathetic response, i.e., we tend to perceive the piece as the expression of someone’s emotional circumstances (Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique or Schubert’s Winterreise are obvious examples) but not necessarily the author’s (transmission theory). The character of our response may be consonant or contrasting and the same piece of music may elicit compassion, commiseration or irritation. In any case, one takes the piece to be closely related to a specific state of mind, which not only causes but formally determines the piece.

Contrasting empathetic responses have as their material object the person whose passion we take the music to express. Consonant empathetic responses diverge, however: they may have objects and thus may not be properly classified as “feelings”. If we come to feel with the person whose emotion is thought to be expressed, our response may share the same object and our empathetic response

1 In this respect, Aaron Ridley proposes that we consider the experience of listening to Wagner’s “Winterstürme” performed as a concert excerpt outside the context of Die Walküre’s first act. (Ridley 1995, 71)

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becomes an emotion. But because we don’t require that sharing of an object, consonant empathetic responses may be either emotions or feelings.

Also, authors such as Aaron Ridley suggest that when we consider an emotion (e.g., “depression”) as being distinct from a co-nominal episode of emotion (this depression) one obtains a formal object, “by means of which the emotion type may be identified without reference to any particular episode of it.” (Ridley 1995, p. 35) Thus we can describe someone’s behavior without linking the expressive behavior to a particular episode: thus we refer a behavior which is “expressive of terror” to a mere formal object such as “reaction to something tremendously threatening”. The reference is made only to the formal object of the passion of which a particular behavior is expressive.

Empathetic responses face serious problems in regard to the heresy of the separable experience, in particular the expression-as-transmission variety (Tolstoy’s or Deryck Cooke’s views, for instance). Deryck Cooke, for example, tried to develop a musical vocabulary such that a descending minor triad would always be expressive of “passive sorrow” (Cooke 1959). But it is doubtful that such invariance does exist. Also, transmission theories would always be heretic because they tend to foster an instrumentalist view and to perceive music as a means to an end. Of course, much depends on the way we characterize musical expressiveness and the degree to which our empathetic responses depend upon musical features expressive of passions. But since virtually all of these passions are characterizable without reference to the music expressive of them, then they are guilty of the heresy of paraphrase and should therefore be inadmissible.

On the other hand, there is the tricky question concerning the identification of the bearer of these passions. Two candidates are usually considered eligible to assume that position: the composer herself or some kind of putative agonic persona who may or may not be identified with the composer. Transmission theories of empathy defend the first candidate: the passions felt by the listener are indeed the emotions of a specific human being, namely, the music’s composer. J.W.N Sullivan (1960), for instance, explains the emotion in music through the composer’s mental state. Note that Sullivan carefully rejects the systematic identification of biographical traits in Beethoven’s music (e.g: his cure in Baden- Baden as being reflected in the Molto Adaggio of his String Quartet n. 15 “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart”): “the work of a great artist is not some kind of sumptuous diary.” (Sullivan1960, viii) He defends instead that there is a “root-experience” by which a composer’s attitude towards life, expressed in his music, is largely conditioned. But against this, it should be noted that there is always something intrinsically disappointing in trying to use life to understand music. As Aaron Ridley puts it, “the deductive traffic should always flow from the music to the life and not the other way around.” (Ridley 1995, p. 190).

The other candidate is a kind of hypostasized persona. Authors such as Coleridge or Scruton argued in favour of the idea that an appropriate understanding of

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dramatic representation, for instance, is strictly a matter of the will. Coleridge called it a “willing suspension of disbelief” and Scruton (1983) a “perceiving in disbelief”. But the truth is that very often we can hardly help but be drawn into the representation, and particularly into the representation of the expression of states of mind (because of sympathetic response) and this is often explained by the fact that we tend to perceive the representation as the expression of a persona. Now, there are several kinds of personae we may postulate. First, we have what we could call the “style-c’est-l’homme” persona, following Buffon’s famous adagio. Some pieces of music invite the construction of one type of persona than of other: as Charles Rosen puts it, in the transition from the Baroque to the Classical sonata style, “the mere rendering of sentiment was not dramatic enough (…) and it was replaced by dramatic action” (Rose 1971, p. 43). Second, we have “diegetic personae”: in coming sympathetically to grasp the expressive character of a singer’s melismatic gestures, we may come to respond empathetically to the persona whom the singer represents. But most importantly, we have the “expressive persona”: empathetic responses require that we postulate a persona (an “anonymous agent”, according to J. Levinson 1982) of which the music is a narrative or a drama. On the one hand, the admittance of this persona makes the empathy theory better suited to extend the range of musical expressiveness as to encompass the full range of human emotions. It also becomes very agile when it comes to explain why the listener may sometimes be deeply moved to an emotional response, since she is actually being confronted with a “person” undergoing an extreme emotional turmoil. However, this “hypothetical emotionalism”, as Stephen Davies calls it, has also been confronted with some formidable contestation. In this context, it suffices to mention three of the main objections: a) How do listeners come to imagine the relevant persona that suffers that entire emotional loop? Take the example of Jerrold Levinson’s explanation for the last movement of Brahms’ First Symphony and, specifically, for the peaceful change announced by the horns). If the listener recognizes a sudden feeling of solving unnamed hardships, won’t this be because she had already recognized expressions of overcoming in the music? In that case, as Scruton points out, hypothetical emotionalism is both circular and redundant. On the other hand, if the music provides no previous guide to what is to be imagined, how can we assess that our imaginings are being properly ascribed to music? b) Authors such as Stephen Davies or Peter Kivy (1989) have argued against the empirical claim that expressiveness is predicated to music on the basis of imagining a persona as subject to a narrative directed by the course of the music. It is simply an oversimplified and to some extent idiosyncratic re-description of musical listening. There are many different things going on in people’s heads when they listen to music. Some of them may allow music to induce in them the imagining of the psychological experience of a persona, but it is doubtful whether everybody does this. Thus, since the postulation of a persona is not a -

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so to speak - transcendental feature of musical listening, it would be better off by being included in the realm of the associations we allow ourselves to make while listening to music. c) It is often denied that music is capable of controlling the listener’s experience in such a way as to unify their experiences in a general agreement regarding the proper expressiveness. To put it in other words, there are no constraints on the number of personas imagined living within a musical work. There are way too many possible narratives and it is doubtful they would all fall under a single archetypical story that would lead to general agreement.

The sympathetic response Fourth, we are merely sympathetically moved by the way the music is expressive, which does not involve the belief that the piece constitutes a biographical trace of its author’s intimate feelings. Weeping willows often induce melancholia but the sentient subject does not entertain the thought that the willow is experiencing some kind of self-commiseration. One recognizes in the object some features that are reminiscent of expressions of feeling ɸ, or, to paraphrase Peter Kivy’s physiognomic approach, “what we see as, and say is, expressive of ɸ is parasitic on what we see as, and say is, expressing ɸ; and to see X as expressive of ɸ, or to say X is expressive of ɸ, is to see X as appropriate to expressing ɸ.” (Kivy 1989, p. 50) It is often the case, of course, that when listening to music one relates to someone else – though not to her passions – as when we react with admiration towards the composer or the performer, to the way they elicit such powerful reactions from their audience. But that too should count as a form of sympathetic response.

Sympathetic responses of this kind are often related to what Aaron Ridley calls the musical melisma, i.e., the notion that there are striking resemblances between music and features of human beings (i.e., proper sentient beings) when involved in the expression of emotions. Even instrumental music comes charged with associations and can thus hook up with affective life-experiences as Peter Kivy points out when he compares the oboe aria of the First Brandenburg Concerto and the part where the Evangelist imitates the weeping of Peter - “und weinet bitterlich” - in St Matthew Passion (Kivy 1989, pp. 27-28). But what exactly are the human features of which we tend to recognize musical resemblances? There are several candidates.

i)

The phenomenological profile of inner experiences of emotion has been the favourite of authors such as Susanne Langer and Malcolm Budd. However, it is farfetched to think that emotions can be individuated in terms of their structural and phenomenological profiles: on the one hand, a single emotion can present different mixes of sensation and feeling on

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different occasions and, on the other hand, contrasting emotions can share a similar outline.

ii)

The facial melisma. It is a fact that we are prone to recognize human faces bearing emotionally suggestive expressions in many nonhuman objects (cars, etc.); but it is doubtful whether we experience music as wearing a smiling or frowning face: temporal unfolding is a crucial aspect of our musical experience but the facial expression comes as an “atemporally structured gestalt” (Davies 2006, p. 181).

iii)

The vocal melisma. But to what features of the voice are we comparing musical expressiveness? If the similarity is supposed to lie in tone, timbre, accent or inflection, as suggested by Jacopo Peri or Thomas Reid. “the whoops, whines, bawls, wails, groans, cries, shrieks, moans and whimpers with which emotions are vocalized” (Davies 2006, p. 181) are quite unlike the sound of expressive music. A variant of the voice melisma consists in the idea that the distinctive prosodic contours of specific emotions can be recreated musically (Juslin 2001). This view derives from the fact that articulated voice and music are more alike in dynamic structure, articulation, pitch and intensity than in timbre and inflection. However, as also noted by Davies, “this process seems to depend more on conventional stipulations than upon iconic similarity.” (Davies 2006, p. 181)

Against all this, an author such as Ridley would reply that all that is necessary for the theory to hold true is that the resemblance of music to voice that strikes the listener can in principle be explained by reference to the features that music and voice have in common. Therefore it is not necessary that the listener can (or does) do this when listening to the music. Furthermore, the perception of resemblance may sometimes happen at a level of which the listener is not conscious. “The reason why these melismatic connections can be made unconsciously has less to do with any merely conventional association than with the ubiquity and importance in our lives of the expressive human voice” (Ridley 1995, p. 80).

iv)

Of course, many musical works cannot be explained in terms of resemblance to the expressive human voice. Thus, melismatic theories need to look for other potentially expressive features of music. Musical motion is the strongest candidate either because of the spatial orientation of pitch or due to the belief that there is also a different kind of melisma – a “movement-based melisma” (Ridley 1995, p. 94) – connecting music and human behavior. “Musical movement” is a very dead metaphor. Since

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many of the adjectives of musical movement apply also to the bodily movements of human beings, music may be related to a number of psychological states without introducing any further mechanism. Of course the number of these psychological states is small because most psychological states are not named after qualities of motion. Words such as “jerky”, “smoothly”, “agitatedly”, “restlessly”, “galumphingly” constitute adverbial expressions that apply to literal and musical movement and to psychological states: “a jaunty person”. This leads us to what Stephen Davies calls the appearance emotionalism, i.e., the resemblance between music’s temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behavior associated with the expression of emotion. We experience movement in music in terms of high to low or fast to slow but also in the production and relaxation of tensions generated within the harmony, the phrasing, the timing, etc. This movement is like human behavior because it seems purposeful and goal-directed: there is closure and development not mere stopping and succession. Music is often expressive in recalling the carriage and posture of the human body as exemplified by Peter Kivy when he describes the aria “I know that my redeemer liveth”, in Handel’s Messiah, as “a speaker firm, confident, stepping forward, gesturing expressively, but with a certain circumspection, a reserve commensurate with the divine mystery of the text” (Kivy 1989, p. 54). The critics deny that the movement of music exactly resembles human behavior. Dereck Matravers (1998), for instance, argued consistently against this by noticing that musical movement resembles the movement of clouds as close as it resembles human expressive behavior. To this Davies has replied that the connection is given in the experience of similarity not in some absolute measure of verisimilitude. That is to say that we choose the similarities we wish to entertain because we do not find all resemblances salient or reversible. We are likely to be struck more by the way weeping willows resemble sad people than by the way they resemble frozen waterfalls. Our interests shape the world and so we experience many things as similar to human experience and behavior. So is the case with music: it is expressive because we experience it as possessing a dynamic character relating to humanly expressive behavior. But how does this work in the case of music that is abstract and insentient, not semantic or representational? How can this music express emotion? In these cases, appearance emotionalism holds that the expressiveness of a piece of music is an objective and literally possessed but response-dependent property of that piece. A response-dependent property produces a certain characteristic response in creatures of an appropriate kind under suitable conditions. “Green” for instance is only available to creatures that experience light-reflecting objects as colored and respond to color discriminations. Now, the fact that expressiveness in music is response-dependent does not mean that it is subjective in the sense of being personal, idiosyncratic or nonobjective. In fact, there is considerable agreement in the emotion-terms we use to

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describe the music’s expressive character. Scherzo.2 Or rather: disagreement is never “too much”: one may describe the scherzo in Beethoven’s 7th Symphony as “exhilarating”, “jubilous”, “hilarious”, “triumphant” or “energetic” but never as “sad” or “melancholic”. Davies claims that this is due to the fact that music can express a fairly limited number of emotional types but that it can express these objectively so that suitable skilled listeners agree highly in attributing them to music. What are these emotional types? Answer: “Only a limited range of emotional types can be individuated solely on the basis of observed bodily comportment (where the face cannot be seen and nothing is known about the context of action” (Davies 2006, p.183).

This kind of melismatic emotionalism constitutes a potent explanation of the way emotions tend to play a significant role in our aesthetic transaction with musical works. It holds several advantages vis-à-vis other theories. First of all, it does not lose the connection between music’s expressive character and the human world of emotional expressions. Other concurrent theories characterize music’s expressiveness as if it constituted a different dimension completely different from that of everyday human experience. Second, it explains how music can be objectively and literally expressive, which is preferable to theories (Goodman, 1968; Scruton, 1997) that try to analyze musical expressiveness as metaphoric but never end up by explaining what this means. For instance, in the case of Goodman’s view that expression is a kind of metaphoric attribution and given that metaphor is a figure of speech, what is to be understood by the claim that music is “metaphorically sad”? Third, this kind of emotionalism is superior to all those theories that consider music’s expressiveness as a cognitive process of abstract symbolization or indirect representation. The melisma does not expunge the vividness with which we experience expressiveness in music which, in this kind of explanation, is perceived as more similar to direct confrontation with, say, a sad- looking person than like reading or hearing a description of such a person.

But objections to “appearance emotionalism” have also been raised and some constitute formidable adversaries. For instance, a physical gesture can transmit with precision a very specific state of mind. But musical gestures can only transmit a kind of state of mind: music’s melismatic repertoire must therefore be confined to a semblance of expression in a very formal sense. Therefore, melisma (vocal or gestural) is not really a question of expression. It becomes a question of semblance. A melisma itself isn’t expressive – it only resembles something expressive. While it may cause our experience to be expressive, it cannot by itself explain what it is to experience music as expressive. If an emotion is expressed only if it is part of a sentient being’s actual behaviour, then “melismatic or appearance emotionalism do not involve the proper expression of emotion” (Stecker 1999), because the appearance hovers independently of a specific feeling of which it would be a direct expression. There is a presentation of the appearance of an emotion but not a proper expression of emotion. And if this is

2 Cf. Kivy’s criticism of Hanslick (1989, pp. 47-48).

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true then appearance or melismatic emotionalism clearly becomes more a theory of representation in music than an actual theory of expression.

Stephen Davies has tried to deflect this objection by clarifying the relation between the music’s expressiveness and the composer’s or performer’s intentions and emotions (Davies 2006, p. 184). It is granted that it is perfectly possible for the music to present an expressive character that was not intended by the composer and that the resulting composition cannot be perceived as a direct or primary expression of the composer’s mental state. Nevertheless, Davies holds that “the music’s expressive character is usually intended by its creator” and that composers intentionally appropriate the music’s expressive potential in order to have it correspond to their emotions. It is as if the composer is showing how she feels not in the usual fashion but by pointing to the mask of tragedy. “In brief: while appearance emotionalism is not automatically associated with acts of expression, in the musical case this connection is quite frequent because musical works and performances are designed to have most of their salient properties, including their emotion-resembling ones” (Davies 2006, p. 185).

However, even if we acknowledge all that, another problem seems to persist. Since everything is similar to everything else to some degree then there is the issue of how similar must an appearance be to its human behavior counterpart in order for the appearance generated by the musical movement to constitute what Levinson (2006) calls “an emotion-characteristic-in-sound” of the proper emotion in question. The problem here is that while we can give content to the expression “sad human appearance” by translating it as “the appearance or kind of appearance sad humans typically display”, we cannot do the same with the expression “sad musical appearance” because there is no archetypical profile for “sad musical appearance” as there is for “sad human face” (2006, p. 197). And if this is so, then it must be our disposition to hear the music as sad (for instance, by connecting it to an emotional persona) that makes us hear the “musical appearance of sadness” and not the other way around, as Davies suggests.

Another objection is often raised against the fact that theories of appearance emotionalism admit that, because of the rather rude melismatic connection between some music’s expressive qualities and its human behavior analog, music can only express a highly restricted palette of emotions. Stephen Davies, for one, is comfortable with the idea that music can express only a fairly limited number of emotional types. Thus, by itself, this kind of theory disagrees that music could ever attain the degree of expressive precision that a composer such as Mendelssohn liked to praise: “a music piece that I love expresses thoughts to me that are not too imprecise to be framed by words but too precise.”(Ridley 1995, p. 116) If appearance emotionalism is correct then all that music can do is resemble, in a somewhat disappointingly particular way, pieces of expressive behavior in isolation from the contexts that could make them more specific and nuanced: it is this passion rather than that.

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To this, appearance emotionalists have replied, first, that although instrumental music may be limited with respect to the range of emotions it can present, that is surely not the case with music with words or with much programmatic music. And even in the case of pure instrumental music, there is the possibility of ordering successive emotional appearances in ways suggestive of subtler or more complex states. Also, one should always take into account the way a given interpretation may alter and vary a work’s expressive palette. Thus there should be no inconsistency in maintaining both that the expressive scope of the musical works is limited and that there is huge diversity and plasticity in which this expressive schema can be elaborated. Second, they maintain that music has limited expressive powers and advance a kind of “statistical” argument. In order to carry on the idea that music is expressive then one should observe a wide coincidence in judgments of expressiveness by suitably qualified listeners (Davies 2006, p. 185). And this “coincidence” is only possible when we are discussing wide categories of emotions. Ergo, intrinsic musical expressiveness must be restricted to those unspecific emotional categories. More nuanced or idiosyncratic emotional responses to music – even those far that are far too specific for words, as Mendelsohn puts it – “are more revealing of the person who has them than of the music itself.” (Davies 2006, p. 185) The appearance emotionalist would also add that differing musical works can be each expressive in its own manner; but this does not mean that each must possess a different emotion. To capture the difference between the “sadness” in, say, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and Schubert’s Sonata opus 959, it is not necessary to qualify what is expressed but, instead, to describe how the musical means for bringing about this result diverge in their detail.

A third criticism argues that melismatic emotionalism cannot explain account the emotional responses music’s expressiveness elicits from the listener. When listening to a musical work it is the case that either (a) the listener has no basis for an emotional response to the music’s expressiveness or (b) the response is an inappropriate one. (a) is justified because while there are palpable reasons to respond to other person’s emotions and feelings, mere appearances of emotion, the moment they are recognized as such, give us no basis for a proper emotional response. (b) is justified because if the listener does not believe that the piece of music has the “emotion-relevant qualities” that are required for a proper emotional response then, even if she does respond accordingly, the music cannot the object of their response. Thus, if sad music makes us sad, we are not sad about the music (Davies, 2006, p.185).

Peter Kivy has argued in favour of (a). Real emotion is not a proper response to the music’s content. All the emotions that we really feel are those for which music is an appropriate object: delight in the music’s beauty, admiration by the composer’s expertise, disappointment by the performer’s incompetence, etc. Stephen Davies, however, does not believe that listeners are never moved to respond to music’s expressiveness with corresponding emotions. He holds that some emotional responses can be generated by a kind of contagion, even in the

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absence of the cognitive content and behavioural elements that accompany them in the normal situation. Emotions lie on a continuum. At one end are emotions like envy or patriotism, in which the cognitive elements are necessary. But at the other end, are emotions in which the cognitive aspects are less important, emotions that we share with nonhuman animals. They have a “fast and frugal” (Davies 2005, p.185) nature: sadness, happiness, fear and anger, i.e., emotions that may occur independently of cognition. Since cognition in not a necessary element of proper emotional experience then we are authorized to speak of ”mirroring responses” to music that deals with the “fast and frugal” termination of the emotional spectrum.3

The association of ideas: a defense Finally, some portion of our emotional response to music is due to some kind of association of ideas, either because music imitates the sound of an object or because we tend to associate the music to some concept, such as pasodobles and Spain. Even Peter Kivy – a keen critic of this kind of approach - admits to have been imprisoned by a particular association of thoughts, always feeling a “bit off color” when he listens to Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn because the piece is tied to a rather unhappy time of his life.4

This idea could be traced back, at least, to Charles Avison and his 1752 Essay on Musical Expression. Avison’s views are usually summarily reviewed and his theory of “association” is often dismissed as a mere curiosity in the history of musical theory.

As Avison puts it, associative responses may be emotions or feelings. Emotions when what we associate to the music is perceived as being the object of our response, or when the music is the object of our response in virtue of that association. Feelings when reflection upon whatever we associate the music with leads us to experience our world under certain descriptions. The response is never grounded in any fact about the music itself but is rather triggered by some contingent connection between the music and a different state of affairs (Ridley, 1995, p. 39). Since any mode of response whose object is characterizable without reference to the music is guilty of the “heresy of paraphrase”, according to many critics associative responses shouldn’t be acknowledged as proper responses to music’s expressiveness.

Also, emotions are more than sensations because they have to involve, conceptually speaking, an intentional content, such as a set of thoughts, beliefs and desires about objects, persons or events. Based on Aristotle, Anthony Kenny suggested that when we experience emotion, we always experience emotion

3 In order to bypass this kind of objections, several theories have tried to go beyond the melisma itself. That was the case with arousal theories in particular (Jerrold Levinson and Colin Radford, for instance). 4 Kivy 1989, p. 30. Amusingly, Kivy calls this the “our song” phenomenon.

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about something (Kenny 1963, pp. 191-2). The threatening object present in the emotion of “fear” constitutes its formal object. The formal object of an emotion gives the description which something must satisfy in order to be taken as the material object of an episode of that emotion. To say that emotions must involve a thought and that all emotions must have an object is to say the same thing: and in each case it is the intentionality of emotion that is being underlined. Problems occur when the formal object of an emotion (of pity: “someone or something suffering”) gives a description that a certain object cannot be thought to satisfy (e.g., the volume of a cadenza, because a cadenza cannot suffer).

There are several important arguments running against the plausibility of “association theories” as proper theories of musical expressiveness but they all tend to gravitate around the idea that the associations we construct when listening to music are idiosyncratic and that musical expressiveness holds an objective and public dimension that should be accounted for.

Consider first the charge of idiosyncrasy. Since many of the aforementioned theories are based upon the corporeal or gestural melisma, one should probably take a better look at dance and see if we can come up with a different sense of “expressiveness”. Directors such as Robert Wilson and choreographers such as Trisha Brown, Alain Platel ou Pina Bausch, just to mention a few, have consistently shown us that there is a special kind of expressiveness that is obtained when we dance against the music. A slow musical movement may be accompanied by convulsive dancing (e.g., Pina Bausch’s Café Müller) and vibrant and speedy rhythms can be resisted by extremely slow movements. In these cases, expressiveness does not derive from a melismatic source but rather from a contrastive option. Nevertheless these episodes are expressively rich. The nature of associated gestures produces a dense non-redundant and, eventually, highly idiosyncratic, approach to music. Couldn’t this be also true of most of our musical listening?

Now let us consider the widespread notion that proper musical responses have to be objective and have a public dimension. Aestheticians and philosophers of art have probably been submitted for too long to what we could call the Kantian prejudice of a “sensus communis” and the idea that an Übereinstimmung in the free play of the faculties leads the way to an Übereinstimmung among spectators of art. But let us entertain for a while the idea that the need for intersubjective agreement and the assumption that through art one connects to our fellow beings and to a higher sense of sharing a common humanity are probably politically based mystifications. What if we assume the counter-hypothesis that aesthetic experience, especially in the cases where we try to derive some emotional dividends from the aesthetic transaction, is often a deeply idiosyncratic, private and non-communicable episode? Levinson’s “personae in music”, Davies’ appearances of emotion, or Ridley’s and Kivy’s melismas, they all fail if forced to work as mutually exclusive explanations of what causes our emotional responses. But they are all admissible if taken as interchangeable items in the game of associations that characterizes musical listening.

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References - Budd, M. 1985. Music and the Emotions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. - Cooke, D. 1959. The Language of Music. London: Faber. - Davies, S. 2006. “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music.” In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Matthew Kieran (ed.), London: Blackwell. - Juslin, P. 2001. “Communicating Emotion in Music Performance: A Review and Theoretical Framework.” In Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, P. Juslin and J. Sloboda, Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Kenny, A. 1963. Emotion and Will. London: Routledge and Kegan - Kivy, P. 1989. Sound Sentiment – An Essay on the Musical Emotions, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. - Levinson, J. 1982. Music and Negative Emotion. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63. - Levinson, J. 2006. “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-expression.” In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Matthew Kieran (ed.), London: Blackwell - Matravers, D. 1998. Art and Emotion. Oxford: Clarendon Press - Meyer, L. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - Ridley, A. 1995. Music, Value and the Passions. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. - Rosen, C. 1971. The Classical Style. London, Faber. - Scruton, R. 1983. Aesthetic Understanding. London: Methuen - Stecker, R. 1999. Davies on the Musical Expression of Emotion. British Journal of Aesthetics 39. - Sullivan, J. 1960. Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. New York: Vintage.

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Artistic value and spectators’ emotions in dance performances

Inma Álvarez* The Open University

Introduction In the field of dance, context has been highlighted as a frame for how movement can be seen as a dancing event, particularly in relation to postmodern choreography (Banes 1987). My concern here is not discussing context to argue for a basic ontological distinction about dance but to look at differences between original contexts, transplant Ted contexts and mediated contexts of what has already been established as dance art. I will connect these ways of framing dance with what is expected from audiences but also with the effects of artists’ challenges of conventions on spectators’ emotions. For an explanation of emotional responses to performative events, I will be drawing on psychological accounts of trust and stress.

Philosophical theories of spectatorship specific to dance are rare. The anthropological semiotic explanation provided by Judith Lynne Hanna at the beginning of the 1980s constitutes an early insight into the performer-audience connection in dance. In her study she takes into account the historical context, the social structure and the process of events to look at emotions because all these aspects of the dance event “shape expectations that create meaning” (Hanna 1983, p. 17). No other significant work in this area has been done since then. In the dance literature, critics report experiences of art works mainly as descriptions of artistic intentions and analysis on the expected reactions from the

* [email protected] . This paper has been possible thanks to the financial support from the research project FFI2008-00750/FISO "Emoción y valor moral en el arte" (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation).

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viewers rather than on what individual affective responses actually are and how this tint the experience of a dancing event. What Hanna’s empirical work did was to connect the emotional intentions with the receptions of the general public.1

Every member of an audience, cognoscente or not, gets emotionally involved when watching a piece and responses reveal aspects of us as encultured human beings. As Hanna has explained, “audiences come to the performances with their expectations shaped by individual and social history” (Hanna 1983, p. 191). After watching the Ballet Russes’ production of L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Gaston Calmette, critic of Le Figaro, wrote a lengthy protest against the piece:

Those who speak of art and poetry apropos of this spectacle make fun of us. It is neither a gracious epilogue nor a profound production. We have had a faun, incontinent, with vile movements of erotic bestiality and gestures of heavy shamelessness. (quoted in Nijinska 1992, p. 436)

Calmette’s outraged commentary refers to having to contemplate a faun masturbating with a nymph’s veil on a rock at the end of the performance. He, as many other members of the 1912 Parisian audience, found the action disturbing and distasteful. Serge Diaghilev, the impresario of the company, was delighted; his intentions to shock audiences had been fulfilled with this work. A century later, these particular actions would not perturb audiences anymore (see, for instance, comments in Farfan 2008).

Artists understand the power of choosing to conform or confront within the established cultural borders. Their choices of medium, content and context affect spectators in a variety of ways. Diaghilev encouraged his Ballet Russes to amplify the taste of the ballet audiences with an extravaganza of new pieces “provoking a reaction by the majority public of dance lovers against the aesthetics and ‘highbrow’ defenders of his new repertory” (Garafola 1989, p. 374). By stretching theatrical performance dance artists invite to the consumption of unknown or unexpected elements of art products. When artistic conventions are modified, expectations need to the adjusted or otherwise the mismatch between individual’s artistic aims and artistic appreciation makes the experience fail. A sexual activity on stage at the beginning of the 20th century was clearly more challenging for ballet goers than it would be today after decades of nudity, violence and sexual acts of various kinds. Contemporary spectators have been increasingly exposed to diverse and complex dance contexts, forms and narratives.

What I would like to argue is that the offering and consumption of performative products can present specific powerful emotional challenges to members of the audience, including the critics or referees of artistry and taste. A distinctive characteristic of the performing arts is that artists’ display of their work and the public’s reactions complement each other at an affective level. This is so because human beings are implicated at both ends.

1 Cf. rejection to the community view (McFee 1992).

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Art contexts Familiarity with art contexts and conventions around them shape audiences’ expectations about the characteristics of their art experiences and guide audience’s recognition of artistic value. Art frames provide clues to the nature of artworks, dictate the distance to them and the type of sensory perception we are permitted but they also support the identification of valuable pieces.

The spaces where art is presented to us reflects traditional established settings that determine the conditions of our appreciation and have become part of each art’s ontology. The performing arts (including cinema) are enjoyed in a theatre, while we go to art museums to look at paintings, sculptures, installations and other artistic objects. Of course, we encounter art collectively in other public spaces as is the case of statues in parks, but also individually in the comfort of our homes, for example, when reading poems and other kinds of literature.

Our senses of sight and hearing are privileged in our experiences of art. The standard norm is that touching is not acceptable in pieces located in museums and mostly not possible for works on a stage. “Do not touch” notices around museums are usually reinforced by virtual or physical obstacles (strings, wire, glass, etc.) in order to specify how close we are allowed to be to the objects. In the case of cinema, we are positioned in the dark separated from the projection of the filmic sequence which is not a unique tangible object; a mechanical technological process facilitates our audiovisual encounter with the work. Similarly, literary works are appreciated via books but there is no actual single valuable object, and it is in principle irrelevant whether we get to know the works through our eyes, or in the case of Braille readers via their finger tips.

Knowledge of art contexts and their cultural rules shape our expectations and provides us with clues for recognizing artistic value. It can be said that the greater the artistic value attached to the work, the more sensory restrictions on audiences’ interactions with them for the protection and preservation of the pieces, our role is to be distant observers. These restrictions are mostly clear for single material works, or for works very limited in number such as prints, which could deteriorate with too much human contact; limitations also apply to the fleeting works of the performing arts which are distant transient constructions in front of our eyes and ears. The proscenium stage removes actors, dancers and musicians from the spectators’ area and therefore, makes unnecessary to warn the public about getting too close to the performers. The stage marks the fictional world of the performers and the seating area the real world of the spectators, although other public and more intimate spaces provide more room for proximity, action (e.g. tapping) and even interaction with performative works.

Dance can be described as immaterial as a whole but temporarily embodied and therefore potentially tangible in some respects. Dance artistic value is mostly dependent on mastery of technique and style, and formal choreographic

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accomplishment which can be only grasped in the development of the performance. Some elements of the dance medium such as the setting or the costumes add to the overall value of the piece at an aesthetic level as well. Artistic value is also connected to other properties of the work, such as its historical, political and moral qualities.

As the world changes, particularly with the increased used of new technologies, the spaces and conditions of art have expanded modifying how we access art. Big plasma televisions with stereophonic or other widening sound effects make possible to watch films at home, but they can also mediate encounters with dance works, concerts and theatre plays. Land art is doubly mediated as it is captured by photographic images which are displayed in museums instead of enjoying them in their original sites. And of course, a great amount of all kinds of art is available in digital format from the internet. The impact of this diversity of contexts in which we encounter art should not be underestimated in our modern world and, I believe, should be present in our considerations on perceptions and reactions to art.2

In addition, a necessary final observation related to the importance of contexts of art is that the levels of attentiveness can potentially change our art experiences. While traditionally the conditions of the theatre focus our attention on the performance by lighting the stage and darkening the seating areas, the new contextual possibilities allow for a multiplicity of stimuli to enter our consumption of the works and thus, affect our engagement and responses. Simultaneously listening to romantic music and reading a romantic novel in the comfort of our homes could reinforce romantic emotions, but the possibility of also moving around, eating a sandwich or performing other daily tasks such as knitting or cooking would require constant adjustments and reconnections as focus is diverted to these different actions. The increasing flexibility of the contexts in which we can experience art that allow us to combine art observation with external stimuli has the potential of enhancing but also of limiting and modifying our appreciation at a cognitive as well as an emotional level.

From dancing at a distance to dancing with you Dance art (as opposed to folk dance, social dance, ritual dance, etc.) is also known as ‘theatrical dance’; it is dance created by artists to be performed at the theatre. In fact, it is conceived for being observed from a specific location in the auditorium that is to be viewed from a specific distance and angle. Susan Foster (1986) has enumerated the main framing conventions in dance art. These conventions refer to the space where art is displayed, programmes with

2 Issues of perception depending on the medium have already been discussed, for instance, in the field of music with respect to differences between experiencing works during a life performance in a concert hall as opposed to via a recording, although it has been suggested that they are aesthetically equivalent (see for instance Uidhir 2007).

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explanatory notes on the pieces, lighting clues that guide the structure, dancers focus with respect to the audience. She has explained that theatrical conventions “also help define the viewer’s role –as spectator, voyeur, or witness– in watching the event” (Foster 1986, p. 65), in addition, as we will see, the contemporary dance viewer has had the role of full participant.

Dance art is no stranger to a variety of other contexts. Dance works have been designed to be presented in parks, office buildings, churches, museums, urban streets and stadiums, or some times merely transplanted there. During the 60s and 70s postmodern choreographers concentrated on altering how audiences experience the viewing of dance art making use of reframing strategies, among others. Trisha Brown’s Walking on the Wall (1971) choreographed six dancers to move around the walls of a room of the Whitney Museum in New York City. Both dancers and spectators could move freely around the empty space. In this piece the museum offered a new set of conventions for viewing dance: proximity to the performers was reduced and perspectives of the action were constantly altered by the choreography itself but also by the spectators who chose to move around.

The selection of non theatrical settings have come up from a variety of experimental impulses some of which have focused on trying to displace the expected orientations of the audiences to the dance piece but new settings have also been prompted, for instance, by marketing strategies to sell dance to the wider public. In a recent interview to Tamara Rojo, one of the principal ballerinas of the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden, explained the decision behind performing Kenneth Macmillan’s classical ballet Romeo and Juliet in London’s O2 arena, a stadium with big screens and a capacity of 10,000 seats mostly used for megaconcerts and sport events:

We’re constantly trying to expand our audiences and reach people that have never thought they would love ballet, and this is a great opportunity. It’s a chance to change perceptions, which is difficult when you are at the opera house. People think it’s an old-fashion art form, but if you take the art form away from that frame and put it somewhere else people might come with an open mind (in Moss 2011, p. 8)

The assumption is that transplanting it to a more familiar setting could popularise ballet. So the idea is that it is not the content or aesthetics of ballet, but rather the traditional context for presenting it, i.e. the theatre stage that is alienating for some audiences. In this case, it was thought that a stadium gives a more accessible shell to younger audiences. It might be indeed that we can popularise art forms like ballet just by changing the context in which they are presented (transplantation) or by encapsulating them in a different format (mediation). Transplantation and mediation provide a new context that reframes or packages the art product. A case of mediation is, for example, how poster formats have made extremely popular some painting masterpieces, or indeed, how dances have been filmed, edited and commercialised in DVDs for the consumption of the

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masses. The dance world tells us “come on, have a look at this, you will enjoy it, it is a beautiful piece,” and under those new circumstances, people get excited at the possibility of acquiring a bit of a valued object. My point here is that both phenomena, i.e. transplantations and mediations of valued art objects, alter not only the conditions in which it is delivered but also the emotional effects of how these are appreciated.

The presentation of the classical ballet Romeo and Juliet in the O2 arena is a case of transplantation where we are invited to consume dance art in a more informal space, a space that feels familiar, less intimidating. The arena also facilitates mediation to a large public via screens that provide alternative viewpoints and close ups. Echoing some theories of the performative, Patricia Bickers (2009) has suggested that where live and mediated creations run in parallel, the mediated version provides a “privileged view”. However, although it is true that mediation in dance can give us access to costume detail, subtle movement, high musical reception and dancers’ expressive gestures, mediation also separates us further from the actual medium of the dance, e.g. the moving bodies of the dancers, the space where they interact, the lighting details. Mediation, as we currently know it, does not always offer a privileged access to a performance, and it is usually controlled externally to the viewer. Moreover, for some pieces, their original frames specify aspects of the work that might not be suitable for some forms of mediation. Acting on a stage requires expressivity that does not suit acting for the camera. Dancer Tamara Rojo was aware of these issues when she expressed that she needed to watch out for the close-ups from the camera because she wanted to avoid “silent-movie-style overacting” (in Moss 2011, p. 8).

Watching dance performances from the specific viewpoint provided by a theatre seat is a very different experience from being able to move around the dancers. Fixed seating emphasises a specific angle and precise distance for each seat to the stage. The audience is made invisible placed in the dark. This positioning translates into a restriction of spectators’ moves and their focused attention to the lit area of the action on the stage. In the words of Stanton Garner:

[T]he proscenium stage continues to project optimal viewing positions as insistently as it establishes visual centers for its scenic arrangement: reinforced by the stage’s rectangular framing and the audience’s perceptual disposition toward a symmetrical, balanced point of view, this theatre tends to privilege viewing positions extending on an axis perpendicular to stage center. Ideal centrality in the auditorium mirrors ideal centrality on stage (Garner 1994, p. 84)

However, no conventional context and rules go without being challenged by an artist. If theatrical distance, optimal viewing and listening, strict performer/audiences roles were the norm in dance art, once each of these conventions was altered, spectators had to learn how to appreciate and enjoy dance anew. In a freer mobile setting, perspectives became more varied, and sounds or even smells acquire more prominence. The degrees of distance

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allowed, the potential points of view and even the invitation to interaction, change our aesthetic experience physically and thus emotionally.

Some contemporary artists have sought not only to blur the performative space but also to transform audiences into choreographers or performers. The works by the Grand Union or Meredith Monk in the 1970s exemplify the push for dance art to be displaced from the theatre and enter more flexible spaces that facilitate contact with their audiences, and even the merging of the roles of choreographer, performer and viewer. As Foster has noted, in some of the pieces “viewers are given the opportunity to see themselves as part of the performance […] They also participate in the creation of the event by choosing what to watch in a dance […], choreographers assume some of the critical perspective normally assigned to the audience” (Foster 1986, pp. 225-226). Rather than tansplantation, these are cases of designing dance altering the expected space and roles. The original contexts of these pieces bring the medium so close to their audiences that they become part of it. More recently, artists like Felix Ruckert have explored further the possibilities of participatory dance theatre.

I began to undermine the world of ballet, which suddenly seemed more open towards less traditional forms of stage performance. The technical excellence and intelligent use of space and time, which I trained in these projects, could easily be converted into direct physical interaction with the audience, i.e. dancing strategies proved successful when they were to be applied to the bodies of the spectators (Ruckert 2007, p. 223)

Erika Fischer-Lichte (2007) has described this type of choreography as an example of “role reversal” between performers and audiences. For instance, in Ruckert’s 2002 work Secret Service spectators are blindfolded so “they now had to rely on their other senses, on their sense of hearing, of smell, and especially their sense of touch” (Fischer-Lichte 2007, p. 229), and in this way they become active parts in the piece. But works like Ruckert’s go beyond including audiences and reversing roles. Some pieces of this kind aim at unsettling members of the audience, he encourages them to dance, kiss and cuddle. Ruckert massages, blindfolds, ties them up and whips them. He has noticed that audiences “were astonishingly willing to surrender themselves and clearly enjoyed doing so. Sensing an opportunity to experience something new, they were capable of overcoming inhibitions and apprenhensions” (Ruckert 2007, p. 222).

Psychologists have long acknowledged that we still do not have an adequate theory of emotion in general (Fischer 1989). It is believed that emotions are “initiated by changes in current circumstances appraised as significant to an organism’s well-being” (Gross, Crane, & Fredrickson 2010, p. 223); and that emotional states change due to three main factors: cognitive processes (activated by expectations), physiological states and environmental influences, which means that “we can have a large discrepancy between our rationalizations of our behaviour and the actual behaviour” (Lindsay & Norman 1977, p. 687). While some art consumers may be willing to surrender to the new no matter what,

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clearly others would not accept any deal proposed by the artist, even when they enter the art experience knowing about its participatory nature. In participatory events we loose our position as viewers to become agents who contribute to shape the performance, so our emotional responses are bound to be more salient. Reactions could be related to perceptions of the risks involved, impact of actions on fellow participants, degree of uncertainty, level of physical comfort and so on.

Emotional rollercoaster: trust and stress In all artist-audience exchanges, emotions are also tie to another component: trust. Trust is a critical affective factor in our contact with performative works in the theatre, and particularly in participatory works, as it is not just trust involved, but interpersonal trust at various levels. Trust between agents has been described as a risky attitude we take with optimism (McLeod 2011) or as “a willingness to be vulnerable under conditions of risk and interdependence” (Rousseau et al. 1998), but with some underlying shared ethical norms (Fukuyama 1995, p. 25).

In a dance performance the context would define the limits of trust which, in principle, would be symmetrical and therefore multidirectional. The artist exposes his or her work to others and hopes that it will be properly interpreted (by the dancers) and valued (by audiences). The performer realises the work and hopes it will convey the intended actions and meanings (as required by the choreographer) and that audiences will be appreciative of the artistic efforts. The spectator is willing to attend an artistic proposal, and expects to be moved by it; his or her trust is based on the honesty and well intended creative work by the artist and on the capacity of the dancers to represent it appropriately. Trust operates at a higher level when audiences attend an event knowing that they will be invited to participate in some way.

But in the artist-performer-audience interplay there is also an implicit understanding that any of the agents could at any time push the borders of the expected norms under which their trust relationship operates. If one of the aims of art is to challenge norms, is then art constantly in danger of breaking a trust relationship with its audiences? How far can the agents of trust in an art event challenge shared ethical norms? It is reasonable to suggest that one of the agents should be able to act with total impunity whether as part of an artistic proposal or as a response to it. The artist can instruct the performers to ignore the expected conventional behaviour and test audiences perceptions and emotions by a variety of means but some limits need to apply to this freedom. By the same token, a member of the public can throw insults or tomatoes at the dancers if he or she feels cheated by the quality of the work, again, it could be argued that responses will be only acceptable if there is no harm to others.

Looking at specific cases might help here. I would like to discuss the dance piece A Little Tenderness for Crying out Loud (2007) by the Canadian artist Dave Saint-Pierre.

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In this work, the choreographer goes on “exploring the fears and fantasies of 22 characters as they search for love in a brutal world” (Mackrell 2011). I choose this piece because it exemplifies the breaking of some theatrical conventions by an artist and the variety of emotional responses these changes of circumstances and actions bring to the dance work.

Reviews by dance critics and commentaries of the general public have not focused very much on the actual dance scenes. Most of the criticism has been reporting and evaluating the most controversial part of the piece where naked men with long blond wigs descend to the seated area of the theatre and behave childlike jumping over the seats provoking the spectators, apparently causing alarm, outrage and fun in equal measures. During this part of the performance, the expected performer-audience theatrical distance is not only reduced but is so close that actual physical contact between performing and viewing agents takes place. Moreover, the fact that this contact involves naked bodies adds to the emotional reactions to the art experience. Dancer Michael Watts has commented that the reactions to this scene are varied including “lot of taps on the bottom from old ladies” (in Mackrell 2011). Critics have observed that some spectators reject the physical contact with the dancers hitting or pushing them, others leave, run away or just cover their faces avoiding to look at their nudity (Mackrell 2011). What we have in this part of the piece is an unexpected alteration of many theatrical conventions. Shock and tension is reached by simultaneously breaking the conventional theatrical distance between the dancers and the audience, expanding the sensory perception, and reversing the focused attentiveness from the action to an interaction. Critic Christine Twite asks “Does the fact that this behaviour took place in a theatre auditorium, in front of an audience who paid up- front for the experience, mean that the performances can play havoc in such a way? A sort of theatrical diplomatic immunity to any offence caused? How far will this wild card take you?” (Twite 2011) Her answers to these questions appeal to the concept of trust. For her, a level of trust is understood between performers and audiences and if humiliation or pain arises in this relationship, then respect for the performance is lost and the point of the piece is ruined.

The breakdown of trust when failing to follow expectations provokes emotional responses that could range from feelings of disappointment to physical violent actions. In the case of A Little Tenderness, extensive publicity informed audiences beforehand that they were going to watch a performance with nudity by someone known as the “enfant terrible” of Canadian choreography. The work was presented in London at the Sadler’s Wells theatre and information on the website for buying tickets included images of the show and the following warning: “Please note the performance contains explicit adult material that some may find shocking.” The performance was rated 18. The choreographer himself had commented that “We have to democratize nudity, put out all the mystery of it […] People say nudity is not provocative any more but that’s not true. It was important for me to create a piece where we go too far” (Gallant 2011). Interest would have also lead potential spectators to information about the

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choreographer’s previous outrageous pieces so it seems to me that Saint-Pierre had not hidden his intentions to push audiences’ perceptions so, in this case, he was appealing to an unconventional situation of trust in a conventional dance setting. Therefore, being shocked by the piece equates to complaining about being scared at a horror movie. In the viewing of A Little Tenderness, negative emotional responses were probably not prompted simply by the fact that performers were undressed but rather by the fact that they also established tactile contacts with members of the audience.

Critic Luke Jennings acknowledged that he was aware of the warnings about the work and was ready for the nudity but, judging from his reactions, he was clearly not ready for the action. He described the show as “the most unpleasant I’ve ever had in a theatre” (Jennings 2011) recounting his experience this way:

At a given point in the show a dozen or so naked guys in ratty blond wigs invade the stalls. They’re yelping, screeching, clambering over people and sticking their genitals in their faces. Further down my row a guy parts his arse cheeks to expose his anus to a visibly alarmed woman. Then he fixes on me, and tries to grab my pen and notebook. I hold on and he pulls my glasses from my face. Then deliberately, clearing his throat, he gobs phlegm all over the lenses, and with a sneer, hands them back to me.

I'm angry, revolted, upset. I say "Fuck you!" I figure in that moment that he's changed the rules of the encounter. Broken our contract, so I can react within the new frame of reference that he’s established. (Jennings 2011)

Jennings’ emotional reaction displays a high level of stress with the rupture of the trust he had put in the artist attending the performance. Psychologists have explained that “in a stress-provoking situation, the important factors are not the objective facts of the situation, but the individual’s appraisal of them” (Lindsay & Norman 1977, p. 670). In our daily lives, we need to believe that we are able “to master the contingencies of the world” so “when such a belief is broken, the results can be feelings of helplessness and hopelessness” (Lindsay & Norman 1977, p. 671). One of the causes of these feelings is when the individual realises that “there can be no adequate response” (Lindsay & Norman 1977, p. 671). The situation can be described as either a misjudgment from the complaining members of the audience who had failed to understand the level of trust expected for this particular piece, or that the artist, despite all his warnings, had gone beyond the tolerable unexpected actions within our contemporary shared ethical norms. There is no possible single account of the dynamics of trust in the experience of this dance event because while some spectators were running away, others were taking photos and reaching for contact with the dancers.

An interesting aspect of such a performance is that it does not/cannot have the same effect on all members of the audience. In the mentioned scene where the naked performers jump across the stalls, where the spatial limits are crossed, the body distance is violated, the physical contact with the audience tests taboos, there are in fact different levels of emotions for different groups of viewers.

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Those in the stalls are forced to enter the performance, being physically invaded and forced to participate in some way. This situation forces them to a more intense direct emotional experience than those who can observe those invasions to others at a distance. Some people like Jennings who found themselves in the thick of the action felt helpless due to their “inability to control the environment” (Lindsay & Norman 1977, p. 671). Therefore they experienced stress and responded with fear or anger failing to engage in the fictionality of the performance and fighting to maintain their status as observers. Other members of the audience who seemed to cope with the assault were reacting passively following the cultural norms of the theatre at a distance. In fact, the alteration of the expected conventional activity had an impact on their levels of attention to the piece not by external stimuli (e.g. a ringing mobile phone) but by the activity within the work itself. It also translated for these people in an annulation of the aesthetic imagination resulting in the devaluation of the work. Yet others became participants and took the opportunity to interact positively with the dancers. For the more distant public, the invasion did not cause direct personal stress. The emotional situation would have been more equal for all observers if the dance event had been organised in an open space. In such a frame, anyone would have been potentially approached and pushed for interaction with the dancers.

One important consequence of these situations is that once trust has been betrayed from the part of the artist, performer or public, it is hard to recover. Trust and distrust are dynamically linked in our interpersonal relations. This means that, after a traumatic experience watching A Little Tenderness, individuals will not be in a good position to judge other works by Saint-Pierre because their trust in the choreographer’s artistic ability has been destroyed, and they are bound to be suspicious of him in future encounters.

Emotional responses for self-transformation Perhaps a way to understand Saint-Pierre’s choreography is to see it as continuing with a choreographic tradition that aims at engaging the audience in a process of self-awareness leading to self-transformation3, but rather than doing it by directing the observer’s attention to performative activity, he points directly at their emotions by a forced physical interaction. Matthew Pelowski and Fiminori Akiba (2011) have recently discussed the process of self-transformation from our engagement with art. They have suggested a five-stage transformative model of aesthetic experience in art. In this model, they link art appreciation with viewers’ personality, beliefs and identity that lead to personal associations in the reception of artistic information. In their model, aesthetic experience is connected to “personal growth or cognitive development” (p. 82).

3 Nick Kaye’s described the works of the choreographer Lucinda Childs as pieces that “are set against a self-conscious frame, the observer is drawn toward an awareness of her own pivotal position in the definition of the piece” (Kaye 1994, p. 108).

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Pelowski and Fiminori Akiba (2011) recount Danto’s famous encounter with Warhol’s Brillo Box and how he could achieve transformation due to “discrepancy between his pre-expectations and perception, self-reflection and self-change”. They also quote Nodelman who has highlighted the role of frustration when you are “thrown back to yourself […] when you become the center of the room. You think about your conduct, your body […] art forces disturbing questions about the nature of the self and its relation to the world”. It is, of course, different to engage in meta-cognitive reflection when we confront an art object like a painting or sculpture. When the process of disruption in art is prompted by the actions of another human being which do not demand imaginative participation but actual involvement in the work, it is understandable that emotions might overpower the experience in the strongest sense. Spectators could experiment betrayal of trust, frustration and stress but this process should not prevent them from achieving self-transformation just because the feelings are prompted by interacting with others. In fact, despite potentially stronger reactions, it might be easier in a way to think about ourselves in the context of the performing arts precisely because they are mediated by other real human beings.

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References - Banes, S. 1987. Tersichore in sneakers. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. - Bickers, P. 2009. Editorial, Art Monthly, pp. 12-12. Retrieved from http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.as px?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=44602027&site=ehost-live&scope=site - Farfan, P. 2008. Man as beast: Nijinsky's faun. South Central Review, 25(1), 74-92. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/south_central_review/v025/25.1farfan02.html - Fischer-Lichte, E. 2007. "On the threshold. Aesthetic experience in performances." In S. Gehm, P. Husemann & K. von Wilcke (Eds.), Knowledge in motion. Perspectives of artistic and scientific research in dance (Vol. 9, pp. 227-233). Bielefeld: TanzScripte. - Fischer, W. F. 1989. "An empirical-phenomenological investigation of being anxious. An example of the phenomenological approach to emotion." In: R. S. Valle & S. Halling (Eds.), Existential-phenomenological perspectives in psychology (pp. 127-136). New York and London: Plenum Press. - Foster, S. L. 1986. Reading dancing. Bodies and subjects in contemporary American dance. Berkeley: University of California Press. - Fukuyama, F. 1995. Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: Free Press Paperbacks. - Gallant, P. 2011, 26 January. "Bare necessities" Eye Weekly. Retrieved from http://www.eyeweekly.com/ - Garafola, L. 1989. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Garner, S. B. 1994. Bodied spaces. Phenomenology and performance in contemporary drama. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. - Gross, M., Crane, E., & Fredrickson, B. 2010. "Methodology for assessing bodily expression of emotion." Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, 34, pp. 223- 248. - Hanna, J. L. 1983. The performer-audience connection. Emotion to metaphor in dance and society. Austin: University of Texas Press. - Jennings, L. 2011, 3 June. "Spat at by a naked dancer: St-Pierre's Un peu de tendresse." - Kaye, N. 1994. Postmodernism and performance. London: Macmillan. - Lindsay, P. H., & Norman, D. A. 1977. Human information processing. An introduction to psychology. New York: Academic Press. - Mackrell, J. 2011, 30 May. 'I didn't want any wobbling': how to dance naked, The Guardian. - McFee, G. 1992. Understanding dance. London and New York: Routledge. - McLeod, C. 2011. 'Trust'. Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trust/ - Moss, S. 2011, 13 june. 'We don't enjoy the pain. We're not masochists', interview, The Guardian, pp. 7-9.

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- Nijinska, B. 1992. Bronislava Nijinska. Early memoirs. Durham and London: Duke University Press. - Pelowski, M., & Fiminori, A. 2011. "A model of art perception, evaluation and emotion in transformative aesthetic experience." New Ideas in Psychology, 29, 80-97. - Ruckert, F. 2007. "For a participatory theatre: touching instead of fumbling." In S. Gehm, P. Husemann & K. von Wilcke (Eds.) Knowledge in motion. Perspectives of artistic and scientific research in dance (Vol. 9, pp. 219- 225). Bielefeld: TanzScripte. - Twite, C. 2011, 6 June. "Abusing the audience: how far is too far?" blog entry. Retrieved from https://culturesofspectatorship.wordpress.com/about/ - Uidhir, C. M. 2007. "Recordings as performances." British Journal of Aesthetics, 47(3), pp. 298-314.

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Aesthetic experience and emotional identification in the performances of different types of artistic dance

Maja Vukadinović * Higher School of Professional Business Studies, Novi Sad

In this paper, we will attempt to provide an answer whether aesthetic experience and emotional identification in the performances in different types of artistic dance are related, and, if the answer is affirmative, to judge what the kind of their relationship is.

Artistic dance, compared to a spontaneous rhythmic dance, is defined as a specific type of human, complex and highly articulated movement, deliberately and systematically cultivated for its own sake, or in other words, as a system of organized and formalized movements conveying a meaning which an artist expresses consciously and transfers to a spectator on purpose (cf. Duncan 1981; Jowit 1994; Layson 1994; Carter 1998; Blom and Chaplin 2000; Meekums 2005; Grove, Stevens and McKechnie 2005; Tufnel and Crickmay 2006). In order to have dance defined as performing art, artistic dance is inextricably bound to the importance of dancing context (McFee 1992; Layson 1994) in which the attendance of spectators is essential.

Keeping in mind this artistic aspect, and also, keeping in mind that dance represents such communication which includes the choreographer, performers and observers, we may conclude that, apart from its specific dancing context (McFee 1992; Layson 1994) and its historical development, form and performance (Layson 1994), dance aims to affect aesthetically not only the choreographer and performers but also spectators.

Having in mind that this paper investigates the relationship between emotional identification and aesthetic experience of dance performances, in order to provide greater clarity, in the following text "performances of different types of artistic dance" and "performances of different dance form" will be used as synonyms.

* [email protected]

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Spectator’s aesthetic experience of dance The results of many different studies and research (Arnheim 1966; Arnold 1995; Thomas 1980; Fenemore 2003; Hagendoorn 2003, 2005; Grove, Stevens and McKechnie 2005; Arnold 2005; Montero 2006; Turner 2008; Stevens, Schubert, Morris, Frear, Chen, Healey, Schoknecht and Hansen 2009) have provided numerous interesting answers to the questions about the aesthetic experience of spectators observing a dance.

Spectators’ aesthetic experience of dance may be observed from the perspective of somaesthetic studies (Fenemore 2003; Arnold 2005; Shusterman 2005; Turner 2008), from the perspective of neuroaesthetic studies (Calvo-Merino, Glaser, Grezes, Passingham and Haggard 2005; Cross, Hamilton and Grafton 2006; Calvo- Merino, Jola, Glaser and Haggard 2008; Calvo – Merino 2009; Hagendoorn 2011; Sevdalis and Keller 2011), and from the perspective of cognitive-oriented research on dance and aesthetic experience of dance (Stevens, McKechnie, Malloch and Petocz 2000; McKechnie 2002; Glass 2005; Grove, Stevens and McKechnie 2005; Stevens, McKechnie, Glass, Scuhubert and Chen 2007).

In this paper aesthetic experience is defined as a particular state of mind that is characterized by a focus on a certain object which engages and fascinates a subject, whereas all other actions in the environment are excluded from consciousness (Ognjenović 2003; Marković 2007, 2010). Recent studies (Marković 2010; Polovina and Marković 2006) suggest that similar characteristics of aesthetic experience may be empirically specified as well. In their factor analysis study Polovina and Marković (2006) suggest that the essence of aesthetic experience consists of fascination with an extraordinary object and may appear in situations with different emotional qualities. Fascination may relate to both pleasant objects and somewhat unpleasant objects and situations (Marković 2010).

In previous study (Vukadinović 2010) an instrument for measuring the aesthetic experience of dance performances was constructed, and the structure of both dancers’ and spectators’ aesthetic experience was investigated. The experiments are carried out during eight different performances of various dance forms, including classical ballet, contemporary dance, flamenco and folklore. Three factors of aesthetic experience of dance performances are identified: Dynamism, Fascination and Evaluation. The work reveals that dancers’ aesthetic experience has a somewhat different factorial structure from that of the spectators'. Unlike spectators' aesthetic experience, dancers’ aesthetic experience singles out the Excitement factor. Dancer’s aesthetic experience and that of the spectators proved to be both quantitatively and qualitatively different, and in terms of relation between them, there is a correlation and regularity.

For the purpose of measuring the aesthetic experience of dance performances the instrument, constructed in the previous study (Vukadinović 2010) was used. The instrument consists of 12 seven-degree scales. Each of 3 dimensions was

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measured with 4 rating scale: Dynamism (expressive, powerful, strong, exciting), Fascination (eternal, unspeakable, unique, exceptional) and Evaluation (delicately, elegant, seductive, emotionally).

Emotional identification Most recent study (Sevdalis and Keller 2011) suggests that dance is an effective medium for examining the communication of performer’s emotions and intentions as well as aesthetic qualities of movements. Basic emotions, such as sadness, anger, happiness and fear, expressed in dance can be communicated accurately (Camuri, Lagerlöf and Volpe 2003; de Meijer 1989). Also, other authors (Stevens, Schubert et al. 2009) found that audience perception of the emotions expressed in dance performance was congruent with choreographer’s expressive intentions.

The contribution of authors (Glass 2005; Stevens, McKechnie et al. 2007) who investigated aesthetic experience in dance from the perspective of cognitive- oriented research, revealed interesting factors that affects aesthetic experience of dance. After conducting research on participants who observed contemporary dance, a group of authors (Stevens, Winskel, Howell,Vidal, Milne-Home and Latimer 2009; Glass 2005) identified that numerous factors, such as visual elements, characteristics of dancers, movement, choreography, interpretation, emotional recognition, novelty, spatial/dynamic, intellectual and emotional stimulation and previous experience, affect the aesthetic experience of dance. Concerning cognitive interpretation in dance performances Glass (2005) suggests that the attribution of meaning involves the spectator’s cognitive background, and that it is not a specific property of the aesthetic stimulus. As it has been suggested by Glass (2005) body movement in dance could be a possible cue that causes emotional response in the spectator and affective response to body movement can be explained by sympathetic kinaesthesia (Stevens et al. 2000, cited in Glass 2005). When spectators observe a dance, it is possible that they create visual stimulation coming from dancers into kinaesthetic and visual images of themselves making movements. Such response to the stimulation caused by dancer’s movements may lead to the situation when a spectator experiences and feels a dancer and thus emphatically experience the dancer’s affect (Glass 2005). Also, according to Glass (2005) emotional response is characteristic of the spectator in relationship with dance it is not inherent trait in dance work.

Beside the fact that emotions expressed in dance are recognisable by the spectators (Sevdalis and Keller 2011; Camuri, et al. 2003; de Meijer 1989; Stevens, Schubert et al. 2009), above-mentioned results of different studies encourage further investigating weather emotional identification of spectator is related somehow with aesthetic experience.

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Purpose of the study Since the different formal characteristics of different types of dance influence the subjective experience of dance in the observer (Vukadinović 2008), and since three factors of aesthetic experience of dance performances can be identified (Vukadinović 2010) it can be expected that there will be correlation between aesthetic experience of dance performances and emotional identification.

In order to reveal the differences of spectators' aesthetic experience of dance performances and then differences of spectators’ emotional identification Analyses of variance was conducted. To determine whether there is a relationship between the aesthetic experience of dance and emotional identification, Correlation analysis was carried out. The objective of this study consisted of investigating the relationship between aesthetic experience and emotional identification in the performances of different types of artistic dance.

Method This research aimed at investigating the relationship between the degree of emotional identification and dimensions of aesthetic experience of different forms of dance performances.

Participants:

Spectators, 33 students from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, without previous experience in any form of dance. Participants judged the aesthetic experience of dance performances, and a degree of emotional identification.

Stimuli:

Eight different performances of different types of dance including classical ballet, contemporary dance, flamenco and folklore. Performances of different forms of dance delivered live by the dancers in front of the participants. Dance performances which were included in the repertoire at the time of this research were selected.

Classical ballet

1. The Lady of the Camellias, Guiseppe Verdi, Libretto: Krunislav Simić, Choreographer and director: Krunislav Simić, Jovan Đorđević Stage, performed by the ensemble of The Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad. 2. Sylvia, music: Léo Delibes, choreographer: Boris Tonin, Gala concert marking the 60th jubilee of the School of Ballet, Jovan Đorđević Stage, The Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad.

Contemporary dance

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3. Metamorphosis, Director: Jan Mahan; Choreographer: Saša Krga, Art klinika, Novi Sad. 4. Divine Comedy, inspired by Dante Alighieri, Choreographer and director: Staša Zurovac, Jovan Đorđević Stage, performed by the ensemble of The Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad.

Flamenco

5. Los recuerdos flamencólicos, Choreographer: Maria Keck, Music: traditional, performed by ''La Sed Gitana'', Jazz Wheels Club, Novi Sad. 6. La búsqueda del Felahmengu, Choreographer: Tamara and Milena Verežan, Arijana Luburić - Cvijanović, Dajana Damjanović, Music: Nenad Patković and ''Šinobusi'', Annual Concert of the group ''La Sed Gitana'', Main Stage of the Youth Theatre, Novi Sad.

Folklore

7. Ivanjsko cveće [Lady’s Bedstraw.], Choreographer: Milorad Lonić, performers AKUD ''Sonja Marinković'', Trg Slobode, Novi Sad. 8. Vilinska planina [Fairy Mountain], the head of performers, costume designer and screenwriter: Dragan Milivojević, the Annual Concert of KUD ''Svetozar Marković'', Jovan Đorđević Stage, performed by the ensemble of The Serbian National Theatre, Novi Sad.

Instrument:

For measuring the degree of emotional identification was used ten-degree rating scale.

Aesthetic experience of dance performances was measured by the instrument for measuring the aesthetic experience of dance performances, constructed in the previous study (Vukadinović 2010). The instrument consists of 12 seven-degree scales. Each of 3 dimensions was measured with 4 rating scale: Dynamism (expressive, powerful, strong, exciting), Fascination (eternal, unspeakable, unique, exceptional) and Evaluation (delicately, elegant, seductive, emotionally).

The design was repeated with all subjects, which means that all participants watched and evaluated all the performances.

Procedure:

Having observed the dance performance, the participants then rated the degree of their emotional identification on ten-degree rating scale, and then aesthetic experience of the performances observed on the instrument for measuring the aesthetic experience of dance performances.

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The participants were told at the beginning of each performance to direct their ratings of emotional identification and aesthetic experience to the dance movements.

The time allotted for the ratings was 15 minutes.

Results Emotional Identification - analysis of variance

The results of the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) show that among the participants, there are statistically significant differences in their perception emotional identification in performances of different forms of dance (F(7,32) = 9.829, p <. 000). Table 1 shows the hierarchy of participants’ assessments of emotional identification in performances of different dance form.

Table 1 Hierarchy of participants’ assessments of emotional identification in performances of different dance form – obtained from the total sample (N=33)

Emotional Identification in Performances M SD

Flamenco: Los recuerdos flamencólicos 86.36 13.878 Flamenco: La búsqueda del Felahmengu 81.81 18.448 Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis 80.90 20.056 Folklore: Vilinska planina 79.09 23.633 Classical ballet: The Lady of the Camellias 74.54 29.800 Contemporary dance: Divine Comedy 66.66 28.136 Classical ballet: Sylvia 62.42 27.389 Folklore: Ivanjsko cveće 47.57 31.822

The application of LSD post hoc test showed that first four performances (both of Flamenco dance form, Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis, and Folklore: Vilinska planina) are assessed with higher statistically significant (p < .05) values on emotional identification than the other performances. Also, the application of LSD post hoc test showed that Folklore performance: Ivanjsko cveće, is assessed with lower statistically significant (p < .05) values on emotional identification than the all other performances. There is no significant difference between both performances of Classical ballet and Contemporary dance: Divine Comedy, in assessments of emotional identification. But, these performances are assessed with higher statistically significant (p < .05) values on emotional identification than the first four performances, and with lower statistically significant (p < .05) values on emotional identification than Folklore performance: Ivanjsko cveće.

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Aesthetic experience of dance performances Generally speaking, the results show that the effect of the type of performance on the assessment of aesthetic experience of dance was statistically significant F (7, 32) = 15.902, p< .000.The differences between the observed dance forms by every dimension of aesthetic experience of dance performances will be discussed within the overview of the results that follows.

Dynamism

Concerning the dimension of Dynamism, the effect of the type of performance was statistically significant F (7, 32) = 7.305, p <.000. There are statistically significant differences among the participants in their perception Dynamism in performances of different types of artistic dance. Table 2 shows the hierarchy of participants’ assessments of dimension of Dynamism in performances of different dance form.

Table 2 The hierarchy of participants’ assessments of dimension of Dynamism in performances of different dance form

Aesthetic Experience of Dance Performances: M SD Dynamism

Flamenco: Los recuerdos flamencólicos 6.73 .310 Contemporary dance: Divine Comedy 6.20 .826 Folklore: Vilinska planina 6.14 .968 Flamenco: La búsqueda del Felahmengu 6.12 .593 Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis 5.86 .823 Folklore: Ivanjsko cveće 5.71 .733 Classical ballet: Sylvia 5.71 1.089 Classical ballet: The Lady of the Camellias 5.64 .568

The application of LSD post hoc test showed that flamenco performance: Los recuerdos flamencólicos is assessed with higher statistically significant (p < .001) values on dimension of Dynamism than all other performances.

Both Classical ballet performances are assessed with lower statistically significant (p < .001) values on dimension of Dynamism than flamenco performance: Los recuerdos flamencólicos, and also with lower statistically significant (p < .05) values than performances of Contemporary dance: Divine Comedy, Folklore: Vilinska planina and Flamenco: La búsqueda del Felahmengu.

Also, the application of LSD post hoc test showed that there is no significant difference between Contemporary dance: Divine Comedy Folklore: Vilinska planina and Flamenco: La búsqueda del Felahmengu, in assessment of Dynamism. But, these performances are assessed with higher statistically significant (p < .05) values on

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dimension of Dynamism than Classical ballet performances, and with lower statistically significant (p < .001) values than Flamenco performance: Los recuerdos flamencólicos.

Fascination

As far as the dimension of Fascination is concerned, the effect of the type of performance was statistically significant F (7, 32) = 13.022, p <.000. There are statistically significant differences among the participants in their perception Fascination in performances of different types of artistic dance. Table 3 shows the hierarchy of participants’ assessments of dimension of Fascination in performances of different dance form.

Table 3 The hierarchy of participants’ assessments of dimension of Fascination in performances of different dance form

Aesthetic Experience of Dance Performances: M SD Fascination

Flamenco: Los recuerdos flamencólicos 5.56 1.181 Folklore: Vilinska planina 4.70 1.692 Flamenco: La búsqueda del Felahmengu 4.65 1.312 Contemporary dance: Divine Comedy 4.64 1.362 Folklore: Ivanjsko cveće 3.75 .979 Classical ballet: Sylvia 3.58 1.469 Classical ballet: The Lady of the Camellias 3.51 1.328 Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis 3.46 1.469

The application of LSD post hoc test showed that flamenco performance: Los recuerdos flamencólicos is assessed with higher statistically significant (p < .05) values on dimension of Fascination than all other performances.

With lower statistically significant (p < .05) values on dimension of Fascination are assessed performances of Contemporary dance: Divine Comedy, Folklore: Vilinska planina and Flamenco: La búsqueda del Felahmengu.

Both Classical ballet performances, Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis and Folklore: Ivanjsko cveće, are assessed on dimension of Fascination with significantly lowest (p < .05) assessments.

Evaluation

Regarding the dimension of Evaluation, the effect of the type of performance was statistically significant F (7, 32) = 15.895, p <.000. There are statistically significant differences among the participants in their perception Evaluation in performances

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of different types of artistic dance. Table 4 shows the hierarchy of participants’ assessments of dimension of Evaluation in performances of different dance form.

Table 4 The hierarchy of participants’ assessments of dimension of Evaluation in performances of different dance form

Aesthetic Experience of Dance Performances: M SD Evaluation

Flamenco: Los recuerdos flamencólicos 6.32 .369 Flamenco: La búsqueda del Felahmengu 6.02 .594 Contemporary dance: Divine Comedy 5.78 .799 Classical ballet: Sylvia 5.64 .731 Classical ballet: The Lady of the Camellias 5.41 .526 Folklore: Vilinska planina 5.31 1.093 Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis 4.88 .814 Folklore: Ivanjsko cveće 4.87 .857

The application of LSD post hoc test showed that flamenco performance: Los recuerdos flamencólicos is assessed with higher statistically significant (p < .05) values on dimension of Evaluation than all other performances.

Also, the application of LSD post hoc test showed that there is no significant difference between Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis and Folklore: Vilinska planina, in assessment of Evaluation, but, also that these performances are assessed with the lowest statistically significant (p < .05) values on dimension of Evaluation in comparison with all other performances.

For the purpose of examining a correlation between emotional identification and three dimensions of the aesthetic experience of dance performances Correlation analysis was employed. In the next section it will be elaborated on in more detail.

The correlation between emotional identification and aesthetic experience of different dance performances The results of correlation analysis of the emotional identification and aesthetic experience of different dance performances showed that Pearson Correlation Coefficient is statistically significant for both classical ballet performances and flamenco performance: La búsqueda del Felahmengu as well. There is a positive correlation between the dimensions of aesthetic experience and degree of emotional identification in performances of classical ballet and flamenco (Table 5, 6 and 7).

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Table 5 Classical ballet (The Lady of the Camellias): correlation between emotional identification and three dimensions of the aesthetic experience of dance

Classical ballet: The Lady of the Dynamism Fascination Evaluation Camellias Emotional Identification r = . 412* r = . 245 r = . 609** Note: *p < .05. **p < .001

Table 6 Classical ballet (Sylvia): correlation between emotional identification and three dimensions of the aesthetic experience of dance

Classical ballet: Sylvia Dynamism Fascination Evaluation

Emotional Identification r = . 347* r = . 420* r = . 359** Note: *p < .05. **p < .001

In the performances of classical ballet the dimensions of aesthetic experience of dance performances show significant correlation with emotional identification. The direction of correlation is positive, which means the higher result in the dimension of aesthetic experience of dance performances is, the higher assessments of the emotional identification are.

Table 7 Flamenco (La búsqueda del Felahmengu): correlation between emotional identification and three dimensions of the aesthetic experience of dance

Flamenco: La búsqueda del Dynamism Fascination Evaluation Felahmengu Emotional Identification r = . 328 r = . r = . 139 472** Note: *p < .05. **p < .001

In the flamenco performance - La búsqueda del Felahmengu, the dimension of Fascination shows significant correlation with emotional identification. The direction of correlation is positive, which means the higher result in the dimension of Fascination is, the higher assessments of the emotional identification are. The other correlations are not statistically significant so they were not taken into consideration.

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Discussion and conclusion The results of this research have revealed that among the participants, there are differences in their estimations of emotional identification in performances of different forms of dance, and in their aesthetic experience of these dance performances as well.

It has been shown that both Flamenco performances, Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis, and Folklore: Vilinska planina, were highly evaluated on emotional identification scale. These results could be understood and discussed from two different perspectives. Glass (2005) suggested that emotional response is characteristic of the spectator in relationship with dance and that emotional response is not inherent trait in dance work. But, the other perspective (Vukadinović 2008) considers the impact of formal characteristics of each type of dance on the subjective experience of dance performances. It could be assumed that the formal characteristics of each tested type of dance in this research affect the estimations of emotional identification.

For example, flamenco dance is usually performed in the direct interaction with singing and accompanying music (Gómez Muñoz 2008) and requires "uniquely personal power of expression" (Gómez Muñoz 2008, p.46) whose aim is to transfer feelings (Gómez Muñoz 2008), which are usually expression of experience and everyday life (Castaño Hervás 2008). Flamenco insists on the effusive, rich emotional expression, numerous gestures, and the increased expression of emotional experience (Candelori and Díaz 1998; Vukadinović 2002, Gómez Muñoz 2008; Guerrero Pantoja 2008).

Concerning the lowest estimation (Folklore performances: Ivanjsko cveće) on emotional identification scale, the effect of formal characteristics can also be discussed. Formal characteristics of folklore performance (Džadžević 2005; Janković and Janković 1949), such as rhythm, symmetric order of dancers in the semi-circle, synchronicity of moving dancers in the same rhythm and pace holding hands, the emphasis on collective balanced dance, probably have influence on forming low estimations on emotional identification scale.

The results of this research have shown that among the participants, there are differences in aesthetic experience of different forms of dance performances. In recent study (Vukadinović 2008) it was suggested that a general formal description of different dance forms which uses following features: figural goodness, dance technique, dynamics, movement elegance and complexity of movements, matches the subjective experience of different types of artistic dance. In that sense, the impact of formal characteristics of each dance form investigated in this research should be taken into account when interpreting results. From that point of view it could be expected that classical ballet performances would have the lowest estimations on dimension of Dynamism which is comprised by the adjectives such as expressive, powerful, strong and exciting. According to its formal characteristics, classical ballet insists on harmony and symmetry of movements

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and on figural goodness, complying with the strict rules of academic dance, which includes en pointe technique, using space in a straight or diagonal line, and on specific and clearly defined positions of arms and hands (Warren 1990; Vaganova 1969). Hence it is possible that formal characteristics of classical ballet referring to correct balance, stability of the body and orientation in space (Warren 1990; Vaganova 1969), influences the formation of spectators’ aesthetic experience of dance performances. Such results complement the findings of the earlier research (Vukadinović 2008) that formal characteristics of classical ballet have impact on subjective experience of harmony and evaluation.

Regarding dimension of Evaluation, results can also be interpreted concerning formal characteristics of investigated dance forms. The lowest estimations on dimension of Evaluation of Folklore performance: Ivanjsko cveće and Contemporary dance performance: Metamorphosis seems to be expected due to the fact that the dimension of Evaluation consists of adjectives such as delicately, elegant, seductive and emotionally. Formal characteristics of folklore, such as rhythm, symmetric order of dancers in the semi-circle, synchronicity of moving dancers in the same rhythm and pace holding hands (Džadžević 2005; Janković and Janković 1949), as well as formal characteristics of contemporary dance, such as more freely use of space, then freer forms of movement among which there are falling, standing-up, walking, various types of turning, the use of voice and the need to separate spiritual component from technique and to emphasize the principle of spiritual and formal freedom (Adshead – Lansdale 1994; Jowitt 1994; Au 2002), probably form low estimations of participants’ aesthetic experience of dance by the dimension of Evaluations. Such findings are complementary with the previous studies (Vukadinović 2008) which suggest that formal characteristics of these two forms of dance are more related to subjective experience of Activity.

The dimension of Fascination is not exclusively characteristic of aesthetic experience of dance since the same adjectives (eternal, unspeakable, unique, exceptional) are also descriptors of aesthetic experience of paintings (Polovina and Marković 2008). Therefore, the dimension of Fascination is not specially connected to any artistic discipline but it refers to aesthetic experience of work of art in general, including dance itself. The results that performances of classical ballet and Contemporary dance: Metamorphosis have the lowest estimations on the dimension of Fascination reflects the aesthetic experience of artistic content of these performances.

It can be noticed that flamenco performance: Los recuerdos flamencólicos has the highest estimations of aesthetic experience concerning all three dimensions of aesthetic experience of dance performances. This result can be interpreted with taking into account the formal characteristics of this particular dance, as well as Glass (2005) suggested with the spectator‘s relationship with dance. But also it should be mentioned that the other factors affecting the aesthetic experience (Stevens, Winskel, et al. 2009; Glass 2005) such as visual elements, characteristics of dancers, or spatial/dynamic are not controlled in this research. For example, it

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is very possible that space in which the performance takes place influences the aesthetic experience of dance and therefore estimations. According to the research procedure participants watch this flamenco performance in the club, where distance from the small stage was about two meters, whilst the other performances were watched in the theatre where the distance from the big stage was approximately between ten and fifteen meters. Folklore performance: Ivanjsko cveće was watched on an open stage in the city centre in the daytime. In that sense, the lack of this research is that not all the variables relevant for aesthetic experience of dance are tested.

Regarding the relationship between estimations of the aesthetic experience of dance and emotional identification, results have revealed that there is a positive correlation between the dimensions of aesthetic experience and emotional identification in performances of classical ballet and flamenco. In classical ballet performances the higher result in the dimension of aesthetic experience of dance performances is, the higher assessments of the emotional identification are. In flamenco performance - La búsqueda del Felahmengu the higher result in the dimension of Fascination is, the higher assessments of the emotional identification are.

Although there is positive correlation between emotional identification and the dimensions of aesthetic experience in classical ballet and flamenco performances, this result should be understood with reserve and in the broader context. In the research of audience reaction to contemporary dance performances Stevens, Winskel, et al. (2009) reported that although more than 87% of participants stated that they felt emotional response, low percentage of emotional recognition is involved in reasons for the experience of emotion and enjoyment in contemporary dance performances. On the basis of the results of our research it can be stated that the performances of different dance forms differ according to observer’s estimations in the case of either assessments of the dimension of aesthetic experience of dance or the assessment of emotional identification. Such results can be understood if they are observed within the context in which aesthetic experience, as suggested by Marković (2010), would be special kind of emotion, independent of other emotions and feelings.

Having in mind all constrains of this study it can be concluded that observer’s emotional identification in dance performances, is, at least, partly determined by the formal characteristics of particular dance form. Also it can be concluded that, for classical ballet and flamenco dance form, there is a positive relationship between observer’s emotional identification and aesthetic experience of performances. Further investigation concerning for example, influence of factors such as space where performance happens, visual elements or characteristics of dancers, on observer’s emotional identification in the performances of different dance forms, would be useful.

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References - Adshead – Lansdale, J. & Layson, J. 1994. Dance history an introduction. London & New York: Routledge. - Arnheim, R. 1966. Towards a Psychology of Art, Collected Essays. Regents of the University of California. - Arnold, P. J. 1995. Objectivity, Expression, and Communication in Dance as a Performing Art. Journal of Aesthetic Education 29 (1), pp. 61-68. - Arnold, P. J. 2005. Somaesthetics, education and the Art of Dance. Journal of Aesthetic education 39 (1), pp. 48 - 64. - Au, S. 2002. Ballet and Modern Dance.London: Thames and Hudson. - Blom, A., & Chaplin, L. 2000. The Moment of Movement. London: Dance books. - Calvo – Merino, B., Glaser, D.E., Grezes, J., Passingham, R.E., and Haggard, P. 2005. Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers. Cerebral Cortex 15 (8), pp. 1243- 1249. - Calvo-Merino, B., Jola, C., Glaser, D., and Haggard, P. 2008. Towards a sensorimotor aesthetics of performing art. Consciousness and Cognition 17 (3), pp. 911-922. - Calvo - Merino, B. 2009. Neural Signatures of the Aesthetic of Dance. In Stoc, C. ed. Dance Dialogues: Conversations across cultures, artforms and practices. Australian Dance Councile - Ausdance Inc. and Queensland University of Technology, Faculty of Creative Industrie. - Camuri, A., Lagerlöf, I., and Volpe, G. 2003. Recognizing emotion from dance movement: Comparison of spectator recognition and automated techniques. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 59, pp. 213- 225. - Candelori, N., and Díaz, N. F. 1998. Il Flamenco. [Flamenco]. Milano: Xenia. - Carter, A. 1998. Dance Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge. - Castaño Hervás, J.M. 2008. Flamenco in the 21st century. Rutas Flamencas. Junta de Andalucia, Consejería de Cultura: Empresa Pública de Gestión de Programas Culturales, 57–59. - Cross, E. S., Hamilton, A.F., and Grafton, S. T. 2006. Building a motor simulation de novo: observation of dance by dancers. Neuroimage 31 (3), pp. 1257 – 1267. - Duncan, I. 1981. Isadora Speaks. San Francisco: City Light Books. - de Meijer, M. 1989. The contribution of general features of body movements to the attribution of emotions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 13, pp. 247-268 - Džadžević, D. 2005. Igra. [Dance]. Novi Sad: Prometej. - Fenemor, A. 2003. On Being Moved by Performance. Performance Research 8 (4), pp. 107-114.

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- Gómez Muñoz, R. 2008. Flamenco dance today. Rutas Flamencas. Junta de Andalucia, Consejería de Cultura: Empresa Pública de Gestión de Programas Culturales, 45 – 48. - Glass, R. 2005. Observer Response to Contemporary Dance. In: Grove, R., Stevens, C. and McKechnie, S. eds. Thinking in Four Dimensions.Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance. Melbourne University Press, pp.107- 121. - Grove, R., Stevens, C. and McKechnie, S. 2005. Thinking in Four Dimensions. Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance. Melbourne University Press - Guerrero Pantoja, D. 2008. Flamenco singing today. Rutas Flamencas. Junta de Andalucia, Consejería de Cultura: Empresa Pública de Gestión de Programas Culturales, 29– 34. - Hagendoorn, I. 2003. The Dancing Brain. Cerebrum 5 (2), pp.19 – 34. - Hagendoorn, I. 2005. Dance Perception and the brain. In Grove, R., Stevens, C. and McKechnie, S. eds. Thinking in four dimensions. Melbourne: Melburn Universiti publishing. pp.137 - 148. - Hangendoorn, I. 2011. Dance, Choreography and the Brain. In Melcher, D. and Bacci F. eds. Art and the Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 499 - 514. - Janković, Lj. , Janković, D. 1949. Narodne Igre. V Knjiga. [Folklore. 5th Book]. Beograd: Prosveta izdavačko preduzeće Srbije. - Jowitt, D. 1994. Expression and expressionism in American modern dance. In Adshead – Lansdale, J. and Layson J. eds. Dance history an introduction. London & New York: Routledge, pp.169-181. - Layson, J. 1994. Historical perspectives in the study of dance. In Adshead – Lansdale, J. and Layson, J. eds. Dance history an introduction. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 4-17. - Marković, S. 2007. Opažanje dobre forme. [Perception of figural goodness]. Beograd: Univerzitet u Beogradu. - Marković, S. 2010. Aesthetic Experience and the Emotional Content of Paintings. Psihologija 43 (1), pp. 47-64 - McFee, G. 1992. Understanding Dance. London & New York: Routledge. - McKechnie, S. 2002. Movement as Metaphore: The construction of meaning in the choreographic art. Sydney: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music perception and Cognition. - Meekums. B. 2005. Dance Movement Therapy. A creative Psychotherapeutic Approach. London: SAGE Publications. - Montero, B. 2006. Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2), pp. 231-242. - Ognjenović, P. 2003. Psihološka teorija umetnosti. [The Psychological Theory of Art]. Beograd: Gutenbergova galaksija. - Polovina, M., & Marković, S. 2006. Estetski doživljaj umetničkih slika. [Structure of aesthetic experience]. Psihologija 39 (1), pp. 39-55. - Sevdalis, V. and Keller, P.E. 2011. Captured by motion: Dance, action understanding and social cognition. Brain and Cognition 77, pp. 231-236.

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- Shusterman, R. 2005. Somaesthetics and Burkes Sublime. British Journal of Aesthetics 45 (4), pp. 323-341. - Stevens, K., McKechnie, S., Malloch, S., & Petocz, A. 2000. Coreographic cognition: Composing Time and Space. In C. Woods, G.Luck, F. Seddon, J.A. Sloboda, & S. O Neill (Eds.). Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Keele, UK: Department of Psychology, Keele University, August. - Stevens, K., McKechnie, S., Glass, R., Scuhubert, E. and Chen, J. 2007. Methods for Maesuring Audience Reaction. Sydney: The Inaugural International Conference on Music Communication Science. December, 155- 158. - Stevens, C. J., Schubert, E., Morris, R.H., Frear, M., Chen, J., Healey, S., Schoknecht, C. and Hansen, S. 2009. Cognition and the temporal arts: investigating audience response to dance using PDAs that record continuous data during live performance. International Journal of Human- Computer Studies 67, pp. 800-813. - Stevens, C., Winskel, H., Howell, C., Vidal, L., Milne-Home, J. and Latimer, C. 2009. Direct and Indirect Methods for Measuring Audience Reactions to Contemporary Dance. Available at: http://www.ausdance.org.au/resources/publications/dance- dialogues/papers/measuring-audience-reactions-to-contemporary- dance.pdf [Accessed: 15 November 2011]. - Thomas, C. 1980. Aesthetic and Dance. American Alliancence for Helth, Psysical Education, Recreation, and Dance. Washington DC: National Dance Association. - Tufnel, M., & Crickmay, C. 2006. Body, Space, Image. London: Dance Books. - Turner, B. 2008. Somaesthetics and the Critique of Cartesian Dualism: Body Counciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Body and Society 14 (3), pp. 129-133. - Vaganova, A. 1969. Basic Principles of Classical Ballet. Rusian Ballet Technique. Courier Dover Publications. - Vukadinović, M. 2002. Flamenko – između tišine i usklika. [Flamenco – Between Silence and Scream]. Novi Sad: Futura. - Vukadinović, M. 2008. Subjektivni doživljaj različitih tipova umetničke igre. [Subjective Experience of different types of artistic dance].Unpublished Master's Thesis, Belgrade University. - Vukadinović, M. 2010. Odnos estetskog doživljaja plesača i estetskog doživljaja publike. [Relation between aesthetic experience of a dancer and aesthetic experience of audience]. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Belgrade University. - Warren, G.W. 1990. Classical Ballet Technique. University of Southern Florida.

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Emotional topographies of performative artistic practices

Mojca Puncer* University of Maribor

After the decline of studies with regard to feeling and emotions within the historical context of aesthetics, we can see a revival of interest in this topic from the so-called "affective turn" aspect in art, culture and the broader social reality. In this context, affect becomes the key which unlocks the door towards harmonizing body and emotions. The cultural turn in aesthetics itself brings us an open mind platform, where the historical methods of studying the senses, emotions and feelings embodied in art objects are increasingly substituted by studies of aesthetical processes and performativity. Psychoanalysis, deconstruction of post- structuralism and the establishment of a tighter alliance between theory and the artistic practice itself were the factors which significantly contributed to the evaluation of the latter. Another important contribution in this evaluation sprang from feminist thought concentrating on the body. Aesthetics is in this context returning to its original field of interest, after which it got its name, namely that of sensual cognition, to a specific discourse of the body as an amalgam of feelings and emotion. Instead of historical forms of representation, this recent affective turn emphasizes temporariness, affect, individual experiences and everyday life.

An artist with his/her performance of "body thoughts" (emotions, affects) emphasize that facet of a performed body, which eludes the capturing of discourse, but is nevertheless of key importance for his/her social and gender positioning. Individual feelings, emotions and affects become an important tool for social and gender politics, performance and pleasure. These processes are very dynamic, transitive and elusive and very difficult to be captured within the theoretical field. Theory of performatives can be of help in understanding such processes. Affective performativity underlines body performances of specific, non- normative artistic subjectivities. A performative body adds value to the art, a value which isn't brought in, neither by static description or representation: the performance of a body with specific social and gender marks is exactly the tool used by an artist to cut into the mythology of a coherent subject. Thus the relational, affective, collaborative and "non-material" aspects – the driving force

* [email protected]

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behind multiple artistic subjectivity in the post-industrial capitalist society – come into focus.

This discussion uncovers some of the key concepts which connect emotions and affects with contemporary art and culture, mainly from the aspect of defying instrumentalization under neo-liberal conditions. What we are dealing with here is a special spatial modus of thinking, which emphasizes the multifacetness of social relations and draws alternative ways of spatialization, of embodiment and emotional topography. It is about new forms with respect to the active co- creation of public spaces, conditioned by the specific nature of art and about the circulation of meanings within it. Conceptions of affective performativity offer the possibility of qualitative explanations of social relationships, where we are predominantly interested in the methods of artistic articulation of emotional and affective forms and meanings, and their evaluation in a specific cultural-historical or social-political context.

Introduction Before I enter the realm of the so-called 'emotional topographies' in contemporary art announced in the abstract with the so-called 'affective turn' (Ticineto Clough, Halley, 2007) and begin to interpret it, allow me to briefly sketch the main trends propelling the contemporary perception of feelings and emotions within philosophy and the cognitive sciences. These trends are also my point of orientation in this article. A philosophical discussion with reference to the concept of emotion is more or less based on the current discoveries in psychology (mainly from the expansion of psychoanalysis during the early 20th century) can be roughly divided into emotions, based on feelings or physical sensations (with sources in the traditional empirical method) on the one hand and emotions as intentional (cognitive) states (with its roots in ancient Greek philosophy) on the other. Studies in the sub-spheres of the philosophy of art or aesthetics are connected mainly with sensual and emotional evaluation (arising from the discussions on aesthetical judgements of taste), while due to the transformation of art, the present calls for ever-increasing and necessary integration along with other scientific fields. Only then can we challenge some conventional ideas, such as the idea that capitalism controls emotions with the means of bureaucratic rationality. The sociologist from the Frankfurt School, Eva Illuoz (2010) with her concept of 'emotional capitalism' points to the rise of homo sentimentalis and to the fact that economic relations have become very emotional. The public sphere is permeated by a spectacle of private feelings and psychotherapeutical discourse of self-help due to a mass expression of mental suffering. We can see the contradiction of processes of emotionally turning oneself into a form of commodity, which permeates social ties, but not all the effects are negative. This social aspects are increasingly connected with 'relations' and 'realism' in contemporary art (the so-called 'relational art', introduced by the

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French curator Nicolas Bourriaud (2002)1, as opposed to completely fictional artistic narratives, which are the subject of interest especially in cognitive theories of emotions. Contemporary art often uses the element of fiction as a proof of its own contradictory autonomy. Contemporary art establishes a complex and contradictory relationship regarding the autonomy of art and also transcending the boundaries between art and life.

Allow me to summarise the main characteristics of contemporary art: the opening of a finished artefact in an open work/process (explosion of installations and performative works, expansion in social and virtual space), which results in new relations between a work of art and audiences (participation), integration in the expansion of new media and technologies in connection with globalised economic processes. This means an extreme internationalisation of this form of art, the consolidation of the art market and a re-evaluation of specific traditions. Other specifics are the extreme heterogeneity and mobility of contemporary art practices and their multi and intermediality or trans-disciplinarity (Tratnik 2010). On the other hand, contemporary art turns away from great narratives and focuses on more partial topics, micro-situations and local issues. Contemporary art is often some how a social experiment and also a form of research. Nicolas Bourriaud, the founding father of the so-called 'relational aesthetics', establishes within his text upon the so-called 'altermodernity’ that 'critical dimension' of art in the contemporary aesthetic thought 'represents the most common criterion of judgement' (Bourriaud 2010, p. 25). Critical dimension, performativity and documentary or reality references are the most obvious and common dimensions of contemporary art.

***

From the aspect of emotions within the context of art, the paradox of fiction is of particular importance for analytical or cognitive aesthetics. The answer to this paradox depends upon the concept of emotions, which can be roughly placed between the two afore mentioned theoretical directions (theory of emotions as feelings and cognitive theory of emotions as some form of evaluation judgements) (Levinson 1997, p. 21).2 Today we have a sort of consensus (not only in the analytical Anglo-Saxon context) that an emotion means a certain physical response with a typical psychological, phenomenological and expressive profile, which serves in channelling attention in a certain direction and that this profile includes a certain level of cognition. We have to mention that we also have different classifications of emotions, based on their complexity, etc. I'll return to this later. More recent philosophical discussions with regard to the nature of emotions and

1 According to Bourriaud, the relational aesthetics is an aesthetical theory, which evaluates a work of art on the basis of interpersonal relationships, are presented, produced or established by that work. 2 Jerrold Levinson introduces a concept of emotion, which functions as a mediator between the sensational and cognitive model.

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to the emotional response to art or more specifically; to the 'paradox of fiction' in representational art, to negative emotions and affects in art or to the so-called 'paradox of tragedy', etc. Suggest the focusing on certain emotions. This enables us toward a better understanding of the relations between emotions, beliefs, desires and acting (Hjort Laver 1997, p. 19)

Underline affective performativity I'd like to make a step towards performativity in contemporary art, which especially interests me within this discussion. Firstly, I'd like to mention the performative aspect of emotions and its expression as a social act. The performative theory of language use has its roots in the work of J. L. Austin (1962), who pointed out that we perform many things in everyday life verbally (offence, apology, conviction, etc.) This aspect of the use of language is considered in analyses of a certain emotion by an analogy employing speech acts. Upon entering the field of performative art analysis, we have to consider the divide, stressed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick when she discusses performativity from the aspect of Austin's theory of speech acts (in contrast with their positivistic treatment in analytical philosophy, which focuses on the division between performatives and constatives, etc. and from the aspect of anti-essentialistic deconstruction (Derrida, Butler) (Sedgwick 2003, pp. 6-7) If Austin's performativity is more about the ways in which language constructs or affects reality, deconstruction and critical theory of genders and aspire for a much broader sense of performativity as a characteristic of discourse. The distance between the theatrical and the deconstructionist meaning of the performative, strives to overcome the polarity of verbal and non-verbal acts. The theory of performative speech act is seminal within the method, which Sedgwick uses for her approach to the queer theory, where the subject of the so-called 'periperformativity' (“around” the performative), which is aesthetical, physical and affective, eludes to be included in a discourse. With regard to the question of overcoming the polarity of non-verbal and verbal acts, forms of post-object works of art, based on the realisation of a space-time event as a work of art, are of special interest for our further discussion. Works of performance, body art, happenings and actions are performative, because the acts of speech and non- verbal physical gestures are expected to have an existential, aesthetical and expressive impact on the viewer. The artistic creation is directed toward action in a social context and not on the product of an object. A work of art is an act of the artist's action and its meaning derives from the very act of rendition (which corresponds with the performative functions of a language). In the visual arts, performative works were created by the relativisation and dematerialisation of an art object.

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Alternative Spatial Models of Reflection and the Emotional Topography of Art Performative theory directs us further to alternative spatial concepts and models of thought, developed by Deleuze (together with Guattari) in accordance with his enthusiasm about mapping, planimetry and representations, which do something, direct us outwards, to non-discursive or beyond-discursive states (Deleuze, Guattari 2009). Deleuze doesn't strive for a marking model, but defines his work as a map making, drawing lines and areas on a flat surface – even with regard to a person's corporeality (Deleuze 2004; Grosz, 1994, pp.160–183).3 Deleuze's interest in planar relations has inspired Sedgwick, who proposes and interesting concept of 'beside', which deconstructs the established spatially designed hierarchies. “Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. /…/ Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.” (Sedgwick 2003, p.8) With this concept, she wants to contribute toward an emphasis upon non-hierarchical, co-existence (of various social groups, creative contribution of several artists to create a joint artistic project, etc.). We are dealing with a special spatial modus of thinking, which emphasises the multi- layering of social relations and interactions.

In my theoretical approach for discussing emotions in performative arts, I try to articulate an idea about emotive topographies, with the help of Guiliana Bruno's ideas in her Atlas of Emotion (Bruno 2007). Nevertheless, I'm more interested in the emotional topography with the intervention of performative practices and performing artistic subjectivity, which in given spatial co-ordinates, which draws and opens new emotional and mind territories and so contributes to sensibilisation of audiences for discussed topics (humorous questioning of conditions for artistic creativity, tragic experience of losing a loved one, etc.) than in geographical shifts and cinematography, which are the focus of Bruno's research. Guiliana Bruno gives a suggestive outline of the history of spatial and visual arts with a focus on the representation of spaces and impacts, of movements and emotions. According to her, the meaning of emotions is historically connected with transfers and migrations, with adaptations and survival strategies. From this and because of the general mobility of forms and subjects in contemporariness, we can conclude that a contemporary emotion needs migrations in new physical and mind spaces. All in all, intercultural negotiations and real and virtual mobility are one of the main features of contemporary art

3 In his analysis of Bacon's painting, Deleuze focuses on the artist's aspiration for direct reaching of a person in his/her sensuality and talks about the logic of sensation, where the body (i.e. the body without organs) is understood mainly as a surface of inscription, a place of emotions and sensations.

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(Bourriaud 2010, pp. 106-31).4 Orientations to networks, surfaces, connections and intensity are coming to the foreground. I'm interested in alternative topological models, such as the model of the Möbius strip as a fold, which opens new perspectives for reflection on spaces and bodies.5 The model encourages attempts of confiscating new social spaces, through connecting with neighbourhoods, the local and regional, beyond dominant ideological, representational or organisational systems.

In the post-Fordian production paradigm, even the affective becomes a tool or technology of the production process. In the 1990s, the so-called 'affective turn' draws the attention away from the historical forms of representations to stressing temporality, affect, individual experience and everyday life. The main two predecessors of redirecting the attention to emotions and affects in contemporary human and social sciences are psychoanalysis and feminist theory, with their focus on the body. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a relevant theoretical reflection on the power of affects such as shame, and their political potentials in social practices.

The affect shame Sedgwick designs a specific theory of emotions and affects (the latter are intense and short-lived emotions, such as fear, anger, enthusiasm, shame), where she thoroughly studies the affect shame, as defined by the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins, who greatly inspires her work (Sedgwick 2003. pp. 93-121).6 In order to understand affect in the work of Tomkins and Sedgwick, it is pivotal to make delimitation from a psychoanalytical (Freudian) notion of drives. Tomkins dedicated his life’s work to researching affects, which he arranged into two groups, in positive and negative affects. He gave special attention to the affect shame. According to Tomkins, shame is the affect of offence, humiliation, ridicule, defeat, etc. which penetrates the depths of a person's ego. Regardless of the form of humiliation, the disgraced person feels naked, defeated, alienated, robbed of dignity and value. His/her responses are epitomised in the body language, i.e. with the lowering of his/her head or eyes, with covering the face and in the feeling of being ashamed of his/her own body and hiding it from the gaze of others. Beside this, shame is strongly connected with pleasure, because it functions as an inhibitor. Shame has power to attach itself to a part of a body, to sensor system, to another affect. With regard to shame, Sedgwick thinks that the perception of

4 Bourriaud discusses the so-called 'journey-forms'. 5 Elizabeth Grosz for her critical review of representation and affirmation of difference similarly as Deleuze uses topological model of Möbius strip: “The Möbius strip model has the advantage of showing that there can be a relation between two 'things' – mind and body – which presumes neither their identity nor their radical disjunction, a model which shows that while there are disparate 'things' being related, they have the capacity to twist one into the other.” (Grosz 1994, pp. 209-210) 6 Together with Adam Frank, Sedgwick wrote a chapter 'Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins' (Sedgwick 2003, pp. 93-121). When analysing Tomkins' essay of affect in perspective of the systemic cybernetic theory, they understand the so-called 'cybernetic fold' as “a fold between postmodernist and modernist ways of hypothesizing about the brain and mind” (Sedgwick 2003, p. 105)

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performativity with expressions of everyday fact of shame and its derivatives opens numerous new ways for a deliberation about identity politics, which are interesting for art as well. “[T]he shame-delineated place of identity doesn't determine the consistency or meaning of that identity, and race, gender, class, sexuality, appearance, and abledness are only a few of the defining social constructions that will crystallize there, developing from this originary affect their particular structures of expression, creativity, pleasure, and struggle.” (Sedgwick 2003, p. 63)

Emotions / Affects in Contemporary Art (a few examples) In order to highlight the mutual applicability of chosen theoretical concepts and contemporary artistic practices, I will discuss some examples of performative expression of emotions in contemporary art. The process of the creation of a work, a performance or spatial installation itself is a medium to express an artists' emotions and feelings, while it is in its finished form a cognitive/performative act, which evokes emotional states in a spectator/interpreter and thus gains his/her attention. Affective power of the performed/represented can for example originate in an emotionally charged focus on powerlessness, which we sense when confronting our own existential vulnerability. This tragic aspect can in art be effectively subverted with its antithesis: humour.

Emotive laboratory of contemporary dance

The Slovene dancer and choreographer Maja Delak (1969) was encouraged by the need to deliberate upon her own history of choreography and to invite a group of female artists in order to establish a laboratory situation for a thorough study of performance material (Delak 2008). Through a specific reading of Slovene dance history, the artists ask questions with reference to the reasons and conditions of their own beginnings and dealings with the medium of contemporary dance. This questioning, through and open and multi-layered discursive positioning, which involves an analysis of theoretical texts, results in the dance performance Drage Drage/Expensive Darlings.7 The process was inspired by the reading of referential texts, which played different functions, from terminological and explanatory to content and structure. Content-wise, the artists thoroughly studied affect, as defined by the American psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins (who inspired the writings of Sedgwick, who is also one of the sources of research). The study of affects deals mainly with the experiential aspects of desire and pleasure, which are strongly connected with the shame affect and the experience of the 'engendered' body.

7 Expensive Darlings: idea and choreography: Maja Delak, EMANAT. Premiere: October 6th, 2007, PTL, Ljubljana.

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The performance Expensive Darlings through deconstruction of an apparent solidity of gender-identity positions makes an analogy with the position of contemporary dance, which with the presentation of body thoughts (emotions, affects) stresses out that facet of a dancer's body which eludes a discourse and rationalisation, but is nevertheless seminal for the artists' self-positioning. Thus we can see the body of a contemporary dancer in the light of the 'physiological' function of art in relation towards the female body. Artists question their positions in contemporary dance through adopting clichéd images of femininity, shown in a constitutive division between the particularity if desire and pleasure and also social norms. The performance builds on cabaret technique of selecting and reinterpreting excerpts from pop music (Celentano) and film (Barbarella), which consolidate the stereotypical images of femininity. With playing and reinterpretation of clichéd characters, whom are driven to tragicomic levels (vampirella, femme fatale, drag king, bride, a fairy, a cabaret dancer, a female toreador), they overturn the established symbol codes. Especially subversive are the possible analogy with queer identities (drag) and humorous dimension of playing typified images. Humour, irony and cynicism often function as the subject's (heroic) answer to a traumatic loss, which is in this way kept at a certain distance and diminished in more 'human' proportions (Zupančič 2002). We laugh at our own pain and impairment and take a reflexive position towards it and to that what caused it. We are able to analyse our own involvement in the situation, and make fun of our own fallacies and delusions. The performance attracts the audience with humorous methodologies and introduces feminist and queer perspectives toward a certain social, cultural and political and also historical context in order to display dominant myths in contemporary social reality. Let us remember that those works, which especially include a female artist’s body, shook the traditional systems of framing within art history with their strategies (Jones 1998). With the use of their bodies, artists cut into this system and questioned the dominant politics of representation in Western cultural history, which work in mass media.

Rituals of remembering and parting; of developing compassion

Allow me to mention two other suggestive and emotionally charged works from the context of contemporary visual ('reality) art, while addressing aspects of our existence, which exceed our usual recognition and which also includes the confrontation of the loss of our dear ones and our own mortality.

Works by the French artist Sophie Calle (1953) are full of elements from her own life (DARE, 2003). Through photographs and performances in public spaces, she creates narratives, where she contributed as an author in first person and a fictional character. In her conceptual processual works, Calle adopts roles of an investigator, detective, voyeur, etc. These roles reflect both a thorough form of research and also a common curiosity. In 1980 she did Suite Venitienne, where she followed a man from a party in Venice for two weeks. A year later she found herself at work as a hotel maid in Venice and created The Hotel, where she imagined the hotel guests with the help of their own personal items. Calle's works

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opens up zones between fact and fiction. She crosses the boundaries of privacy to study meaning, which are supposed to stay hidden in public places. By this, she brings a certain air of intimacy into them. When her boyfriend broke up with her by E-mail, Calle asked 107 women to read and analyse it according to their professional interests. The E-mail was set to music, textually rearranged, staged and received a psychiatric evaluation amongst other things. Thus, the work Take Care Of Yourself was created (named after the final phrase in the letter) for French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2007 (Vernissage TV, 2007). We can understand it as a rational woman's control of the situation instead of a fit of capricious emotions or dumbness due to emotional turmoil. Calle explicitly says that she doesn't want to give any directions for viewing her work and thus influencing the spectator's experience. The second example of the artist's ability to create a work of art based on intimate and painful details from her life, is a film, edited from the recorded moments of her mother dying (during Calle's preparation for the Biennale).

The Slovene visual artist and performer Andreja Džakušič (1971) with one of her works, Developing Compassion (2006–2008) (SCCA – Ljubljana, Studio 6, 2010) also deals with the personal experience of the illness and death of her father and the connected long-term process, which was the fundamental impetuous toward addressing the emotions of sadness, fear and pain, which are connected with death. The moments before death, the death itself and the time after it are three time axes, which became the focus of the artist's dealing with such a specific traumatic situation. Typical for the entire project are the multi-phased processes of the intertwining of repeating elements (disinfectant, pillows, red colour, etc.), segments of performances, which bring a spectator, through the means of both audio and video recordings and also objects (personal items, etc.) to a visual, atmospheric and poetical landscape, brimming with emotions, typical for the rituals of parting and mourning (minimalistic visual artistic interventions into space, performative articulations, accompanied by an undertone singing of laments). Installations, left after the performance, are traces of a live event.

After the theoretical discussion, I now address the mechanisms of emotions and affects in connection with an actual art practice, which in contrast with the mass media isn't a routine of techniques and a tried and tested formula. I'm interested in both the aspect of the emotional response to performative art, which uses real referential points as the process of creating a performance as a specific emotive laboratory, which is at the same time a laboratory for constructing identities and is inspired by topical theoretical texts regarding feelings, emotions, affects and performativity. Female artists and performers have developed their own techniques to express specific emotions through emotional occurrences, which are contingent and numerous, which doesn't mean that they don't participate in the more general phenomenological forms of human perception.

Conclusion

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Recent affective turns from historical forms of representation stresses temporariness, affect, personal experience and everyday life. This turn marks a peculiar break in perceiving relations and with them the related ethical and political responsibilities of a creating subject, who is also at the centre of interest of feminist and queer based interpretations and performative artistic articulations. Hardt uses the syntagma 'affective work' with a goal to encompass corporeal, emotional and intellectual aspects of new production forms (Hardt 2007, p. xi) Eva Illouz lucidly talks about the so-called 'process of emotional self-commodification as a central part of the current stage of capitalism (Illouz 2010). She insists that the fundamental ambiguity of the process, which subordinates a person on the one hand and liberates it on the other. Capitalism penetrates subjectivity, drives it to action and thus problematise theses about autonomy and non-instrumentalised art production. In the spirit of broader experimental traditions of the past century, art explores the methods of renewed establishment of forms, which affirm the subjectivity of an artistic process, which goes beyond the institutional frame.

In search of answers to how should we look at the transfer of accent from a finished work of art to open social relations from an aesthetical point of view on the one hand, and the political potential on the other, we can use ideas of affective performativity, seen through Sedgwick’s work, as they offer the possibility of qualitative interpretations of social relations. With performative and affective awareness of antagonism (the affect shame in the queer scene in relation to the mainstream, etc.) and also searching for alternative forms of participation and solidarity amongst members of specific social groups, where we can transcend the hegemonic duality of positioning. The political aspect of Sedgwick's theoretical- performative-affective work opens up through the demand for transcending the dualism and plurality of positions. Affective work, which evokes specific emotions and actions and thus encourages the establishment of a political subject and his work in the public sphere of a certain community, is here constitutive.

The example of coded queer representations and their identity positions, with origins in the field of pop-culture (drag, etc.) can become a material in those artistic practices, which self-position themselves through the establishment of analogies with other marginal positions (in a dance performance, for example, a contemporary dance creativity, meaningfully relates with the marginality of feminism and queer movement).8 Artist and performer with performing 'body thoughts' (feelings, affects) stresses that facet of the performing body, which eludes a discourse and rationalisation, but is nevertheless pivotal for her social and gender positioning.

Muving (in) arts (G. Bruno) can evoke an intensive emotional reaction; detect the birth of new ways of empathy and feeling in society. A renewed articulation of

8 This comparison is convincingly addressed by Maja Delak's dance performance Expensive Darlings (2007). The performance was partially inspired by Eve K. Sedgwick's Touching Feeling. (Delak 2008)

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space according to the measure of body in art is both a restoration of the sensual (non-verbal) and affective experience and an impulse for reflection – not in the sense of isolation, but in sense of negating borders, transformative orientation outwards, toward active, emancipated audiences in the Rancière line of thought (Rancière 2009).

At the end, allow me to address the question, posed by Rancière with respect to the concept of art in light of the bonds between aesthetics and politics, through the so-called division of the sensible, which marked inequality in society. Art can be socially relevant ('political' or 'meta-political) with regard to the specific disclosure of the division in the field of perception and the sensible, i.e. in the field of the aesthetical. If the addressing of the sensual and emotions in art are qualitative explanation from the re-articulation of social bonds perspective, we can determine that the effects of art cannot be predicted. As explains Rancière, art can only coincidentally match politics, when it manages to rock the existing division of the sensible. Therefore the evaluation of the sensible, affective and emotive potential in art (in contrast with instrumentalised reactions), which presumes an emancipated spectator, is put to the test again and again.

References - Bourriaud, N. 2002. Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les Presses du réel. - Bourriaud, N. 2010. The Radicant. 2nd ed., New York: Lukas & Sternberg. - Bruno, G. 2007. Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. 2nd Ed. New York: Verso. - Delak, M. 2008. Expensive Darlings – A Revision (A Note on the Creative Process of the Performance). Reartikulacija, 4, Summer Issue [online] Available at: http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=200 [Accessed 29 November 2011]. - Deleuze, G. 2004. Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. - Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. 2009. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 13th ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. - Grosz, E. 1994. Volatile Bodies. Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. - Digital Art Resource for Education (DARE), 2003. Sophie Calle. [online] Available at: [Accessed 29 November 2011]. - Hardt, M. Foreword: “What Affects Are Good For” In: Ticineto Clough, P., Halley, J. (eds.), 2007. Affective Turn. Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. ix–xiii. - Hjort, M. Laver. S. (eds.), 1997. Emotions and the Arts. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Illouze, E. 2010 Cold Intimacies. The Making of Emotional Capitalism. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press.

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- Jones, A. 1998. Body art / Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. - Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. 2003. Touching Feeling. Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003. - Levinson, J. 1997. “Emotion in Response to Art. A Survey of the Terrain” In: Hjort, M. Laver. S. (eds.), 1997. Emotions and the Arts. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 20–34. - Rancière, J. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. - Ticineto Clough, P., Halley, J. (eds.) 2007. Affective Turn. Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press. - SCCA – Ljubljana, Studio 6, 2010. Nevenka Šivavec with Andreja Džakušič (discussion and exhibition, SCCA Project Room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana, Slovenia). [online] Available at: http://www.scca-ljubljana.si/news-en_10- 24.htm [Accessed 29 November 2011]. - Tratnik, P. Vinkler, J. (eds.) 2010. Transumetnost: kultura in umetnost v sodobnih globalnih pogojih (Transart: Culture and Art in Global Conditions). Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut. [Accessed 29 November 2011]. - Vernissage TV, 2007. Sophie Calle / French Pavilion / 52nd Venice Biennale 2007. [video online] Available at: [Accessed 29 November 2011]. - Zupančič, A. 2002. Komična razsežnost psihoanalitičnega izkustva (Comical Dimension of Pychoanalytical Experience). Problemi, 1–2 (40), pp. 51-67.

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Theater and Compassion: the Aesthetic Criteria in the Theatrical Staging

Adrián Pradier* Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático de Castilla y León

To Peter J. González, lar familiaris.

1. Introduction1 When Faust, the wise man, is in front of the jail where Margaret lies buried, we can grasp his desperation and imagine that situation of hers, just like him. But in that moment, Faust says, “the whole unhappiness of human nature is pressing on my heart” (Der Menscheit ganzer fasst mich an) (Goethe []: I, v. 4406; Kaufmann 1992, p. 45). We are able to feel his “pity”, his “deep pain”, his “fear” for Margaret, but only in a non-original way; otherwise, we may feel an authentic, native and original “compassion” towards Faust, because nobody would like to see the beloved person in a situation as horrible as that of Margaret. There are two types of affective response in the scene: (1) that of Faust, where he “feels” a powerful passion towards Margaret, imagining her state –Faust's exclamation is shouted to the other side of the door-; and (2) that of the spectator, where he “feels” a kind of passion, not as intense as that of Faust and directed, precisely, to him. In the first case, we cannot speak about “compassion”, because, as Aristotle says, “the people we pity are: those whom we know, only if they are not very closely related to us –that case we feel about them as if we were in danger

* E-mail: [email protected] 1 This study responds to a desire to deepen some of the keys presented in a paper entitled “The concept of éleos and its drift towards the aesthetics of compassion” (El concepto de éleos y su deriva hacia la estética de la compasión), defended at the V Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics, 4th to 8th July, 2011, under the general issue “Art, emotion and value”. I want to express my gratitude to the organizers of the event for their exquisite professionalism and to my friends, Sixto J. Castro and Wolfgang Bergande, for discussing with me some of these ideas. Finally, I thank my friend, Pedro Javier Gonzalez Rodriguez, translator and lover of philosophy, for the generous review of the English translation of this paper.

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ourselves” (Aristotle 2010, 1386a18-20). Gretchen is Faust's beloved, so it is normal that he can not feel compassion, but similar emotions. As discussed below, the state of Margaret, imagined by Faust, infects him and, under Aristotle’s account, it happens as if it were his own pain. Somehow, there is no distance between them... and there is a door!

Accordingly, we can suppose a spectator who feels great sorrow seeing Faust, considering that the wise suffers greatly after imagining the situation of his beloved Margaret. And we know that Faust “imagines” it because Goethe, through a quotation, tells us only that he is “at the iron door of a cell” (vor einem eisernen Türchen) and listens her “singing within” (Es singt inwendig). Some spectators –and readers-, of course, can suffer “compassion”, “pity”, “sadness”, etc. But another director may have decided to show us the situation of Margaret, her bodily misery, her spiritual defeat, her abandonment feeling. Some spectators will have feelings more or less intense, more or less powerful, but it is strange that, at the grotesque sight of Margaret, some other spectators do not change their facial expressions showing a deep pain, almost visceral, more adequate to what they are seeing, i.e., the situation or Margaret and her own emotional reaction to it. Both cases live together, in fact, in the theater, even in the same drama. Then, I can feel compassion for Margaret, Faust can feel pity for her, I can feel compassion for Faust and I can feel pity because of Margaret’s state... or compassion… or anger… or…

It is clear that the choices of the stage director on the design of the scenic space and a concrete performing code for his artistic proposal constitute a pair of elements that, aesthetically, seek one dominant response in the field of the emotions. It is the way of the theory of art, and particularly theory of theater. I we would delve deeper in this way, we would study the dramaturgical theory of theater, the narrative quality of the spaces, the dominant aesthetic concepts of staging from the sensitive elements, the differences among an expressionist performative code, another Brechtian and other deconstructive and so on. But it is evident that the aesthetic criteria condition the spectators’ emotional response when the stage director presents his own proposal. In other words, it is not the same experience “reading Faust that seeing Faust, because there is not an unique way of making it. Fortunately.

A good feeling to analyze the types of emotional reactions of the theatrical audience –theater and, in any case, movies- is “compassion”, because the nuances that arise not only historically, but conceptually, open a wide range that allows a thorough study of the emotional life of the spectators. The open possibility of being a receptacle of the evil of others opens, at the same time, the need for the similarity between the other and oneself. The evil of another awakes in us a deep regret that opens a door to the subject itself: first, it is a passion that begins in oneself in front of an evil that appears painful to those who do not deserve it, that is, an evil that opens us to the contemplation of the others. The compassion gives us a circumstantial knowledge of the other, but, precisely because the other is

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equal to us, compassion also gives us an existential knowledge of ourselves. Human beings, through compassion, become fragile and needy.

Aristotle’s classic characterization of “compassion” defines it as one of the “feelings” involved during a tragedy. It requires a certain affective distance for the necessary analysis of the event the person for whom we feel “compassion” is situated in. In any case, the situation is “undeserved” or “disproportionate” in relation to the mistake committed and it is “exclusively” his. This need for contemplation, assessment and calculation of possibilities that the spectator have to fall in such a situation imply that “compassion” (1) requires “empathy” (sections 2 to 4), (2) an external perspective (section 5) and (6) a conceptual delimitation against sympathy. These three parts will allow us to address, from the study of compassion, problems like empathy, empathetic emotions, identification, emotional contagion and, finally, the possibility of suffering real feelings rather than fictional feelings in the experience of arts, through certain techniques of the art of theater. It is my intention with this paper to open a few channels to approach the field of the aesthetics of the theater considering all its complexity.

2. Empathy and compassion The experience of compassion requires empathy. Empathy is a capacity which includes various intensity levels that correspond to different affective phenomena. The empathy requested by éleos has to allow an analytical assessment of the “outside” situation which, in turn, would open a check of the “own” status and an affective response to it. Aristotle’s definition of éleos indicates that this affection opens a consideration of the spectator as “placed” under threat, namely, the same threat that arouses our assessment in the terms of a likely “possibility” of falling into that situation. Therefore, the exercise of “empathy” founding of “compassion” has to be placed in a medium degree of emotional intensity, that is, neither to a little of null “psychical distance” of the situation, nor to an excessive “distance” that places the spectator in a completely “separated” perspective from an affective or, even, experiential point of view. In this sense, contemporary works on “empathy” define it (1) like an open possibility of the spectator along his own process of expectation and (2) like a capacity based “on” and articulated “from” perception, imagination and memory through which is set a “figure” or “image” of the other’s pathos (see Mehrabian & Epstein 1972; Brown 1987: pp. 86-89; Preston & De Waal 2002). The “empathy”, finally, is a complex process (see Hoffman 1984, pp. 103-131) that has to be exercised, honed, refined and perfected in the recognition of emotions in others.

Accordingly, there are at least a transcendental limit and a hermeneutical guarantee: in the first case, although the “empathy” collaborates in the management of emotions and feelings of the “other” –in case of the theater, generally “characters”- the communicating channel is certainly narrow. It guarantees a comprehensive and personal “living” of the emotional states of

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others from a standpoint based on “otherness”, but it is not a capability (a) to “reproduce” such emotional states; or (b) to “recognize”, without error, those feelings and emotions or (c) to “identify” with the “other”. There are emotional phenomena in (a) which we will study later; there are clues –facial gestures, postures, movements or expressions- in (b). There are certain guarantees on the reliability of the approach to the facts, but (c) is impossible. Recognition is a distinguishing action of items within a domain; those items are identified emotions, i.e., distinct emotions recognized through a perceptual identification and the consequent semantic donation. This characterization is widely accepted from the main models of approach and study of the intelligent management of emotions (see Goleman 1996; Mayer 1997; Mayer et al. 2001, 2004) and it is defined like a first necessary segment in any affective-emotive processing of the states of the “other” (see Moya-Albiol, Herrero & Consuelo Bernal 2010, p. 90). The spectator of a situation likely to arise “compassion” will never achieve “to identify himself with the other” in the fullest sense of the term. The metaphysical limit is precisely what compels him to interpret and imagine what happens “in there”. If this were so and as phenomenologists have established (2), we would lose our own identity, not living “as if” we were in the place of the “other”, but actually “being” the “other”. For this reason, this movement of consciousness towards the apprehensive figuration of the “emotional state” of the others was, after the phenomenological review, no longer a “specular reproduction” or “identification” with the “other” –or the “object”- but a singular and genuine “production” of oneself. Consequently, the spectator who “empathizes” is highly qualified not for “reproducing”, but only for “producing” his own affective states in response (1) to his understanding and (2) his consequent appraisal of the situation of the “other” (see 3). In this sense, I am agree with Feagin’s account on the consideration on the “empathetic emotion” as, to some extent, a “shared emotion” in terms of affective coincidence (see Feagin 1997, pp. 53-54), but I think that “empathy” is not a singular kind of emotion, i.e., empathetic emotion. When I empathize with Ichabod Crane, a circumstance exists where his emotional reaction (fear) to a target (the Headless Horseman) coincides with mine. This shared emotion is, for me, an “empathetic emotion”. But this does not imply that empathy or the act of empathy is reduced to this. If I see Johnny Depp fleeing the headless horseman in the film Sleepy Hollow (1999), I can be afraid of what might happen to Ichabod Crane, but it is a low-level feeling in the sense of its intensity. Rather, fear is projected to the Headless Horseman and, only in a figured sense, both are confused, namely, my own fear of the Headless Horseman and that of Ichabod Crane. My excitement and that of Ichabod seems to agree; in addition, Ichabod’s reaction within that situation can increase the intensity of my emotional response –if Johnny Depp, for example, plays more dramatically or tragically- or, maybe, decrease it –if Depp plays on a comic or parodic way. But in any case, empathy allows me to recognize Crane’s fear; meanwhile, it seems that my fear follows its own path. In the case of “empathy” and “compassion”, “one may, again, empathize with someone to whom one refuses compassion on grounds of fault: as a juror, for example, I may come to understand the experience of a criminal without

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having compassion for the person’s plight, if I believe him both responsible and guilty” (Nussbaum 2001, pp. 329).

Consider the character of Terry Malloy in the film On the waterfront (1954). Elia Kazan presented the character played by Marlon Brando suggesting that Terry was a good guy, plain and straightforward, but who has had the misfortune of ending up with bad guys for lack of opportunities in life, interest or maybe a mixture of both. In any case, it is clear that Terry is a person who can carry on their shoulders heavy weights and crammed boxes, but not big moral decisions, because they can collapse his strength and his own integrity. The viewer, in the process of his own expectation and from his own beliefs, (1) detects that Terry does not deserve to be in the situation that works as the dramatic engine of the film, i.e., to choose between private morality based on loyalty to the group I belong and between public morality based on the fulfillment of justice for all citizens above or regardless of race, family, status, etc.; (2) the spectator qualifies Malloy’s suffering as excessive because of the loneliness, the lack of understanding by everyone, the threats made from both worlds or the terrible pressure of his own conscience for his indecision; (3) when he, the spectator, estimates that there has been a similar situation in his own life or there is a real chance of falling into such a situation, our viewer feels compassion. If I have been through a situation like this one, or, in fact, I'm living now something alike, it is likely that compassion is directed toward the poor Terry. Empathy allows us to imagine and understand the emotional state of Terry. But when we feel compassion, we evaluate the situation in relation to pain and pain in relation to the situation. Empathy is the condition for having a previous appraisal that, in turn, is necessary for “compassion”, otherwise, a theory that is consistent by itself and coherent with the various contemporary accounts of “cognitive appraisal” in theory of emotions –at least, from Aristotle (see Nussbaum 2001, pp. 306-314)- that have been articulated in the last fifty years (see Arnold 1960; de Rivera 1977; Lazarus, R.S., Kanner & Folkman 1980: 189-217; Lazarus & Smith 1988: 281-331; Roseman 1984: 11-36; Frijda 1986; Ortony, Clore & Collins 1988; Smith & Ellsworth 1985, pp. 813-838; Weiner 1985, pp. 548-573; Manstead & Tetlock 1989, pp. 225-240; Omdahl 1995; Nussbaum 2001). According with all these theorists, our emotional responses depend on the spectator’s perception and his appraisal, evaluation or assessment of the situation in which the subject is submerged. On the other hand, “compassion”, like a specific emotion, is closely linked to this necessity of “appraisal” (see Nussbaum 2001).

Maybe the pain is enormous, but the situation is not “evaluated” or “appreciated” as sufficient to generate such pain. Then, we will suffer no compassion, but rather contempt, shame, embarrassment. This is the example of Seneca and his friend, Q., a Roman aristocrat, who knows that his shipment of peacock’s tongues from Africa has been interrupted. Supposing that his dinner party that evening will be a disaster, he cries like a little boy and begs compassion for him nothing less than to Seneca. Obviously, the stoic laughs happily (see Nussbaum 2001, pp. 309); (Ben Ze’ev 2000, pp. 344-345). First, no one can ask for the birth of a feeling, because

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we can only express our hope that this feeling occurs in the other. If the request for genuine feelings in the other were a guarantee to get someone to love us, it would be a disaster, at least, for the ninety-five percent of the world literature… the adventures of Werther would be solved with a simple request or application form! And secondly, Seneca, the great Stoic of the Roman Empire, cannot feel compassion for a situation that, for him, is not so serious to bring so much suffering. Maybe for another absurdly superficial aristocrat as Q. the situation would be worthy of compassion.

However, Seneca does not seem very sympathetic to Q. He judges him from his own beliefs and principles which help him to make a clear distinction between what it is important and what is not. Exactly like Q. Nussbaum thinks of his own example that we should not show compassion for Q., unless Q. was unaware of his social distortion of his preferences (see 2001, p. 372). But we can also proceed as a stage director, asking for the triggering event and working with an actor who had to play Q. In the absence of other information specifying the personal situation of this character, we are entitled to think in a dramaturgical way that (1) maybe Q. is actually a good guy with good intentions (2) endowed with an extraordinary sense of responsibility as a citizen (3) that, before buying the shipment of peacock tongues, had decided to organize an evening party for ascending in his own cursus honorum. If we were talking about T. instead of Q., a reader could think of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Even we can be less fine and more prosaic, more Brechtian and less Shakespearean… because, surely, the reader of this paper has some link with the Academy, as well as personal ambitions. We can imagine Q. as a young academic who only wants to be a good teacher and a good reference for the students. But, sometimes, a teaching position often implies to sit well with other colleagues not only by pleasing conversations about philosophy, cinema, theater or football, but also by personal favors (to grade papers, to design and to plan tutorials with students, etc.). It is likely to feel compassion for Q., is it not? In the very terms of Nussbaum, “compassion takes up the onlooker’s point of view, making the best judgment the onlooker can make about what is really happening to the person” (2001, p. 309).

Secondly, if the manifestation of pain is null or minimal and the situation is “evaluated” or “appreciated” as sufficient to cause pain, we do not feel compassion, but admiration, respect, surprise. This is the principle that operates, for example, in the hagiographies of the Middle Ages and the use of humor as a permanent exhibition of moral superiority, faith in a cause, control over the body. The sense of humor and the ostentation of laughter in painful, terrible and undeserved situations tend to generate admiration, respect and a sympathetic respect. Maybe, this is the reason why the comic heroes please their readers, because they show no sign of pain to their archenemies, even when being tortured. Therefore, precisely, the Green Goblin attacks not Spider-Man, but his beloved Aunt May or even Mary Jane. If we don’t care about our body or our possessions, perhaps the most important thing for us is “in there”, i.e., other people and our feelings related to them. This is because we feel compassion not

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when beloved persons are hurt, because, with Aristotle, “in that case we feel about them as if we were in danger ourselves” (Rhet., 1386a19-20). Spider-Man cannot feel compassion for Mary Jane, but I can feel compassion for him when I think that there are always risks of losing a loved person… although it is more likely that I feel anger and repulsion against Green Goblin. Fortunately, Green Goblin is not our enemy.

Finally, if the pain is evaluated according to the situation and this is coherently appreciated, we may feel compassion. When I see Medea crying for Jason’s infidelity, I feel compassion not because of the elements that articulate the situation themselves, but rather by the structural relationship that brings them together. In other words, I do not feel compassion because of Jason’s infidelity, but because I know there is always the risk of losing the person we love by the irruption of a third element that will probably be hated by us during all our lives. On the other hand, it is true that no one has done or proposed a version of what happened to Jason when he was subdued by the love of Creusa. Even though it is the oldest story in the world. Think, for example, on Robert James Waller’s book The Bridges of Madison County, and the homonym film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring himself and a masterful Meryl Streep. I can feel compassion for Francesca, because she feels terribly guilty with Kincaid; and I can feel compassion for Robert, who has never been so in love with anyone as he is of Francesca.

3. The aesthetic criteria: example from a staging of Antigone The three possibilities I have presented above, however, pose affective responses that are contrary to one another. We can feel compassion for Jason, but also for Medea; we can feel contempt for the Roman aristocrat, but also compassion; we can feel admiration for Spider-Man, but also compassion or even pity him... in other words, reality is complex and has many possibilities. Aristotle set some general criteria without going into excessive casuistry, but it seems that from the very definition it is recognized, implicitly at least, the existence of a close link between (a) the emotional response of that whom we see suffering and (b) the evaluation of such a response in relation to the situation in which it arises. Thus, at least in the most celebrated English translations, the Greek words is always translated considering both the aesthetic dimension of the situation –something appears serious, painful, destructive- as the epistemic approximation –something is judged as oppressive, painful, destructive-. We cannot separate the two dimensions, as Nussbaum recognizes two of their studies. So, expressions like “apparent mischief” Midgley (1685, p. 111), “apparent destructive and dolorific evil” (Taylor 1818, p. 135), “seemingly menaces” (Crimmin 1811, 1812, p. 235), “on beholding destruction” (Gillies 1823, p. 286), “an evil […] appearing to […]” (Buckley 1857, p. 136), “the sight of some evil” (Grant 1877, p. 88; Ross & Roberts 1910-1931, 2010, p. 77), etc. The spectator’s compassion is not only

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conditioned, therefore, by the content itself, although we can talk about common looks from a cultural, social or even epochal perspective. Actually, our emotional responses are highly conditioned by the manner in which the content is presented to the spectator (see Feagin 1997 pp. 57-58); (Hamilton 2007, p. 310); (Alcaraz 2011, pp. 36-39), in other words, by aesthetic and/or reception criteria.

A theatrical attitude of the spectator, based on the principle of generosity, on the suspension of belief and on the covenant of fictionality, predisposes to the acquisition of a specific emotional experience different from that which we could have on the street. If factors such as tone of voice or gestures provide information under normal circumstances and they condition our emotional response, the stylization of such factors in the work of art, “including the length of sentences, vocabulary and diction, shifts in voice, recurrence of images, allusions, and juxtaposition of episodes […] prompt our emotional responses to it, just as much as, or more than, and even instead of, our beliefs about what anyone would believe, desire, think of, or feel in real time” (Feagin 1997, p. 58). If, indeed, the spectator’s emotional drag is influenced or conditioned –better than determined- by the criteria of representation, including not only technical criteria (e.g., need to change the position of some spotlights because adaptation to the space of representation), but aesthetic or poetic criteria (e.g., the change of position of the spotlights has altered the poetics designed for lighting and the light effects do not contribute more to scare), then it is evident that the creative decisions have enough power to soften or aggravate the importance of the content in relation to the beliefs about it. I think, moreover, that this conclusion is not surprising. It is one of the first principles we learn and assume when we deepen the study of Aesthetics.

This consideration of the criteria genuinely aesthetic that artists follow for arousing emotions is particularly important in theater, where compassion is one of the most complex feelings to be worked upon by the actors. I will focus on an example drawn from my own experience as aesthetics and philosophy teacher at the Higher School of Dramatic Art in Castilla y León. There, one of the acting teachers, Dr. David Ojeda, led a staging of Antigone with senior students of performing arts. Dramaturgical adaptation was made combining Sophocles’ original text and Anouilh’s version, thanks to the good work of the young author and teacher of dramatic writing, Dr. Alberto Conejero. Finally, I was responsible to explain to the young actors and actresses the conceptual differences between compassion, empathy, pity and so on. In addition, at the express request of Ojeda, I had to tell them some notes about the risks of certain aesthetic drifts that could lead to poor or erroneous staging of compassion.

The first phase of the rehearsal process, an analytic period that was implemented in dramatic art by Konstantin Stanislavsky, was the “active analysis” within the general framework of the “table work” (Knébel 1996, pp. 13-28; Leach 1999, pp. 254-277; 2004, pp. 6-52; 2008, pp. 131-141; Thomas 2009, pp. xxii—xix, pp. 1-37; Archer, Gendrich & Hood 2010, p. 115). This moment is one of the most

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important in the staging process, because it is then when both actors and director –and sometimes the very playwright- collaborate, sitting at the same table, in the construction of meanings and in the design of the ways of presenting to the audience the staging proposal, making it particularly useful for anticipating the most likely affective responses. The poetic space is chosen, the codes of interpretation, movement, speed, and, in short, general statements of the aesthetic presentation of the play are designed2. In the case at hand, Ojeda told the actresses that the first scene had to be built taking into account that if the spectator was paying attention to Antigone or to Ismene, in both cases the personal dignity of the heroines could not arise the characteristic paternalism of pity. We feel pity or sorrow for an abandoned puppy on the street; we feel pity for The Kid of Chaplin or, under some circumstances, even for Charlot. But we must not feel pity for Antigone or Ismene, Oedipus’ daughters. The actress who played Ismene had no major problems in working this way, as, indeed, Ismene’s temper is wiser, unhurried and generally much closer to the spectators (Adams 1955, pp. 48-49; Knox 1964, pp. 62-90; Jens 1967, pp. 296-299; Oudemans & Lardinois 1987, pp. 169-175) than that of Antigone, who has the charm of the idealist and the tenacity of the adolescent. In this regard, Goethe told Eckermann that Ismene was “a good measure of the ordinary” (ein schönes Mass des Gewöhnlichen) (Eckermann 1827, p. 101) and just for that reason she is always beyond heroic diseases and closer to human weaknesses. For achieving that closeness was necessary to address the audience, choosing some techniques of aurisecular soliloquy and leaving Antigone in the back of the stage. This way of presenting Ismene aroused not only the compassion of the spectators, but their sympathy or, better, their commiseration (4). But through both positions, the spectators (1) faced the serious dilemma that Ismene had to face, namely, break Creon’s law to help her sister and subvert public order… or breaking the laws of the gods to maintain public order and sacrificing family duties, (2) and, on the other hand, they were able to feel compassion for a resolute and determined Antigone, whose loneliness and physical distance in relation to the spectator increases her appearance of emotional isolation and lack of understanding of who she is the only victim.

2 When we say that such issues are a matter of “choice”, we defend the thesis of contemporary radical separation between "art theater" and "dramatic literature"-in the present case, in line not only with the claims of theorists and specialists in aesthetics, but by the directors as well. In other words, what Hamilton called "text-based tradition" is, in effect, an outdated tradition that does not respond to the genuine essence of theater as an autonomous art. As Hamilton says (2007, p. 310), “it is false to hold that there is something in or about texts written for performance that must guide performers when they decide how the words are to sound, at what speed and in what tone(s) they are to be delivered, what gestures are to be made, and where attention is to be focused at each moment. All these decisions and more are usually taken to be unspecified in the text- based tradition. The aims in the service of which decisions are made are also taken to be unspecified. In short, there is room for stylistic variation in the tradition; and the concrete performance use of any text, even within the text-based tradition, is subject to substantive variance in conventions and aims.”

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This was the director’s scenic proposal. But it could be different. In fact, the actress who played Antigone suffered a pathetic drift that led her to the adoption of a pathetic sentimentality: a lack of simplicity or naturalness within the psychological code adopted for the acting work and a certain temptation to reduce the character to its most basic features. In short, she took refuge in a querulous style, in a haughty tone, drawn, pompous. This gave her character a dramatic force inversely proportional to the dramatic interest aroused in the spectator. After two minutes, this desperate, tearful and exhausted Antigone also exhausted the pleasures of our theatrical excitement. This is a typical movement of the drama students when they feel lost in the acting process: using a superficial increase of the dramatic intensity. In terms of Stanislavsky, they increase the rhythm of the voice, the movement of the bodies, the facial or body gestures... but the dramatic action itself does not seem to need it. Perhaps the work of the actress might have made sense in a different staging with a different performative code, expressionist or even farce. But she affected her oral expression to arouse sadness, confusing the sadness proper of compassion with that proper of pity or shame; her voice, which should sound firm and passionate, was soft and pitiful; her movements, which should have been displayed in favor of her moral resolution, were conveyed in a pantomimic work that was incoherent with the rest of the elements of the staging proposal. Therefore, it seems confirmed that the way of presenting the theatrical play to the spectators “conditions”, rather than “determines”, their emotional response. Consequently, (1) the chosen rhythm by our actress does not work and (2) she has not been able to reconstruct the dominant feeling of the character as something related to the overall presentation of the staging.

Summarizing, (1) the empathy is a capability that, through perception, imagination and memory, allows us to understand a subject emotionally; (2) this capability works for providing us a picture, image or figure of that person’s emotional state, a imaginary representation sanctioned by the very contemporary neuroscience (see Moya-Albiol, Herrero & Consuelo Bernal 2010, p. 89); (3) this emotional state is not judged in isolation from other elements, but in relation to them when they are articulated within a specific situation; (4) by transitivity, empathy is necessary to make a cognitive appraisal, assessment, review or evaluation of that situation in relation to the subject’s emotional response to it; (5) the emotional response of the spectator will be aroused by that appraisal, assessment, review or evaluation, so this assessment precedes the emotional event itself and causes the ensuing emotion; (6) The content of the situation, i.e., its meaning and implications, are aesthetically articulated, something that determines or, at least, conditions the emergence of some passions rather than others.

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4. Phenomenological approach to empathy and compassion Edmund Husserl wrote that it is impossible to speak sensu stricto about “empathy” (Einfühlung), because “I cannot get into the other, I can only figure out how would I feel if I be the other, how I would be, in which case, strictly speaking, I’m not myself, I cannot keep my identity”, so it’s an “imaginary representation” (Husserl 1973, p. 338; 1952, pp. 167-169). Heidegger, in the field of the existential analytic, defined this ability, “which is not too happily designated as empathy (Einfühlung)” as the capacity closely linked to the existential structure of man for providing “the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject, which is given proximally as alone, to the other subject, which is proximally quite closed off” Heidegger (1962, p. 162). It was, above all, (1) a condition of possibility for “understanding” (Verstehen) the “other’s” frame of mind (2) in a hermeneutical sense (3) and when the target is the acquisition of a figure or image of that “experience” (Erlebnis) that is, in any case, non transferable. The “empathy” was phenomenologically understood as an aid to philosophical thought in the partial resolution of one of its classic and fundamental problems, namely, the possibility of communication between people endowed of mind and the guarantee of reaching agreements for coexistence and mutual understanding. This supposes an interpretation that, although obviously subjective, was far from being subjectivist, because the generated “sum of looks” would achieve a range of objectivity equivalent to all the “subjects” (Husserl) or “existents” (Heidegger), center of all epistemic controversies about the objectivity of “understanding” and “knowledge”. Thereby, “empathy” became a fundamental capacity in the encounter with the “other” and his own inner world.

The most important objection against the notion of “empathetic identification” came from a short and blunt text attached to the phenomenology and written in 1916 by Edith Stein to obtain her Doctorate degree. Printed and published a year later, she started her study on the criteria of her own director, Husserl himself, who had determined the process of “empathy” in three steps: (1) apprehension of “experiences” of others, not only affective-emotional, but also epistemic-cognitive; (2) self-perception of them and emotional response to; (3) epistemic sanction of them from the inter-subjective and collaborative condition between the “self” and the “others”. Edith Stein thought that the contents of the experience of “other” were given from a “non native” perspective as opposed to “original” in which these “experiences” are lived. In other words, there is an insurmountable leap between the “original experience” and that “figured”, “imagined” or, in conclusion, “empathized experience”. Therefore, there is always a hermeneutic exercise propitiated by the need to overcome the gap between the “experiences” of the other and those of the spectator.

The next time I see Ophelia falling into madness, I will respond with my “own” and “original” affections, motivated by the apprehension of her passions, “improper” for me. When I “empathize” with her, I value her situation, but only and once I have understood her emotional state. Consequently, the recognized

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emotions of Ophelia are “improper” for the spectator, but absolutely “proper” and “authentic” for her. Thus, Stein distinguished “empathy” (Einfühlung) from an “emotional sharing” (Mitfühlen). In the first case, the spectator that sees Ophelia has a “non original” experience to the extent that he has obtained an affective representation of the other. The “madness” of Ophelia or the “sadness” of Hamlet at the scene of the wedding feast of Claudius and Gertrude are reconstructed by ways of “recognition” (acting exercise, facial gestures, affective tone of words, ultimately, elements endowed with meaning). Those ways direct me towards a hermeneutic interpretation of the other’s passion, but also simultaneously to the emergence of an affection that is “originally” mine. However, the case of “emotional sharing” is different. When we “share an emotion”, we have “originally” “joy”, “sadness” or any passions, since we have “empathized” with the “other” his own “experiences” in a “non original” way.

The “emotional sharing” is, in that way, “coincident” with the affections of the “other” after an assessment of the situation. For example, when a director works on Guillén de Castro’s Las mocedades del cid and he reads in the text that “a curtain is run and the altar of Santiago appears and in it a fountain of silver, a sword and golden spurs”, the spectator can “apprehend” the sublimity of the scene or the pity of the Cid, but in a “non original” way, i.e., “empathetic”. But, if he is “happy with him”, because the spectator knows about the important meaning of the “apparition”, “we can understand the original act like ‘congratulation’ (Mitfreude) or, more generally, like emotional sharing (Mitfühlen)” Stein (1917, p. 14). If, on the contrary, the “pain” is the dominant feeling and this is articulated on the “fear” that reverts on the spectator, we define it as éleos, i.e., “compassion” (Mitgefühl) rather than “congratulation”. It is more than likely that we will feel “compassion” for someone who has lost his house, especially, in this time of crisis, because “we feel pity whenever we are in the condition of remembering that similar misfortunes have happened to us or our kind, or of expecting them to happen in future”.

The “shared joy” and the “empathized joy” do not need to be the same according to the content. In fact, depending on the quality, they are not, because the first one is an “original experience” and the other is “non-native” or “non original” (see Stein 1917, p. 14). For example, Rodrigo’s “devotion” in the play Las mocedades del Cid may be more intense than that of the spectators, but if the stage director wants to endow the knight with an element of melancholy, perhaps the opposite happens and Rodrigo thinks in front of the altar in terms of “disappointment”, “lie”, “betrayal”… despite the consternation of the respectable audience. This is again a moment to study the proposal, either from the table work, either from other working of discrimination of meanings and aesthetic construction. Returning to an earlier example, I can empathize with the fear of Ichabod Crane to the headless horseman, but maybe I have more fear of the headless horsemen and, to some extent, his reaction is, probably, a fact very important to me, but closed to my own passion. Again, this is an aesthetic criterion: if Johnny Depp had not endowed the character of dramaturgical

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elements based on the reactions of a hysterical teenager –in his own words- and he had built it making Ichabod feel a more dignified, serious, and Gothic terror, then, probably, the viewer’s reaction could have been different3.

The philosopher Noël Carroll, not many years ago, turned to the old problem of “identification” and its characterization as the most emotionally intense degree of “empathy” (see 1990, 2001, p. 262). His conclusions were as clear as stentorian: the capacity that we have as theatrical spectators for placing us in the place of the others does not sanction an identification process, because “when Oedipus is racked by guilt, we are not; we feel pity for him”. That is, we suffer mixed passions: on the one hand, we understand what “guilt” means from an emotional point of view, because, after all, we all have felt guilty occasionally; on the other hand, we feel “compassion” for Oedipus, because we could be the victims of a similar situation… probably we will not be accused of having killed our father and of committing incest with our mother, Freudian ravings aside. But, like Oedipus, we can be victims of our ambition to know the truth even though it ends up destroying us, for example. In this sense, what we feel towards Oedipus is “compassion”, because there’s a situation of equality between the viewed subject and the subject that contemplates. In contrast, what Faust feels at the cell doors where Margaret is unjustly imprisoned, alone and desperate, is “pity”, “shame”, rather than a genuine “compassion” (Mitgefühl or Mitleid), i.e., because the wise man is looking down into the “pit” of Margaret’s misery. Otherwise, I can also feel compassion for Faust, because I too could sacrifice the happiness and welfare of another beloved person to satisfy my own ambitions. Finally, when we feel “compassion”, this passion is unleashed in second place, being different from that suffered by Margaret, Ophelia or Oedipus. There is not, in conclusion, “unipathy” or “feeling of oneness” when we feel “compassion”. It cannot be possible.

Summarizing, (1) empathy became a fundamental capacity in the encounter with the other and his own inner world, (2) and it is a condition of possibility for understanding the other’s frame of mind in a hermeneutical sense, being the target a figure or image of that non-transferable experience; (3) the empathized experience is proper of the subject who sees and judges the situation, therefore, the empathized sentiments, feelings or emotions are not original, but only understood and, sometimes, shared (3); (4) “emotional sharing” is one of the possible forms of “empathy” and it is defined in terms of emotional coincidence; (5) Compassion, generally speaking, is a specific case of “emotional sharing”.

3 Although, if so, the Burton universe would have collapsed and the film would have been probably worse.

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5. “Compassion” and “emotional contagion”: the “external perspective” Why reason cannot be articulated compassion on emotional contagion? Remember the Faust’s sentimental infection and why we said that there could not be. An “empathetic emotion” is an “infected emotion”, that is, an emotion that coincides in form and in content with that of the seen subject. The “emotional contagion” diminishes the exercise of “imagination”, absolutely necessary for feeling compassion, making to swing the spectator’s emotional response from “observation” to “imitation” and vice versa. And “imitation”, which is the third cornerstone of “empathy”, provides an element of unconsciousness and automaticity that cannot supply all the required steps in compassion. In this sense, the “emotional contagion” is defined as an unconscious, automatic process that occurs when the viewer does not reach an enough “psychical and/or physical distance” that allows him to be placed in a proper perspective. In the terms of Susan L. Feagin, an “external perspective” specifically characterized as the critical position of the spectator in front of the work and the contents thereof (Feagin 1983, pp. 95-104; 1996, p. 146).

Sometimes, however, our tears are those of Jocasta. The character's emotional life, the very formal structure of the situation or the tone of the play itself resituate us under certain limit situation in which a spark is enough to move us from the “emotional sharing” of compassion, for example, where we (1) see, imagine and empathize, (2) we evaluate under the specific conditions of the game expectation and (3) we respond emotionally from (1) and (2), to a “emotional infection” where (1) we see, imagine and empathize, [eventually, (2) evaluate under a circumstance almost non-fictional] and (3) we respond emotionally from (1) [and, eventually, (2)]. When we are infected to such an extent, it seems as if there has not been a genuine empathetic response in the sense of an “emotional sharing”, but a “specular” or “mirror” response. We cannot deny that sometimes there is a kind of “mirror reproduction”, i.e., “mimetic” of the affections of the others. It is no wonder that Jocasta’s tears are reproduced on the spectator’s face or, rather, that the spectator “mimics” the affection and the gestures of Jocasta. This “reproduction” of the affections, even her facial expressions remains a personal and non-transferable “production”, because of the monadic nature of the subject. Rather, it seems that the “non-originality” condition of the “empathetic emotion” disappears, but there is only an illusion of identification because it is articulated in most cases from a theatrical attitude based on the spectator’s generosity, on the covenant of fictionality. This “empathetic identification” (Neill 1996, pp. 175-180) precludes the necessary “distance” and “exclusivity” requested by the theatrical spectacle. If there is an “empathetic identification”, the spectator can be very happy “feeling” fictional sorrow and fictional terror” –like, for example, during a “tear-jerking drama” or a “horror film”-, but he can be very unhappy, too, when certain limits are broken. In that case, the spectator may be reluctant to enter the game, because it can be harmful to his own emotional integrity. This situation will hinder the entry into the theatrical game by “real anxiety”, “real

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anguish”, “real despair” or “real repugnance”… or, worse than all this, “real indifference”. And this is not a desirable response. The “personal distress” can be motivated (1) by a breach of the covenant of fictionality that derives into a negation, from the spectator’s point of view, to play with those rules, where one or many of the affects are not fictional, but real –i.e., some performances of the Wiener Aktionismus, like those of Otmar Bauer, Rudolf Schwartzkogler, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl-; (2) by traumatic memories that have been updated or remembered in the very expectation –i.e., there is a legend about the actor training for The Brig (1963), a proposal in the light of Artaud and staged by The Living Theater on a text of Kenneth Johnson, and the reaction of a former marine who, against the ideas of Judith Malina, decided to leave the casting claiming that he had had enough of that reality (see Tytell 1995, pp. 179-194); (3) by physiological responses, like disgust or repugnancy, that react to the object because it “is represented as it were obtruding itself for our enjoyment while we strive against it with all our might” and “the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of the object itself in our sensation” (Kant, KrU, 48); (4) by psychological responses in which the spectator is subjected to such emotional stress that the situation gets to break the dam of “fiction” and turn “fictional pain” into “real pain” born in the very expectation. In all these cases, the “personal distress” can make an appearance and get us out of our expectation because of an overdose of reality.

Artistic and/or theatrical strategies that look for a spectator’s emotional contagion may fall into “personal distress”, which is a typical response to that “overdose of reality”. It is obvious that the “emotional contagion” is a very intense and powerful form of “emotional sharing”. But it is also clear that this may break the limit of “pain fictionally true” and fall into the “real pain caused by fiction”. We must think not only in cases of sentimental or maudlin people. For example, it is not surprising that the work of Lessing, Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weisse) was represented by at least 245 times in Berlin in the period between 1945 and 1950, instead of other works of a political nature and clearly antifascist, such as The Illegal One (Die Illegalen) of the playwright Günther Weisenborn. While the old Lessing received the approval of much of the Berliner public, the work of Weisenborn was much performed, but destined to a minority who, having been silenced since at least 1933, demanded a historical memory difficult to satisfy when “the memorized content” was, virtually, the proper yesterday itself. In other words, The Illegal Ones was soon forgotten and filed as a topic (see Koepke 2003, p. 242). Brecht, on the contrary, did not choose after his exile the representation of the work his own work Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches). He preferred a staging of Sophocles’ Antigone with the introduction of a prologue with the ruins of Berlin as backdrop (Fehervary 1997, pp. 408-409). This “curved way” guaranteed a sufficient distance to the audience not to fall in personal distress.

Contemporary neuroscience has managed to clear the mechanism of this “emotional contagion” in three stages: “mimicry”, “feedback” and “contagion”.

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Focusing on the first, the mimicry reveals that this case of “empathy” is very basic and primitive, but it also indicates a strong specular condition by the subject that guarantees, in some way, the conversion of consciousness in “mirror” of the emotions that we recognize. And this is, precisely, the basis for Lipps’ theory of “inner imitation” (see Lipps 1900 and 1907). Basically exposed, the knowledge of others presents two tendencies: first, a tendency to reproduce the foreign gestures and, second, a tendency to associate an affective response to them. The “projection” is the magical word for explaining the phenomena that in Stein’s account was called “feeling of oneness” (Einsfühlen): if I see the acrobat, I feel like the acrobat through the projection that allows me to imitate internally and even on the outside, through gestures and posture changes. This is precisely the main objection against Lipps’ doctrine of identification around the concept of “unipathy” (Einsfühlung). Stein focused it on necessary distinction between “unipathy” and “empathy” (Einfühlung). The treatment of “empathy” in terms of “identical reproduction” of other’s emotional states falls into the paradox of the simultaneous “non-originality”-and-originality of the spectator’s involved passions. In her very terms, “I am not one with the acrobat, but only ‘almost’, i.e., not just that I do not make the movement outside, which also emphasizes Lipps, but nor what correspond ‘internally’ to the movements of the living body –the ‘I move’ experience- is original in me, but non-original” (Stein 1917, p. 17).

This “imitation” or “mimicry” does not imply” identification” in a strong sense and, obviously, it is not a conditio sine qua non for the exercise of “empathy”. For example, if I see my students mourn heartbroken for having failed the exam, I can feel a deep sorrow, I would really like to embrace them and tell them that such thing happens, that the next time it will be better, that, in memoriam of Charles Bronson, pride and revenge are a good combination for success. I have felt pain, sadness or pity for them, I have seen their appearance from a sensorial point of view; then, I have understood their gestures and I have ascribed them a specific meaning; last, I have an affective response to those meanings and that situation. But it is not necessary “to cry” with them for being “empathetic” with them. I can “feel” “compassion”, “pity”, “anger”, “sadness”, but without “imitation”… and, however, there is “empathy”. The “imitation”, in conclusion, is not necessary for the understanding of the gestures and emotions of others and it only explains a part of the phenomena, in particular, that corresponding to a high level of emotional intensity where there is a real “emotional contagion”. In this sense, Zahavi and Overgaard say that “Lipps’ theory might explain why a certain experience occurs in me, but it doesn’t offer an explanation of how I come to understand the “other”, because Lipps’ account on empathy is better for the elucidation of phenomena like motor mimicry or affective contagion, rather than for explaining empathy (Zahavi & Overgaard 2012, p. 3). In fact, we tend to confuse “being empathetic” with the ability of some people to show their extraordinary sensitivity face to the others. Probably for these people, a calm and serene “evaluation”, “assessment” or “appraisal” will be more difficult in some situations. Although this does not imply that it was impossible for them, or that “being

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empathetic” was necessarily to be a “specular reproducer” of the others’ emotions.

(Alex Neill 1996, pp. 175-194), in the early nineties, accepted the challenge of recovering and redefining the concept of “identification” for contemporary Aesthetics, hoping (1) to avoid the repetition of problematics of early twentieth- century and (2) offering a terminology that could be useful to outline the analysis of the theatrical and filmic “expectation”. The first step consisted in making an operational distinction between “empathetic identification” and “sentimental imagination”, which allows us to imagine the feelings of the “other” taking away from them and suffering “found or mixed feelings”. According with this, the “sentimental imagination” involved in “empathy” swung between the question about “how would I feel in that situation”, for example, that of Ophelia, and the subsequent “how I feel with this”, after the rudeness showed by Hamlet and like an external spectator. In contrast, the “empathetic identification” raises a radical “location” into “real” affections in front of the play, in other words, emotions that depart from a breach of the fictionality pact and, consequently, the play of theater. This phenomenon might degenerate into feelings like anxiety and bordering on despair, where the enjoyment gives way to pain, either by a “remembrance” of analogous situations where the “original” affective answer is updated, or by certain types of situations that lead to the spectator from his “theatrical” or “aesthetic awareness” to his “analytical awareness”. In other words and following the conception of Kendall Walton, it is not the same to feel a pain that is “fictionally true” than a “really true” pain; one thing is to see how the character of an acrobat makes us believe that he is falling. Another thing is to see how the performer falls4. The emotional intensity of the situation of both individuals generates in the viewer, in the first case, a process of “sentimental imagination” that keeps us from losing our status as safe and sound spectators; in others – besides, perhaps, that people with little capacity for empathy or maybe accustomed to this type of accidents, e.g., medical staff or personal trainers- a “empathetic identification” is manifested even with gestures, facial mimicry, posture changes, etc. The “emotional contagion” admits both levels: (1) that of

4 This is, in short, the position of Kendall Walton about theory of mimesis and the use of props in imaginative activities, i.e., make-believe games. In these games, the position of the viewer is vehiculated on the classical suspension of belief. The distinction between “knowing what is fictional” and “knowing what is real” is temporary and willingly neutralized, i.e., it remains fictionally inoperative, but it never ceases to exercise its influence. There are two emotional levels in the expectation process: (1) fictional feelings or emotions that work analogously to these actual feelings or emotions; (2) actual feelings or emotions. The question of truth or falsehood affects the objects that bring up such and such feelings, rather than the nature of these feelings, as both are, in fact, passions, because it seems that the difference lies in their intensity and the degree of commitment that the viewer takes in terms of emotional integrity. But we leave this for another time and we refer to other more serious studies (Walton 1990, 1997; Hjort & Lavert 1997; Feagin 1997; Dorsch 2009, 2011; Alcaraz 2011). Walton’s thesis can be summarized in the famous words of Plutarch about Gorgias: “he who is deceived is wiser, because the mind which is not insensitive to fine perceptions is easily enthralled by the delights of language” (Plutarch 1936: 509, 348c).

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“emotional imagination”, where “feelings” that are “fictionally true” are apprehended in the sense of a temporary and voluntary suspension of the fictionality of fiction; (2) that of “empathetic identification”, where “feelings” that may or may not be “fictionally true” in the actor or actors are apprehended as “actual”. When the feelings are very intense in a bad sense –i.e., anxiety-, we talk about the phenomenon of “personal distress”. In this case, the spectator's reaction when he seeks a perceptive refuge outside of the representation –in his feet, his hands, in the playbill or over my companion’s shoulder- is the natural response to this collapse of the “theatrical attitude” based on the painful confusion between what is fictionally true and what is only true. The reasons for this contemplative break can be varied, but the fate of all of them would be the same: to change the “theatrical attitude”, to stop the expectation through the closure of the “imagination” or “observation” involved in empathy. The spectator is emotionally shaken and the perspective is changed to a different state, where there is not an enough psychological distance to approach the representation from the external perspective required by complex feelings as compassion.

Summarizing, (1) The “emotional contagion” diminishes the exercise of “imagination” and is articulated on “mimicry” and “imitation”, making to swing the spectator’s emotional response from “observation” to “imitation” and vice versa, (2) something that does not work for feeling compassion, (3) because “compassion” cannot be a kind of “emotional contagion”, because it needs not only “imagination”, but “distance” for evaluating or making an appraisal that was calm and serene, i.e., the “external perspective”. (4) The “empathy” and, consequently, the “compassion”, do not need “imitation” or “mimicry”. (5) The “emotional contagion” can be an aesthetic target of the stage director, but it can generate dangerous and non-desirable responses articulated on “personal distress”.

6. Individual “compassion” and “intersubjective” sympathy The spectacle DJ Peep Show: the last days of Don Juan is a theatrical performance premiered in Sevilla at the Lope de Vega Theater on October 28, 2010, directed by the Spanish artist Juan José Villanueva for the theatrical company Excéntrica Producciones. It was a cabaret led by a master of ceremonies, the Andalusian actor Juanfra Juárez, who guides the spectator with a keen sense of humor through a reflection on society of the spectacle and the media use of cultural icons. A spectacle for the spectator, who enjoys seeing the traumatic epiphany of Don Juan when he reveals his own nature as a false myth or a cardboard literary topic, rather than seeing his classical death and his fall into hell. At the scene of Don Juan’s death, in the inside of the mysterious and gloomy grave, Villanueva decided to light not only the stage lights, but also the lights of the stalls. Through this brief

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scenic gesture, Don Juan discovered the spectators who had witnessed his death and, really, his self-revelation and also his fall as a myth. At the same time, he recognized that his life was a fable, a falsehood, a game for others’ enjoyment. However, the act of lighting the stalls implied that this character, midway between Don Juan and Augusto Pérez from Niebla of Miguel de Unamuno, opened a dimension in which, suddenly, audience and character were placed in the same situation. In a recent interview, Robert Redford said to hate when someone referred to him as a living legend. He probably would have sympathized with the Don Juan. But the rest of the audience thought in terms of compassion, even if it was, in effect, the same situation.

Neuroscience, behavioral psychology and social psychology have delved into the problem of distinguishing “empathy” and “sympathy”. In fact, the achievements and progress in this area have given rise to a characterization that is far from being definitive, but that seems to draw a common place, to the extent that it offers striking similarities with Scheler’s ancient and phenomenological considerations. For example, in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology published in 1986, two famous articles aimed, precisely, to a necessary distinction between these affective responses. (Gruen and Mendelsohn 1986, pp. 609-614) presented their proposal from a strictly empirical perspective and a controlled analysis with laboratory subjects, while several months before, Dr. Wispé, from a more philosophical perspective, subtitled his own paper with an eloquent warning: “To call for a concept, a word is needed” (1986, pp. 314-321). The conclusions reached by the three specialists underpinned in a scientific way the original Schelerian consideration from phenomenology, considering that “sympathy” refers more to the “situation” in which “we” are and only reaches its meaning “in relation” to the others and including myself among them. The difference with compassion seems to be the difference in emotional intensity, being compassion more intense than sympathy; the difference with empathy is clearly exposed by Nussbaum, when she thinks of “a malevolent person who imagines the situation of another and takes pleasure in her distress”: he “may be empathetic, but will surely not be judged sympathetic” (Nussbaum 2001, p. 302).

David Krasner, in a stimulating account about empathy and theater, defines sympathy as a “feeling” that “differs from compassion in that I might be unconcerned with justice or fair play”, because “my feelings are in line with the actor’s, and his or her plight is what moves me” (Krasner 2006, p. 259). Despite agreeing in general terms with Krasner’s definition, I believe, however, that the phenomenon we are talking about is not reflected well enough. From my point of view, Krasner (1) explains generally what does it happen to the spectator when he “sympathizes” with the actor, but not the nature of the “situation” in which all the spectators are in the same state of mind with the actor and/or the character; (2) this idea of sympathy only contains one of the, at least, two possible attitudes of the public theater, namely, a disposition based on the contemplative closure rather than collaborative openness. But, is it possible to “sympathize” with a character?

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Edith Stein's position denies the possibility of “empathy” to be a “feeling of oneness”, in terms of identification with characters or other spectators… but this case is different. The phenomenon we are talking about is not a “feeling of oneness” based on some kind of “emotional contagion” in front of a “strange situation”, but rather it points to that moment within all or almost all spectators where they have the same emotional response “with” the characters in a play, besides degrees of intensity. For explaining this structure, Stein imagines a newspaper that proclaims the fall of an enemy fortress. “As we hear this, all of us are seized by an excitement, a joy, a jubilation”, in other words, “we all have ‘the same’ feeling” (Stein [1917]: 17). This does not mean, on the one hand, that the limits of the monadic subjects have been dropped and, on the other hand, broken the metaphysical engagements of phenomenology. But this case cannot be treated as a mere “illusion”, because it implies the emergence of a higher unity which could be called “we”. Max Scheler, saving the distances with Stein (see 1917, p. 18), but in line with her, dedicated the famous text Wesen und Formen der Sympathie (1923) to this singularity, that he called, precisely, “sympathy” (Sympathie). According to him, the key to solving the problem of sympathy lies in the fictionality of the characters. Scheler, like Stein, considered that the “empathy” may sacrifice the “real” condition of the character with which we “empathize”, something that is not possible in “sympathy”. According to this, “empathizing” with both the read and the performed Hamlet could be a normal response, being impossible to sympathize with them. “Thus we can easily reproduce in ourselves the joys and sorrows of characters in fiction, or the persons in a play (Faust or Gretchen, for instance), as the actor presents them; but so long as we maintain a generally aesthetic attitude, and do not, like the novelette-reading teenager, take their part as if they were real, we cannot have genuine fellow-feeling for them” (Scheler 1973, p. 98). In short, we can only “empathize” but never “sympathize” with performed Hamlet, except in those cases already studied, in which there is any kind of emotional identification, as he points to the teenager’s attitude.

Really? I do not think so. Scheler, like many other philosophers and thinkers, missed the point and, according to custom, he confined the concept of aesthetic experience to the “dramatic reading” rather than opening the effects concerning the very “theatrical expectation”. I think, with all due respect, that Scheler did not go to the theater... or only saw theatrical forms based on the contemplative closure of which we spoke earlier and Krasner selected for speaking about differences between “sympathy” and “compassion”. According with him, there can be no sympathy for Ophelia, but in any case among the characters of Hamlet or among the spectators, because they can be in the same situation. But when we theorize about theater, it happens something similar to the bullfighting in Spain: everyone knows everything just because everyone recognize the bull and the bullfighter in the arena. However, theater –and bullfighting, of course- are so complex, rich and varied art forms that the philosopher, generally, disclaims any intent of conceptualization. At worst, he can be tempted by analysis that ignore

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the audience and its responses to the spectacle, focusing all his worries in huge theoretical and semiotic constructs in which the “sema”, unfortunately, only they recognize. In other words, it is necessary to study the “expectation” from within, i.e., as a spectator, but not from outside. We have to go more often to the theater for theorizing from it rather than about it; secondly, we must recognize that it takes a lot of shapes, in addition to the purely dramatic or textual (Hamilton [etc.]). The experience shows that when we go to watch a play, a genuine form of sympathy can be forged between the character and the audience, and not only among spectators or characters being in the same situation.

Case (A). Sympathy among spectators. When a spectator falls asleep and starts snoring, persons who surround him look at each other and sympathize mutually, while they live a situation that is as annoying as, probably, funny and the same for everyone; when the staging is extremely boring, sometimes we slid the look for something or somebody more interesting, maybe for finding the look of anyone, i.e., an “other”… and we snorted greatly, but quietly, to indicate him how much we are bored. Maybe we get a wink of complicity which reveals the same condition for “us” because of a “situation” that is the same for both. Consider The Trojan Women. I think of a spectator who decided to place his attention not on the assembly of outraged wives and women of Troy, but on the different facial reactions of the audience. Probably, this spectator would find a mood that would seem the same for everyone, at least formally, appearing under various degrees of intensity, from the moral repulsion to the compassion, from indignation to shame, from the sphere of feeling to that of emotion… and vice versa. According to this, the spectators would have come to a sort of emotional communion with the “other” spectators, becoming to compose a distinct entity, i.e., a “we”. The “empathy” of the first spectator, which inevitably involves a distance from the focused characters and a strictly individual response to the “recognition” of the other's feelings, is able to open the doors to a “we” when we recognize that there is one same situation for everyone. We live a kind of “sentimental communion”. If I had to express what happens to me in one sentence, I would say that “I sympathize with them”, because my pathos is with that of them and we are under the same circumstances, i.e., the same situation.

Case (B). Sympathy between spectators and actors. Sometimes it is even possible that sympathy arises between the actor and the audience, for example, in those moments where the “acting game” is broken by “illegal” or “unforeseen moves”. I remember, in this regard, a representation of Lorca’s The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, directed in 1994 by the renowned director Luis Olmos with the company Teatro de la Danza. When the leading actor, Roberto González, had to put the cartelón (picture scroll) in the corresponding stand, it fell to the floor of the stage on three occasions, but not at the beginning of the monologue which tells the famous story about the patient man and his terrible wife, but on three separate occasions during the recitation. If the performer had not broken the game of expectation at any time, we probably would have felt sorry for him… or even compassion (after all, many of us can get to be in similar situations, namely, trying

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to get something done right in front of an audience and, however, failing miserably due to reasons beyond our control). But the actor, Roberto González, sought our sympathy with a knowing wink, literally, while he directed a surreptitious glance at the audience and half smile, as if he had been telling us, “the third time lucky”. This last case is a genuine encounter between actor and his audience through the “sympathy”.

Case (C). Sometimes, the very rules of “theatrical play” allow and ensure a genuine “sympathizing” with the “character”, easing the hardness of certain clauses of the “covenant of fictionality” and against Scheler’s conclusions. In this regard, artistic interventions that articulate their performative game including, among their own materials, the “collaboration” of the spectator as a legitimate element of the game itself, and even necessary for the course of it, are not uncommon. There are a lot of traceable examples not only in the history of theater, but even among their own forms, e.g., the game of the clown in the circus, with whom the children are able to sympathize easily, since he makes them believe that he is a big boy with situations similar to theirs; e.g., the apartes (asides) of the aurisecular Spanish theater, in which the actor addresses the audience to communicate his intentions, desires or experiences, and whose use “has been criticized in an ingenuously conception of performance, but contemporary staging has rediscovered its virtues in terms of its dramatic force and dramaturgical effectiveness” (Pavis 1998, pp. 29-30); e.g., the street proposals of pantomime or the diffuse forms of the “street theater” (in Spanish, teatro de calle) or “actions” (in German, aktionen).

There is a paradigmatic case of a real “sympathy” between “spectators” and “character”: Shakespearean soliloquy as a specific and deeper form of aside. The technical interpretation of the Elizabethan theater and Spanish aurisecular theater conceived the “theatrical play” of soliloquy as a kind of dialogue in which the actor said his text guided by the reactions of the spectators, they were trivial (coughs, sighs, etc.) or more blunt (laughs, cries or oral statements, such as insults, words of encouragement, and so on.) Today, the company that produces the spectacles of the new Shakespeare's Globe in London aims to rebuild that intimacy with the audience which was established not only in commercial theaters in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, but also in the Spanish corral of comedies (corral de comedias) or in Italian spectacles of Commedia dell’Arte, etc.. In 2008 the company commissioned the young director Lucy Bailey's staging of Timon of Athens. In line with earlier and later works –such as the Hamlet currently on tour, played by the young actor Joshua McGuire and staged by the theorist of theater and director, Dominique Dromgoole-, the work of soliloquy was executed following the directions of the audience, who could “sympathize” with a defeated Timon in the strict sense of the term. This could be possible thanks to masterful “game” played by veteran actor Simon Paisley Day, expert on Shakespearean performative techniques.

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7. Silence, the curtain does not rises… yet: the “testing ground” of the theater pedagogy

The field of theater pedagogy is certainly instructive for understanding this dimension of acting as capable of generating a genuine “sympathy” with illusory characters, revealing a same situation for character and audience. The teachers in the Department of Performing Arts of the Higher School of Dramatic Art of Castilla y León worked, hand in hand with their coordinator, teacher and actor Carlos Martínez-Abarca, in a staging entitled Lope y Shakespeare: trabajo sobre escenas (Lope and Shakespeare: scenes work) on the IX Festival of Classical Theater in Olite (Navarra, Spain) 2009. One of the most attractive proposal contrasted two ways of approaching the famous soliloquy of Hamlet, i.e., that of “to be or not to be”: (1) the method used by the traditional Russian acting school, characterized by a great deal of physical work and the closure of dramatic space with respect to the spectators, i.e., the “fourth wall”; (2) the method of the English school, worked in the light of texts and studies of the stage director and pedagogue of theater, Declan Donnellan (Donnellan 2005). This second option on the Shakespearean soliloquy in Hamlet showed students, teachers and spectators of Olite the dramatic power of the “collaborative event” (Homan 1980; Hapgood 1988, pp. 1-25; González Fernández de Sevilla 1993, pp. 45-70; Ackroyd 2005, p. 343) as an essential art form of the European aurisecular theater. But those of us who checked the actors’ work even before the final staging, we could see the ruling principle of a proposal over another, thanks to the invaluable open classes of teachers involved in the work. Thus, while the young actor Luis Enrique García Conde worked and polished the usual problems of his proposal, based on the techniques of master William Layton (Stanislavsky’s follower and trainer of the responsible teacher for the staging of these two Hamlets), the also young actor Luis Alberto Heras managed to break, after initial resistance, the convention of the “fourth wall” inviting spectators to join his soliloquy. In the context of a legal move, his eyes, his gestures and even his voice modulation were continually readjusted by audience’s reactions although these were minimal. A cough, a sigh, a smile or a look of censure were, in Declan Donnellan’s terminology, their “targets”. Spectators were directly confronted with a Hamlet who, in turn, was “with” them, creating a same sphere of intimacy where his doubts, his disorientation, loneliness and misunderstanding were not only “empathized” individually, but shared by a “we” who sympathized with the situation of the young prince, and, therefore, with him. Again, the aesthetic presentation of the doubts of Hamlet provoked the spectator to feel no doubts about whether or not to kill Claudius –questions that only concerned the young prince-, but the pressure on human existence itself that exerts this kind of crossroads, when we do not want to do what we have to do, but we know that we must do what we do not want to do. Suddenly, we passed from feeling sorry for Hamlet to feel sympathy for him because we were also in the same situation.

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This young Hamlet played by Heras made us his confidants, better than Guildenstern and Rosenkranz; and he gained quickly our sympathy rather than our compassion: his fate was in our hands, because to some extent Hamlet begged us not to continue the representation. That soliloquy was a point of no return. Meanwhile, the spectators faced directly, without falsehood or trap, a Hamlet who was not a mere “character”, but a real “person”, in so far as Heras managed to generate the same situation for everyone making us partakers of his own situation. I think this situation, at least, undermines the principle of asymmetry between real emotions and fictional, because we would like to say: “Don’t worry, I’m with you, I know what you’re feeling right now.”

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- Donnellan, D. 2005. The Actor and the Target, Second Edition, London: Nick Hern. - Dorsch, F. 2011. “Emotional Imagining and Our Responses to Fiction”, Enrahonar, 46, pp. 153-176. - Eckermann, J. P. 1827. Gespräche mit Goethe. Leipzig: Philipp Reclam Verlag. - Feagin, S. L. 1983. “The Pleasures of Tragedy”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 20, 1, pp. 95-104. - Feagin, S. L. 1996. Reading with Feeling. The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. - Feagin, S. L. 1997. “Imagining Emotions and Appreciating Fiction” in Hjort, M. & Laver, S., Emotion and the Arts, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 55-62. - Frijda, N. 1986. The emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Gillies, J. 1823. A new translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric; with an introduction and appendix, explaining its relation to his exact philosophy, and vindicating that philosophy, by props that all departures from it have been deviations into errors, London: Cadell/Blackwood. - Goleman, D. 1996. Emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. - González Fernández de Sevilla, J.M. 1993. El teatro de William Shakespeare hoy: una interpretación radical actualizada, Barcelona: Montesinos, 1993. - Gruen, R., Mendelsohn, G. 1986. “Emotional responses to affective displays in others: the distinction between empathy and wympathy”, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 51, 609-614. - Hamilton, J.R. 2007. The Art of Theater, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. - Hapgood, R. 1988. Shakespeare The Theatre-Poet. Oxford: Clarendon Press. - Hjort, M. & Laver, S. 1997. Emotion and the Arts, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. - Homan, S. (ed.) 1980. Shakespeare More Than Words Can Witness. Essays on Visual and Non-Verbal Enactment in the Plays, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. - Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and time, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. - Hoffman, M.L. 1984. “Interaction of affect and cognition in empathy” in Izard, C.E., Kagan, J. & Zajonc, R.B. (eds.), Emotions, cognition, and behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press, 103-131. - Jens, W. 1967. “Antigone-Interpretationen” in DILLER, H. (ed.), Sophokles, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 295-310. - Izard, C.E., Kagan, J. & Zajonc, R.B. (eds.) 1984. Emotions, cognition, and behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103-131. - Kern, I. 1973. Husserliana XIII. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Ha. XIII, Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 335-339. - Knébel, M.O. 1996. El último Stanislavsky. Madrid: Fundamentos. - Knox, B.M.W. 1964. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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- Krasner, D. 2006. “Theater and Empathy” in Krasner, D. & Saltz, D.Z. (eds.) Staging Philosophy. Intersections of Theater, Performance and Philosophy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 255-277. - Krasner, D. & Saltz, D.Z. (eds.) 2006. Staging Philosophy. Intersections of Theater, Performance and Philosophy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. - Koepke, W. 2003. “Günther Weissenborn’s Ballad of his Life” in DONAHUE, N.H. & KIRCHNER, D. (eds.) Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature 1933-1945. New York (NY): Berghahn Books, pp. 235-247. - Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S.H. 1994. Truth, Fiction and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. - Layton, W. 1990. ¿Por qué? Trampolín del actor. Madrid: Fundamentos. - Lazarus, R.S., Kanner, A.D. & Folkman, S. 1980. “Emotions: a cognitive phenomenological analysis” en PLUTCHIK, R. & KELLERMAN, H. (eds.), Emotion: Theory, Research and Experience. Nueva York: Academic Press, pp. 189-217. - Lazarus, R.S. & Smith, C.A. 1988. “Knowledge and appraisal in the cognition-emotion relationship”, Cognition and Emotion, 2, pp. 281-331. - Leach, R. 1999. A History of Russian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 254-277. - Leach, R. 2004. Makers of Modern Theatre. An introduction. New York: Routledge. - Leach, R. 2008. Theatre studies: the basics. Routledge: New York. - Moya-Albiol, L., Herrero, N. & Consuelo Bernal, M. 2010. “Bases neuronales de la empatía”, Revista de Neurología, 50, pp. 89-100. - Manstead, A.S.R. & Tetlock, P.E. 1989. “Cognitive appraisals and emotional experience: further evidence”, Cognition and emotion, 1989, 3, 3, pp. 225- 240. - Mayer, J. D., Salvoes, P., Caruso, D.R. 2000. “Models of emotional Intelligence” in STENBERG, R. (ed.), Handbook of Intelligence. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 396-420. - Mayer, J. D. 1997. “What is emotional Intelligence?” in Salovey, P. & Sluyter, D. J. (eds.), Emotional Development and emotional Intelligente: Educational Implications. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-31. - Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D. R., Sitarenios, G. 2001. “Emotional Intelligence as a standard Intelligence”, Emotion, 1, pp. 232-242. - Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., Caruso, D. R. 2004 “Emotional Intelligence: Theory, Findings and Implications”, Psychological Inquiry, XV, 3, pp. 197- 215. - Mehrabian, A. & Epstein, N. 1972. “A measure of emotional empathy”, Journal of Personality, 40, pp. 525-543. - Neill, A. 1996. “Empathy and (Film) Fiction” in Bordwell, D. & Carroll, N. (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 175-194.

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- Nussbaum, M. 2001. Upheavals of thought: the intelligence of emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Omdahl, B.L. 1995. Cognitive Appraisal, Emotion, and Empathy. Mahwah (New Jersey): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. - Ortony, A., Clore, G.L. & Collins, A. 1988. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Oudemans, Th. C.W. & Lardinois, A.P.M.H. 1987. Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy and Sopocles’ Antigone. Leiden: Brill. - Preston, S.D. & De Waal, F.B. 2002. “Empathy: its ultimate and proximate bases”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, pp. 232-242. - Roseman, I. J. 1984. “Cognitive determinants of emotion: A structural theory” in SHAVER, P. (ed.), Review of personality and social psychology: Emotions, relationships, and health. Beverly Hills Sage, 5, pp. 11-36. - Ross, W.D. (ed.) 2010. Rhetoric. New York (NY): Cosimo. - Scheler, M. 1973. Wesen und Formen der Sympatie in M.S. FRINGS (ed.), Gesammelte Werke, Bern: Bd. 7. - Stein, E. 1917. Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Halle: Buchdruckerei des Wesenhauses. - Stys, Y. & Brown, S.L. 2004. A review of the emotional Intelligence Literature and Implications for Corrections. Research Branch Correctional Service of Canada, 2004 march, nº r-150. - Taylor, T. (ed.) 1818. The Rhetoric, Poetic and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor. London: James Black and son. - Thomas, J. M. 2009. Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers. Burlington (MA): Elsevier. - Tytell, J. 1995. The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage. New York (NY): Grove Press. - Vázquez Sánchez, J. 2007. Mente y mundo. Aproximación neurológica. Madrid: Akal. - Walton, K. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard: Harvard University Press. - Walton, K. 1997. “Spelunking, simulation and slime: On being moved by fiction” in HJORT, M. & LAVER, S. Emotion and the Arts. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 37-49. - Weiner, B. 1985. “An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion”, Psychological Review, 92, pp. 548-573. - Wispé, L. 1986. “The distinction between sympathy and empathy: to call fort a concept, a word is needed” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 50, pp. 314-321. - Zahavi, D., Overgaard, S. “Empathy without Isomorphism: A Phenomenological Account” in Decety, J. (ed.) 2012 forthcoming. Empathy: From Bench to Bedside, Cambridge (MA): The Mit Press. < http://cfs.ku.dk/summerschool/readings/Overgaard_and_Zahavi_Empathy_ without_isomorphism.pdf/>

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Film Evaluation and Three Temporal Notions in Hume

Robert R. Clewis* Gwynedd-Mercy College

This paper concerns a phenomenon I hope film viewers will easily recognize. It will be referred to as film dating or aging, which has to do with changes in the reception of films over time. The paper pays philosophical attention to this common experience for several reasons. For many viewers, the experience of watching a film that has aged may be a certain je ne sais quoi. Moreover, there is a growing interest in the topic of film evaluation among philosophers of film (Carroll 2009, 2008, 2003; Freeland 2006; Wartenberg 2005). Since evaluation is an important part of aesthetics, it is crucial for an aesthetic theory of film to understand how we evaluate films. Moreover, as Noël Carroll notes (2008, p. 192), our engagement with films often involves an assessment of them. He adds: “It would be a grave mistake to think of moving picture evaluation as exclusively a professional affair. Evaluating movies is something that we all do all of the time” (2008, p. 193). I will begin with an overview of my account of film aging, defining my use of the concepts of aging and related terms. I then look at David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757) while referring to his less discussed essays, “Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing” (1742) and “Of Eloquence” (1742). I shall propose that we distinguish three main kinds of aging in Hume’s work: (i) passing the test of time, or retaining value as an artwork (ii) repeated viewing of the work, and (iii) the personal aging of the viewer, which Hume thinks influences our appraisals of artworks. A word about scope is in order. My discussion is meant to refer only to standard,

* Email: [email protected]

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commercial, narrative films such as suspense thrillers, comedies, dramas, action and adventure films, and horror pictures. It is not meant to take into account “non-narrative” films, which is broadly conceived to encompass avant-garde, minimalist, postmodernist, abstract, and reflexive motion pictures. For, when non- narrative films have aged, it can be difficult to separate their “abstract” nature from the effects of aging. The distancing effect that non-narrative films often have on viewers is distinct from the one caused by aging. Indeed, non-narrative films may not be intended to be “interesting” to the viewer, but rather to engage one’s intellectual and cognitive abilities with either very little emotional engagement, or at least little engagement of a positive timbre or valence. Non-narrative films may deliberately aim to evoke distress or confusion. I focus on narrative films since these are more likely to be intended to move, compel, interest, and engage viewers. I propose we understand this kind of film before we examine non- narrative films, the importance of which I do not deny or wish to downplay.

Types of Aging and Emotional Responses to Aged Films Why do artistically excellent films sometimes become less enjoyable with time? Why are we attracted to or fascinated by aged films? How should we understand our response of laughter or comic amusement when we think an aged film is ridiculous or laughable on account of the effects of aging? I would like to introduce the idea that the concept of film aging can help us better understand what is going on in these questions. The first question touches on the phenomenon I call negative aging, the second on positive aging, and the last on mixed or ambivalent aging. What, then, is film aging? First, it should be noted that it is the cinematic elements that are responsible for film aging. This includes: close-ups, camera movement and angles, trick photography, CGI, fades and wipes, superimposition and other visual devices, music, sound recording, dialogue, acting style, costume, mise en scène, sets, makeup and hairstyling, editing, screenplay, plot, and other filmic elements – one could go on and on. Even color-coding and symbolism can look dated. (I use “aged” and “dated” as synonyms throughout this paper.) Film aging is caused by at least two features of filmic art. The first is the industrial and commercial nature of cinema, which implies that film is largely subject to fashions, which come and go quickly, but can also come back at a later date. The second reason, usually working conjointly with the first reason, is the indexical nature of the film image. A film offers viewers a depiction of the real world on screen in all of its architectural, technological, linguistic, and cultural detail. Each of these detailed elements date at its own pace, but the cumulative effect of these can be the very rapid dating of the film.1 On this issue, a claim made by Carroll is instructive. To overcome cultural gaps

1 I would like to thank an anonymous reader for suggesting this point.

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between viewers and the screened worlds found in films from previous eras or different cultures, viewers ought to be educated in film, ethnography, and film history. Often when we are watching films that are remote from us in time and place, we will not be able to depend on our own emotional responses to the film because we do not have the appropriate cultural background. This is exactly where film history and the ethnographic study of film have an indispensable role to play. Film historians and ethnographers can supply us with the background necessary to make the emotive address of films from other cultures and other periods in our own culture emotionally accessible to us (Carroll 2003, p. 73). Filmgoers should be suitably educated, informed, and “suitably backgrounded” (Carroll 2008, p. 195) so that the world presented to them does not seem foreign or strange after all, or so they know what emotions the filmmakers intended to evoke. Viewers would then be in a position to judge to what extent the filmmakers achieved those aims. Not all emotional responses are intended, however. My hypothesis, which I cannot fully defend in this paper, is that the three kinds of aging (positive, negative, and ambivalent) map onto three kinds of unintended affective2 responses: nostalgia, boredom, and comic amusement. Let me explain what I mean by these terms.3 1. Let us call a film aged in a positive sense if and only if the enjoyment4 it provides increases on account of the effects of dating. One of the main ways we respond to such dated films is with nostalgia. I use “nostalgia” in an uncomplicated sense to refer to the pleasant affective state that accompanies finding something charming that is associated with the past. The screened world, in other words, evokes nostalgia in this case.

2. Let us call a film aged in a negative sense if and only if, due to the effects of dating, the enjoyment it brings about decreases. In the case of negatively aged films, the viewer is less engaged by the film. It would move him less or at least in unintended ways. This can take a variety of forms: the viewer can be less fascinated or compelled by the film. The filmgoer may struggle to feel wonder, admiration, curiosity, suspense, or other emotions. This can lead to, or at least border on, boredom. “Boredom” is here used in a straightforward way to refer to the affective state associated with increased distraction and inattention as well as the self-perception thereof (Damrad-Frye 1989, p. 315). Such a state results in a diminished interest in the events screened. As an example of negative aging, consider The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984). When it was first released, its make-up and visual effects were mesmerizing and

2 I use “emotions,” “affective responses,” and “affects” as synonyms in this paper. 3 I pass over the ontological question of whether the aesthetic properties that constitute a film change with time. The issue of film identity across time is quite complicated and merits a fuller discussion than I can give here. 4 Note that what is at stake here is enjoyment, not evaluation, of the film.

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absorbing. But, as reviewer James Berardinelli notes (2009), “Key special effects, which were cutting edge in 1984, appear dated by today’s standards. Stan Winston’s stop-animation Terminator, which takes over for Schwarzenegger at the end, looks like what it is: the product of a special effects lab.” The Terminator may hold up well overall and retain its artistic value, but it would do so despite this negative aging, which makes the film less enjoyable to a certain degree. 3. Let us call a film aged in an ambivalent sense if and only if i) it is more enjoyable due to the effects of dating, and ii) it is viewed in a way that the filmmakers did not intend, that is, against the intentions of its creators. I call this mixed or ambivalent aging since the film is still enjoyable, yet is enjoyed in a way that goes against the grain. We might see a horror film or thriller for kicks it was not intended to give. The US television comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-99) offers many examples of this form of enjoyment of inferior films from an earlier era. RiffTrax (2006-present), which provides heckling audio commentaries of films that are (usually) dated, continues this tradition of feeling mixed pleasures in response to aged motion pictures. The French language even has a word for this type of viewer: the nanard. A nanar is an inferior film that, due to weakness of plot, acting, special effects, and the like, or a combination of such cinematic elements, becomes exquisite on another level or in another sense, that is, when seen against the grain or in a way that runs counter to the intentions of the filmmakers. It is worth pointing out that nanards are typically very knowledgeable about film and its history. Note that all three kinds of aging can occur even when the viewer has not previously seen the movie. Aging does not require previous viewing of the film. It may touch films one has already seen, but repeated viewing is not necessary. A film from the past can look aged the first time one watches it. What does all of this have to do with evaluation? Although I cannot fully defend this claim here, one of the premises of this paper is that we should separate our enjoyment of a film from our evaluation of it. I understand “evaluation” in terms of a success-value model according to which the critic appraises what was actually achieved by the artist (filmmaker) and this achievement is understood in terms of the artist’s aims.5 Passing the test of time is not to be confused with what I called positive aging, for the latter has to do with our enjoyment of a film, not our evaluation of it. To say that a work passes the test of time is to say something about its value as a work of art. Lamarque describes our interest in an artwork that we esteem or give high artistic marks: “Much of this interest lies in the artist’s achievement, how aims are realized, problems solved, themes developed, how a subject matter emerges from, and melds with, the materials used” (Lamarque 2010, p. 213). We understand the artist’s achievement in terms of how her aims are realized, and, accordingly, we evaluate how well she executes her task.

5 My account of evaluation is indebted to the work of Noël Carroll and Peter Lamarque.

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Insofar as nostalgia, boredom, and amusement are unintended and thus beyond the control of the filmmaker, they have little influence on the film’s artistic value, which is here understood in terms of what the filmmaker actually achieved and thus in terms of his or her intentions. (Although one’s actions may have unintended consequences, it does not make sense to say that such unintended consequences are “achieved” by, or the “achievement” of, one’s actions.) In contrast, nostalgia, boredom, and amusement affect a viewer’s level of enjoyment. Insofar as these three states are unintended, they would affect our enjoyment of the film but not our evaluation of it. By recognizing this, I submit, we can rationally resolve disagreements that are grounded on these unintended affective responses to dated films. In other words, this account can help us resolve disputes in which one filmgoer feels boredom in response to a dated film while another feels nostalgia. By properly understanding and explaining their different responses, the two viewers can realize that they are responding to the film with different levels of enjoyment and that this has little to do with the film’s artistic value. The film’s artistic value is located elsewhere, as noted above. Let me try to avoid a possible confusion. I think that evaluation can and should take into account, when relevant, intended garden-variety emotions evoked by the film being judged. Evaluations ought to take into account the extent to which the film in question evokes the emotions that films of its genre typically elicit and that the film was intended to elicit. For instance, a suspense thriller that is gripping and enthralling is in some degree good since that is what suspense thrillers typically do – that is what they are supposed to do. Following Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” we might wish to formulate this claim as one of the “laws of criticism” (Hume 1985, p. 231), “general rules of art” (ibid, p. 232), “general principles” of art (ibid, p. 236), or “avowed patterns” (ibid, p. 235) derived from established models and empirical observation of what works and what fails. Although I do not wish to defend the validity of the principle-based approach here, I will state how it might look. Assuming one wanted to offer such an empirical rule, one could formulate this as a general principle that applies to the genre of thrillers (with the necessary ceteris paribus clause): “Suspense in a thriller is always good in some degree.”6 This principle would refer to the suspenseful quality in isolation from other properties of the work. Thus, it leaves aside how suspense might interact with other aesthetic properties such as humor, which might make the film better or worse or leave it about the same (cf. Dickie 1997, p.164). This brings us to another distinction. How is “oldness” different from aging? An object’s being old is a matter of the passage of time. Such oldness is an external, not an aesthetic, property; it can be measured by scientific instruments. Aging is an aesthetic phenomenon and is response-dependent. It requires a viewer to be affected in some way and to be acquainted with the film. It would be hard to

6 I am adopting the structure of the formula used in George Dickie’s summary of Monroe Beardsley’s account (Dickie 1997, p. 144).

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determine beforehand or a priori how films will age, and how much. Experience shows which movies have aged and how they have done so. There is no equation that will give us a determinate answer if we wish to know if a film will appear aged, what kind it might have, or to what extent it will have it. A viewer has to assess such matters on a case-by-case basis.7 In addition, we don’t know how long or short the time scale of aging would be for a particular film.8 It seems to me that the objective passage of time is a logically necessary condition of aging. A discussion of a counterexample might help me elucidate this idea. Perhaps some will object to my claim that the passage of time is a necessary condition of aging by referring to new releases that look dated, such as Woody Allen’s Zelig when it was first released in 1983. Surely it was dated when it premiered, one might object. However, this black and white mockumentary was produced long after the filmworld was releasing color films, which had been around since the 1930s. Allen made a “sylistic” choice, in Thomas Wartenberg’s sense of the term (Wartenberg 2005), to shoot the film in black and white, and informed viewers will know this. Allen adopted one of many possible options available to him; he could have made a color film had he desired. Educated viewers of Zelig will know that the film, even if it is designed to look aged, is going for a dated look. They therefore will view the film as a new release that is attempting to appear aged. (Of course, the ways in which a film tries to look dated, the filmic means it uses, could appear aged at a later date.) With this account in place, let us turn to Hume.

Three Temporal Notions in Hume’s Account Although I do not wish to provide an elaborate interpretation of Hume’s essays in aesthetics, I would like to anchor my discussion in his work. After all, it is the Scottish philosopher who introduced to modernity the philosophical puzzles associated with passing the test of time. Hume’s account contains three related notions: passing the test of time, the personal aging of the critic, and repeated viewing. Before explaining each of these, I will give a brief word about Hume’s theory of evaluation, a taste-aesthetic according to which experts or critics are said to make judgments of beauty or taste. Hume understood artistic appraisal in terms of taste and beauty. For Hume there is an analogy between the tongue’s “taste” and Taste (with a capital “T”), the faculty of judging artworks and finding what is valuable in them (Carroll 2009, p.

7 In saying that judging a film’s aging requires acquaintance with the film, I mean neither to affirm nor to deny an “intuitionist” position. I am not claiming that there is an intuitive faculty that apprehends or senses aging. 8 Moreover, aging is not to be confused with a film stock’s decomposition, deterioration that would require restoration or preservation. Datedness does not concern the physical degradation of any material substance.

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156f.). Even if Hume himself did not take “subjective” to mean what is private, individual, or idiosyncratic, several later interpreters unfortunately read him as claiming just that. Hume himself thought there was a faculty of taste that allowed critics to make accurate and correct judgments. Hence their judgments were subjective in that they depended on the sentiment of the critic, yet inter- subjective in that there were shared by fellow informed critics and were not merely private or whimsical. Hume’s evaluating judges (“critics”) are supposed to be sensible, experienced, informed, and unbiased. Specifically, the critics are to have at least five qualities that are necessary if they are to make accurate judgments and if they are not to be “unqualified” as critics (Hume 1985, p. 238): delicacy of taste, frequent practice in a particular art, freedom from prejudice, good sense, and experience in comparing artworks with other ones (ibid, p. 241). In addition, Hume thinks that qualified critics will possess “a perfect serenity of mind” and “a recollection of thought” and that they will give “due attention to the object” (ibid, p. 232). The notion of “comparing” artworks raises the question of the passage of time, for the critic is supposed to compare works from different nations and ages. Thus, this brings us to the different temporal notions, which, in my view, the literature on Hume’s aesthetics has neither sufficiently examined nor properly distinguished. Let us turn to each of these notions. First, what has been called “passing the test of time” (Savile 1982) involves a work’s being valued and esteemed by different generations. A work that passes the test of time will evoke “durable admiration” and survive “all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance and envy” (Hume 1985, p. 233). Thus, Hume continues: “The same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London. All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory” (ibid). And: “A real genius, the longer his works endure, and the more wide they are spread, the more sincere is the admiration which he meets with” (ibid). I interpret Hume’s point to be similar to what Lamarque has in mind when he writes: “Artistic value, then, is the value that survives across time when a work continues to be valued beyond its context of origin. Many works that initially seem important simply fade from view when the context changes” (Lamarque 2010, p. 212; cf. Silvers 1991, p. 213). The critic should see many other works so that that he can compare the judged work to these other artworks, allowing him to contextualize the work better. He should be acquainted with many “species” of beauty and know his art form. The critic’s comparing activity seems to involve examining works in the same category or genre. Thus, Carroll seems right to discuss Hume’s claim in terms of genre (Carroll 1984, pp. 184f.). Hume explicitly holds that comparative judging would involve works from different ages. “One accustomed to see, and examine, and weigh the several performances, admired in different ages and nations, can alone rate the merits of a work exhibited to his view, and assign its proper rank among the productions of

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genius” (Hume 1985, p. 238). Some works will not hold up well when so examined. He thinks we are inclined to be more pleased by those works from our own age because they will resemble and depict subject matter that is familiar to us. Hume recognized that a critic’s noticing a resemblance between the depicted fictional world and her own world is enjoyable. He then claims that a critic’s preferences for, say, comedy over tragedy are “innocent and unavoidable” and can never reasonably be the object of dispute because there is no standard by which they can be decided.9 He continues: “For a like reason, we are more pleased, in the course of our reading, with pictures and characters, that resemble objects which are found in our own age or country, than with those which describe a different set of customs” (ibid, pp. 244-245). This last point is related to the aforementioned indexicality of films, one of the characteristics of film that gives rise to its tendency to become dated. Carroll rightly points out that film education can largely make up for the human tendency to find delight in cultural and linguistic phenomena that are familiar to us. Hume rightly endorsed the principle that our appraisals should not be anachronistic. He explained his “freedom from prejudice” condition by referring to a critic who comes from another era than that of the work. Such a critic (of oration, in this case) should “place himself in the same situation as the audience, in order to form a true judgment of the oration” (ibid, p. 239). The principle that the critic should attempt to overcome anachronism while making judgments seems plausible indeed. Hume himself compares artworks from different eras. He juxtaposes ancient and modern oration in “Of Eloquence.” Unlike the modern kind, prevalent in England, ancient eloquence is “sublime and passionate” (Hume 1985, p. 108), and it is superior to its modern counterpart (ibid, p. 98). Ancient eloquence “is of a much juster taste than the modern, or the argumentative and rational; and, if properly executed, will always have more command and authority over mankind” (ibid, p. 108). He adds: “We are satisfied with our mediocrity, because we have had no experience of anything better” (ibid). That is why the critic must be familiar with many instances of an artform and with several models of artistically successful works, including works and models from different nations and ages. Let us turn now to the second temporal notion. Hume refers to the viewing of a work by the same person who ages over time. This is what I call the personal aging of the viewer or critic. “A young man, whose passions are warm, will be more sensibly touched with amorous and tender images, than a man more advanced in years, who takes pleasure in wise, philosophical reflections concerning the conduct of life and moderation of the passions. At twenty, Ovid may be the

9 Hume seems to be overly pessimistic here. For one genre likely has more significance for the culture than another. A cultural critic, taking a broader perspective than the film critic, can plausibly argue that realistic drama is more valuable than slapstick comedy insofar as realistic drama has more importance to the culture. But this would bring us beyond the realm of aesthetics and into other kinds of value theory. Carroll offers an account along these lines (2008, pp. 223-226).

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favourite author; Horace at forty; and perhaps Tacitus at fifty” (Hume 1985, p. 244). As any marketer of films knows, viewing preferences typically change as viewers grow older. (Hume himself thinks that these preferences are beyond rational dispute, but he may be wrong about that.10) The concept of personal aging is meant to reflect the changes a person undergoes over time, including developments in his or her physical, moral, intellectual, psychological, and emotional character. Since personal aging in Hume’s account is relatively straightforward, we can turn to the third notion. Hume suggests that the critic see the work more than once. He recommends the “frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty” (ibid, p. 237). He says that before we can “give judgment on any work of importance,” the “very individual performance [must] be more than once perused by us and be surveyed in different lights with attention and deliberation” (ibid, pp. 237-238). I call this repeated viewing. A few lines later, Hume adds: “There is a species of beauty, which, as it is florid and superficial, pleases at first; but being found incompatible with a just expression either of reason or passion, soon palls upon the taste, and is then rejected with disdain, at least rated at a much lower value” (ibid, p. 238). This repeated viewing is not to be confused with passing the test of time over a period of decades or centuries, the enduring of a work across generations. Rather, repeated viewing is carried out by the same viewer or critic. An artwork that first impressed the critic may not do so after a second or third viewing. It “soon palls upon the taste” on account of its artistic demerits. Let us leave aside that Hume focuses on beauty and taste. Beauty is too limited a concept for film evaluation, since many films are intend to evoke disgust, fear, sadness, pity, suspense, and many other kinds of emotions. Nevertheless, Hume’s point about repeated engagement with the artwork can be expanded and applied to films, as we shall see in a moment. Some movies that once struck the critic as well executed in terms of their genres can, after re-watching, strike him or her as having less artistic value. This is true of films from the past and present alike. In “Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing,” Hume compares ancient and modern authors. It is as if he is fulfilling the “comparison” condition he would later defend in “Of the Standard of Taste.” Moreover, he points out that repeated engagement with the work can lead us to devalue it – in this case, an epigram that aims for wit and refinement rather than simplicity.

10 Hume’s view of preferences based on “humours of particular men” (1985, p. 243) or “diversity in the internal frame” (ibid, p. 244) seems too extreme. A cultural critic would be in a position to judge the value of action films (often enjoyed, let’s assume, by adolescent males) vis-à-vis realistic dramas in which serious social issues are presented (typically appreciated by viewers with more “life experience,” let’s say). The action films would presumably be judged to be less valuable or significant for the culture. Of course, such an estimation would be supra-generic and lead us beyond genre-based appraisals. It would bring us out of the realm of aesthetics and into cultural criticism. Cf. the previous footnote.

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If the merit of the composition lie in a point of wit; it may strike at first; but the mind anticipates the thought in the second perusal, and is no longer affected by it. When I read an epigram of Martial, the first line recalls the whole; and I have no pleasure in repeating to myself what I know already. But each line, each word, in Catullus, has its merit; and I am never tired with the perusal of him. It is sufficient to run over Cowley once: But Parnel, after the fiftieth reading, is as fresh as the first (Hume 1985, p. 195). The critic should view the work more than once in order to catch parts or elements he may have missed the first time, and to see the artwork for what it is. Poems that have plainness and simplicity, and are not glaring and dazzling, hold up after repeated viewing, Hume claims. For him, this is not merely a matter of enjoyment (or the lack thereof). Repeated viewing devalues the inferior artwork; the work deserves to be demoted. The able critic, he implies, judges the epigrams of Martial to be inferior to those of Catullus. That Martial’s poem does not please us upon repeated reading is a consequence of its artistic demerits. Let us see how this would be applied to film. Roger Ebert claims that Taxi Driver holds up after repeated viewings. In a 2004 review of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Ebert comments on how the film endures over the years: it “is a film that does not grow dated, or over-familiar.” I read this as passing the test of time. In addition, he describes his experience of watching the film repeatedly: “I have seen it dozens of times. Every time I see it, it works.” Consider another example, The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu, Jean Renoir, 1939). André Bazin held that it is only after repeated viewing of the film that its excellence emerges. The Rules of the Game is a work which should be seen again and again. As it is necessary to hear a symphony more than once to understand it or to meditate before a great painting in order to appreciate its inner harmonies, so it is with Renoir’s great film. The fact that The Rules of the Game was so long misunderstood is not simply the result of its originality and the public’s psychological inertia, but also because it is a work that reveals itself only gradually to the spectator, even if he is attentive (Bazin 1992, p. 83).

After repeated viewing, this film is more clearly seen for the superior film that it is. François Truffaut claimed that at the time of its release, The Rules of the Game was “the greatest failure of Renoir’s career,” yet, in retrospect, his “masterpiece” (in Bazin 1992, p. 257). Truffaut added that the two re-releases of the film, in 1945 and 1948, met with “complete commercial failure” before the great success of the release of the definitive version in 1965 (ibid). Finally, we see these three temporal notions in the following review of E.T (Steven Spielberg, 1982), a short piece written by Charles Taylor in 2002. To facilitate my commentary, I break up Taylor’s paragraph. Returning to a movie that delighted you when you were younger can be a dicey proposition. We’ve all re-viewed some once-beloved picture only to find that we no longer connect to it, that our previous affection was based on who we were

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and where we were in life when we first saw it, that experience has shaped our outlook in a different way. Note the implicit reference to personal aging (“who we were”). Taylor admits that the film might have delighted him merely because he was a young man at the time. In addition, he explicitly mentions repeated viewing (“re-viewed”). (The fact that we find personal aging and repeated viewing discussed together should not be surprising, for the notions can be easily related to each other: during the period of time that separates two viewings, filmgoers may very well have changed or developed.) The film might pall “upon the taste” after repeated viewing. Does it? For Taylor, E.T. holds up. But for other viewers it may not.11 Watching E.T. 20 years after it was first released (half my life ago), I can’t say that the movie holds the same sense of discovery it did in 1982. (Narrative discovery is a casualty of knowing what’s going to happen in a story, for one thing.) Since the filmgoer knows what is going to happen in the film, it does not move him in the same way or as it once did. Repeated viewing causes this. The jokes might be not as funny, the thrills thrilling, or the surprises surprising. But for people who saw E.T. on its first go-round, particularly moviegoers who were kids back then, the pleasure of seeing it now is the joy of feeling your responses deepen. My conception of the nostalgia that is evoked when viewing a dated film sheds light on this claim. Taylor’s viewing experience is clearly pleasant (“joy”), just like nostalgia as I have characterized it. If years have passed after our previous viewing and the earlier era was a good one for us, we are likely to feel some degree of nostalgia when re-watching the film. When we see a film we first saw when we were young, it is apt to evoke pleasant associations, assuming the time of that earlier viewing was a happy one. It’s no news to anyone that E.T. is one of the loveliest and happiest of American movie entertainments. It’s also a greater picture than we could have known. In other words, E.T. passes the test of time and its artistic value endures. Taylor’s claim here seems to suggest that E.T. holds up across generations: it is a great film in the sense that it continues to do for filmgoers what it did for previous ones. Thus, Ebert describes how the film “worked” the first time his young grandchildren saw the film, in 1997, just as it worked for viewers in 1982 (Ebert 1997). In short, all three temporal notions are at work in this single paragraph.

11 In personal correspondence, philosopher Craig Fox commented: “I can remember watching E.T. as a kid and being thoroughly mesmerized by it. I had occasion to see a few minutes of it within the past few years and I was struck at how almost unwatchable certain scenes were. (The same might apply to the TV show Alf.) Audiences today won’t accept special effects that impressed in 1982. It seems of note, though, that we’re almost embarrassed by being taken in at something so comparatively crude years ago. We say— of this or of other similar examples—that we were wrong, that ‘we thought it was a good movie.’” I am indebted to Craig Fox for his comments and suggestions.

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Conclusion I have described my account of how nostalgia, boredom, and amusement are each associated with positive, negative, and mixed aging. I then characterized three temporal notions in Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” “Of Eloquence,” and “Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing”: passing the test of time, personal aging, and repeated viewing of the work. I close with an irony that Hume’s remarks seem to imply. Repeated viewing, as we have seen, can lead to increased boredom with a film. I do not mean intended boredom, the sort Michelangelo Antonioni aimed for with La Notte (1961), which was meant to “articulate the theme of the pointlessness of modern life” (Carroll 2008, p. 193). Rather, what I mean is this: if we follow Hume’s implication that we should watch a film repeatedly before we judge it, it might not work as well for us or have the same effect. For instance, if we know that the killer is lurking behind the door, we will no longer jump and scream when he appears. When we are familiar with the film’s jokes, it will be hard (or at least harder) to make us to laugh. Is our failure to be moved or engaged evidence of the artistic shortcomings and demerits of the film, or is it just that we have seen the film too many times? If my hypothesis about evaluation and enjoyment is correct, then, insofar as this response (lack of engagement) is an unintended consequence of seeing the film repeatedly, it would have no bearing on the film’s artistic qualities or merits. Yet it would bear on how much we enjoy the film. If this is correct, the fact that, due to the numerous viewings of a comedy, jokes become stale or gags worn out has no bearing on the film’s artistic value. Thus, such a case would be unlike Hume’s ranking of Martial below Catullus, since the latter judgment was an assessment of the artistic value of their poetry. Sometimes it is due to the films artistic success that we are so familiar with it. On account of its excellence (which leads to repeated viewing), it fails to move us as it was intended to move us and as it once did. If we watch an excellent action film over and over again because it is a superior work, we will be prepared for what is about to happen in the film. This is likely to decrease our enjoyment of it. It is rather ironic that we would not enjoy a classic as much because we have seen it so many times – a repeated viewing that, qua classic, it well deserves. I close with an example of this. Consider Peter Stack’s review of the 1997 re- release of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). So many years, so much exposure, so many spin-offs, special-effects trends and continuous warp-speed hype have made it nearly impossible to look at Star Wars as just a movie anymore. It remains an icon on the ever-changing pop culture landscape – but there’s no going back to the young eyes that glowed with awe when the film landed in May 1977 (Stack 1997). Is the fact that “there’s no going back” an artistic shortcoming of Star Wars? That seems quite unfair to this influential and significant action and adventure film. But our exposure to and familiarity with the film may very well affect our enjoyment of it.

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References - Bazin, A.1992. Jean Renoir. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo. - Berardinelli, J. 2009. “The Terminator.” 3 May 2009. [http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1618] Accessed 19 October 2011. - Carroll, N. 2009. On Criticism. New York: Routledge. - Carroll, N. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. London: Blackwell. - Carroll, N. 2003 Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven: Yale University Press. - Carroll, N. 1984. Hume’s Standard of Taste. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 43, 2: pp. 181 – 194. - Damrad-Frye, R. and Laird J. D. 1989. The experience of boredom: The role of the self-perception of attention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, v. 57, n. 2: pp. 315 – 320. - Dickie, George (1997). Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach. New York: Oxford University Press. - Ebert, Roger (2004) “Taxi Driver (1976).” 1 January 2004. [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040101/REV IEWS 08/401010364/1023] Accessed 19 October 2011. - Ebert, Roger (1997) “E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).” 14 September 1997. [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19970914/REV IEWS 08/401010316/1023] Accessed 27 November 2011. - Freeland, C. 2006. Evaluating Film. Film Studies v. 8: pp. 154 – 60. - Hume, D. 1985. “Of the Standard of Taste”. In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Eugene Miller, ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, pp. 226 – 249. - Hume, D. 1985. “Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Eugene Miller, ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, pp. 191 – 196. - Hume, D. 1985. “Of Eloquence.” In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Eugene M., ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, pp. 97 – 110. - Lamarque, P. 2010. The Uselessness of Art. Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, 68, 3: pp. 205 – 214. - Savile, A. 1982. The Test of Time: an Essay in Philosophical Aesthetics. Clarendon: Oxford University Press. - Silvers, A. 1991. “The Story of Art is the Test of Time.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49, 3: 211 – 224. - Stack, P. 1997. “Star Wars – Re-entry. The force is with us again – and it’s still a real trip.” San Francisco Chronicle. 31 January 1997. [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1997/01/31/DD41983.DTL] Accessed 20 October 2011.

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- Taylor, C. 2002. “You Can Go Home Again.” Salon. 22 March 2002. [http://www.salon.com/2002/03/22/et/] Accessed November 27, 2011. - Wartenberg, T. 2005. “Style and Methodologies: On Carroll’s Engaging the Moving Image.” Film-Philosophy, v. 9, n. 4. [http://www.film philosophy.com/vol9- 2005/n48wartenberg] Accessed 15 August 2011.

Filmography - Allen, Woody (1983) Zelig. USA. - Antonioni, Michelangelo (1961) La Notte. Italy. - Cameron, James (1984) The Terminator. USA. - Lucas, George (1977) Star Wars. USA. - Scorsese, Martin (1976) Taxi Driver. USA. - Spielberg, Steven (1982). E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. USA. - Renoir, Jean (1939) La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game). France.

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Distopía y deshumanización en el arte último: el ciberpunk. Un viaje a través del cine

María Salvador Cabrerizo* Universidad de Granada

Nos encontramos en un tiempo en el cual las nuevas tecnologías se han instalado en nuestra rutina de manera incontestable. Sin embargo, la literatura, y también el arte, se hicieron eco de esta posibilidad hace décadas. El advenimiento de la ciencia ficción, y más aún del ciberpunk, delataba las inquietudes que suscitaban en el ser humano las consecuencias de la revolución tecnológica. No sin una cierta dosis de verosimilitud, se nos mostró -y se nos muestra- en el arte y literatura ciberpunk una sociedad distópica, brutalmente dominada por algún tipo de totalitarismo (capitalista o gubernamental), donde las emociones quedaban tamizadas por la máquina. La necesidad de cambio y evolución en busca de una ruptura con ese ambiente opresor se manifiesta en el enlace con la tecnología, en la mutación humana y la construcción del concepto de cyborg como complicadas metáforas del rechazo a un presente que, en ciertos aspectos, no se halla tan alejado del mostrado en la obra de arte. Todo este imaginario anti-utópico fomenta en el espectador un desasosiego apoyado en esa verosimilitud: ¿quién no tiene acceso a Internet?, ¿a cuánto estamos de conseguir una hibridación real con las máquinas?

La concepción negativa de la tecnología y el impacto de un mundo globalizado se funden en la creación de meta-mundos y de personajes anti-heroicos que devienen mesías en pos de la salvación de una sociedad que no sabe que lo necesita, pero que se aniquila, creando pseudoemociones cibernéticas, dando lugar a personas que se encierran y viven una vida exclusivamente virtual. Más aún, este género plantea la posibilidad de una réplica de nosotros, de una recreación no ya de la inteligencia -tan trabajada por los científicos de hoy en día-, sino también de la sensibilidad humana, o incluso la promesa de una vida eterna en la

* [email protected]

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clonación virtual de nuestra esencia inmaterial y su posible implantación en la máquina.

El ciberpunk expone, de esta manera, una serie de miedos, posibilidades, e incluso preguntas de carácter ontológico a un público masificado, que apenas es consciente de las ideas que está absorbiendo en el visionado de la que tal vez sea, simplemente, su película favorita.

Todos conocemos el género de la ciencia ficción. A través del imaginario mainstream ha penetrado en nuestras vidas de una manera u otra; al fin y al cabo, ¿quién no conoce La guerra de las galaxias? Sin embargo, cuando se trata de aproximarse a una de sus muchas ramificaciones, como es el caso del ciberpunk, la cosa se complica, aunque no son pocos los estudiosos anglosajones que se han acercado a este mundo intentando establecer una definición. No obstante, como bien apunta Michael Fiegel1, ni siquiera mediante la definición etimológica del término es fácil llegar a una comprensión exacta de su significado, pero sí queda clara su constitución en un género en sí mismo. No es el momento de hacer una historia del ciberpunk; por el contrario, procederemos a analizar, mediante una serie de películas, uno de los aspectos más relevantes del género: el fenómeno cyborg, la relación del hombre y la máquina y las consecuencias que plantea: la relación del ser humano consigo mismo y con el mundo que, a día de hoy, está construyendo.

Ya desde el Neuromante de Gibson se hizo la distinción inherente al ciberpunk entre carne y tecnología. El cuerpo humano se convierte en una frontera finalmente salvable y manipulable, que llevará al sujeto a una transformación que puede tomar diferentes caminos. Siguiendo el libro Cyborg de Igor Sádaba, este híbrido carne-metal supone “el resultado de que la mediación técnica pase de ser exterior a ser interior” (Sádaba 2009, p. 228), de manera que se rompa “la esclavitud frente a la máquina” y se idee “una relación mucho más horizontal” (Sádaba 2009, p. 25.). Este autor nos cuenta que el origen del término cyborg está en la ciencia aeroespacial de mediados del siglo XX, cuando se buscaban formas de mejorar las posibilidades del hombre en la aventura espacial. Asimismo, nos pone sobre aviso de que es en la tecnología militar donde más se avanzó en este aspecto, siendo la ciencia ficción la responsable de la expansión y aceptación social no sólo del término cyborg en sí, sino de las connotaciones positivas y negativas que conlleva. En este sentido, Sádaba nos informa de tres métodos de alcanzar este estado de hibridación: la maquinización del hombre, la humanización de la máquina y la modificación genética (Sádaba 2009, p. 40), no sin detallar que toda relación con la máquina, ya sea física -mediante prótesis, por ejemplo- o cognitiva -como la utilización de ordenadores para proyectarnos al ciberespacio- entran dentro de la definición.

1 Como vemos en FIEGEL, Michael, “Defining cyberpunk” en su tesis Cyberpunk and the New Myth, publicación online [http://www.aeforge.com/~aeon/thesis/thesis0.shtml ], consultada a 30 de noviembre de 2010.

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En la sociedad que vivimos es habitual una relación estrecha con la máquina y la técnica: la utilización de gafas, los automóviles, los ordenadores personales o los teléfonos portátiles están en la vida diaria de casi todos. En el momento en que la máquina pasa a formar parte del cuerpo del sujeto, se da una maquinización del ser humano, una transformación de su existencia física aunque sea a niveles aparentemente inocentes, como la necesidad de un marcapasos. En el cine ciberpunk dos películas nos muestran ejemplos muy interesantes de esta micro- modificación, que puede incluso llegar a convertirnos en mayoritariamente artificiales: Repo Men (Miguel Sapochnik, 2010) y Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995). Si en la primera nos encontramos con que todos los órganos del cuerpo humano son susceptibles de ser construidos por el hombre, de manera que se consigue no sólo dar una segunda oportunidad a todo aquel que necesitara el trasplante de un órgano vital, sino también realizar auténticas “actualizaciones” del cuerpo humano mediante injertos de súper-oídos o visión mejorada, en la segunda presenciamos unas mejoras similares -manifestadas en el cuerpo de Jane, interpretada por Dina Meyer- que llegan a ser la causa última de una afección que amenaza la salud pública. Sin embargo, el máximo exponente de estas mejoras es la que posee el propio Johnny, ese chip que le permite almacenar datos en su cerebro, no exento de riesgos. Sádaba pone de manifiesto cómo esta película tratará “la deshumanización del hombre, adulterado y trastocado por implantes cibernéticos para mejorar sus prestaciones” (Sádaba 2009, p. 71): es la búsqueda de un hombre más eficaz y completo, aunque sea a expensas de lo que nos hace humanos.

En el visionado de estas películas nos hemos percatado de un hecho curioso: el papel asignado a la mujer. En ambos casos, tanto el personaje de Jane en Johnny Mnemonic como el de Beth en Repo Men, poseen una mayor cantidad de implantes que sus compañeros masculinos. En el caso de Jane, la tradicional imagen de la mujer débil que ha de ser rescatada deja pasar a una femme fatale que hace las veces de guardaespaldas del propio Johnny, gracias a las habilidades que le conceden sus mejoras tecnológicas. Beth, por el contrario, mantiene esa fragilidad: su cuerpo es la quintaesencia de la relación entre la tecnología y el ser humano: ni sus ojos, ni sus oídos o rodillas le pertenecen realmente, siendo herida en una de las escenas de acción del filme. Debido a su construcción semi-artificial, se ve forzada a vivir escondiéndose, ya que no ha podido pagar el precio de sus órganos y The Union no dudará a la hora de extirpárselos. Las connotaciones que adquirirá este personaje son especialmente interesantes si nos fijamos en la escena imaginaria en la que Remy, el protagonista, la abre en canal para cancelar las deudas de los órganos. Es una escena de sangre y pasión, pues mientras va pasando cada parte artificial por el lector, la besa y acaricia en una escena que nos remite por sus connotaciones a la relación con la máquina y el metal que retrataba David Cronenberg en Crash (1996).

En este sentido, la imagen del cyborg-mujer es, quizás, la más antigua del imaginario cinematográfico, apareciendo en la réplica androide de María en Metrópolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). En la literatura uno de los referentes más famosos y

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semilla de estas investigaciones sería el Frankestein de Mary Shelley, el cual encontraría su réplica femenina en el cine en La novia de Frankestein (James Whale, 1935), convirtiéndose, al igual que el personaje de Lang, en uno de los iconos más famosos del género2. Otros ejemplos serían The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975, con un remake por Frank Oz en 2005 protagonizado por Nicole Kidman), donde las mujeres han sido reemplazadas por robots sumisos a los hombres, en la que a nuestro modo de ver es una interesante metáfora de la sociedad, y Weird Science (John Hughes, 1985), quizás más conocida entre las generaciones más jóvenes por la adaptación a la televisión emitida entre 1994 y 1997. Para describirla, utilizaremos las palabras de Manuel Dos: “nos encontramos ante una comedia disparatada que adopta los modos de fantasía adolescente y que no duda en invocar todos los ingredientes necesarios para alcanzar la aprobación masiva del público al que va destinada” (Dos 2004, p. 30), enfrentándose así al más elaborado concepto de los replicantes de Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) para satisfacer el simple deseo de entretenimiento por parte del espectador.

Precisamente el feminismo, en la figura de Donna Haraway, se ha apropiado del término cyborg en pos de una disolución de las diferencias sociales que entrañan los términos de género, raza y clase. Es una idea muy interesante que, sin embargo, ha sido utilizada con términos despectivos, con unas consecuencias nefastas que contrastan con el optimismo de las palabras de Haraway, en uno de los capítulos del revival de la clásica serie de la televisión británica Doctor Who, donde el ejército de cyborgs denominados Cybermen, compuestos de un cuerpo de metal y un cerebro humano al que se le inhibe la capacidad de sentir, proceden a “actualizar” al resto de la humanidad diciéndoles que así no habrá más distinciones entre raza y género3.

Este ejército tendrá su origen, sin embargo, en otro capítulo, “Rise of the Cybermen”4, donde se explica que son el producto del dirigente de una empresa, Cybus, cuyo máximo deseo es alcanzar la inmortalidad. Nos atrae así a uno de los factores más importantes a nuestro modo de ver de la teoría y la utilización del cyborg, pues no es el único caso en el que la simbiosis máquina-ser humano podría significar la llegada de una nueva trascendencia. Más significativa en este sentido sería la serie Caprica (2009, precuela de Battlestar Galactica, iniciada en 2004), en la cual el personaje de Zoe Graystone consigue duplicar su esencia espiritual -su mente- en el espacio virtual construido por su propio padre y al que se accede mediante unos aparatos denominados holobandas, que nos recuerdan en su utilización al “wire” con el que traficaba Lenny Nero en Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995). Así, a pesar de la muerte del personaje, éste pervive en la red, logrando, gracias a la tecnología de la empresa rival, transportar esa esencia al interior de un robot, el cylon, mostrando así la posibilidad de la supervivencia a través de la unión entre el espíritu y la tecnología. El colectivo religioso y

2 A este respecto, consultar Dos 2010, pp. 20-33. 3 Capítulos finales de la segunda temporada: “Army of ghosts” y “Doomsday”, emitidos originariamente el 1 y el 8 de julio de 2006, respectivamente. 4 Quinto episodio de la segunda temporada. Emitido el 13 de mayo de 2006.

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terrorista Soldiers of the One se percatará de las posibilidades de este logro técnico, queriendo mostrar a la humanidad que, finalmente, se ha encontrado esa trascendencia prometida en el Evangelio, con un pequeño detalle: la resurrección no será de la carne, sino de la máquina. El concepto de cyborg supondría, por tanto, un reto a las religiones tradicionales en el caso de hacerse real, al traer de nuevo a colación preguntas como qué es el alma o quiénes somos, pudiendo finiquitar una de las funciones principales de las creencias teístas: el consuelo ante la muerte: ¿qué necesidad habría de Dios en un mundo donde la humanidad se perpetúa a través del tiempo gracias a su propia creación?

Caprica no constituye el único ejemplo donde la mente puede ser duplicada en algún sentido mediante la tecnología. En la propia Blade Runner la replicante Rachael es única en su especie: posee los recuerdos de una humana, viviendo como si se tratara de ella. ¿Supone eso que nuestra identidad se basa en los recuerdos? Según apunta Kevin McCarron, el ciberpunk cuestionará hasta qué punto esto no es así en las obras literarias de Philip K. Dick, en las que se basa el filme Total recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990), donde los humanos tienden a seguir esta creencia en oposición a las palabras del mutante que dice que “un hombre se define por sus acciones, no por sus recuerdos” (McCarron 1996, p. 266).

La segunda vía para llegar al cyborg la compone la humanización de la máquina. No es en absoluto insólito el comprobar cómo las relaciones de la gente con sus ordenadores, etc., les lleva a ponerles nombres, decorarlos e incluso tratarlos con cariño, estableciendo una relación íntima con ellos. En el ámbito de la ciencia ficción, ésto se llevará a su máxima expresión al dotar al ordenador de una inteligencia similar a la humana que será capaz no sólo de las mayores atrocidades, sino también de sentimientos como el miedo. En este sentido, el fenómeno más famoso sería el que da título a uno de los capítulos del libro de Sádaba5: HAL 9000, el malévolo ordenador de 2001: Una odisea en el espacio (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Este supondría un primer escalón al establecer esa relación máquina- humano desde uno de los componentes más importantes y básicos: la suposición de que la inteligencia artificial conllevará a la emulación o a la creación de una mente equiparable a la humana. Sabine Heuser se pregunta si esto es acaso posible, si la inteligencia, en tanto que característica definitoria del ser humano, “puede ser artificial, construida, incluso hecha por el hombre”. Es interesante cómo esta autora considera que, dada esa simulación que constituye la inteligencia artificial, ésta puede suponer “una expresión del sueño de la raza humana de perpetuarse y recrearse sin las limitaciones del cuerpo humano como órgano reproductivo” (HEUSER, 2007).

No son pocos los ejemplos en la historia del cine que hacen de la máquina algo similar al ser humano. La propia Blade Runner con sus replicantes ofrece el beneficio de la duda a las creaciones de la Tyrell Corporation: de tan similares a nosotros, son indistinguibles a simple vista. Creados para realizar los trabajos que

5 SÁDABA, Igor, “Biomáquinas: HAL 9000 y robots que casi viven” en op. cit., pp. 109- 132.

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los humanos no queremos, se amotinan sangrientamente, provocando la caza que llevará a Deckard a enfrentarse a ellos. Desde el inicio de la película se nos muestra que la manera de determinar si se trata o no de replicantes es mediante un complejo interrogatorio que revelará la existencia de emociones equiparables a las humanas, es decir, un replicante poseerá el aspecto y la inteligencia humanas, pero no así las emociones, no así la empatía más básica. Sin embargo, esto será desafiado no sólo por el personaje de Rachael, replicante con recuerdos humanos implantados, sino por el propio Roy Batty, cuyo discurso final conmovió a todos y cada uno de los espectadores: “yo... he visto cosas que vosotros no creeríais... atacar naves en llamas más allá de Orión, he visto rayos C brillar en la oscuridad cerca de la puerta de Tannhäuser. Todos esos momentos se perderán en el tiempo como lágrimas en la lluvia. Es hora de morir”. El propio motín que los lleva a ser perseguidos nos hace plantearnos cuál es la auténtica naturaleza de los Nexus-6, nombre técnico de esta clase de cyborg, llevándonos a una cuestión ineludible: ¿quién es más humano, el replicante que desea ser libre de su esclavitud, o su creador, el hombre, que lo domina y destruye, programando incluso la duración de su vida?

Otros ejemplos igualmente conocidos serían el de Terminator (James Cameron, diversas fechas) y el de El hombre bicentenario (Chris Colombus, 1999). En el primer caso, nos encontramos con dos tipos de cyborg diferentes: por un lado, tenemos el T-800, interpretado por Arnold Schwarzenegger, que consiste en una estructura mecánica recubierta por auténtica carne, de manera que su aspecto externo es el de un ser humano; por otro, el más avanzado T-1000, que tiene la particular característica de estar construido con una polialeación mimética de metal líquido que le permite cobrar la apariencia de cualquier ser humano u objeto, además de nanochips que le posibilitan la auto-regeneración6. Sádaba apunta que en Terminator 2 la imagen tradicional -iniciada, quizás, por la propia HAL 9000 o la versión robótica de María en la Metrópolis de Lang- de la máquina como algo malévolo se invierte gracias a la figura del T-800 que viene a salvar el mundo.

En El hombre bicentenario, Andrew, cyborg interpretado por Robin Williams, no sólo tiene emociones y capacidad artística, sino que, además, se hace a sí mismo a imagen y semejanza de los humanos, llegando incluso a ser considerado como tal. Este personaje muestra así un deseo contrario al que tiende a impulsar al hombre en el tipo de historias que tratamos: no es ya el deseo de mejora, sino el de humanizarse, el de ser “normal”, como los demás, aunque eso suponga una “desactualización”, para utilizar términos equivalentes. Este afán de llegar a ser humano también lo demostrará el niño-cyborg David en Inteligencia Artificial (Steven Spielberg, 2001), una suerte de Pinocho del futuro cuyo anhelo de cariño le lleva a desear esa metamorfosis con todas sus fuerzas, hasta el punto del intento de suicidio. Esta desesperación resulta interesante en una máquina, llevándonos a la pregunta que se hace Brian McHale: “¿quién (o qué) es humano?

6 Esta información la hemos tomado del artículo correspondiente al T-1000 en Wikipedia, [http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-1000].

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¿en qué punto deja una máquina de ser una “mera” máquina y empieza a contar como un ser humano?” y, por supuesto, esta pregunta también es posible en el sentido inverso, gracias sobre todo a las prótesis: “¿en qué punto deja el ser humano de ser humano y empieza a contar como máquina?” (McHale 1992, p. 160).

Si la tercera vía la constituye la intervención genética, en este punto nos alejamos incluso de la relación estricta de fusión de máquina y hombre, interviniendo ésta únicamente en el proceso. A este respecto, Sádaba habla de la película Gattaca (Andrew Nicol, 1997) como muestra de esos cyborgs de ingeniería genética, humanos perfectos que dejan atrás a los “hijos del amor”, aquellos concebidos de manera natural, instituyéndose así un desalentador futuro de clasificación genética y marginación social que, a nuestro modo de ver, constituye una mayor deshumanización de la sociedad que la hibridación con la máquina. Otro ejemplo que hemos encontrado al respecto entra aún más en el ámbito de la ciencia ficción: se trata de dos episodios de la ya citada serie de la televisión británica Doctor Who, concretamente “The Empty Child” y “The Doctor Dances”7, donde unos entes minúsculos, llamados nanogenes, tienen la misión de reparar heridas, con la mala fortuna de reconstruir erróneamente a un niño al no conocer la auténtica estructura de su ADN. Así, fusionarán el cuerpo del niño con la máscara de gas que portaba en el momento de su muerte, construyendo un híbrido de la carne y la técnica, completamente perdido en esta amalgama genética sin sentido.

Como hemos visto, la idea del cyborg conlleva en sí misma la expresión de algunas de las preguntas más clásicas de la humanidad, desde las que se refieren a su identidad como las que le asaltan con respecto a la muerte, amparándose así en la tecnología no sólo en la perpetuación de su existencia durante la que sería su vida natural, como sucede en Repo Men, sino también en la consecución de la inmortalidad. Asimismo, la propia naturaleza humana es cuestionada al comparar la sensibilidad de los hombres con la que se atribuye a la máquina, generalmente considerada meramente inteligente, incapaz de emularnos en lo que nos hace más humanos pero que, quizás, no consiga más que demostrarnos cómo los genuinamente malvados somos nosotros, al desviar la técnica de su propósito en el momento en que creamos una criatura tecnológica llamada a ser despreciada en tanto que temida por sus mayores capacidades físicas, tan admiradas por el hombre pero incapaz de adquirir para sí mismo si no es, precisamente, con el auxilio del metal o la ingeniería genética. Esto supondría, así, una paradoja según las representaciones del género; mientras los humanos tienden a la máquina, la máquina tiende a lo humano, o así es cómo los creadores han deseado verlo: si la íntima relación con la máquina es el camino a la soledad, como demuestran aquellos que pasan horas conectados a su ordenador, la vía inversa no es sino el camino a la aceptación: en el fondo, por más que soñemos con mejores capacidades o vidas más largas, el ser humano no desea ser más que humano.

7 Episodios 9º y 10ª de la 1ª temporada, emitido por primera vez el 21 y el 28 de mayo de 2005, respectivamente.

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Referencias

− Dos, Manolo. 2010. “Almas de metal. La mujer como creación científica en el cine” en Dossiers Feministes, 14, pp. 20-33.

− Featherstone, Mike y Burrows, Roger (ed.). 1996. Cyberspace /Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, London : Sage Publications Ltd.

− Fiegel, Michael, “Defining cyberpunk” en su tesis Cyberpunk and the New Myth, publicación online [http://www.aeforge.com/~aeon/thesis/thesis0.shtml].

− Haraway, Donna, “Manifiesto cyborg”, online [http://manifiestocyborg.blogspot.com/].

− Heuser, Sabine. 2007. “(En)gendering Artificial Intelligence in Cyberspace”. En: Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 37, nº 2. Acceso a través de Questia [www.questia.com].

− McHale, Brian. 1992. “Elements of a poetics of Cyberpunk”, en Critique, vol. 33, nº 3.

− Sádaba, Igor. 2009. Cyborg, Barcelona: Península.

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Duchamp and the notion of optical tactility

Dr. Uršula Berlot* University of Ljubljana

Initially, Marcel Duchamp's preoccupation with the expanded perceptible experience is articulated mostly in terms of optics, mechanics, and perspective and it is expressed through the idea of extra-retinal perception. He manifested his interest in broadening the limits of visibility by optical and technical experiments accompanying the construction of the Large Glass (1915–1923) or later by optical experiments with kinetic machines (Rotative plaques verre, 1920, Rotative demi- sphère, 1925). In the forties of the twentieth century, Duchamp paid more attention to tactile and erotic phenomenological experiences, the artworks from this period are mostly sculptural, deliberately engaged with materials and their processing. Duchamp's previous preoccupation with optical and mechanical is apparently replaced by his interests in haptic and organic. His sculptural work is connecting the conceptual with the bodily, sometimes subtly evoking eroticism. Duchamp’s last monumental work entitled Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946–1966), being created over the last two decades of his life, is basically focused on visual experience and eroticism. While observing the work through the peepholes of the wooden door, the look deprived of a physical touch establishes the oscillatory experience melting visual and tactile sensation. The multidimensional bodily experience of space, time and meaning can be thus the common point allowing us to compare Duchamp’s last, formally quite different work Given with the Large Glass.

Optical tactility The notion of optical tactility as formulated by Michael Taussig (1993) can be described as a specific perceptual qualitative transformation of visual sensing into

* [email protected]

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the haptic mean of contact. To experience this, it is essentially “to insist on breaking away from the tyranny of the visual notion of image […] To emphasize the non-visual is to emphasize the bodily impact of imaging […]” (Taussig 1993, pp. 57-58). Taussig states that similar experience of non-visual imaging can be caused by the ritual use of psychodelic drugs. While experiencing altered states of consciousness “you may also see your body as you feel yourself leaving it, and one can even see oneself seeing oneself – but above all this seeing is felt in a non-visual way. You move into the interior of images, just as images move into you” (ibid. p. 58).

We can find similar observations about the expanded character of and altered perceptional experience in some of the writings of Walter Benjamin, which are concerned with the influence of contemporary technology capable of mechanic reproduction onto the way of sensing the physical reality as well as experiencing images. “Optical unconsciousness” and a specific haptic quality of images recorded by a movie camera for example, reveal the hidden physiognomic aspects of visual worlds. Benjamin reflects upon the modifications of human perception caused by new optical technologies: while merging the perceived object with the body of the perceiver, the physiognomic aspects of visual phenomena gain bodily or tactile presence; they start to exist as a tactile reality (phenomena) at the level of bodily perception.

In line with Benjamin’s reflections, Taussig’s anthropological analysis of contemporary visual culture observes that nowadays it is not possible to deal with the multiplication of new forms of visual reality merely by visual contemplation anymore, but only by a new sort of tactility: “This provides a vivid notion of optical tactility, plunging us into the plane, where the object world and the visual copy merge” (ibid., p. 35). The accelerated invention of new optical devices and technologies of reproduction caused the disturbance of tactility up to the point where the eye is taking over the tactile sensation: while looking at the world, observer is simultaneously touching it, simultaneously, the dematerialized form of the world itself is entering into his own body.

The notorious Duchamp’s appeal1 to abolish the superiority of the retinal (visual) in perceiving the work of art cannot be understood only as promotion of the conceptual aspect of the artwork (an idea). His emphasis on the non-retinal experience of art can be comprehended as an initiative for searching the new forms of perceptual or sensual dimensions in the constitution of an artwork. The idea is manifested in his artwork as a constant aspiration to span the perceptional experience into a domain of discernable crossings between the visual and the non- visual, the sensible and the intelligible.

Apart from a range of artworks based on the exploration of the issues mentioned above, Duchamp was concerned with this topic particularly by his invention of the notion of infrathin. The collection of forty six notes, published posthumously in

1 “The painting should not be exclusively retinal or visual” (Duchamp 1975, p. 183).

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the booklet Notes2, uncovers the artist in a less conceptual but intuitive light. In many cases the examples of infrathin perceptual qualities describe subtle sensorial transitions (between audible and visual, visual and tangible…).

Magnifying glass for touching infrathin.

The warmth of a seat (that had just been vacated) is infrathin.

When the fumes of tobacco also smell of the mouth that exhales it, the two odors commingle by way of infrathin.

2 forms cast in the same mold (?) differ from each other by infra thin separable amount.

The condensation or moisture on polished surfaces (glass, copper) is infrathin.

(Duchamp 1980 (n. 32r, 4, 11v, 35, 36) pp. 21-36)

Referring to infrathin dimension, Duchamp is describing subtle sensorial experiences, which escape any form of conceptualization and strictly rational (logic) comprehension. Thierry de Duve (1984, p. 235) argues that the invention of infrathin is another form of Duchamp’s aspiration to stimulate the observer’s imagination. Duchamp was attentively observing a specific aspect of ephemeral, mostly banal incidents, employing the notion of infrathin as a conceptual instrument for describing the infinitesimal aspects of physical phenomena as a mean to define barely- or non-sensual but still imaginable phenomenological events. Duchamp’s neologism infrathin can be understood as the “elucidation of the intelligible embodied in the sensible”, establishing thus a particular connection of cerebral/mental and visceral/sensual qualities. Didier Semin observes that “Duchamp’s notes on infrathin attempt to identify those unheard of moments where a pure abstraction of the fourth dimension would deliver itself up in an indisputably concrete, yet extraordinarily fleeting manner” (Semin 2004, p. 245).

Large Glass and the Haptic Experience of Optical In his notes3 accompanying the creation of the Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, 1915–1923), Duchamp writes that the work on glass was originally conceived to capture the projected shadow of a higher dimension reality: the upper part of the Glass contains the Bride, imagined as being a three dimensional shadow of a four dimensional entity.

2 The notes of Marcel Duchamp have been published in two parts: Notes, Champs- Flammarion. Paris 1980 and Duchamp du signe, Champs-Flammarion. Paris 1975. Notes are divided into four thematic parts: Inframince, Le Grand Verre, Projets and Jeux de mots. 3 Dating period of Duchamp’s notes concurs with the construction of the Large Glass, mostly in its preparatory and beginning stage (1912–1915); they are collected in the Box of 1914 and the Green Box (1934). Moreover, some notes from the same or later period and collected later in the White Box (1966) deal with the problem of fourth dimension in connection with the Large Glass.

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In spite of the complex narrative configuration of elements constituting the imaginary of the Glass – the Bride, a group of Bachelors and a set of mechanic devices, which transform and translate erotic energies on the Glass, the primary concern of Duchamp was a visualization of the imperceptible relation of the visible and invisible.

The conceptualization of Large Glass relied on Duchamp’s deliberating use of transparence and its relevant optical effects. He drew his inspiration on the use of perspective, but only up to the point of its anamorphic negation: by applying dimensional analogy to conceptualize the transition from 3rd dimension to the 4th dimension he opposed to the classical rule of linear perspective, which is reducing 3rd dimension to 2nd dimension. By this mean, he introduced the idea of specific perspective, which can only be reached by engaging the particular optical tactility of sensation or so to speak, by employing the mysterious “sixth sense” of perception.

It is not surprising, as George Didi-Huberman (2008) observes, that the Glass, being conceived as a projection of imaginary four dimensional entity into our three dimensional world, was considered in optical as well as in tactile (haptic) terms. In his writings, Duchamp himself accentuated a tactile aspect of vision:

Use transparent glass and mirror for perspective 4.

Analogy: perspective 4: the tree dimensional perspective representation of an object 4 will be perceptible to the eye 3 just as the perspective of a cathedral is perceptible to the flat eye2 (and not to the eye 3). This perception for the eye 2 is a wandering- perception (relating to the sense of distance).

An eye 2 will only have a tactile perception of a perspective 3. It must wander from one point to another and measure the distances. It will not have a view of the whole like the eye 3. By analogy: wandering perception by the eye 3 of perspective 4.

(Duchamp 1975, p. 125; translation: Sanouillet M. and Peterson E. 1989, p. 88)

Or, we can say, the eye will not see the whole as an “eye”, unless it wanders in a “tactile” way (“tactile exploration”) over the surface of the glass. Wandering means moving, implying the dimension of time. Ordinary visual perception, while focusing at the point a, point b, point c etc. cannot reach the space “in between”. One can only attain the whole by the complex perception, conducting a sort of optical tactility and a non-retinal “sixth sense”, capable to perceive the fullness of the “empty” space between the point a and point b (as a space-time continuum).

The Large Glass is conceived on deliberate use of optical effects of glass, which allow the constitution of spatial multiplying or dissections, imaginary separations and refractions. The surface of glass is transparent as well as mirroring, thus incorporating duality that works like a visual trap by destabilizing the ordinary perceptional experience of space and time. As Lyotard states, the Glass is

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embodying two kinds of mirrors: the first one is formed by a virtual intersection perpendicular to both parts of the Glass (upper and lower) – at the point of the middle transversal. The second mirror is engaged by modification of our sight: the transparent surface is not only the medium of “seeing through” but is also reflective; it is up to the observer to choose what to be engaged with, what to see; object reality around the Glass, the complex iconography on its surface, the ephemeral reflection of light in the space, his own reflection or his own mental projections. The simultaneous intersection of transparency and reflection induces a specific perception of transitional virtual space in motion, where cast shadows are melting the vision of the real objects, represented reality and imaginary mental worlds, thus creating an intangible impression of fleeting allusions and apparitions.

Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas Duchamp’s last monumental artwork entitled Given 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas strongly differs from the Large Glass formally speaking, but notwithstanding reformulates the problem of expanded perceptual experience in a very new way. While the Large Glass is inducing the extra-retinal, unstable, and mobile perceptual experience by using the optical effects of glass and methodologically, dimensional analogy, the installation Given establishes the conditions of experiencing erotic tactile vision by constructing a physical distance between the viewer and the viewed. The erotic story between the bride and her bachelor(s) is connecting both artworks, as well as practically all elements from the Large Glass are transposed into the scene of Given: the bride, illuminating gas, waterfall etc. In both works, the fourth dimension is treated as a conceptual fact which cannot accomplish in physical reality; it remains to be unseen and untouched, though it can be experienced and conceived.

The key element of the installation Given, constructing the distance between the viewer and the scene, is a wooden door, being perforated by two peepholes to pear through it. The door is setting up the obstacle for the observer’s body but not for his curious gaze. Thus, the barrier is dividing a corporeal experience from the visual: the erotic and seductive scene invites us to approach, to touch, to explore it from near; however, the wooden door (in front of which we cannot be nothing else but still) sets up the situation to become aware of the body in a new and particular way. By visual scope we become part of the scene, out of which we stay, in the same time, excluded. The position of the body is opposed to the gaze and the visual energy directed to the stage is returned back and transformed into strong sensation of excited but immobile state of the body. The installation Given is trying to define the imaginary “inter-space” by breaking down with any illusionism or symbolic connotations of the artwork. The spectator is seeing him/herself seeing, sensing him/herself sensing; the self-awareness increases while sensing his/her own body immanence.

Duchamp’s work can induce the perceptional experience which is not purely optical neither strictly conceptual, but essentially corporeal, melting the cerebral and the visceral. The optical tactility is plunging us into a bodily experience of

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images, merging the object world and its visual reflection into the same corporeal plane. The haptic power of vision, the mediation of visual into tactile physical experience engages the perception of space “in-between” as described by Didi- Huberman:

The point is not to choose between what we see […] and what sees us; the important is the space between. It is needed to be dialectical, therefore, to try to think the contradictory oscillation in its rhythmic extension and contraction (the heart beat that pulses, the tide of the sea that waves). A moment that imposes neither a surfeit of sense nor the cynical absence of sense. This is the moment that opens the gap between what observes us in what we see.4

References - Clair, J. 2000. Sur Marcel Duchamp et la fin de l’art. Paris: Gallimard. - Cabanne, P. 1967/1987. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. London: Da Capo Press. - Décimo, M. (ed.) 2008. Marcel Duchamp et l’érotisme. Dijon: Les presses du réel. - Didi-Huberman, G. 1992. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde. Paris: Minuit. - Didi-Huberman, G. 2008. La ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte. Paris: Minuit. - Duchamp, M. 1975/1994. Duchamp du signe. Ecrits. Sanouillet M. and Peterson E. (eds.), Paris: Flammarion. - Duchamp, M. 1980/1999. Notes. Matisse P. and Hulten P. (eds.), Paris: Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou/Flammarion. - Duve, T. de. 1984. Nominalisme pictural. Marcel Duchamp, la peinture et la modernité. Paris: Minuit. - Judovitz, D. 1998. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. - Lyotard, J. F. 1977. Les transformateurs Duchamp. Paris: Galilée. - Sanouillet, M. and Peterson, E. 1989. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, New York: Da Capo Press. - Schwarz, A. 2000. The Complete works of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Delano Greenidge Editions.

4 Didi-Huberman 1992, pp. 51-52: “Il n’y a pas à choisir entre ce que nous voyons (…) et ce qui nous regarde (…). Il y a, il n’y a qu’à s’inquiéter de l’entre. Il n’y a qu’à tenter de dialectiser, c’est-à-dire tenter de penser l’oscillation contradictoire dans son mouvement de diastole et de systole (la dilatation et la contraction du Coeur qui bat, le flux et le reflux de la mer qui bat) … C’est le moment où ce que nous voyons commence juste d’être atteint par ce qui nous regarde – un moment qui n’impose ni le trop-plein de sens, ni l’absence cynique de sens. C’est le moment où s’ouvre l’antre creusé par ce qui nous regarde dans ce que nous voyons.

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Dr. Uršula Berlot Duchamp and the notion of optical tactility

- Semin, D. 2004. La piste du hérisson. Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon. - Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses. New York, London: Routledge.

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The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction and Mediated Reality. Ethics and Aesthetics in the dream and cream world of every-extending publicity

Ulla Karttunen * University of Eastern Finland

Shift in publicities My focus is on the public, published, reproduced sides of reality – existing in the contemporary world is something more than immediate presence, it very often also means touching what is already mediated. Reality, as public and social, consists not only of persons, actions and social structures; it is also made up of images and words, reflections and reproductions. I shall call these reproduced parts of reality-mediated realities.

* [email protected], [email protected]

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Art and science are traditional forms of reflecting and interpreting reality, but in today’s society there are also many forms of mediated reality that did not exist just a short while ago.

Public realms of words and images have undergone enormous change, massive growth, and a kind of virtual urbanization. In spite of silent villages, consisting of prayer books, textual newspapers and religious imagery, we have today real publiCITIES: crowded centres and favelas consisting of advertisements, reality shows, magazines, lifestyle books, music videos, blogs and so on. This development has been made possible by various technical discoveries, inventions from photography and cinema to computers and digital reproduction.

In the 19th century advertising, marketing, entertainment, celebrity culture and similar fields were either non-existent or minimal if we compare their coverage today.1 These areas are generally based on visual enjoyment, so aesthetics (with its visual orientation criticized in anti-ocularcentric2 philosophy) could have dealt with them. Nonetheless these areas are still very seldom treated by aesthetics.3

In the public sphere – in reproduction technologies and the productions they enable – we see shifts, changes, in different fields:

1 In the timeline of celebrity culture in Cashmore (2006, pp. 270–279), there was little activity before the 20th century. In the 19th century the celebrities mentioned are still figures like Charles Dickens or Oscar Wilde, persons with a life’s work. 2 Martin Jay (1993) and David Michael Levin (1993) have criticized that Western thinking and aesthetics has been dominated by a privileging of vision over the other senses. Jay (1993) reads French philosophers such as Georges Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida as critics of ocularcentrism. 3 Despite the existence of applied aesthetics or contemporary pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s apology for popular arts is well known (Shusterman, 1992, Shusterman, 2000), but with advertisements or internet porn we move still further from today’s acceptable popular arts, like rap or comic strips, and especially into more socially charged areas, whose processing needs an interdisciplinary approach, which joins cultural and media studies and sociology with aesthetics.

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There’s a shift not only from immediate to mediated realities, but also from the textual to the visual, from local to global, from mechanical to digital reproduction, from information to entertainment, from state-controlled to market-based structures, from the religious to the profane, from intimacy to publicity and from innocent to sexualized/pornificated media surfaces.

These histories of change can be represented by a simple series of advertising pictures.

Advertisements were at first textual, seeking to give information. Until the 1960s one can see a kind of chastity and innocence for contemporary viewers in the advertisement images. In the present situation, on the other hand, most ads are visual, and constructing brands means building mental images of happiness, which generally means simply erotic attraction.

Ads, like entertainment, must be sexy, because it helps producers to sell products. The principles of selling and competing form the ethics of contemporary consumer society. The market economy has made an enormous advance from the sexual liberation of the 1960s: advertising would lack means without sexual connotations. Erotic contents are so obvious in contemporary media, advertisement and entertainment that they could be called a norm, a law. To describe erotic connotations as a norm, I have a still of a commercial video that has been banned in the United Kingdom.

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The reason why this ad has been banned is here the most interesting. It was not for erotic reasons, although there is an actress who takes ecstatic, orgiastic positions. The brand is well known and appreciated: YSL’s perfume Belle d’Opium.

The Advertising Standards Authority declared “the woman’s actions simulated drug use”. That was hardly noticeable in this erotically explicit ad, but sufficient. Simulated or real erotic scenes could not serve as a reason for banning, because they confirm the standard.

However, the standards are different in art and in advertisements. If this picture were included in a market-critical work, an issue we will examine later, it would have been banned for 25 years – and for another reason.

Mediated realities and aesthetic economy Various fields of contemporary life are linked to the virtual and digital realms. We use e-mail and social media, search for information, read internet magazines, buy flights and reserve hotels on the internet, order books, check translations, listen to music, read blogs, and so forth.

In the digital age our relation to reality has become more and more mediated. I do not, however, mean to speak of mediated realities as a danger. Art is not a

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danger merely because it is generally fictive or representative, not direct action. Mediatedness is just a fact, and should be just a starting point for aesthetics to grow to reach new realms of reality: fields that are as real as reality, but also virtual, fictive, representative as art. If aesthetic research deals with mediated realities, it will also notice that the borders between the aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of the real world are blurry.

Mediated realms are part of the aesthetic economy. The contemporary Western economy has largely been turned aesthetic. From habitation to traffic, from food to clothes, from media to entertainment, consumers are seduced by aesthetic refinement. The aesthetic economy seeks to transform customers’ lives into a never-ending flow of enchantment and pleasure. We can refer to all productions that have been designed to sell through sensual pleasure with the term aesthetic economy.4

In numerous fields in contemporary society the aesthetic and the economic are intertwined. Contemporary society shows in every detail that the era of the

4 Economics and aesthetics have generally been kept apart in the history of aesthetics. For recent efforts to treat aesthetic and economic theories together see Mossetto, 1993 and Gagnier, 2000. Entwistle, 2009, uses the concept of aesthetic economy in a case study focusing on fashion.

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aesthetic field being separated from the practical is over, at least if aesthetics wants to remain a relevant science and say something about contemporary reality.

The aesthetic economy also has an impact on mass media.5 In the digital age media has undergone a development of both visualization and simplification; news are sold as scandalized visual products. Information delivery is under massive aesthetization, under market terms.

Even before the digital age, there has been talk of a process of tabloidization. This term signifies that communication has become more condensed and sensationalized, that there is a shift to a more entertainment-oriented content, and a shift from verbal to visual priorities. Tabloidization has been seen as a threat to rational debate: the stress upon the sensational and emotive undermines the place of reason.6 In the digital realm this process only goes further.

The human being in the digital age: consuming advertisements One material example of tabloidization, scandalization, and tendencies towards simplification and visualisation of media can be seen in the contemporary coverage of celebrity culture. “Celebrities are performative texts: they act out.” (Marshall 2006, 11)

In celebrity culture the worlds of media and advertising intermix. A celebrity is someone who has become a picture in repetition, an advertisement in continual reproduction. From a basic-style celebrity we do not even remember why he or she is famous. What is important is that images are delivered widely. “Each time we are photographed, it could be argued, we reproduce.” (Giles 2006, p. 482.)

One might claim that cultural studies can deal with celebrities, but aesthetics is about beauty. Let us then talk about what is beautiful.

While in a plane last summer travelling to the 18th International Congress of Aesthetics in Beijing, I happened to hear a true story from the Chinese countryside. There was a family who wanted to give their daughter the most beautiful name, a name in English. The baby was honoured with the name Pornstar.

The story summarizes in one word the perceived message of Western media. The aim of human beings today is to become famous and sexy, and the training to

5 The scene of medias, publicities, must always be spoken of in the extreme plural, for there is not a single mass media, but an ”amorphous plurality”; Siegert, 2003, p. 38. 6 Critics of the phenomenon see that ”the process of tabloidization is usually considered to sacrifice information for entertainment, accuracy for sensation and to employ tactics of representation which entrap and exploit its subjects”, but ”it would have to be admitted that many of the concerns expressed about the influence of tabloidization are grounded in a conventional and longstanding hostility to popular culture itself” (Turner, 2006, pp. 491- 492).

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become a sexy star can begin already when one is a baby. Porn stars are the existential idols of the digital age.

These are pictures to show how a porn star’s education can begin already as a baby. Baby Bratz dolls wear long hair with strings and feeding bottles.

Black leather or pink fur coats with bikinis make hot babes.

Fashion, cosmetics and poses idealize a pornographic, sexy style.

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The next step for a 3- or 4-year old, at least in America, is to take part in a child beauty queen reality television program. And the next natural move would be to start a career as a teen porn star.

Internet porn stars are the prototype of celebrity, reproduction and self- commodification. The celebrity’s profession means trying to maximize visibility, deliver images. The logic is the same as anywhere else in the consumer society: advertisements are distributed as widely as possible in order to get enough paying clients.

Normally advertisement images advertise the product and nobody consumes them. In Internet porn the situation has changed. Images in the free-access pages are actually advertisements that seek to lure visitors to pay sites. But because there are millions of free images in circulation, most consumers just use them, without even going on to the products advertised.

For the first time in history the advertisement image in itself has become the object of consumption and enjoyment. A large clientèle has begun to consume ads on a daily basis.

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Consumer culture is in this gesture – human being as a consumer of advertisements – sucked inside flesh, made part of a personal and intimate being.

Art in the digital age: art of success and seduction Everybody remembers from Walter Benjamin at least one thing: his article The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2008 (1936)) is one of the most canonical articles of art. It is philosophical already in its title, which speaks about technologies, the meaning of reproduction techniques, for interpreting the status of art.

When environmental and applied aesthetics have led aesthetics to study the real world, we could read from Benjamin another extension for aesthetics as well. We should not just deal with art or reality, but mediated, reproduced realities as well, and also see how technological conditions shape the concept of art.

Unfortunately, I have no time here to concentrate on digital technologies in producing art, although I am also a visual artist, who has focused precisely on digital imagery. Here I am more interested in the effects of how the digital age has formed social reality and what kind of place the contemporary situation gives to art.

Benjamin wrote about the impact that reproduction technologies have had on the definition of art. In the corresponding ways we must ask if the structure of contemporary reality – digital reproduction as its reproduction technology, and mediated and virtual realities as its living world – produces changes in the ways that art and reality are understood. Benjamin argued that art loses its aura, but he also hinted towards a new politics of art. What could be the politics of art in the age of digital reproduction? Is there any place for controversial art in our dreamy universe of seduction and fulfilment?

The concept of contemporary art is considered to have begun from the 1960s. One important starting point is seen in Andy Warhol’s replicas of celebrities and

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ads, as the whole range of Arthur C. Danto’s books relate.7 Here, in Warhol, the importance of publicity and commercialism has been built into the concept of contemporary art.

Andy Warhol advertising hairspray

There is a direct line from Warhol to Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst: art that is inventive, ironic, and witty with a pop attitude, market-minded, monumentalistic, as shiny and cool as the best design. Warhol, Koons and Hirst have created the artist as CEO, with his or her own production team, factory and workers, equipment of financial and media consults.

7 Danto writes about the revelatory moment in front of the Brillo Boxes in many books, e.g. (Danto 1986, pp. ix–x, pp. 171–172; Danto 1987, p. 208, p. 216; Danto 1994, pp. 6–7, p. 12, p. 384)

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Much lesser known art also follows this line of ironical, conventional and true-to- market art. Art retraces the easy shocks and seductions of advertising and luxury objects, with spicy, nasty and quasi-rebellious details (like skulls) borrowed from urban style boutiques for teenagers.

In this stylish conventionality where art is one part of the style business, its philosophy owes much to two unphilosophical items: celebrities and luxury objects. An uncritical part of the art world cannot stop singing the praises of this glorious business. From the celebrity cult such art borrows the importance of the largest possible publicity, and from luxury objects the largest possible price and creating surplus value by the brand.

Is there any possibility of resistance, of questioning, in these altars of seduction, the ironical pop of ludo-capitalism?8

8 The concept of “Ludo-capitalism” is from de Mul (2010).

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The contemporary artist Thomas Hirschorn understands art as resistance in his 2011 Venice Biennale work.9 It has been said of Michel Houellebecq that he “tackles the dark side of the late-20th century: the descent of the west into an orgy of consumerism.”10

What are possibilities of critical, resistant art in the orgy of consumerism? Perhaps we should meet this question from the other end: if the orgies of the market establish the laws of contemporary society, is the only place for critical art as a crime? Let us examine one case where art criticizing the dream world of the market was seen as a crime.

A case from Finland

The artwork (Ulla Karttunen, the Virgin-Whore Church, in the exhibition Ecstatic Women: Holy Virgins of the Church and the Porn, 2008 Kluuvi Gallery, Helsinki City Art Museum) criticized the same jubilated fields that I have introduced earlier in this paper.11 It was a work of reality art, where one part consisted of direct prints from the Internet in the floor of the carrage-chapel.

9 Hirschorn (2011). 10 ’Michel Houllebecq Biography’ (2008). 11 See e.g. Heikkilä & Purhonen 2008, Hoikka & Rautiainen 2009, Jyränki & Kalha 2009, Karttunen 2009, 2010 & 2011, Schanz 2008, Sevänen 2010, Vänskä 2011.

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Reality art comes close to various genres of contemporary art, such as socially engaged art or activist art. In reality art, commenting on real-world phenomena, acting, is more important than the object.

This artwork offered commentary on public mediated reality, the virtual flesh market in Internet: teen porn galleries. It is interesting that on the Internet there is a gallery structure more popular, global and available than art has ever had.

Is it possible to criticize Internet galleries in an art gallery? Not in Finland. The work sent the artist to court, which ruled that artists are not allowed to make critical comments of society as researchers or journalists are.12 Artists must accept markets as they are. Teen Topanga, whose picture was presented in the previous chapter and who said she wanted to become famous, was one of the stars included in the material.

12 The Judgment of the Helsinki City Court, 22 May 2008, p. 20.

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As we see from the statistics, teen porn stars can be much more famous than the most important internationally known contemporary artists, who have a long career behind them. Teen Topanga advertises herself as “just 18”, because teen porn stars remain forever at their 18th birthday.

A Google search also returns in 0.16 seconds 13,80013 pictures of Teen Topanga. In spite of this immense publicity, cultural criticism of the phenomenon is forbidden.

A collection of the teen porn brands piled on the floor of the Virgin-Whore Church

This case of Virgin-Whore Church might be quite extraordinary in the history of censorship. As far as can be determined from case studies from art trials and censorship cases, this is the first time when justice has judged market reality legal but commentary or criticism of this market in art illegal.14 Reality is fine, but criticism of reality is a crime.

13 Google search 30 June 2011. 14 For art trials, see McClean 2007; for art censorship in America, see Bolton 1992, Dubin 1992, Dubin 1999, Heins 1993, Heins 2001, Byrd 2006.

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Ethics and aesthetics in the age of consumerism When the ethos of the market is creamy and dreamy, it demands that art be made in the same spell. Porn can of course be used in art, but in a glorifying, sweet way – one cannot take reality as it is. Warhol-like beautifications of teen porn stars would surely be okay, and Koons already has his heavenly porn works.

Ethics and aesthetics in the age of consumerism are constructed on pleasure, on a pornified sweetness. That is why reality art, when it is too real, is a crime.

Art becomes crime, if it does not glorify the market.15 The task of art in the age of digital reproduction and mediated realities remains offering heaps of whipped cream, in order to conceal reality.

This last picture is from a performance where I gave people the possibility to stone me to death (if the stoning would have been just after the case and the media uproar it provoked, I would not be here to talk about it, but it occurred one and half years later). In an advanced market society like Finland there is not much place for art as resistance.

15 As Benjamin (1996 (1921), p. 289) writes in his ”Capitalism as Religion”, ”Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction.”

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References - Benjamin, W. 2008. Dream Kitsch. (1927)- Benjamin, W. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. - Benjamin, W. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction. Second version. (1936)- Benjamin, W. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. - Benjamin, W. 1996. “Capitalism as Religion” (1921) Benjamin, W. 1996. Selected Writings, volume 1 (1913-1926). Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. - Bolton, R. (ed.) 1992. Culture Wars: Documents from recent controversies in the Arts. New York: New Press. - Byrd, C. 2006. Potentially Harmful: The Art of American Censorship. Curated by Cathy Byrd, with Susan Richmond. The Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta: Georgia State University. - Cashmore, E. 2006. Celebrity/Culture. London, New York: Routledge. - Danto, A. C. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. - Danto, A. C. 1987. The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall Press. - Danto, Arthur C. 1994. Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays & Aesthetic Meditations. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. - De Mul, J. 2010. “Playing arts. Ludic activism in the digital domain. The <>”, The XVIIIth International Congress of Aesthetics, Peking University, Beijing, China, 9-13 August 2010. - Dubin, S. C. 1992. Arresting Images: Impolitic, Art and Uncivil actions. Routledge. New York: London. - Dubin, S. C. 1999. Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation. New York and London: New York University Press. - Entwistle, J. 2009. The aesthetic economy of fashion: markets and value in clothing and modeling. New York: Berg. - Gagnier, R. 2000. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. - Gumbrecht, H. U. & Marrinan, M. (ed.) 2003. Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. - Heikkilä, M. & Purhonen, T. 2008. Kriittinen taide sensuurin hampaissa, Helsingin Sanomat 23.2.2008

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- Heins, M. 1993. Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America’s Censorship Wars. New York: The New Press. - Heins, M. 2001. Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth. New York: Hill and Wand. - Hirschorn, T. 2011. Chrystal of resistance, Venice Biennale 2011 [online] http://www.crystalofresistance.com/statement.html [30 Jun 2011] - Hoikka, M. & Rautiainen, P. 2009. Neitsythuorakirkko ja taiteilijan ilmaisuvapaus, Defensor Legis 4/2009, Helsinki. - Jay, M. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. - Jyränki, J. & Kalha, H. 2009. Tapaus Neitsythuorakirkko. Helsinki: Like. - Karttunen, U. 2009. Critical art as a crime; Criticism of market-based values and popular culture superstars brings artist to court in Berlusconian Finland. – Karttunen, U. 2009. L’Amour et La Mort / Invisible Book. Helsinki: Rööperi art gallery. - Karttunen, U. 2010. “Art as crime: The possibility of critical art in a market-based society.” A Paper presented at the "Diversities in Aesthetics", The XVIIIth International Congress of Aesthetics, Peking University, Beijing, China, 9-13 August 2010. - Karttunen, U. 2011. Art as Crime – Karttunen, U. 2011, Blindfold / Zavezanih oci. Exhibition catalogue, Ljubljana, Galerija Alkatraz 25.11.- 9.12.2011. Publicisticino drustvo ZAK, Ljubljana. - Levin, D. M. (ed.) 1993. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. - McClean, D. (ed.) 2007. The Trials of Art. London: Ridinghouse. - ’Michel Houllebecq Biography’ in The Guardian 22 July 2008 [online] http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/13/michel.houellebecq [30 Jun 2011] - Marshall, P. D. (ed.) 2006. The Celebrity Culture Reader. New York and London: Routledge. - Mossetto, G. 1993. Aesthetics and Economics. Dordrect, Kluwer Academic Publishers. - Schanz, A. L. 2008. Finnland - Zensur - “Neitsythuorakirkko”. Art, das Kunstmagazin, art-magazin.de 23.2.2008 [online] http://www.art- magazin.de/szene/4182/finnland_zensur [30 November 2011] - Sevänen, E. 2010. “Contemporary Art as a Criticism and Counterforce of the Prevalent Societal Rationality”, A paper presented at the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology 11- 17 July, Gothenburg, Sweden 2010 - Shusterman, R. 1992. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell. - Shusterman, R. 2000. Performing live: aesthetic alternatives for the end of art. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

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- Siegert, B. 2003. “There Are No Mass Media.” in Gumbrecht, H. U. & Marrinan, M. (eds.) 2003, Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 30-38. - Turner, G. 2006. “Celebrity, The Tabloid And The Democratic Public Sphere.” in Marshall, P. D. (ed.) 2006. The Celebrity Culture Reader. New York and London. Routledge, pp. 487-500. - Vänskä, A. 2011. “Tapaus Ulla Karttunen.” Susanne D., Sari K. & Susanna P. (ed.) Skandaali! Suomalainen taide ja politiikka mediakohujen pyörteissä. Helsinki: Helsinki-kirjat.

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Lo estético, lo mercantil y lo patológico (La estetización del mundo, la desilusión estética y las psicopatologías de la hiperexpresión)

Leopoldo La Rubia de Prado* Universidad de Granada

En las últimas décadas hemos asistido a un fenómeno sugerente y provocador: la temática de los diferentes fines (en el sentido de finalización u ocaso) en distintos ámbitos, como el fin de la historia (Fukuyama), el fin del arte (Danto, Kuspit, Gadamer, Vattimo), el fin de la filosofía (Kosuth), etc. Sin embargo, nada de esto es nuevo; en realidad ya fue pronosticado en su momento por Hegel, aunque nada parecía haber terminado en aquella época: la historia continuó, se siguieron haciendo obras de arte y también filosofía. La cuestión radicaba no tanto en la muerte o el fin de estos ámbitos, sino un cambio en el curso de los mismos.

No es de extrañar que en el siglo XX, en el ámbito de la representación se haya tocado techo tras el denostado hiperrealismo (Richard Estes, Chuck Close, etc) al haber alcanzado las más altas cotas en el plano de la representación. El ámbito de la expresión es distinto: ahí no tiene por qué quedar resuelto nada; siempre habrá algo que decir desde las más íntimas formas de subjetividad.

Sin embargo, lo cierto es que a finales de los años 50, Ad Reinhardt, teórico, pintor y autor de “Doce reglas para una nueva academia” afirmaba en una entrevista con Bruce Glaser: “I’m merely making the last painting which anyone can make”1 (Reinhardt, 1975, p. 13). Con ello la pintura quedaba consumada. “More is less (…) Less is more”2 (Reinhardt, 1975, pp. 204-205) escribía en “Doce reglas para una nueva academia”, lo cual, unido a las doce reglas (no textura, no pincelada o caligrafía, no dibujo, no formas, no diseño, no colores, no luz, no espacio, no tiempo, no tamaño ni escala, no movimiento, no objeto, sujeto ni cuestión alguna) dejaba extremadamente restringido el campo de la pintura en

* [email protected] 1 “Estoy haciendo las últimas pinturas que se pueden hacer” 2 “Más es menos (…) Menos es más”

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aras a la pureza. Si la pintura ha sido consumada, ¿qué queda? Queda el mundo de la tridimensionalidad, propiciando así Reinhardt la aparición del Minimalismo.

No mucho después, en abril de 1964, Andy Warhol presentó en la galería Stable de Nueva York sus famosas Brillo Box, una obra de arte salida de la estantería del supermercado para quedarse en la vitrina de un museo que ocasionó una gran conmoción en la sociedad y una nueva polémica en los círculos intelectuales y del mercado del arte. Las diferencias entre estas Brillo Box y las cajas de estropajo enjabonado del mismo nombre eran imperceptibles, como señala Arthur Danto, dando lugar a la pregunta de qué hace que algo sea una obra de arte cuando no hay ninguna diferencia entre lo que es una obra de arte y lo que no lo es (indiscernibles perceptivos). El asunto no era baladí y se convirtió en un punto de inflexión en la reflexión en torno a la naturaleza del arte. Si cualquier cosa podía ser arte, nada lo era. La buena noticia es que, efectivamente, cualquier cosa puede ser arte, pero eso no quiere decir que todo lo sea. Este hecho dio lugar a una reflexión ya añeja, implícita en la Estética de Hegel, que se reavivaría tras comprobarse esta condición de indefinición del arte que algunos autores ponían sobre el tapete a partir de ese momento.

Danto, en “Tres décadas después del fin del arte” proclama: “realmente se había producido una especie de cierre en el desarrollo histórico del arte, que había llegado a su fin una era de asombrosa creatividad en Occidente de probablemente seis siglos, y que cualquier arte que se hiciera en adelante estaría marcado por lo que yo estaba en condiciones de llamar carácter poshistórico” (Danto, 2010, p. 49). El arte, como Hans Belting sostiene, tiene su comienzo hacia el año 1400, y una duración de seis siglos; posteriormente, a partir de este hito que representa la exposición de Warhol, el arte entra en un periodo distinto: el periodo poshistórico. ¿Y qué había sino arte antes de 1400? No es que no hubiera arte, sino que lo que denominamos arte, anterior a 1400, no tiene esa consideración en aquel momento. De 1400 hacia atrás apenas nos topamos con el nombre de algún autor, como Fidias, por ejemplo. En la edad Media lo que hoy consideramos arte tiene una función muy distinta a la de, por ejemplo, la fruición estética. En la Edad Media lo que denominamos arte está al servicio de la trascendencia, de ahí, en cierto modo, la nula importancia de quién fuera el autor.

Pero prosigamos un poco más con el fin del arte. Para Gadamer “son principalmente los últimos años los que rechazan el nuevo arte meneando la cabeza, como si fuera el fin del buen gusto y del arte verdadero. Hoy se trata, como es notorio, de una ruptura y una irrupción más profundas, de una desconfianza y suspicacias más radicales que nos desafían a todos a reflexionar y llegar al fondo de la situación“ (Gadamer, 1990, p. 65). Pero esta ruptura puede convertirse, en opinión de Gadamer, en “germen de un nuevo crecimiento” (Gadamer, 1990, p. 65). Gadamer menciona el fin de la historia, haciendo alusión a Hegel. Si el fin de todo hombre, de todo pueblo, es la libertad, una vez sea conseguida queda clausurada la historia. Fin del arte, fin de la historia, fin de la

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metafísica. ¡Demasiado fines para que no haya algo de eso, por más que se ponga en duda!

Donald Kuspit en El fin del arte sostiene que el arte ha llegado a su término porque ha perdido su carga estética. El arte ha sido sustituido por el “postarte”, un término inventado por Alan Kaprow como una nueva categoría visual que eleva lo banal por encima de lo enigmático, lo escatológico por encima de lo sagrado, la inteligencia por encima de la creatividad. Remontando la desaparición de la experiencia estética hasta las obras y la teoría de Marcel Duchamp y Barnett Newman, Kuspit sostiene que la devaluación es inseparable del carácter entrópico del arte moderno y que el antiestético arte posmoderno constituye su fase final. A diferencia del primero, que expresaba el inconsciente humano universal, este último ha degenerado en una expresión de estrechos intereses ideológicos. Como reacción a la vacuidad y el estancamiento del postarte, Kuspit señala el futuro estético y humano que traen los Nuevos Viejos Maestros. Pero pongámosle nombres propios a los gustos de Kuspit: él disfruta con la obra de Bill Viola, que es un consagrado videoartista. Y si no, vean su magnífico The reflecting pool.

Gianni Vattimo también reconoce la deuda con Hegel respecto a la temática de la “muerte del arte”. Para el filósofo italiano “la muerte del arte es algo que nos atañe y que no podemos dejar de tener en cuenta. Ante todo, como profecía y utopía de una sociedad en la que el arte ya no existe como fenómeno específico, en la que el arte está suprimido y hegelianamente superado en una estetización general de la existencia” (Vattimo, 2007, p. 50). “La práctica de las artes – continúa Vattimo– comenzando desde las vanguardias históricas de principios del siglo XX, muestra un fenómeno general de ‘explosión’ de la estética fuera de los límites institucionales que le había fijado la tradición” (Vattimo, 2007, p. 50). En mi opinión, el hecho de que lo bello haya sido, en gran medida extirpado del ámbito del arte provoca que se refugie en otros ámbitos es una de las razones que ha dado lugar a dicha estetización. En esta misma dirección crítica se expresa Yves Michaud cuando escribe en El arte en estado gaseoso:

“Este mundo es exageradamente bello. Bellos son los productos empacados, la ropa de marca con sus logotipos estilizados, los cuerpos reconstruidos, remodelados o rejuvenecidos por la cirugía plástica, los rostros maquillados, tratados o lifteados, los piercings y los tatuajes personalizados, el ambiente protegido y conservado, el marco de vida adornado por las invenciones del diseño, los equipos militares con su aspecto cubo-futurista, los uniformes rediseñados tipo constructivista o ninja, la comida mix en platos decorados con salpicaduras artísticas a no ser que de manera más modesta sea empaquetada en bolsas multicolores en los supermercados, como las paletas Chupa-Chup. Hasta los cadáveres son bellos cuidadosamente envueltos en sus fundas de plástico y alineados al pie de las ambulancias. Si algo no es bello, tiene que serlo. La belleza reina. De todas maneras, se volvió un imperativo: ¡que seas bello! o, por lo menos, ¡ahórranos tu fealdad!” (Michaud, 2007, p. 9).

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¿No será tanta hiperexpresividad estetizada ligada a la mercancía síntoma de algo?

Y buceando entre el abanico de posibilidades y puntos de vista que muchos autores exponen sobre el fin del arte, el autor minimalista Tony Smith, desde una perspectiva muy distinta, “siente, conduciendo de noche por una carretera sin terminar, una experiencia ‘reveladora’ de algo ‘planeado pero no socialmente reconocido’. Una experiencia ‘real’, ‘no artística’, más novedosa y por descubrir que cualquier otra cosa en arte, y que no puede ser contada o representada, sino que debe ser vivida: ‘No hay manera de enmarcarla, tienes que experimentarla’. De hecho, nos recuerda Pérez Carreño, Smith intuye la relevancia de estas consideraciones para la actividad artística puesto que afirma: ‘… debería estar claro que esto es el fin del arte’” (Pérez Carreño, 2006, pp. 61-62).

Finalmente, Jean Baudrillard, sociólogo francés cuyas aportaciones más significativas giran en torno al término “valor de cambio del signo”, que apunta al desplazamiento del valor de cambio de las mercancías a sus representaciones, como son los logos de las empresas, y la cuestión de los simulacros, se expresa siguiendo la misma línea de Vattimo y Michaud. Para Baudrillard “hoy el arte está realizado en todas partes. Está en los museos, está en las galerías, pero también en la banalidad de los objetos cotidianos; está en las paredes, está en la calle, como es bien sabido; está en la banalidad hoy sacralizada y estetizada de todas las cosas, aun los detritos, desde luego, sobre todo los detritos” (Baudrillard, 1997, p. 49), y sentencia:

“La estetización del mundo es total”. Pero a lo que, según Baudrillard hay que temerle es a la “estetización de la mercancía (…) hay que temerle a la transcripción de todas las cosas en términos culturales, estéticos, en signos museográficos. Nuestra cultura dominante es eso: la inmensa empresa del almacenamiento estético que muy pronto se verá multiplicado por los medios técnicos de la información actual con la simulación y la reproducción estética de todas las formas que nos rodean y que muy pronto pasarán a ser realidad virtual” (Baudrillard, 1997, p. 49).

Una realidad virtual que, en gran medida, no es sino creación de realidad o hiperrealidad.

Es preciso llegados a este punto y antes de proseguir con Baudrillard mencionar a algunos precedentes críticos en esta temática como Adorno en su Dialéctica de la Ilustración (1944) o Clement Greenberg en su ensayo “Vanguardia y kitsch” (1939), por cierto, previo a la influyente obra de Adorno y Horkheimer. Ya el propio Walter Benjamin en La obra de arte en la época de su reproducción mecánica de 1935, nos alerta señalando que la humanidad: “Está lo suficientemente alienada de sí misma como para vivir su propia destrucción como si de un gozo estético de primer orden se tratara. En esto consiste, señala Benjamin, la estetización de la política que propugna el fascismo. El comunismo responde con la politización del arte” (Benjamin, 2010, p. 60). Adorno, aunque mantiene posiciones muy distintas

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en cuanto al arte aurático del que habla Benjamin, sostiene también lo siguiente: “Creer que el individuo está a punto de sucumbir es un acto de fe optimista”. O sea, señala el crítico de arte mexicano Jorge Juanes siguiendo a Adorno: “el individuo ha sucumbido ya. De lo que se trata es de defenderse frente a un mundo que pugna desde todas sus perspectivas y sus despliegues por aniquilar al individuo por completo” (Juanes, 2010, p. 373). Para Adorno, en clara oposición a Benjamin, prosigue Juanes:

“la proclamada pérdida del aura, el poner todo en manos de la reproductibilidad técnica, la multiplicación de los objetos artísticos y la masificación del consumo del arte, lejos de conducir a una emancipación de los individuos, nos lleva a la industria cultural entendida como una nueva forma de homogeneización consagrada, a su manera, a la aniquilación de los individuos libres. La cultura convertida en mercancía, producto de la industria de la cultura, viene a consumar el sistema mercantil capitalista que da origen a la modernidad. Faltaba algo que se le escapaba al sistema: la cultura. El sistema ha dicho ‘adelante’, convirtamos la cultura en mercancía, la cultura también es mercantilizable, también debe ser objeto de constitución de plusvalor. Por lo tanto, con la industria de la cultura se cierra por completo el capitalismo como sistema paradigmático de la mercancía, lo cual trae consigo como consecuencia el advenimiento de la sociedad unidimensional administrada. Ya no hay nada que escape, ya no hay cabos sueltos, todo está integrado” (Juanes, 2010, pp. 374-375).

Adorno, para quien lo que no debemos perder nunca es la autonomía personal, a diferencia de Benjamin, no cree en el encabalgamiento del intelectual libre en el proceso revolucionario pues tal encabalgamiento condujo a la pérdida de la autonomía del pensador y del artista, lo cual trajo consigo consecuencias nefastas. La industria cultural, por tanto, consuma la transformación del mundo en mercancía. Aquello que escapaba, el arte, es por fin enganchado al tren de la lógica del valor intercambiable. Y es la propia mercancía la que contiene intrínsecamente, generando deseos homogeneizables, la integración de los individuos en la socialidad. Hay así una estandarización de la conciencia. La industria de la cultura estandariza la conciencia, simplifica el arte, lo vuelve digerible, comunicable, lima cualquier aspecto profundo y crítico. La cultura se convierte en espectáculo y en simulacro. Hay una apoteosis del arte convertido en entretenimiento. Impera lo trivial y lo sensiblero. Se crean gustos estándar, deseos estándar, satisfacciones estándar. La individualidad es aniquilada. La publicidad es la gran igualadora. Se da lo que llama Adorno una dominación sugestionada. El consumidor de esta cultura exige aquello que lo somete. La masa se vuelve pasiva, limitada a consumir lo que la enajena. Se trata de una dominación sutil donde el individuo se pone las cadenas de la servidumbre en un simulacro en que parece ejercer la libertad, en que parece elegir. Identificación, por tanto, con el poder que nos golpea, nos tritura y nos aniquila.

¿Y es esto aséptico, carece de consecuencias? No. Creados estos valores homogeneizables de los que todos participan sucede que aquel que nos los posee

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se siente un desdichado, un fracasado, un marginado, alguien que no ha alcanzado aquello que el sistema ofrece. Se vive la inalcanzabilidad de la enajenación como desdicha, como dolor y, por tanto, se lucha por no romper con el sistema sino por poder poseer aquello que todos poseen y que debe ser poseído, aquello que ofrecen los manipuladores de la conciencia. Lo que impera frente al individuo autónomo es el individuo asimilado y un sistema que se presenta –lo que es el colmo- como defensor de la diferencia y la libertad. Esto es lo que le ocurre al que por imperativos socializadores debe dejarse asimilar. Pero, ¿qué ocurre una vez asimilado? Sigamos con Baudrillard que, reconozcámoslo, tiene una deuda con estos autores que le precedieron.

Baudrillard no tiene reparos en afirmar que el arte es un simulacro (copia sin original), pero “un simulacro que tenía el poder de la ilusión (…) El arte era un simulacro dramático en el que estaban en juego la ilusión y la realidad del mundo, y hoy no es más que una prótesis estética (…) también el arte vendría a ser la prótesis de un mundo del cual habrá desaparecido la magia de las formas y de las apariencias” (Baudrillard, 1997: 50). Nos encontramos pues con dos vertientes del problema: la estetización del mundo y, peor aún, de la mercancía y de esa hiper abundancia de realidad estetizada, de hiperexpresión y, por otro lado la pérdida de la ilusión, la desilusión estética, ambos factores relacionados.

En El complot del arte Baudrillard deja clara esta desilusión estética comparando una vertiente del des-ilusionante cine actual con la ópera de Pekín:

“No hay más que ver esos filmes (Instinto básico, Corazón salvaje, etc) que ya no dan cabida a ninguna clase de crítica porque, en cierto modo, se destruyen a sí mismos desde adentro. Citacionales, prolijos, high-tech, cargan con el chancro del cine, con la excrecencia interna, cancerosa, de su propia técnica, de su propia escenografía, de su propia cultura cinematográfica. Da la impresión de que el director ha tenido miedo de su propio filme, de que no ha podido soportarlo (o por exceso de ambición, o por falta de imaginación). De lo contrario, nada explica semejante derroche de recursos y esfuerzos en descalificar su propio filme por exceso de virtuosismo, de efectos especiales, de clichés megalomaníacos” (Baudrillard, 2007, p. 13).

En efecto, en películas como la citada Instinto básico todo el mundo espera los dos momentos “estelares”: ver las braguitas de Sharon Stone y el esperado final en el que presuntamente se desvelará si la protagonista es o no la asesina. Triste bagaje para filmes con presupuestos multimillonarios con los que verdaderos artistas podrían hacer auténticas virguerías. En las antípodas, películas como Stalker, de Andréi Tarkovski, un director que ocupa un lugar eminente en la historia universal del cine. Sus convicciones estéticas, poéticas e intelectuales, reflejadas con rotundidad en su obra prácticamente desde su primer film, cimientan una inconfundible puesta en escena que continúa seduciendo tras más de veinte años desde su fallecimiento. En este tipo de películas, como también en las de Dreyer, Bergman, Buñuel, Sakurov, Fellini, Fassbinder y tantos otros, no importa, inclusive,

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saber cuál sea el final o el desenlace; la ilusión estética viene por la vía del arte y no de su contenido. La fotografía, el montaje, los recursos propios del cine articulan un discurso ilusionante y no un bodrio efectista y vacío.

Todo parece, para Baudrillard, programado para la desilusión del espectador, a quien no se le deja más constatación que la de ese exceso de cine que pone fin a toda ilusión cinematográfica (…) La ilusión se marchó en proporción a esa tecnicidad, a esa eficiencia cinematográfica. El cine actual ya no conoce ni la alusión ni la ilusión (…) Vamos cada vez más hacia la alta definición, es decir, hacia la perfección inútil de la imagen (Baudrillard, 2007, p.14). Cabría pensar si esta desilusión estética no es extrapolable a una desilusión en el orden ontológico respecto al lugar del ser humano en el mundo en el marco de la hiper expresividad y del bombardeo de información y de la dictadura de lo nuevo, si es que hay algo nuevo bajo el sol y no se nos venda como nuevo lo gastado, pero remozado con un marketing impecable e implacable. Baudrillard, acaso un tanto nostálgico, pero no por ello menos certero, nos invita a pensar en la Ópera de Pekín y en de qué modo, con el simple movimiento dual de dos cuerpos sobre una barca, se podía representar y dar vida al río en toda su extensión; de qué modo dos cuerpos rozándose, evitándose, moviéndose uno muy junto al otro pero sin tocarse, en una copulación invisible, podían representar en el escenario la presencia física de la oscuridad en que se libraba ese combate. Allí la ilusión era total e intensa, éxtasis físico más que estético, justamente porque se había removido (borrado) cualquier presencia realista de la noche y del río, y porque sólo los cuerpos se hacían cargo de la ilusión natural. Hoy se traerían a la escena toneladas de agua, se filmaría el duelo en infrarrojo, etc (Baudrillard: 2007, p.15). ¡En qué medida Baudrillard no iba descaminado! ¡Lo podríamos imaginar abominando del cine en 3-D o en un futuro cercano de las imágenes en hologramas! Pero estas son las categorías del camino que ha seguido nuestra sociedad, que no necesariamente nuestra cultura: la fugacidad, el instante, la novedad, como si todo fuese a terminar mañana, por eso hay que consumir y que nada se quede en los estantes del hipermercado de la cultura.

Creación de realidad o hiperrealidad y desilusión frustrante. Baudrillard sospecha que “a lo mejor ya no estamos en el arte tal como era cuando había obra. Hoy no es sino una manipulación de lo real, en fin, de los vestigios de lo real” (Baudrillard, 1997, p. 112). La manipulación de lo real da lugar asimismo a la creación de realidad, a la hiperrealidad. Análogamente sostiene que “el problema no es de pérdida del sentido, sino del demasiado sentido, del too much, de una proliferación del sentido, que a mi modo de ver afecta también al arte, afecta a la actividad artística. Hay una proliferación de expresión, de dar expresión a todo, de hacer que todo tenga un sentido estético. Eso para mí es la muerte del sentido, pero por exceso de sentido, y no por falta” (Baudrillard, 1997, p. 115). Demasiada realidad, demasiada expresión, demasiado sentido, estetización total por un lado, frustrante desilusión estética por el otro. Desilusionante estetización extensiva.

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Vale la pena en esta línea llamar la atención sobre una cuestión de tipo histórico que, en mi opinión, podría ser reveladora y nos podría ayudar a entender algunas vertientes de la situación actual. Lo que se ha venido conociendo como proyecto (político) ilustrado tiene sus primeros signos de vida a mediados del siglo XVIII con reinados como el de Carlos III, la Declaración de Independencia de los EEUU o la Revolución francesa, poco después. Pero aquel proyecto, sintetizado bajo los ideales revolucionarios de Libertad, Igualdad y Fraternidad, fue insuficiente, se vio en gran medida frustrado y malogrado poco tiempo después de su nacimiento (peor lo tuvieron en algunas otras latitudes donde pasaron del Barroco al Positivismo rompiendo así una cadena que, para los que creemos en las teorías del desarrollo, representa un lack difícil de superar posteriormente). Pero el proyecto ilustrado tuvo otras vertientes, como queda puesto de relieve a través de las Cartas sobre la educación estética del hombre (1795), de Friedrich Schiller que representa la posibilidad de alcanzar la emancipación por mediación del arte o, en otras palabras, para resolver en la experiencia el problema político, es preciso tomar el camino de lo estético, porque a la libertad se llega por la belleza. De ahí que esta formulación schilleriana se encuentre en el núcleo mismo del surgimiento de la modernidad y el régimen estético de las artes. La estética de Schiller significó un preámbulo para la formación de los proyectos de emancipación que ocurrieron a lo largo de toda la modernidad artística. Pensemos en la vinculación entre arte y praxis política en el socialismo real, por ejemplo. El sueño, en este caso, tampoco se realizó, es más, tuvo consecuencia nefastas.

Pero lo que al final permanece, -y esta es mi hipótesis-, es la estetización como poso del proyecto, de lo cual resultan: 1) El arte queda reducido a la estética y 2) estetización del mundo; esto último por varias razones, o bien porque lo bello no ha tenido más remedio que buscar otros ámbitos externos al que le fuera propio durante siglos, como el del arte, o bien debido a que esta estetización global podría representar el poso mercantilista de una esperanzadora, pero fallida, relación entre ética y estética. Intentando materializar el proyecto ilustrado en praxis política se terminó en revueltas y revoluciones cruentas. Intentando materializar el proyecto también ilustrado de hacer mejor al hombre a través del arte y la estética se terminó estetizando al mundo, con la consiguiente desilusión estética. Y todo ello en nombre de proyectos en lugar de máximas, según sugiere Thierry de Duve. Por otro lado, quizás en el marco de esta hipótesis valga la pena reflexionar sobre si ese poso del proyecto schilleriano (que prosiguen en gran medida las Vanguardias) que desemboca en la estetización global no deriva de una hiperexpresividad acaso pulsional a través de la cual podríamos entender en clave, inclusive patológica (psicótica), las extravagancias de determinadas manifestaciones artísticas que no responden a ninguna inquietud, carencia o solución planteada por el arte mismo y que, sin embargo, parecen más cercanos a postulados mercantiles de un mundo con un cierto tufillo a descomposición.

Crear realidad es lo que venimos haciendo desde hace siglos... Sin embargo, entre los modos de crear realidad, aparentemente fuera de la inercia social, del acontecer diario, están las operaciones de ingeniería social, operaciones diseñadas

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con tiralíneas en fríos despachos al margen de la inercia social. La ingeniería social diseña estrategias para modificar sustancialmente el modo de comportamiento social y la velocidad con que acontece lo social. Son operaciones según las cuales una serie de reajustes, llevados a cabo desde instancias de poder, sea éste político o fáctico, leyes, modificaciones, etc, etc, operadas en distintas vertientes y en distintas fases dan lugar a modificaciones sustanciales de la sociedad o de la percepción de la sociedad ante determinados eventos o acontecimientos. Ejemplos de hiperrealidad los hay a cientos: de la batalla de Covandonga que nunca tuvo lugar, pero diera lugar al mito de la Reconquista, a la guerra televisada del Golfo, con sus patos embadurnados a propósito en petróleo para modificar la percepción de los occidentales. Hiperrealidad, por tanto, que da lugar a la creación de realidad.

Baudrillard llama la atención acerca de las muchas ficciones que nos ofrece la vida cotidiana: el cine, la literatura, la historia oficial, el circo de los debates parlamentarios, los noticieros televisivos, los reality shows, los videojuegos, etc. En su obra La guerra del Golfo no ha tenido lugar y en muchos otros lugares avisa al ciudadano actual carente de posibilidades críticas, conceptuales o éticas a causa de la desinformación ambiental, al cual le resulta imposible distinguir qué es realidad y qué invención entre la enorme masa de novedades audiovisuales con que es abrumado a diario, los conceptos de verdad y de mentira son ya algo obsoleto. Las noticias, los acontecimientos del mundo, están tergiversados o son imposibles de verificar y, por lo tanto, son relativos, intercambiables y, en todo caso, remotos. La realidad es construida por los medios y esto afecta a todos los campos de nuestra existencia.

Esta realidad construida constituye la hiperrealidad. Pero nada de esto es aséptico, pues la desilusión puede traer consigo una fuerte carga de frustración, mientras que la creación de una realidad inventada a través de esa hiperrealidad es, en cierto modo, la operación que realiza el psicótico.

Lo que voy a plantear ahora es sencillo de entender. En un pasado no muy remoto, debido a multitud de factores, tanto familiares como sociales, entre otros, la patología más extendida era la neurosis. La neurosis está vinculada a contextos represivos. Y la pregunta que planteamos ahora es la siguiente: ¿nos hallamos actualmente en un contexto represivo? ¿Se legisla en la actualidad con objeto de reprimir las libertades individuales o, por el contrario, nos hallamos en un contexto más bien permisivo y, llamémoslo así, flexible? ¿Y la sociedad actual a través de los distintos medios, se expresa e hiperexpresa o aparece reprimida cuando todos podemos comprobar a diario a través de la “infosfera” cómo no hay apenas barrera alguna a la expresión? Pero no me refiero a la expresión, sino a la hiperexpresión y a la hiperrealidad a lo que pudiera resultar patológico. Parece claro que las psicopatologías actuales no están tan vinculadas a la represión como lo estuvieron en el pasado fruto de lo cual la neurosis se convirtió en la psicopatología más extendida. En la actualidad hemos pasado de las patologías de

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la represión y por tanto de la neurosis a las de la hiperexpresión que acarrean patologías como las distintas formas de psicosis.

Según Franco Berardi “la intuición de Baudrillard ha resultado ser importante a la larga. La patología que predominará en los tiempos que vienen no nacerá de la represión sino de la pulsión de expresar, de la obligación expresiva generalizada. Lo que parece que se extiende en la primera generación videoelectrónica son patologías de la hiperexpresión, no patologías de la represión” (Berardi, 2007, p. 59). ¿Y cuáles son estas patologías contemporáneas?: los trastornos de déficit de atención, la dislexia, el pánico. Son patologías, sostiene Berardi, “que hacen pensar en otro modo de elaboración del input informativo” (Berardi, 2007, p. 60).

Se da por sentado, por tanto, que de la represión del pasado pasamos a un estado de cosas donde no hay ocultación sino exceso, exceso de visibilidad, hiperexpresión, hiperrealidad, explosión de la infoesfera, sobrecarga de estímulos nerviosos, etc., etc., detonantes todos ellos de los estados psicóticos. Pero esta reacción ante la represión que constituye la hiperexpresividad termina resultando también patológica al no constituirse la represión en un detonante constructivo, acaso sublimado o canalizado de manera edificante. No estamos más que ante una reacción ante la represión tan patológica o peor que aquélla lo cual generaría un estado de cosas ante el cual una nueva formulación de la represión cerraría un bucle patológico del cual es preciso salir. ¿Podría pensarse, en este sentido con objeto de romper ese bucle que determinadas patologías sin una base biológica (déficit de neurotransmisores, por ejemplo) podrían ser abordadas bajo un paradigma terapéutico distinto?

Referencias - Adorno, T. y Horkheimer, M. (2007) Dialéctica de la Ilustración. Madrid: Akal. - Baudrillard, J. (1997) La ilusión y la desilusión estéticas. Caracas: Monte Ávila. - Baudrillard, J. (2007) El complot del arte. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. - Benjamin, W. (2010) La obra de arte en la época de su reproducción mecánica. Madrid: Casimiro. - Berardi, F. (2007) “Patologías de la hiperexpresión” en Archipiélago, 76, pp. 55-63. - Danto, A.C. (2010) “Tres décadas después del fin del arte”, en Después del fin del arte. El arte contemporáneo y el linde de la historia. Madrid: Paidós. - Duve, Th. De (2001) “Arqueología de la modernidad práctica”, Acto, 0, pp. 133-154 .

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- Gadamer, H.G. (1990)“¿El fin del arte? Desde la teoría de Hegel sobre el carácter pasado del arte hasta el antiarte de la actualidad”, en La herencia de Europa. Barcelona: Península. - Greenberg, C. (2002) “Vanguardia y kitsch”, en Arte y Cultura: Ensayos Críticos. Barcelona: Paidós. - Hegel, G.W.F. (1985) Introducción a la estética. Barcelona: Península- NeXos. - Juanes, J. (2010) Territorios del arte contemporáneo. Del arte cristiano al arte sin fronteras. México, D.F.: Ítaca. - Kuspit, D. (2006) El fin del arte. Madrid: Akal. - Michaud, Y. (2007) El arte en estado gaseoso. México D.F.: FCE. - Pérez Carreño, F. (2006) “Espacio y cuerpo en el arte minimal: la experiencia del arte”, en Maderuelo, J., (comp.), Medio siglo de arte. Últimas tendencias 1955-2005. Madrid: Abada editores. - Reinhardt, A. (1975) Art-as-art: the selected writings of Ad Reinhardt. Berkeley: University of California Press. - Schiller, F. (2004) Escritos sobre estética. Madrid: Tecnos. - Vattimo, G. (2007) “Muerte o crepúsculo del arte”, en El fin de la modernidad. Nihilismo y hermenéutica en la cultura posmoderna. Barcelona: Gedisa.

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Representaciones de género en el contexto global. El diálogo entre culturas y la democracia sexual: conflictos éticos y políticos

Jesús Martínez Oliva* Universidad de Murcia

El concepto de “democracia sexual” como uno de los argumentos de “la lucha de civilizaciones”. Si observamos el trazado de la genealogía de las configuraciones de las identidades de género y sexo en el Occidente actual podríamos ver una línea ascendente y progresiva que arrancaría en el Siglo de las Luces y tendría su punto álgido en los frutos cosechados a finales del siglo XX por las reivindicaciones y las luchas feministas desde los años sesenta (segunda y tercera oleadas feministas): léase una deconstrucción y desarticulación de parte de las opresiones del sistema patriarcal así como una multiplicación y aceptación de una mayor diversidad de identidades genéricas y sexuales que corrigieron las flagrantes desigualdades, injusticias y opresiones de unos sistemas que sacaban pecho y alardean de democráticos. Esta escalada de los derechos civiles de género y sexo alcanzados en Occidente son vistos como una de las expresiones más evidentes de la igualdad democrática, es lo que el sociólogo francés Eric Fassin denomina la “democracia sexual” (Fassin 2006). La extensión del dominio democrático toma forma en la segunda mitad del siglo XX en una politización creciente de las cuestiones de género y sexo, siendo éstas objeto de fuertes controversias ideológicas y políticas. Como todos sabemos, cuestiones como la prostitución, la pornografía, la violencia contra las mujeres, la paridad, el matrimonio homosexual… causan fuertes enfrentamientos entre los sectores progresistas y los más conservadores de la sociedad (con la Iglesia Católica a la cabeza). Lo más reseñable de este asunto es que la sexualidad adquiere el mismo valor político que el trabajo o la inmigración, ocupa un lugar

* [email protected]

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central en el debate democrático. Es un estandarte para la reivindicación de derechos en nombre de valores como la igualdad y la libertad una vez abandonadas las utopías de la igualdad material y económica de principios del siglo XX. La igualdad ya no es una cuestión de la igualdad entre clases sociales o entre las razas sino que ha devenido en una cuestión de igualdad entre sexos y géneros. Se ha llevado a su extremo la máxima feminista norteamericana “lo personal es político” y se ha politizado esa parte de lo privado ya que como sagazmente denunciaron autoras como Betty Friedam es en esta esfera donde se fraguan los mecanismos de poder de la opresión patriarcal y no solamente en las desigualdades laborales o en la exclusión de las esferas de poder. El término democracia sexual no es oxímoron entre dos esferas, la privada de lo sexual y la pública de la democracia como en un principio pudiera parecer. Esos logros alcanzados en Occidente se han erigido en no pocas ocasiones en categorías universales y por lo tanto necesarias (Jullien 2010). En el nuevo contexto global en el que se cruzan y conviven diversas culturas, religiones, formas diferentes en definitiva de entender la realidad y el mundo, como sabemos, estas reivindicaciones no se caracterizan por la unanimidad. Por poner el ejemplo más palmario: modelos civilizados de buen sexo y de buen género frente a modelos primitivos e incivilizados son lanzados continuamente como arma arrojadiza en el contexto político y social posterior al 11 de septiembre de 2001, o por poner otro ejemplo, qué decir de la actual Europa conservadora y xenófoba que se agita frente a una supuesta amenaza a su identidad cultural por culpa de la inmigración. La democracia sexual ha devenido una de las armas predilectas para la lucha en el conflicto de civilizaciones, que planteara Samuel Huntington (2005). Según sus tesis Occidente ha vivido la modernización y ha llegado a unos principios seculares que trascienden y se acomodan a las posturas religiosas, unos parámetros que son más avanzados y más racionales, por lo que es capaz de deliberación democrática y de autogobierno. Los otros (el afuera de Occidente) no habrían llegado a alcanzar el progreso y la modernidad estarían en un tiempo diferente en una especie de infantilismo cultural que justificaría una misión civilizadora. Misión civilizadora que capitanea Estados Unidos bajo un cruce de perspectivas seculares y no seculares. Bajo el paraguas de una reivindicación de secularidad y de ataque a las religiones integristas su planteamiento parte en realidad de la tradición judeocristiana que considera que las demás tradiciones religiosas se quedan fuera de la trayectoria de la modernización y de ahí la legitimidad de su reivindicación misionera y civilizadora del futuro. En este contexto de choque y conflicto las instrumentalizaciones del género y el sexo trazan una trayectoria de tintes colonialistas que establece un encadenamiento entre modernidad, desarrollo y políticas sexuales. La apropiación de los valores de igualdad y libertad de género y sexo como emblemas de la modernidad democrática justificaría la necesidad de una misión civilizatoria, el imperialismo de la democracia sexual. Esto genera un discurso en el que los que no aplican esta democracia sexual son construidos como los otros bárbaros, que

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aparecen como polígamos, violentos prisioneros de una cultura que oprime a sus mujeres, que impone le velo, organiza matrimonios forzosos... En palabras del propio Eric Fassin la retórica democrática poscolonial choca con la retórica colonial de las civilizaciones en el punto de la sexualidad. La libertad sexual y la igualdad entre los sexos es una cuestión de geopolítica, (la geopolítica deviene aquí en una geopolítica sexual), así Sarkozy trae a debate en su presidencia la cuestión de la identidad nacional junto a la cuestión de la inmigración y el papel de las mujeres o Estados Unidos entra en Afganistán para emancipar a las mujeres afganas del burka. Algunas teóricas como la feminista Doreen Massey, plantea que las convencionales concepciones de las geografías de la globalización (países desarrollados y no desarrollados) no son espaciales sino en realidad temporales. La narración de la modernidad y del progreso supone una victoria del tiempo sobre el espacio. Las diferencias que en realidad son espaciales son interpretadas como diferencias en el desarrollo temporal, como diferencias en el desarrollo alcanzado. De hecho si trabajamos espacialmente podemos admitir la coexistencia de distintas narrativas, establecer una serie de redes de conexión, procesos de intercambio, afinidades y diferencias. Esto nos permitiría establecer un genuino diálogo transcultural en un mundo globalizado. Hemos de resituarnos en un diálogo con la diferencia, capaz de reevaluar nuestras conexiones históricas, renegociar nuestros roles contemporáneos, y reinventar nuestros futuros con nuevos términos. También Judith Butler, como todos sabemos cabeza capital de la política sexual progresista, otorga un papel decisivo dentro de las políticas sexuales al factor del tiempo que encadena modernidad y progreso con libertad sexual, al que da una explicación basada en el mero culturalismo y por tanto carente de legitimidad para imponer su supuesta superioridad. Por otro lado critica duramente Ia instrumentalización coercitiva de la libertad en el presente, concretamente para lanzar un ataque sin paliativos contra el Islam. Por ejemplo en los Países Bajos se realiza un examen de integración a los inmigrantes que intentan acceder a su territorio, en el que se les pide que miren imágenes de parejas homosexuales besándose en la calle y que opinen si les parecen ofensivas o si están dispuestos a vivir en una democracia que defiende los derechos de los homosexuales y su libre expresión pública. Cabría preguntarse: ¿Es dicho test un examen de tolerancia o en realidad es una forma de coacción para que estas minorías religiosas desistan de emigrar a Europa? La libertad es utilizada aquí como elemento de coacción para que las minorías religiosas abandonen sus creencias y hábitos culturales para mantener Europa blanca, pura y secular. Otro de los grandes loci de nuestro tema es el debate sobre si a las jóvenes debería prohibírseles usar el velo en las escuelas y públicas basándose en la laicidad de la cultura europea (en especial en Francia, pero también se debate en otros países europeos). Vemos así como ciertas normas exclusivistas y algunas prohibiciones se convierten en precondición y teleología de la cultura que

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propician una negativa a la negociación, a permitir la diferencia cultural y lo que hacen es consolidar una serie de presupuestos culturales que catalizan en la exclusión y la abyección institucionalizada de la diferencia cultural. Por otra estas estrategias lo que parecen perseguir de forma desesperada es una pureza, una homogeneización cultural. Los discursos de la modernidad en los que la igualdad de género y la aceptación de la homosexualidad aparecen como su cima están pidiendo, en el marco del siglo XXI, que se desarticulen las luchas por la libertad sexual de las luchas contra el racismo y contra los sentimientos anti-islámicos. En este contexto Butler se siente especialmente incómoda con el uso del feminismo y la lucha por la libertad sexual como el signo de la misión civilizatoria. La filósofa norteamericana remarca los peligros de esa antinomia creada en el seno del liberalismo de la modernidad entre homofobia y racismo. Las bases de la modernidad, que se sustentan en una serie de libertades en constante progresión, deben servir como base cultural para sancionar formas de odio y abyección de índole cultural y religiosa, no para lo contrario. Lo que yo propongo no es cambiar libertades sexuales por libertades religiosas, sino más bien cuestionar el marco que asume que no pude existir análisis político que trate de analizar la homofobia y el racismo más allá de la antinomia de liberalismo. Está en juego saber si puede haber o no una convergencia o alianza entre tales luchas o si la lucha contra la homofobia debe contradecir la lucha contra los racismos culturales y religiosos. Si se mantiene dicho marco de exclusión mutua –un marco que, permítaseme sugerir, deriva en una idea restrictiva de la libertad personal, estrechamente asociada a una concepción restrictiva del progreso-, entonces parecería que entre las minorías progresistas y religiosas no existen puntos de contacto cultural que no sean encuentros de violencia y exclusión (Butler 2010, pp. 156-57). Butler lleva su discurso un paso más allá enlazando las imágenes de las mujeres afganas liberadas del burka difundidas por el ejército norteamericano con las fotos y torturas de Abu Grhaib. Butler interpreta las famosas imágenes de Abu Grhaib en las que se utilizan los tabúes culturales (del Islam) relacionados con la sexualidad como una forma extrema de humillación y violencia como la gran paradoja de la supuesta misión civilizadora en nombre del feminismo y de la libertad sexual. Los hombres son obligados a llevar ropa femenina (tabú de la homosexualidad) y las mujeres forzadas a la desnudez integral. Tenemos entonces que la supuesta misión civilizadora se basa en unas prácticas misóginas y homofóbicas que a su vez pretenderían ser liberadoras de la homofobia y la misoginia de las comunidades islámicas y de su barbarie. Las escenas de tortura se montan en nombre de la civilización contra la barbarie, y podemos ver que la “civilización” en cuestión forma parte de una dudosa política secular que es tan poco ilustrada y tan poco crítica como las peores formas de religión dogmática y restrictiva. Si las escenas de tortura son la apoteosis de cierta concepción de libertad, se trata de una concepción libre de

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toda ley y libre de toda restricción, precisamente con objeto de imponer la ley y ejercer la coacción (Butler 2010, p. 186).

El velo a través de la práctica artística reciente Adentrándonos ya en el impacto de estas fricciones identitarias en el campo de la práctica artística como apuntamos en la introducción el uso del velo es quizás uno de los temas más recurrentes en la representación visual dado su fuerte iconicidad y sus conexiones con cuestiones como la sexualidad, la religión, la vida pública, el feminismo, la identidad cultural… Esto junto con la gran cantidad de controversias y debates sociales y políticos en torno al tema ha hecho que un gran número de artistas fundamentalmente de Oriente Próximo, del norte de África y de la diáspora musulmana lo aborden en sus obras. Incluso ya se han realizado algunas exposiciones sobre el tema como: Veil, Veiling, Representation and Contemporay Art, INIVA, Oxford, 2003 y The Seen and the Hidden. (Dis)covering the Veil, Austrian Cultural Forum, Nueva York, 2009. Si rastreamos los ensayos de dichas exposiciones la sensación general que se desprende es que el velo -tanto en su uso como en su representación- es un significante cuyo significado es difícil de acotar y de fijar. Lo que “esconde” el velo en estas obras que vamos a ver no puede ser contenido en una única verdad. El velo, como símbolo, no es estático sino que está continuamente redefiniéndose dependiendo de los diferentes contextos geográficos, históricos y políticos. It stand for tradition, religious affiliation, conformity, and discipline, for crime, terrorism, anarchy, revolt, independence, republican values, and subsidarity, for abjection, silencing, and anticapitalism. The veil is not just a simple place of clothing or a modern accessory, it is part of speaking, of thinking, and of acting. It is political and economical, and it is increasingly constituting itself as technological. It acts as an object of both distinction and camouflage (Bidner 2009). Hoy el velo es visto casi siempre como una institución islámica, asociada con los musulmanes y el Islam, sin embargo en el pasado era una práctica cultural compartida por determinadas poblaciones del Oriente Medio y el Norte de África, donde el velo hablaba de estatus más que de religión. Al igual que el Harem el velo era un sistema de segregación de géneros que tenía un mayor impacto entre las clases ricas que entre las pobres, así como en el entorno urbano que en el rural. Como sabemos esto queda muy alejado de cómo lo entendemos hoy. La intrincada evolución de esos usos del velo no ha estado desligada del contacto con Occidente sino que esa relación ha jugado un papel decisivo. Sólo hay que recordar cómo la emergencia de formas de modernidad en estos contextos, no pocas veces derivadas de la colonización, marcaron un compromiso no exento de conflictos con las ideologías occidentales, sus mercados, y sus formas culturales. En esos procesos la mujer con velo o sin velo ha sido un reclamo beligerante de la tradición y de la modernidad progresista respectivamente. La mujer -o bien- liberada del velo o que vuelve a ponerse el velo es un asunto capital en los

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procesos de descolonización, nacionalismo, revolución, de occidentalización o de rechazo frontal de los valores occidentales. Dos ejemplos históricos pueden servir para mostrar el rol desempeñado por Occidente en esa evolución. La guerra de Argelia las mujeres utilizaron el velo como una forma de resistencia contra los invasores coloniales franceses, tanto de forma táctica -escondiendo armas bajo sus velos-, como de forma simbólica al reivindicar la validez y dignidad de las costumbres nativas y en particular aquellas que los colonizadores atacaban con mayor fiereza. Es por lo tanto Occidente el que con su discurso contrario al velo determinó los nuevos significados y dio lugar a la emergencia del mismo como un símbolo de resistencia1. De hecho cuando se las obligaba a desvelarse en los puestos de control del ejército francés era una humillación y casi una forma de violación. Un segundo caso histórico podría ser la revolución de los mullahs en Irán a finales de los setenta que fue apoyada por sectores de la izquierda europea como una forma de resistencia contra la hegemonía del capitalismo y del imperialismo de Estados Unidos en el orden internacional2. En ese contexto y a nivel simbólico tanto la desnudez reivindicada por los artistas de la performance y del body art como la reivindicación del velo tuvieron lecturas paralelas como formas de protesta y rechazo contra el consumo, la publicidad, los símbolos de estatus y las dependencias económicas generadas por la propaganda de la industria cultural. En los ochenta estas luchas ideológicas como sabemos fueron reemplazadas por las luchas culturales e identitarias y este enfoque perdió su trasfondo. En el campo de la representación del velo el papel articulador de Occidente también ha sido fundamental y se podría trazar una genealogía del mismo que iría del orientalismo de finales del XVIII a la islamofobia de la actualidad. El orientalismo tal como lo postulo Edward Said (2002) es un sistema de conocimiento y creencias mediante las que Europa articuló e ilustró su superioridad sobre oriente y consiguió hábilmente que permearan en el inconsciente colectivo. Todo esto fue producto de una geografía y una historia imaginativas que crearon una ficción que se presentaba como una realidad. Este proceso tendría un enclave decisivo que sería al invasión de Egipto por Napoleón en 1798 y la creación de una serie de expediciones de expertos (orientalistas, grabadores, arqueólogos…) para la creación de una gran archivo de ese mundo desconocido. Está claro que en la articulación de ese orientalismo la representación del velo jugó un papel relevante. Podemos traer a colación desde las postales de las Misiones Heliográficas que recogían las tipologías etnográficas de los países de Oriente Medio y el norte de África, a las postales de Malek Alloula sobre el harem y unas intenciones bastante menos cientifistas, a las

1 Frantz Fanon en el estudio de la Revolución Argelina identifica el dinamismo histórico del velo en el desarrollo de la colonización y de la resistencia nativa con el proceso de “desvelamiento” de Argelia como nación. Fanon, Frantz, “Algeria Unveiled”, Studies in a Dying Colonialism. 2 El ejemplo más conocido y polémico es el de Michel Foucault, véase Afary, Janet, and Anderson, Kevin, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism.

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odaliscas y mujeres veladas de Henri Matisse que nos acercan a un contexto mucho más contemporáneo. Estas visiones orientalistas conjugan a la perfección una serie de estereotipos y miedos volcados sobre el otro que el puritanismo cristiano occidental achacaba al Islam: sexualidad femenina peligrosa, la poligamia, una sensualidad desbocada… En la actualidad esos miedos, bajo una mirada islamofóbica, se han sustituido por la idea del velo como una forma de opresión de la mujer. La gran cantidad de producciones contemporáneas, como ya señalé anteriormente, que introducen el tema del velo hacen necesario una sistematización de las mismas, ya que esa labor taxonómica podría servir para desvelar la complejidad de una cuestión que a nivel social y en especial desde los medios de comunicación se trata de una forma maniquea y simplista. No voy a acometer yo esa ingente tarea aquí pero si voy a intentar partiendo de la obra de algunas autoras hacer un bosquejo de ese gran entramado de perspectivas en el que antes que posiciones beligerantes y dogmáticas podríamos adelantar que predominan las visiones de la complejidad y la relativización de los significados dependiendo de los contextos históricos, culturales y políticos. Comenzaremos por las posturas más espectaculares y poco afinadas como la de Burka, 2002, de la artista portuguesa Joana Vasconcellos, en la que una forma antropomorfa creada con diversos velos es elevada mediante un mecanismo y a una determinada altura la deja caer al suelo produciendo un violento impacto. En palabras de la propia autora: “Quería mostrar a la mujer afgana privada de su individualidad y libertad, así como a las mujeres del mundo, representadas en las enaguas”. ¿Es conveniente la espectacularización de la presentación en un contexto inmediatamente post 11S? ¿Qué efectividad puede tener la igualación de todas las opresiones de las mujeres del mundo? AES Art Group también realiza una serie de provocativas imágenes manipuladas digitalmente en las que se pone en evidencia la continua islamofobia que los medios de comunicación, sobre todo en campos como el cine y la televisión, van amasando día tras día hasta llegar a estos fotomontajes delirantes en los que el Parlamento de Londres aparece arabizado con una cúpula en forma de bulbo y de color verde o la estatua de la Libertad lleva un burka. No menos polémica es la pieza Mitgift de la artista turca residente en Austria Esin Turan, que quedó excluida de la exposición que celebró el Cultural Forum Austriaco de Nueva York por miedo a las posibles reacciones. En esta fotografía se puede ver una mujer ataviada con un hiyab negro por el que despunta su pelo rojo y una especie de joya al cuello compuesta de granadas de mano y al fondo una estilizada pero obvia bandera americana. Más sutil y productiva es la reflexión de Rogelio López Cuenca en El paraíso es de los extraños. Mediante un ejercicio de apropiación de imágenes procedentes de revistas, periódicos, publicidad… muestra las paradojas de las representaciones que Occidente ha realizado del tema del velo desde el orientalismo decimonónico hasta las visiones actuales llenas de xenofobia y abyección islamofóbica. El archivo

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de imágenes y su acumulación va desvelando cómo se superponen representaciones contradictorias de lo sensual y misterioso, de la lujuria y la perdición pero también de lo puritano, de lo opresivo y antifeminista, de la violencia, del terror y del desastre (es interesante cómo en los medios nunca vemos una mujer velada sonriente). Otro grupo de artistas la mayoría procedentes de la diáspora musulmana se posiciona de una forma tolerante y conjugan hábilmente el uso del velo con enfoques feministas. Majida Khattari artista de origen marroquí que vive y trabaja en Paris sostiene que el encierro al que somete el velo a las mujeres no es más opresivo que los cánones estéticos que impone la moda occidental. “Yo no estoy ni a favor ni en contra del velo integral, sólo busco un diálogo, resituar las cosas”. Desde hace años la artista de origen marroquí afincada en Paris realiza unas serie de pseudo performances-pasarelas de moda en las que las modelos por ejemplo lucen velos integrales con el logo de Coca Cola en tipografía árabe o con los colores de la bandera francesa. Una de sus últimos trabajos llevaba por título VIP (velo islámico parisino). En un tono también provocativo e irreverente trabaja Princess Hijab la artista grafitera parisina que recorre el metro de París pintando el hiyab sobre los modelos de anuncios publicitarios. Los ideales modelos de Dior, Dolce&Gabbana o H&M es fácil encontrarlos con la cara tapada con un hiyab o con el rostro tachado en negro. La artista dice nutrirse del magma de la sociedad y la política y encuentra en el velo un tema impactante que difícilmente pasa desapercibido. Es interesante traer a colación aquí que algunas jóvenes francesas de origen musulmán eligen de una forma totalmente voluntaria portar el velo como una seña de identidad elegida y sin implicaciones con la cuestión religiosa y su historia tradicional (Loigier 2010). Este las libera de las presiones que la sociedad ejerce sobre el cuerpo de la mujer y les otorga una identidad totalmente diferente. El velo como una tendencia hipermoderna y una forma radical de salirse del camino marcado por la moda y las tendencias uniformizadoras de la globalización. (Me), 1997-2000, es una pieza de video de la artista de origen iraní Ghazel en la que realiza una especie de video-diario en la que aparece realizando una serie de actividades cotidianas como patinar, boxear, tomar una clase de ballet, nadar en una piscina pública, descender en tobogán… siempre vestida con chador. Rodadas las escenas en París, Nueva York, Irán y Montpellier atestiguan a veces de forma cómica, otras de forma absurda, la banalidad de la diferencia. En su mundo el velo es un rasgo más de la vida diaria. Las obras de Zoulikha Bouabdellah responden a una lógica de la hibridación y del mestizaje similar a su propia biografía en la que se mezcla su ascendencia argelina y rusa con su nacionalidad francesa. En Monochrome Blue, crea un paisaje ideal en el que la desnudez y el velo coexisten teñido de referencias de la historia del arte occidental reciente. Su trabajo desdramatiza el supuesto choque irreconciliable entre dos mundos e intenta enfrentarse a las mentalidades cerradas blindadas por los estereotipos y las visiones uniformes del mundo.

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Las piezas fotográficas de la artista iraní Shirin Neshat plantean el tema de cómo el velo ha estado ligado a la historia de la lucha contra el colonialismo y más recientemente contra el neocolonialismo. Su obra aporta visiones complejas de la situación de la mujer en su país a través de una superposición de una serie de elementos que se suelen repetir en estas series de los años 90 como The Women of Allah, 1993-97, el rostro femenino presentado de forma frontal enmarcado por el velo (chador), textos escritos en farsi que cubren o decoran el rostro y las manos y la imagen de un rifle, que suelen causar un fuerte impacto y ponen en evidencia cómo el cuerpo es un campo de batalla para el lenguaje visual y los discursos políticos. Lo que a simple vista parece un pendiente es un arma apuntando al espectador. El velo que para nosotros es una forma de opresión en el Irán posterior a la revolución islámica es una forma de acceder a la vida pública y una forma de protesta contra el colonialismo occidental y la uniformización cultural. Los textos también tienen un doble sentido ya que están escritos por influyentes escritoras iraníes y plantean reivindicaciones feministas. Janane Al Ani también aborda el tema de velar y desvelar como un proceso histórico. La narrativa histórica es un hecho fragmentario, una actividad articulada de diferentes formas que está hecha de un ensamblaje de experiencias individuales. En su pieza Veil, 1997, cinco mujeres de diferentes edades posan - como en una foto formal de estudio- veladas, desveladas y vueltas a velar, en diferentes grados, una y otra vez, situándonos ante los flujos y reflujos de la historia personal y colectiva.

Referencias - Afary, J., and Anderson, K. 2005. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. - Bidner, S. 2009. “When History Wears a Veil.” In The Seen and the Hidden. (Dis)covering the Veil. NY: Austrian Cultural Forum. - Butler, J. 2010. Marcos de guerra. Las vidas lloradas. Madrid: Paidós. - Fanon, F. 1989. “Algeria Unveiled.” In Studies in a Dying Colonialism. Earthscan Publication. - Fassin, E. 2006. La Démocratie sexuelle et le conflit des civilisations. Multitudes 26, (on line) www. Multitudes. samizdat.net/La-Democratie- sexuelle - Huntington, S. 2005. El choque de civilizaciones y la reconfiguración del orden mundial. Barcelona: Paidós. - Jullien, F. 2010. De lo universal, de lo uniforme, de lo común y del diálogo entre culturas. Madrid: Biblioteca de ensayo Siruela. - Loigier, R. 2010. Le voile intégral comme trend hypermoderne. Multitudes 42. (on line) www.multitudes. samizdat.net/Le-voile-intégral-comme

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- Said, E. 2002. Orientalismo. Madrid: Debate. - The Seen and the Hidden. (Dis)covering the Veil, Austrian Cultural Forum, Nueva York, 2009. - Veil, Veiling, Representation and Contemporay Art, INIVA, Oxford, 2003.

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Hackers, artistas, testers y público. Aproximación a la estética hacker

Manuel Muñoz Gil* Universidad de Murcia

En primer lugar sería conveniente clarificar que cada vez que en este texto aparezca la palabra hacker se asocia a ella la figura del programador informático, aunque no únicamente. No se habla de crackers. Un hacker es alguien que disfruta del reto intelectual de superarse creativamente o de sortear las limitaciones. Su objetivo no es entrar en un ordenador para robar información sensible.

El esquema de esta comunicación es extremadamente simple. Procederemos, en primer lugar, a hacer una introducción a la producción teórica en materia de software libre, movimientos hackers y copyleft. Con este propósito, se intentará clarificar estos fenómenos para poder comprender el contexto en el que esta producción teórica se enmarca. Introduciremos ciertas nociones como bien común o artesanía. Sin embargo, si bien es cierto que estas premisas parecen alejarse del objetivo de fondo de esta comunicación, los conceptos que iremos introduciendo nos ayudarán a comprender el institutional environement y cómo la cultura hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información tienen una influencia que va más allá de la producción de software.

En una segunda parte pasaremos a definir, por un lado, los conceptos de hacker y artista, y, por el otro, público y tester. Partiendo de lo expuesto anteriormente, intentaremos arrojar un poco de luz sobre estos términos a veces confusos, en particular en lo que se refiere a la cultura hacker, desconocida y mal entendida. En esta parte se desmultiplicarán diferentes términos. A veces, estas nociones describen una realidad muy cercana, como por ejemplo hackers, programadores o maintainers; en otros momentos, estas parecerán más lejanas pero el fondo de

* [email protected]

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dichas nociones tiene una base común, como se intentará demostrar más adelante. Hacker, pirata, artesano, creador o prescriptor pueden servir como ejemplo. Necesitaremos, por tanto, desenredar las relaciones entre estas figuras para aproximarnos a los valores del hacking y la estética hacker.

Breve aproximación a los cimientos y bases filosóficas de la cultura hacker

«Nuestro futuro depende de nuestra filosofía»1. Dado su carácter multinodal, una aproximación a las bases filosóficas del movimiento, o cultura, hacker tiene por fuerza que hacerse recorriendo diferentes ámbitos. Es, a nuestro entender, imposible enfrentarse a esta tarea creyendo que el pensamiento hacker es monolítico y único, aunque sí es cierto que hay algunos puntos que lo recorren de manera global. Uno de los planteamientos de fondo que van a vertebrar esta intervención es la ética hacker. Peka Hiamen ha escrito uno de los textos esenciales a este respecto, La ética del hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información2. En la red podemos encontrar un sin fin de códigos éticos hackers y textos sobre el hacking3, como La catedral y el bazar o Cómo convertirse en hacker, de Eric S. Raymond. Fueron publicados en la red y han sido traducidos a numerosos idiomas por los propios miembros de diferentes comunidades de hackers (Raymond es una de las personas que más ha trabajado por escribir sobre la cultura hacker desde dentro). Sin embargo, para el hacker «hacer es pensar»4 o, dicho de otra manera, el pensamiento de la cultura hacker se genera a través del hacer. La producción de pensamiento depende del trabajo que millones de programadores estén desarrollando en este mismo momento. No es válido acercarse a las bases filosóficas de la cultura hacker desde los textos publicados únicamente, puesto que nos alejaría de la realidad del hecho que este pensamiento se produce de una manera fragmentaria en la red. En la cultura hacker cada pequeño avance es importante. En el equipo de trabajo tiene tanta importancia la persona que es capaz de escribir una gran cantidad de código como aquella que sabe depurarlo con elegancia.

La bases filosóficas del pensamiento hacker no se limitan al código. Para Raymond «la mentalidad hacker no está confinada a esta cultura del software. Hay gente que aplica la actitud de hacker a otras cosas, como la electrónica o la música —de hecho, puedes encontrarla en los más altos niveles de cualquier ciencia o arte»5. Raymond sostienen que «la naturaleza hacker es, en realidad, independiente del

1 Stallman, 2004, p. 39. 2 Himanen, 2002. 3 Stallman, 2000. 4 Sennett, 2009, p. 19. 5 Raymond, 2001.

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medio particular en el cual el hacker trabaja»6. Cuando hablamos de hacking no nos referimos solamente a los movimientos de software libre. Si bien es cierto que el Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) tuvo una gran importancia como germen de los movimientos hackers durante los años setenta, fue la aparición del proyecto GNU, cuyo objetivo era desarrollar un sistema operativo de código abierto, iniciado en 1985 por Richard Stallman y completado en 1991 con la liberación del núcleo Linux desarrollado por Linus Torvalds cuando todavía era estudiante, lo que aceleró un fenómeno ya en marcha. Este hecho marcó un antes y un después. Se sentaron las bases teóricas del pensamiento del software libre a la vez que se formalizaba un modo de producción inédito. Posteriormente, basándose en estas ideas, Lawrence Lessig ha trasladado estos conceptos al mundo de la cultura. Los conceptos de copyleft7 y Creative Commons8 son «una aplicación de los principios del software libre al mundo de la cultura»9, ampliando el frente de las luchas del control de la propiedad intelectual a la producción cultural.

Esta intervención no es el lugar para un análisis detallado de los valores hacker. No obstante, creo que sí es oportuno citar algunos puntos que señalan el camino de la mentalidad o ética hacker. «Los hackers resuelven problemas y construyen cosas, y creen en la libertad y la ayuda voluntaria mutua»10. Cuando hablamos de cultura hacker hablamos de libertad, creatividad y necesidad por compartir la información. El hacker hace suya la cultura del don. Uno de sus principios fundamentales es «trabaja tan intensamente como juegas y juega tan intensamente como trabajas»11. Motivación, iniciativa, habilidad para educarte a ti mismo, autonomía, improvisación. Un hacker es «alguien que ama la programación y disfruta explorando nuevas posibilidades»12. La pasión es el objetivo a la vez que el principio generador.

De estas pistas de reflexión se desprenden varios de los ámbitos que están relacionados con la cultura hacker en la sociedad de la información. Pero ¿qué se nos está proponiendo en el fondo? La lucha que los hackers han tenido en el campo de la programación y el código desde que «se ha tomado progresivamente consciencia de que ellos constituyen la base misma de la infraestructura de Internet y la Red»13 se ha extendido. Frente a la «guerra de los derechos de explotación»14 encontramos posiciones radicales como el «comunismo informacional»15. La radicalidad puede variar pero la elección moral es la misma, ya estemos hablando de software libre, copyleft o anti-copyright. En todos los casos estamos hablando de compartir y, más allá, estamos proponiendo nuevos modelos

6 Ibidem. 7 Lessig, 2005. 8 Véase: «creativecommons.org» 9 Kyrou, 2004, p. 85. 10 «Para los hackers, la diferiencia entre "juego", "trabajo", "ciencia" y "arte" tienden a desaparecer, o mezclarse en un alto nivel de creatividad». Raymond, 2001. 11 Ibídem. 12 Stallman, 2000. 13 Aigrain, 2010, p. 45. 14 Rivière, 2010, p. 67. 15 Xifaras, 2010, p 52.

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de propiedad y bien común.

¿Dónde nos lleva este valor de compartir que parece recorrer toda la cultura hacker? Tan lejos como la ética hacker llegue en el modelo de producción que la sociedad red impone. Nos lleva, por ejemplo, a la cocina cuando desde el pensamiento hacker se hace la siguiente afirmación: «compartir software no se circunscribe a nuestra comunidad [hacker] en particular: es tan antiguo como los propios ordenadores, lo mismo que compartir recetas es tan viejo como la cocina»16.

Un análisis de las diferentes proposiciones en materia de licencias, podemos decir anti-guerra de los copyrights, merece un estudio detallado pero recordemos sólo algunas para ver como la relación con los derechos de autor ha cambiado. Todas ellas evidencian que no sólo la relación con los derechos de autor se ha transformado, también lo ha hecho la naturaleza de estos autores y creadores. Volveremos sobre eso más adelante. Entre otras licencias podemos hablar de Licencia Pública General GNU, Licencia de Documentación Libre u Open Patent. No podemos dejar de mencionar las diferentes versiones de creative commons o Licence Art Libre en el campo de la creación. Si bien no son licencias al uso debemos incluir el software, u otro, publicado en código abierto (open source) y las declaraciones de anti-copyright que no son algo nuevo ya que las encontramos en las primeras ediciones de textos situacionistas.

Se ha criticado que muchas de estas licencias no van hasta el final en lo que concierne la propiedad y no abandonan el copyright, sino que utilizan la ley «dándole la vuelta para servir a una propósito distinto al habitual»17. Sin embargo, a pesar de no abandonar el sistema legal que está implícitamente criticando, estas licencias cortocircuitan el sistema desde dentro. Centrándonos en una de ellas, la creada por Stallman para GNU/Linux, debemos decir que «GLP es como un virus»18 que actúa sobre el copyright. Manuel Delanda, entre otros autores, ha analizado este hecho. El objetivo de Stallman al idear esta licencia fue el de responder el copyright, puesto que «no es una ley natural, sino un monopolio artificial impuesto por el Estado que limita el derecho natural de los usuarios a copiar»19 con el objetivo de compartir la información. Se ha querido, no obstante, hacer ver el copyright como un «sistema legal con una autoridad ética: si copiar está prohibido debe ser malo»20, un robo.

Este tipo de licencias aseguran que las obras tengan un acceso no restringido y que sea posible compartirlas en todo momento. De esta manera, se ha devuelto al autor la capacidad de poder decidir sobre el devenir de su trabajo. Sin duda, funcionan como un virus ya que un creador de modificaciones ulteriores, en un

16 Stallman, 2004, p. 19. 17 Ibídem, p. 28. 18 Delanda, 2001. 19 Stallman, 2004, p. 21. 20 Ibídem, p. 279.

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software por ejemplo, nunca podría ejercer el derecho de exclusión a su creación. La razón es el hecho de que el creador de este nuevo software ha rechazado implícitamente esta posibilidad accediendo a un código fuente bajo Licencia Pública General GNU, por poner un ejemplo. Esto ocurre de la misma manera en todas las diferentes versiones de las licencias creative commons21.

Sobre una base de libertad y autonomía, el fondo de los movimientos de código abierto y la cultura hacker es la «elección moral radical»22 de compartir. «Anteponiendo los usuarios a cualquier otra consideración»23 se están creando otros modos de propiedad. En definitiva, estos nuevos modos de propiedad van de la mano de los cambios que están aconteciendo en la sociedad red y todo el sistema de producción desde «Internet como medio para una autonomía política»24.

Cuando una comunidad de hackers decide tomar las riendas del desarrollo de una aplicación, software, y además deciden dotarla de una licencia de software libre no están haciendo otra cosa que la «gestión de bienes comunes por una comunidad de usuarios»25. También encontramos modelos de gestión de bienes públicos por comunidades de usuarios, ciudadanos o vecinos en la explotación de pastos, bosques o recursos pesqueros. En algunos lugares se esta abandonando las concesiones del servicio de agua a empresas privadas para devolver el control a la ciudadanía. La razón no es sólo la eficacia. Entender que el agua o un bosque, por ejemplo, son bienes comunes se inscribe en la misma tendencia que la toma de consciencia por parte de la cultura hacker en tanto que base de Internet y la Red. Esto se está extendiendo, además de a las prácticas artísticas y culturales que aquí tratamos analizando la figura del artista y el público, a la educación —con la creación de herramientas pedagógicas de libre acceso—, la salud pública —con la investigación en los medicamentos genéricos—, el acceso a la información producida por organismos públicos, el medio ambiente o el espacio público.

Hackers, artistas, testers y público. Algunos apuntes y vectores comunes La intención de esta comunicación no es hacer un análisis exhaustivo de cada una de las nociones propuestas sino, por el contrario, quedarnos en las fisuras, explorar aquellos terrenos poco definidos y buscar los nexos. Lo más interesante es el devenir de estos conceptos, cómo se están transformando sobre la base de los fenómenos descritos anteriormente. Tanto en lo que concierne a la figura del artista como a la noción de un público, hay estudios rigurosos que han analizado

21 Véase todas las implicaciones del hecho aquí descrito en Xifaras, 2010, p. 63. 22 Stallman, 2004, p. 22. 23 Ibídem. 24 Sey, 2004, p. 446. 25 Aigrain, 2010, p. 45.

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estas nociones desde múltiples perspectivas.26 Aquí la intención es otra. No se ha buscado reducir el campo de estudio, más bien al contrario lo que sigue es una desmultiplicación de nombres y términos, para abandonar así toda visión lineal. Estos conceptos tienen una forma prismática en la que cada uno de los lados nos da sólo un parte de la realidad. Lo que se ha buscado con ello es desplegar estos conceptos para intentar comprender cómo las caras de diferentes prismas están muchas veces en contacto.

El objetivo de esta segunda parte no es otro que desmontar estas nociones. Ésta será la herramienta que nos permita acercarnos a la estética hacker inducida de la ética de la cultura hacker. Esto es clave para poder entender muchas de las prácticas artísticas actuales, como éstas funcionan como indicador de ciertas realidades y, sobre todo, el rol de creadores y artistas en tales prácticas. Saltar entre varios términos como artesano, artista, programador o prescriptor nos ayudará a aclarar los porqués de ciertos posicionamientos artísticos.

Antes de comenzar, me gustaría, no obstante, definir los cuatro términos del enunciado. No se pretende sentar una base inamovible, si no más bien evitar confusiones dotándonos de un mínimo vocabulario común. Evitamos así que, a estas alturas, nadie piense que cuando hablamos de hacker lo hacemos pensando en un individuo malvado que quiere robarnos nuestros códigos bancarios.

Hacker: «[originalmente alguien que fabrica muebles con un hacha] Una persona que disfruta explorando los detalles de un sistema de programación y mejorando sus capacidades, opuesto a la mayoría de usuarios que prefieren aprender lo estrictamente necesario. Un experto o entusiasta de algún tipo. Por ejemplo alguien podría ser un hacker en astronomía»27.

Artista: «2. com. Persona que ejercita alguna arte bella. 3. com. Persona dotada de la virtud y disposición necesarias para alguna de las bellas artes. 5. com. artesano (‖ persona que ejerce un oficio). 6. com. Persona que hace algo con suma perfección»28.

Público: «4. adj. Perteneciente o relativo a todo el pueblo. 6. m. Conjunto de las personas que participan de unas mismas aficiones o con preferencia concurren a determinado lugar. Cada escritor, cada teatro tiene su público»29.

Tester: [beta tester] «un usuario de programas cuyos ejecutables están pendientes de terminar su fase de desarrollo, o alcanzar un alto nivel de funcionamiento, pero que aún no son completamente estables. Los beta testers usan sus conocimientos informáticos y su tiempo para detectar errores en el software y así poder informar

26 Véase como ejemplo Kris, E. Kurz, O. La leyenda del artista y Warner, M. Públicos y contrapúblicos. 27 Jargon file: hacker, en http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html. 28 Diccionario de la lengua, Real Academia Española, en http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltConsulta?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=artista. 29 Diccionario de la lengua, Real Academia Española, en http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltConsulta?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=p%C3%BAblico

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de éstos para que los desarrolladores los corrijan, o corregirlos ellos mismos. Generalmente, el betatester comparte una cierta afinidad con la herramienta puesta a prueba en cuestión, de ahí el entusiasmo por probarla, verificar nuevas funcionalidades y detectar anomalías en pos de mejorar el desarrollo de la herramienta en cuestión»30.

Hackers y artistas Un artista es alguien en quien destaca «la pasión lúdica, la inteligencia, la voluntad de exploración»31. En la base esta de afirmación Richard Stallman tenía la intención de citarnos algunas de las características necesarias para el hacking. Stallman define al hacker como «alguien que ama la programación y disfruta explorando nuevas posibilidades»32. Ya en este ejemplo se percibe hasta qué punto lo que entendemos por hackers y artistas (autores y creadores) está fuertemente imbricado. Lo que podemos aventurar es que hackers y artistas, aunque desde puntos partida diferentes, trabajan en una misma dirección, en pro de uno modelo de producción nuevo y bajo unos valores comunes para una nueva forma de propiedad. Todo esto utilizando estrategias creativas que son semejantes.

Recurrimos, en muchas ocasiones, a términos que, sin ser sinónimos, son muy cercanos. Hablamos por ejemplo de hackers, programadores, bidouilleurs, project leaders, co-developers, co-authors, maintainers o creadores de juegos independientes. Aunque, ya en otro extremo, utilizamos palabras como pirata informático, clase creativa, autor, creador, artesano, cocinero, artista, prescriptor o amateur. Vamos a incidir sobre algunas de ellas que resultan clave para poder estirar estas definiciones buscando sus puntos comunes y divergentes.

Cuando se habla se hacker en el lenguaje común utilizamos también la noción de pirata informático y, cuando se evoca la figura del pirata, es difícil hacerlo sin provocar recelos. Especialmente si estamos hablando de ética hacker muchos pueden preguntarse: ¿cuándo ha sido el pirata un modelo moral? La intención de esta comunicación es no quedarse en la visión de la RAE que describe al pirata como «persona cruel y despiadada»33 o, simplemente, clandestino34. Creo que es necesario evocar la historia y decir que el pirata, el del siglo XVIII, el de periodo comprendido entre 1715 y 1725 si bien fue un delincuente lo fue a los ojos de las monarquías colonialistas europeas, en el contexto de exclusividad del comercio de indias por ciertas compañías, en especial la Compañía de las Indias Orientales, la mayor empresa británica en aquel momento.

30 http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_tester. 31 Stallman, 2004, p. 20. 32 Stallman, 2000. 33 Pirata: Diccionario de la lengua, Real Academia Española, en http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltConsulta?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=pirata. 34 Ibídem.

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Algunos estudios han vuelto sobre la figura del pirata no sólo viéndolo como un delincuente sino desvelando que, en definitiva, era un personaje perseguido por oponerse con su conducta social a todo el sistema de producción. Durand y Vergne defienden en su libro L'organisation pirate. Essai sur l'évolution du capitalisme, que la piratería surgió como una forma de enfrentarse el capitalismo ya en su modelo más primitivo. Exponen en este texto que ha habido diferentes formas de piratería en distintos momentos de la historia del capitalismo. Hoy nos encontramos frente a una forma del capitalismo en evolución y, por lo tanto, las formas de piratería cambian a la par.

La resistencia con la que la cultura del software libre se ha enfrentado a la patentabilidad de los programas informáticos ha sido ejemplar. Se ha demostrado que los ciudadanos son capaces de obtener resultados más que significativos35. Un fenómeno importante en esta lucha ha sido el proyecto GNU/Linux (con licencia General Public License). Se creó como un modelo de desarrollo basado en el software libre y el código abierto, lo cual ha provocado que el número de hackers que participan en su desarrollo actualmente sea incalculable. Stallman ha escrito en este sentido: «hoy en día, a menudo me encuentro que no estoy solo. La visión de un regimiento de hackers manos a la obra constituye una fuente de alivio y alegría»36. La imagen de los hackers manos a la obra nos sirve para introducir otra figura clave: el artesano. Son varios los puntos de contacto entre la artesanía, el artesano y la cultura hacker. Comparten los valores respecto del trabajo colectivo y el conocimiento abierto. En El artesano, Richard Sennett ha comparado incluso los programadores de Linux a los tejedores antiguos37.

En el seno de los gremios «el orgullo por el trabajo propio anida en el corazón de la artesanía como recompensa de la habilidad y el compromiso»38. El artesano es un ser social pero lo es a través de la reputación que adquiere en su gremio. La meritocracia rige de la misma manera las comunidades de hackers, la utilidad social de un determinado gremio y el sistema de aprendices y maestro que en la cultura hacker está fuertemente codificado. El carácter colectivo de los gremios es, por lo tanto, un valor que está de vuelta en la creación y producción cultural. Cuando hablamos de prácticas artísticas hacker hay que hacerlo siendo conscientes de que en muchas ocasiones éstas se desarrollan dentro de colectivos que, si bien no están caracterizados por la homogeneidad de los gremios, desarrollan un trabajo común teniendo como premisa esencial compartir la información y el conocimiento. Durante el Renacimiento «el artesano se hace artista»39, este se convierte en un maestro en soledad. La subjetividad y la originalidad parecen ganar terreno. No obstante, la figura del artista siempre ha sufrido idas y venidas en función del posicionamiento ético y estético. De la misma manera que el en Renacimiento hablamos del artista como el maestro en soledad, hoy nos

35 Aigrain, 2010, p. 70. 36 Stallman, 2004, p. 39. 37 Sennett, 2009, p. 33. 38 Ibídem, p. 361. 39 Sennett, 2009, p. 86.

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encontramos con posicionamientos radicalmente opuestos. «No somos ni artistas, ni músicos. Somos trabajadores»40. De esta manera tan inequívoca se ha definido el grupo de música electrónica Kraftwerk.

Cuando se programa apasionadamente hay en esa actividad algo profundamente creativo en lo que concierne la resolución de problemas. Lo lúdico es algo que está anclado en a la cultura hacker. Existe una estrecha relación entre la solución y el descubrimiento de problemas, la técnica y la expresión, el juego y el trabajo. Esto nos proporciona pistas sobre las que reflexionar muy interesante ya que, como plantea Dewey, «el trabajo que se mantiene impregnado de juego es arte»41. Si hablamos de trabajadores que en su cotidianidad tienen una alta carga de juego, el trabajo deviene algo radicalmente distinto. Dentro de los nuevos modelos de producción propios de la sociedad red, Himanen no lo ha definido ni como artistas ni como creadores. Él nos habla de clase creativa.

De lo lúdico en el trabajo nos desplazamos directamente al juego, al videojuego. Aquí tenemos otra figura que está a caballo entre el hacker y el artista. Entre las fisuras de estas nociones anidan muchas prácticas pero, entre ellas, la figura del «creador de juegos independiente en el ámbito del underground del arte digital»42 es paradigmática. El gaming independiente se ha realizado desde el software libre de la cultura hacker. El material de trabajo, al igual que para el programador, es el código. Además este trabajo se ha realizado desde estrategias propias de ciertos movimientos artísticos como el detournement de personajes o escenarios. La «reapropiación lúdica de la industria del videojuego»43 es a la vez la toma de consciencia por parte de los ciudadanos de la existencia de un espacio de creación, y la ocupación de un espacio de producción simbólica que parecía que iba a estar reservado a una industria del entretenimiento altamente cualificada.

Para concluir con las relaciones entre hackers y artistas me parece oportuno hablar de la figura del fotógrafo. La fotografía comenzó su existencia siendo un proceso altamente sofisticado que imitaba lo pictórico. Tras haber pasado por diferentes etapas, en las que sirvió por ejemplo a la ciencia en el estudio del movimiento, adquirió el carácter de arte al entrar en galerías y museos, convirtiéndose así en un vector muy importante del mercado del arte. En la actualidad, la fotografía, o al creación de imágenes, se encuentra en una encrucijada. El autor-fotógrafo se está desvaneciendo, se esconde tras las prácticas amateurs. La profusión de imágenes con la que contamos ha ocasionado que el fotógrafo no necesite tomar fotografías. «El autor ha dejado paso al prescriptor»44. Este actúa recombinando otra forma de código que son las imágenes. Las prácticas apropiacionistas adquieren en este momento otra dimensión desde la cultura hacker, sobre todo cuando partimos de la base de que compartir la información es

40 Peran, 2005. 41 Sennet, 2009, p. 353. 42 Soler, 2009, p. 91. 43 Ibídem, p. 95. 44 Fontcuberta, 2011.

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un principio ético para los hackers.

Testers y público En la actualidad no es necesario evocar los hábitos del público en el teatro de los siglos XVIII y XIX, donde «se aplaudía en medio de una ópera para pedir la repetición de una nota»45, para decir que existe una creciente participación de los espectadores, del público. Este fenómeno está presente en todos los campos de la creación. Ha servido para revitalizar muchas prácticas culturales proponiendo la implicación del público. Se ha pasado de un público consumidor a un público participativo.

Duchamp planteaba que la obra difícilmente puede existir sin la conexión con el mundo exterior que le otorga el espectador. Para él, la contribución de espectador descifra e interpreta el acto creativo en sí mismo. Lejos ya de lo planteado por Duchamp, en muchas de las prácticas actuales la obra no puede existir sin el usuario. El público se ha convertido en un usuario activo de las prácticas culturales. Este fenómeno ha adquirido una dimensión nueva ya que «la red ofrece hoy roles nuevos a los usuarios en los que es compatible ser actor, explorador y espectador en la misma acción»46.

También aquí los términos que vamos a manejar actúan como prismas con diferentes caras. Y, aun siendo términos diferentes, en ocasiones estas caras son semejantes o están muy cercanas. El objeto de análisis son tanto las rupturas como las semejanzas. Se generan continuidades entre nociones como espectador, público, usuario o comunidad de usuarios. Pero, por otro lado, las rupturas también están presentes si, frente a éstos, hablamos de actor, multitud o clientes. La variedad de caras del prisma se hace evidente cuando, además, introducimos conceptos como jugador, tester, fan o apasionado (passionné).

En la cultura hacker la pasión es un valor que recorre tanto a los hackers o desarrolladores como a los testers o usuarios. Para Peka Himanen la pasión es el motor del trabajo de los hackers y de toda actividad creativa en general. La pasión y el entusiasmo47 son las bases para la realización de toda actividad. Desde un punto de vista hacker, la pasión es el posicionamiento moral que da pie a la creación. De esta manera, la pasión, además de la libertad, la igualdad social, el libre acceso a la información, el compartir o la creatividad, se convierten en elementos vertebradores de nuestra relación con las obras, o creaciones, en tanto que público o utilizadores. Con esta implicación tan estrecha se busca el desarrollo continuo de la creación. Ésta se ha convertido en algo colectivo, de lo que el público se siente partícipe y responsable. Un ejemplo de lo descrito

45 Marzo, 2009, p. 76. 46 Hispano, 2009, p. 61. 47 Himanen, 2002, p. 24.

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anteriormente son las estrategias creativas que se han planteado desde la cultura hacker. Como ha escrito Raymond, «tratar a los usuarios como colaboradores es la forma más apropiada de mejorar el código, y la más efectiva de depurarlo»,48 y va más allá del desarrollo en software. En la cultura hacker es un principio para toda creación.

¿Cómo se traduce esto en las relaciones que tiene el público con las obras o creaciones? Esta relación se ha visto transformada dado el cambio en el sistema de producción. Manuel Delanda ve en esto una oposición radical a la tendencia anterior. Para él la relación de los usuarios frente a un production-level software es radicalmente distinta a la que tenemos frente a una end-user application. Con este posicionamiento pasamos de ser consumidores pasivos a estar comprometidos activamente en la evolución de una creación dada49. En su texto Open-Source: A Movement in Search of a Philosophy, Delanda habla de producto pero quizá sea más oportuno utilizar el término creación ya que es menos reduccionista, sobre todo en lo que concierne a las prácticas artísticas performativas.

Desde la cultura y ética hacker se ha implementado un modelo en el que la participación se abre en momentos clave de la creación o concepción (diagnóstico, elaboración del programa, seguimiento de la producción)50. El rol del público se ha vuelto más exigente. La responsabilidad es mayor. Si bien es cierto que del developer se espera que sepa crear un ambiente abierto y evolutivo, del usuario se espera que esté a la altura respondiendo activamente; en definitiva, contribuyendo a la mejora. En el desarrollo de software este sistema ha demostrado funcionar. Así ha resultado ser casi más valiosa la respuesta de cientos, a veces miles, de testers que en versiones beta contribuyen con su feed-back, código, bug-spotting y otras mejoras, que los desarrolladores de software.

Esto despierta también ciertas reticencias puesto que en torno a la participación surge la pregunta de si ésta «¿no es acaso una ilusión que esconde el sometimiento al mecanismo, la dependencia a una terminal y a un tiempo de ocio- trabajo cada vez más indiferenciado y banal?»51. Partiendo de los movimientos hacker y ciertas prácticas artísticas que han hecho suyos los valores de la ética hacker, podemos «darnos cuenta que tenemos el poder de cambiar nuestra realidad y no sólo un entorno virtual»52. A pesar de esto, debemos ser cautos ya que si nos extrapolamos al ámbito de la política es innegable que «no se han cubierto las expectativas de una mayor deliberación e interconexión entre ciudadanos y políticos, ya que internet se ha utilizado generalmente para facilitar la información en un solo sentido, de los políticos al público»53. En la política, o más bien en la clase política, no ha habido, a pesar de que las herramientas a nuestra

48 Raymond, 1997. 49 Delanda, 2001. 50 Aigrain, 2010, p. 47. 51 Soler, 2009, p. 92. 52 Soler, 2009, p. 100-101. 53 Sey, 2004, p. 448.

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disposición lo permiten, un cambio. Si el espectador, o público, se ha convertido en usuario54 no es para ser un mero jugador. Quiere además poder opinar sobre las reglas del juego. No admite estar desvinculado de las decisiones que conciernen al modelo de creación. Del todo para las masas pero sin las masas quiere pasar a un todo para las masas y con las masas. «Nada puede haber para las masas si estas no disponen de acceso directo a los mecanismos de producción»55. ¿Qué clase de usuario es si no se le permite acceder a las estructuras de producción? ¿Usuario o consumidor? La ética hacker, entre otras cosas, rechaza la relación entre dinero y tiempo que el espíritu capitalista defiende. Los hackers tienen una «libre relación con el tiempo»56 y la forma de desarrollar sus actividades es su resultado.

Las comunidades de usuarios, el público, son el epicentro de la creación cultural contemporánea y además han demostrado que puede obtener resultados. Como hemos expuesto anteriormente los ejemplo se multiplican en otros campos con usuarios comprometidos. ¿Por qué no en las instituciones culturales? Inclusive, o más bien sobre todo, las instituciones públicas.

La noción de espectador ha sido superada, así como la de usuario consumidor. En lo que respecta los bienes culturales estaríamos hablando de la imagen de una comunidad de usuarios que gestiona un centro de arte o un museo nacional. El público quiere participar pero no sólo en decidir si quiere o no aplaudir al final de la representación. Quiere estar en el seno de los mecanismos de producción con un posicionamiento «participativo y político».57

Referencias - Aigrain, P. ( 2010), “La réinvention des communs physiques et des biens publics sociaux à l'ère de l'information”, en Multitudes, 41, primavera 2010. - Aigrain, P. ( 2010), “Le temps des biens communs”, Internet, révolution culturelle, Manière de voir, febrero-marzo 2010. - Delanda, M. (2001), Open-Source: A Movement in Search of a Philosophy, conferencia pronunciada en el Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, en http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/pages/opensource.htm - Fontcuberta, J. (2011), Por un manifiesto postfotográfico. Conferencia, Centro cultural Puertas de Castilla: Murcia.

54 Marzo, 2009, p. 69. 55 Ibídem, p. 65. 56 Himanen, 2002, p. 39. 57 Soler, 2009, p. 83.

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- Himanen, P. (2002), La ética del hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información, Barcelona: Destino. - Hispano, A. (2009), “Se sospecha de su participación: el espectador de vanguardia”, en Querido público. El espectador ante la participación: jugadores, usuarios, prosumers y fans, Murcia: CENDEAC. - Jargon File Resources, un glosario de argot de hacker, en catb.org/jargon/ - Kyrou, A. (2001) “Elogio del plagio. El sampling como juego o acto artístico”, Capitalismo cognitivo, propiedad intelectual y creación colectiva, Madrid: Traficantes de sueños. - Lessig, L. (2005), Por una cultura libre. Como los grandes grupos de comunicación utilizan la tecnología y la ley para clausurar la cultura y controlar la creatividad, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. - Marzo, J. L. (2009), “Se sospecha de su participación: el espectador de vanguardia”, en Querido público. El espectador ante la participación: jugadores, usuarios, prosumers y fans, Murcia: CENDEAC. - Peran, M. (2005), Hurto y producción Piraterías en la cultura contemporánea, en www.martiperan.net/print.php?id=5&srchrst=1 - Raymond, E.S. (1997), La catedral y el bazar, en http://biblioweb.sindominio.net/telematica/catedral.html - Raymond, E. S. (2001), Cómo convertirse en hacker, en http://biblioweb.sindominio.net/telematica/hacker-como.html - Rivière, P. (2010), “Les pirates suédois à l'assaut du Parlement”, Internet, révolution culturelle, Manière de voir, febrero-marzo 2010. - Sennett, R. (2009), El artesano, Anagrama. - Sey, A. Castells, M. (2004), “De la política en los medios a la política en red: Internet y el proceso político”, La sociedad red: una visión global, Madrid: Alianza. - Soler, P. (2009), “Era más que un juego. Transformación del público en la breve historia de los juegos digitales”, en Querido público. El espectador ante la participación: jugadores, usuarios, prosumers y fans, Murcia: CENDEAC. - Stallman, R. (2004), Software libre para una sociedad libre, Madrid: Traficantes de sueños. - Stallman, R. (2000), On Hacking, en http://stallman.org/articles/on- hacking.html - Xifaras, M. (2010), “La copyleft et la théorie de la propriété”, en Multitudes, 41, primavera 2010.

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L’artiste : immunité ou responsabilité? Considérations sur l’usage des catégories éthico- juridiques dans le monde de l’art

Dan Eugen Ratiu* Université Babeş-Bolyai

I. Cet article1 se propose d’examiner l’usage des catégories éthico-juridiques dans le monde de l’art contemporain. Plus précisément, l’analyse portera sur la légitimité de l’application d’une catégorie telle que la responsabilité au mode de l’art, ainsi que sur son contenu et ses limites : est-il légitime de « juger » les artistes à l’aune de cette catégorie externe au monde de l’art ou bien jouissent-ils d’immunité à l’action des normes ordinaires ? Qu’est-ce que signifie pour un artiste en tant qu’artiste d’être moralement ou juridiquement responsable et comment ces exigences qui le livrent à l’hétéronomie s’accordent-elles avec l’exigence de la liberté artistique découlant d’une autonomie laborieusement conquise ou avec l’exigence de la liberté d’expression issue de l’exercice démocratique ?

Cet examen part du constat d’un décalage grandissant d’horizon éthique entre les artistes et le public, soit-il le grand public ou les diverses publics constitués de différentes communautés ou associations. En témoignent leurs attitudes opposées quant au monde de l’art, qui visent soit à mettre en cause son autonomie en le

* [email protected]

1 L’article est une version révisée et réduite de l’article publié dans la Revue francophone d’esthétique, no.4, 2007, pp. 101-126.

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soumettant au contrôle public soit, au contraire, à l’isoler comme un domaine protégé, imperméable à l’injonction des normes qui régissent le monde réel dont les frontières sont pourtant systématiquement transgressées. Comme il a été observé, l’art contemporain (ou du moins une de ses directions principales) se définit à la fois par un souci intransigeant d’autonomie et par la revendication d’une liberté illimitée, entendue comme droit de transgresser toute frontière. L’analyse que Nathalie Heinich dans Le triple jeu de l’art contemporain (1998) a mené sur les transgressions systématiques opérées actuellement par l’art contemporain, qui font partie de ce qu’elle qualifie de « triple jeu » (transgressions, réactions, intégrations), montre que celles-ci visent non seulement les critères artistiques (en quoi elles ne se distingueraient pas des transgressions que l’art moderne a déjà expérimenté), mais aussi les cadres moraux et même juridiques qui régissent la vie sociale, les artistes jouant tant sur la frontière entre art et non-art que sur la frontière entre le bien et le mal, le légal et l’illégal, le juste et l’injuste. Ainsi du répertoire de l’art contemporain font partie des œuvres ou des actions qui sont considérées comme des atteintes à la dignité humaine (« obscénité ») et à l’intégrité de la personne (« cruauté »), des atteintes à la vie privée (« violation de l’intimité »), à la propriété (« vol ») et aux œuvres d’art (« vandalisme »), et qui en même temps portent atteintes aux concepts juridiques délimitant la frontière du légal ou, du moins, du sanctionable (Heinich 1998, pp.151, 153, 160-165).2 D’autres auteurs parlent de « provocations », des exemples suggestifs étant le hold-up symbolique du vétéran Pierre Pinoncelli à la Société Générale de Nice en 1975 ou l’hallucinante attaque du port militaire de Toulon lancée en 1993 par l’artiste marseillais Philippe Meste à coups de fusées éclairantes, à bord d’un navire œuvre d’art conçu par ses soins – le plus étonnant étant que l’artiste, arraisonné par la police, a été verbalisé pour défaut d’immatriculation du bateau (Bourriaud 1999, p.72). En outre, ces transgressions ou provocations s’accompagnent d’une revendication d’immunité au sens littéral du terme, comme prérogative assurant une protection contre les actions judiciaires. Une « exception esthétique » semble donc être requise par/pour les artistes, au sens où, en tant que « héros culturels », ils mériteraient un traitement spécial au regard de la loi (Merryman and Elsen, 1979; Heinich 1998, p.158).

2 Comme l’observe Heinich, le laboratoire expérimental de la transgression des tabous liés à l’intégrité du corps et à la dignité fut l’actionnisme viennois, la plupart de ces transgressions étant condensées dans la performance Kunst und Revolution de Gunther Brus, Otto Muhl et Oswald Wiener, le 5 juin 1968 à Vienne. « L’atteinte à la vie privée » est une spécialité de Sophie Calle qui a franchi souvent ses bornes, en publiant des photos de chambres d’hôtel occupées (L’Hôtel, 1981), ou d’un inconnu suivi clandestinement pendant plusieurs jours (Suite vénitienne, 1982). « Le vol » comme matière à œuvre d’art fut utilisé en 1996 par un jeune artiste, Hervé Paraponaris, qui exposa au Musée d’art contemporain de Marseille divers objets volés, sous un titre qui se voulait provocant : Tous ce que je vous ai volé. Quant au « vandalisme », un exemple particulièrement éloquent est celui du vétéran Pierre Pinoncelli qui, en août 1993, dans un acte artistique inscrit dans la suite de ses actions, endommagea à coups de marteaux La Fontaine de Duchamp au Carré d’art à Nîmes, après avoir fait l’usage pour lequel cet ustensile était à l’origine prévu (Heinich 1998, pp.151, 153, 160-165).

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Un tel examen s’avère actuel d’autant plus que ces types de transgressions ou provocations sont des pratiques courantes et même en expansion, si l’on en croit l’édito de la revue Beaux-Arts du février 2003, intitulé prophétiquement « Le vent se lève » :

Il semble que, statistiquement, la fin de l’année 2002 a vu la croissance des actes artistiques illégaux ainsi qu’en témoignent les nombreuses actions d’affichage sauvages ou de changement de plaques de rue dans Paris. D’ailleurs, le Palais de Tokyo […] ouvrira à la fin du mois une exposition, « Hardcore, vers un nouvel activisme », ayant pour ambition de questionner la radicalité et l’activisme de nombreux artistes contemporains. Des artistes dont le commissaire, Jérôme Sans, dit qu’« il ne s’agit plus, pour eux, de produire simplement une forme ou de faire effet, mais d’être un fait réel, l’hyperbole de la brèche laissée béante par les médias, le social ou le politique. L’œuvre devient une matière à réagir.» 2003, année subversive? (Bousteau 2003, p.5) (C’est nous qui soulignons).

Au même sujet, il est intéressant de signaler un fragment de l’entretien dans Beaux Arts magazine avec le commissaire de l’exposition, intitulé « Hardcore. Désir de politique », qui proclame la posture spéciale de l’artiste contemporain au regard de la loi :

[Emmanuelle Lequeux:] Plus question, avec « Hardcore », de chercher à situer la frontière entre l’œuvre d’art et le geste activiste. L’essentiel est ailleurs. Le champ de l’art serait-il le dernier où construire un discours de la marge, hors-la-loi? [Jérôme Sans:] En tout cas, il est le dernier bastion où l’on puisse dire « je », exister hors d’un groupe, et être à la frange. Par principe, un artiste est un hors-la- loi. Certains, exposés ici, prennent sans doute des risques. Mais le vrai grand risque, ce serait de continuer à ne dire rien, et ne rien faire » [c’est nous qui soulignons.] (Lequeux 2003, p.48).3

Ce comportement tend à s’installer également dans d’autres espaces comme celui universitaire, ainsi que le constate avec inquiétude l’artiste–professeur Richard Conte dans l’éditorial intitulé «L’art a-t-il tous les droits? », dans la revue Plastik no.2/2002 :

Depuis quelques années, des jeunes étudiants en art, à l’instar de leurs aînés mais avec moins de théâtralité et une insouciance déconcertante, prennent des risques considérables avec leur propre corps, avec les institutions et avec les lois de leurs pays, aussi bien dans les universités que dans les écoles d’art, ici et ailleurs (Conte 2002, p.3).4

3 Voir aussi le dossier « Subversion. Quand les artistes passent à l’acte », Beaux Arts magazine, no. 227, avril 2003, pp. 78-86. 4 Voici quelques exemples dont il est question ici : au printemps 1999, un étudiant organise avec deux complices un hold-up dans une pharmacie où, encagoulés de bas nylon et munis d’armes factices (mais identiques à des armes réelles), ils demandent au pharmacien un simple coton-tige ; en 2001, une étudiante annonce le projet de se déclencher volontairement un œdème de Quincke (une allergie possiblement mortelle), pour filmer sa crise et en faire une œuvre d’art; un étudiant avancé apporte un travail intitulé « Les vols de fragments, 1993-2002 », sa pratique consistant à prélever

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Certes, on peut se demander si ces faits révéleraient-ils quelque chose vraiment de nouveau qui donne réellement à réfléchir: la stratégie transgressive des artistes contemporains ainsi que la prétention d’impunité qui l’accompagne ne s’inscrivent- elles dans la suite d’une pratique critique, provocatrice, déjà mise en œuvre par l’art moderne et qui s’est bien acclimatée aux conditions d’une société démocratique? En effet, comme l’observe Yves Michaud, « l’art moderne a revendiqué depuis le temps de Baudelaire une immunité esthétique, en d’autres termes une impunité en matière morale qui va de pair avec sa prétention à l’autonomie, à la libre création et à la critique des conventions, et qui est conforme aussi à son esthétique du choc » (Michaud Y. 1997, p. 126). Jacques Soulillou dans son livre L’impunité de l’art (1995) montre comment les sociétés occidentales au cours de leur évolution récente ont progressivement été acquises à l’idée d’une « autonomie pénale de l’art ». En ont contribué graduellement la permissivité de la société démocratique qui a favorisé la limitation de la juridiction de la loi et l’apparition dans l’espace social d’une «poche » relevant de l’irresponsabilité pénale ou du non-lieu (Soulillou 1995, pp. 11-12, 19-21), ainsi que des anciens lieux communs tel que le statut fictionnel de la représentation artistique d’où on a tiré plus récemment les arguments de l’autonomie ou l’intégralité du « corps esthétique » et de la non-réalité de l’œuvre d’art.

À première vue, on est dans la situation d’un retour du même qui ne saurait mettre à l’épreuve le statu quo dûment établi entre l’art et la société. Pourtant il n’en est rien. La «déresponsabilisation pénale » dont parle Soulillou concerne l’art en tant que production des biens symboliques et s’exerce selon certaines normes – celui de la fiction au sens large –, et dans un certain contexte : le livre imprimé par exemple, mais aussi le musée ou la galerie. Or ce que caractérise les transgressions artistiques actuelles c’est justement le changement de profil et d’enjeux, par rapport à l’art moderne qui avait invoqué la liberté absolue au nom des exigences esthétiques.

Il s’agit, d’une part, du passage de l’œuvre à l’acte : on a affaire à des actions (performances) qui pour la plupart ne remplissent aucune des conditions de la «dépénalisation» de l’œuvre d’art – à savoir la médiation d’une représentation et le contexte symbolique de présentation –, et qui en plus aiment consciemment à brouiller les distinctions entre ce qui est ordinairement qualifié d’« ordre symbolique » et l’« ordre du réel ».

D’autre part, ce qui est en jeu dans les transgressions actuelles c’est plus qu’une redéfinition ou « dé-définition de l’art », selon la formule de Harold Rosenberg (1992), dont les limites ont été successivement élargies au cours des dernières décennies : il s’agit aussi, comme les exemples invoqués auparavant l’ont fait ressortir clairement, de tentatives de dé-définir ce qu’on appelle ordinairement le bien, le légal, le décent, etc., et que les artistes (et les critiques d’art et les

discrètement des échantillons d’œuvres dans les musées et les expositions et à les dérober pour ensuite revendiquer comme artistique non le fragment lui-même, mais l’enchaînement d’actes que constituent la déprédation, le vol et le recel (Conte 2002, p.3).

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commissaires) de leur part qualifient de « préjugés » sociaux ou politiques, de «conditionnements collectifs » et d’« autorité contraignante ».5

II. Pour bien mener à terme l’examen de l’usage de la catégorie de responsabilité dans le monde de l’art, une clarification conceptuelle s’avère indispensable. Les débats ou les polémiques engagées au fil du temps autour de ce problème ont fait intervenir plusieurs concepts, associés ou opposés, tels qu’engagement, devoir, irresponsabilité, censure, impunité, liberté d’expression, etc. Pendant l’entre-deux guerres, une pédagogie politique a été formulée à laquelle auraient pu souscrire de nombreux artistes modernes: « Les artistes ont la même responsabilité envers le public en tant que masse, que les membres du gouvernement envers la masse de citoyens » (Papini 1935, cité par Michaud E. 2002, p.259). Au début des années 1990, pendant la querelle de l’art contemporain et ses critères de jugement, certains auteurs crièrent à la censure en accusant « l’esprit procédurier de l’époque» et la « judiciarisation » de l’art,6 tandis que d’autres dénoncèrent la « rhétorique de l’intimidation » instaurée par le militantisme de l’art moderne et rejetèrent l’idée de l’irresponsabilité de l’artiste: Jean-Philippe Domecq par exemple, dans un chapitre intitulé «De la vulgate en milieu d’art » de son livre Artistes sans art ?, dénonça le « préjugé tenace » de l’artiste intouchable, irresponsable, comme mythe romantique, et en revanche, il attribua à certains artistes contemporains une lourde responsabilité (esthétique), à savoir celle de la crise de la créativité ou de la crise de l’art tout court (Domecq 1994, pp.97-121).

Pour qu’un tel examen ne prête pas à des confusions, il faut donc démêler les différents sens de ce qu’on a pu appeler la «responsabilité» des artistes. A cette fin, on fait appel aux différenciations introduites par Hans Jonas dans son livre Le Principe responsabilité (2001), sans suivre pour autant sa théorie pour laquelle la responsabilité se rattache originairement à la vie (la création artistique étant, selon lui, plutôt un cas à part, difficilement catégorisable).

Un premier sens de la responsabilité est celui d’imputation causale des actes commis: c’est la responsabilité de n’importe quel acteur (qui possède certaines capacités cognitives et volitives) à l’égard de son action. Cela a d’abord une signification juridique, selon laquelle l’agent est tenu pour responsable des conséquences de ses actes, ce qui implique l’idée de la compensation, de la réparation du dommage commis. S’ajoute ensuite une signification morale, lorsque c’est la qualité et non la causalité (les conséquences) de l’acte qui est le point décisif dont on porte la responsabilité, ce qui implique l’idée de la punition, du

5 En ce sens, voir Nicolas Bourriaud, « La provocation dans l’art contemporain », Beaux Arts magazine, no. 182, juillet 1999, pp. 68-75, et le dossier spécial « Les Grandes scandales de l’art. D’hier à aujourd’hui : Sexe, politique, religion, esthétique », Beaux Arts magazine, no. 290, août 2008, pp. 50-109. 6 Voir l’éditorial de la revue Art Press no. 191, mai 1994, pp. 5-7, « L’ordre moral est de retour », signé par Jacques Henric qui dénonce « le caractère ultra-répressif » et la « censure » visant tous les médias, rétablie par les deux articles de loi (dit « Jolibois ») du nouveau Code pénal entré en vigueur en France en 1994.

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châtiment qui servirait à établir l’ordre moral perturbé. Au-delà de ces différences, l’une et l’autre ont en commun que la « responsabilité » se rapporte à des actes commis et qu’elle devient réelle dans le fait que l’agent est tenu pour responsable de l’extérieur: c’est une imposition formelle qui est en jeu dans ce « être responsable de ». Mais, selon Jonas, il y a un tout autre concept – substantiel – de responsabilité qui ne concerne plus le calcul ex post facto de ce qui a été fait mais la détermination de ce qui est à faire, et qui est lié à des fins: l’« être responsable pour ». Ce qui est ici intéressant pour notre propos, c’est la définition de cette « responsabilité pour ce qui est à faire » comme une obligation du pouvoir: la première chose, affirme Jonas, c’est le devoir-être de l’objet, le second le devoir-faire du sujet appelé à être le chargé d’affaires de la cause (Jonas 2001, pp. 179-210). En effet c’est l’idée selon laquelle le pouvoir de faire (quelque chose) inclut l’obligation, le devoir ou la mission de la faire, qui a commandé à une certaine époque la pensée sur les artistes et leur «responsabilité » qui a été ainsi mise en relation directement proportionnelle avec le pouvoir supposé de l’art.

Ces différenciations sont utiles en ce qu’elles nous permettent de distinguer clairement la question de la responsabilité juridique ou morale d’un côté, et la question de la responsabilité-« devoir » ou « mission » d’autre côté, et, subséquemment, de séparer la problématique de la responsabilité juridique des artistes qui est actuellement en jeu et la problématique de la responsabilité-devoir ou mission qui est plutôt une affaire du passé. Cette dernière ouvre une interrogation concernant l’engagement des artistes envers la société – c’est-à-dire la question de l’utilité sociale et politique de l’art –, tandis que la première concerne inversement l’engagement de la société, comme espace régi par le droit et l’opinion publique, envers les formes d’art et les valeurs qu’elles véhiculent.

Ces remarques préliminaires visent à mieux préciser l’objet de l’analyse et le type de démarche que nous poursuivrons. Ce qui est à interroger, ce n’est pas la responsabilité ou l’engagement de l’artiste en tant que citoyen (dont la liberté d’expression et l’assujettissement à la loi commune ne sauraient faire l’objet d’une mise en question), mais la responsabilité de l’artiste en tant qu’artiste, c’est-à-dire dans l’exercice de son métier. Plus précisément, cet exercice devient l’objet d’un questionnement soit dans la mesure où, tout en restant dans l’ordre de la représentation, il transgresse les valeurs éthico-sociales, soit lorsqu’il prend la forme d’une action qui à la fois investit l’ordre du réel et revendique l’immunité que lui confère l’appartenance à l’ordre symbolique. Il ne s’agit pas ici de s’ériger en « juge » mais de mener une réflexion sur la légitimité de l’application de la catégorie de responsabilité – au sens éthico-juridique où nous l’avons précisé – à ces types d’œuvres et d’actions transgressives ou, inversement, sur la légitimité de la revendication d’une « exception esthétique » à leur égard. Cette démarche se veut donc une analyse des conditions de légitimité, car c’est la logique, la cohérence d’un système de pensée et d’action qui nous intéresse, et la compréhension des présupposés théoriques qui le sous-tend.

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III. La question s’il est légitime ou non d’appliquer la catégorie éthico-juridique de responsabilité aux artistes dans l’exercice de leur métier a trouvé des solutions divergentes, qui se rapportent en premier lieu à la manière dont on définit le « monde de l’art » et ses frontières : comme un domaine clos ou, au contraire, comme un domaine ouvert au contrôle du public. Des relations serrées se sont tissus entre les différentes caractéristiques attribuées au monde de l’art – autonomie, pureté ou au contraire, perméabilité aux critères hétéronomes – et les qualités attribuées aux acteurs qu’y jouent – immunité ou au contraire, responsabilité.

Dès lors deux perspectives différentes s’ouvrent sur la même question: soit le monde de l’art est actuellement un domaine clos dont l’autonomie esthétique confère aux artistes une liberté illimitée et le privilège de l’immunité qui les exempte de la soumission aux normes communes; ou bien il n’est qu’un domaine social parmi d’autres dont l’autonomie laisse place aux imputations des actes commis lorsque ceux-ci débordent la sphère esthétique et tombent ainsi sous le coup de la catégorie de responsabilité. Au premier cas, juger les artistes en termes de responsabilité morale ou juridique ne serait qu’une forme d’intolérance ou de régression à une époque qui les soumettait à la censure, c’est-à-dire un transfert des critères de l’ordre du réel à l’ordre (supposé pur) de la représentation. Au deuxième cas, la prétention d’impunité n’est qu’une conséquence de la confusion du statut « exceptionnel » de l’œuvre d’art et de l’action de l’artiste dans l’espace social, c’est-à-dire un transfert inverse des critères de l’ordre symbolique à l’ordre du réel.

De l’autonomie/souveraineté esthétique à l’« autonomie pénale » de l’artiste. La première perspective a été ouverte par la logique moderniste de l’autonomisation de l’art qui confère à l’artiste une liberté esthétique illimité: « Nier à l’artiste le droit de peindre ou de sculpter n’importe quel thème dans n’importe quel style à son choix, c’est nier sa totale liberté» (Merryman and Elsen, 1979). Suivant cette logique, la souveraineté conquise de l’art a été transféré à l’artiste et à son comportement social. Comme l’a montré Pierre Bourdieu dans un chapitre des Règles de l’art, « La conquête de l’autonomie », l’invention de l’esthétique pure est inséparable de l’invention d’un nouveau personnage social qu’est l’écrivain ou l’artiste moderne, professionnel à plein temps, voué à son travail de manière totale et exclusive, indifférent aux exigences de la politique et aux injonctions de la morale et ne reconnaissant aucune juridiction que la norme spécifique de son art (Bourdieu 1992, pp. 85-191). Et depuis les avant-gardes, l’artiste acquit une liberté apparemment illimitée, comprise comme immunité et impunité absolues vis-à-vis du libre jugement du public. Aussi le « monde de l’art » apparaît-il comme un camp retranché élaborant lui-même les normes d’acceptation, de refus et de sortie des artistes. Ceux-ci poursuivent en toute liberté leurs démarches en dehors des contraintes de la connaissance et de l’action, échappant aux conventions de l’activité et de la perception commune.

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IV. Des conflits entre l’esthétique et le juridique, l’art et l’opinion publique. Pourtant, comme on l’a vu, certaines œuvres ou actions artistiques contemporaines transgressent non seulement les frontières de l’art mais aussi celles de la morale ou les valeurs de la vie en commun. Le public ou plus exactement certaines catégories de public – organisations non gouvernementales, divers communautés, associations – ont réagit en remplaçant les jugements esthétiques par des jugements éthico-juridiques. Peut-on considérer ces jugements comme des formes de censure, à savoir d’interdictions à l’expression publique de l’opinion, de limitation de la liberté artistique, de l’autonomie esthétique? En revanche, les artistes et leurs défenseurs ont fait appel à diverses justifications, parmi lesquelles celle « formaliste » occupe une place prééminente. Cette justification este-elle cohérente par rapport aux démarches artistiques en questions et leurs présupposés?

Pour répondre, prenons quelques exemples d’affrontements autour des expressions artistiques dont les enjeux dépassent le domaine esthétique car transgressent les normes morales, civiques ou religieuses. Ces affrontements sont connus sous le nom de Culture Wars aux Etats Unis où, à partir de la fin des années quatre-vingt, de ligues conservatrices ou d’associations de citoyennes se sont mobilisés contre des ouvrages ou des expositions qui ont été accusés de sacrilège, d’obscénité ou d’attaque aux bonnes mœurs.

Il est par exemple le cas d’une œuvre d’Andres Serrano de 1987, intitulée Pissed Christ (la photo d’un crucifix baignant dans un liquide jaune), accusé de blasphème, et qui a déclenché le Culture Wars. Ainsi qu’il a été remarqué, c’est surtout la présence de l’œuvre de Serrano dans une exposition subventionnée par un organisme fédéral chargé à la promotion de l’art, le National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), qui avait suscité un scandale national, à l’origine d’une campagne appelant à l’arrêt des subventions gouvernementales pour les expressions artistiques irrespectueuses de la religion et de la décence, ainsi qu’un débat au Congrès sur l’opportunité d’ajouter un amendement à la Constitution qui ne permette plus la protection des actes de sacrilège par l’appel à la liberté d’expression. Le résultat a été l’adoption de l’amendement Helms qui interdisait à NEA de subventionner des œuvres obscènes (Michaud Y. 1997, pp.125-126; Heinich 1998, p.147; Young 2007, p.309). Il est aussi le cas de l’exposition rétrospective de l’artiste photographe Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) au Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) Cincinnati. Les photos de cette exposition intitulée The Perfect Moment (1990) exploraient d’un côté en manière classique la beauté et la forme – de nus sculpturaux aux portraits d’artistes ou des célébrités et des fleurs/natures mortes – et d’autre côté représentaient l’underground SM de New York, la subculture gay. Cette exposition a donné lieu à « l’affaire Mapplethorpe », la première poursuite en justice d’un musée, CAC Cincinnati, et de son directeur, Dennis Barrie: certaines de ces œuvres – cinq des photographies de l’ensemble intitulé « X Portofolio » qui représentaient des actes homosexuels extrêmes, d’autres des enfants nus – ont accusées d’incitation à

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l’obscénité et d’utilisation illégale des mineurs dans des matériaux qui impliquent la nudité (Vassal-Adams 2007, pp. 289-304).

Plusieurs justifications ont été employées pour défendre ces artistes et leurs œuvres. Tout d’abord « l’argument canonique » : il s’agit de replacer l’œuvre dans un contexte historique (l’historie de l’art) en montrant ses liaisons avec des œuvres d’art reconnues. S’en est ajouté un autre, appelé par Anthony Julius « l’argument de la séparation » (the estrangement defence), selon lequel un rôle important des artistes est celui de mettre en question les normes et les valeurs sociétales et d’enlever l’homme moyen (Mr. and Mrs. Mainstream) de la zone de confort. La plus importante justification fut celle « formaliste » : ce qu’on doit prendre en compte c’est la forme (ligne, couleur, texture etc.) et non pas le contenu de l’œuvre (Julius 2007, pp. 327-345; Vassal-Adams 2007, pp. 293-294). Dans le cas du Pissed Christ de Serrano, certains défenseurs de l’artiste ont invoqué, à côté de la liberté d’expression, un argument « formaliste » qui met l’accent sur les qualités formelles, compositionnelles de l’œuvre et non son contenu/sujet: ils se sont déclarés être indifférents à la nature du liquide en question, dont seule importerait la qualité plastique de la couleur (Heinich 1998, p.147). Il s’agit donc de l’argument revisité de l’autonomie du langage artistique.

Un argument semblable a été employé aussi pour défendre les œuvres/photographies qui ont été accusées d’obscénité dans l’affaire Mapplethorpe. Dennis Barrie dans un article qui avait attiré l’attention sur la liberté d’expression, “Freedom of the Expression is the Issue”(1992), mettait aussi en garde ses collègues et la communauté artistique en général en appelant à lutter pour que toute exposition soit jugée comme un tout, comme un corps esthétique autonome:

C’est une question décisive pour tous ceux du monde de l’art. Le juge a décidé que les cinq photographies citées pour obscénité soient jugées séparément. C’est là une décision très sérieuse pour nous tous si une œuvre d’art peut être jugée de cette façon ; si vous pouvez retirer des phrases d’une pièce de théâtre ou des pages d’un livre. Tout ça relève pour moi du même concept. […] Les musées sont des institutions protégées. Que l’œuvre soit ‘obscène’ ou non, si elle se trouve dans l’enceinte du musée elle est protégée (Barrie 1992, pp. 295-300).7

Comme l’observe Soulillou, dans ces cas-là, la défense de l’œuvre ne s’appuie pas (tant) sur l’argument de la liberté d’expression, mais sur l’idée que le « corps » de l’œuvre d’art – poème, roman, pièce de théâtre, film de fiction, tableau – très différent en cela du «corps » d’un discours politique, d’un film documentaire et de propagande, d’une affiche politique comportant des slogans, etc., ne saurait être mutilé, amputé de morceaux qu’on exhiberait à la foule pour exciter sa vindicte.

7 L’argument de l’autonomie ou l’intégralité du « corps esthétique » a été déjà formulé par André Breton en défendant Louis Aragon poursuivi pour incitation au meurtre à cause de son poème révolutionnaire Front Rouge (1931): « La portée et la signification du poème », écrit-il, « sont autre chose que la somme de tout ce que l’analyse des éléments définis qu’il met en œuvre permettait d’y découvrir » (Breton, cité par Soullilou 1995, pp. 119-121).

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On refait ainsi le parcours de l’autonomie / souveraineté esthétique à l’« autonomie pénale » de l’artiste moderne, garante de son immunité:

L’autonomie pénale renvoie au tracé d’un cercle autour de l’œuvre, interdisant l’accès à la loi, toujours tentée, au vu de certaines parties de ce corps, de venir en prélever un morceau qualifié de malsain. Elle consomme la rupture avec la loi en la déclarant incompétente à légiférer à l’intérieur de ce cercle (Soullilou 1995, pp. 18-19).

Il est vrai que dans les cas d’obscénité aux Etats-Unis le jury devait juger le mérite artistique ou esthétique des œuvres en dispute, les photos de Mapplethorpe en l’occurence, car le constat de l’existence d’une « valeur artistique sérieuse » exempte l’œuvre d’accusation d’obscénité ; il est aussi vrai que la maîtrise technique et compositionnelle formelle des photos de Mapplethorpe fait qu’elles se prêtent à une défense « formaliste », et que l’artiste lui-même avait fait appel à une justification « formaliste » semblable. Il parlait de son œuvre comme celle-ci serait un exercice formel où compte non pas ce qui est montré mais comment cela est montré: « My approach to photographing a flower is not much different than photographing a cock », disait Mapplethorpe. « Basically it’s the same thing. It’s about lighting and composition… [I have] a formalist approach to it all, which I haven’t seen in photography and pornography » (Mapplethorpe, cité par Julius 2007, p.337; Vassal-Adams 2007, pp.296-297). Pourtant, comme l’observe Richard Bolton dans l’Introduction de l’anthologie Culture Wars. Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (1992), ce comportement du monde de l’art – qui, en évitant délibérément ce que tout le monde pensait, avait fait semblant que le contenu de l’œuvre n’aurait eu aucune importance –, avait renforcé l’impression que le monde de l’art est/reste isolé et distancé de la société et ses problèmes:

Les artistes ont agi comme si les gens n’ont pas le droit d’être provoqués par l’art provocateur – une réponse qui révèle le noyau des problèmes du monde de l’art lui-même. À la fin, plusieurs artistes et institutions ont choisi à défendre un avant- gardisme conventionnel et institutionnalisé, qui propose une séparation entre l’art et la vie quotidienne. Dans cette vision sur la production artistique, les artistes sont des membres visionnaires et privilégiés de l’avant-garde, qui s’adressent prioritairement aux autres membres de l’avant-garde et seulement incidentement à une audience plus large. Ce modèle du monde de l’art de trouve en opposition avec les conditions réelles de la pratique de l’art que la guerre de la culture avait révélé (Bolton 1992, p.23 ; la traduction est notre.)

Les conditions réelles de la pratique artistique dont parle Bolton sont liées à un nouveau cadre social, celui de la « démocratie radicale »8, auquel correspond un modèle du monde de l’art entendu comme espace public, donc ouvert. Ainsi que le souligne Yves Michaud (1999), celui-ci implique légitimement des interrogations

8 Sur ce concept, voir Jürgen HABERMAS, Droit et démocratie (1992), Paris, Gallimard, 1997, p. 387, et Yves MICHAUD, La crise de l’art contemporain. Utopie, démocratie, comédie : « Vitalité de l’utopie citoyenne : la démocratie radicale », pp. 223-225. Sur la théorie de la démocratie radicale et plurielle, voir aussi Ernesto LACLAU, Chantal MOUFFE, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, New York: Verso, 2001.

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éthiques et juridiques, ainsi qu’une relation active des différents publics à des formes de l’art, qui peut se manifester aussi bien positivement – défense d’un art pour la communauté, commandes publiques, prise en charge communautaire d’un art ethnique – que négativement – poursuites engagées par des associations, campagnes de presse, saisine des autorités judiciaires. Selon Michaud, dans ces cas-là, il ne s’agit pas de la censure proprement dite – où c’est le pouvoir central et identifiable, politique ou religieux, qui prend l’initiative des poursuites –, mais d’un autre type de contrôle de l’art, où c’est plutôt le public qui réagit, et plus particulièrement certaines catégories de public – des organisations non gouvernementales, des communautés et des associations diverses –, qui interviennent au nom de leurs valeurs propres (Michaud Y. 1999, pp.133-134, 228-231).

Du côté des publics, l’appel à des critères ou registres d’évaluation hétéronomes – éthique, civique, économique, fonctionnel, juridique – à travers lesquels les spectateurs expriment leur opinion, est aussi la réponse au fait que les artistes eux-mêmes ont déserté le terrain esthétique pour investir celui du réel. L’instance juridique constitue un dernier et très important registre d’accord ou désaccord. Comme le remarque Michaud, le fait que, dans ces situations de conflit, ce soit souvent la justice à laquelle on s’adresse et de qui l’on attend finalement une décision – comme en France dans le cas des colonnes de Buren au Palais-Royal en 1986 ou de l’installation de Huang Yong Ping pour l’exposition Hors limites au Musée National d’Art Moderne en 1994 – est hautement significatif : non seulement l’instance juridique semble pouvoir fournir une procédure effective de décision sur l’œuvre en lui permettant ou non de continuer à exister, mais elle fonctionne aussi comme métaphore du jugement esthétique perdu en entretenant la croyance qu’il y aurait encore une manière de trancher, même lorsque le champ de l’esthétique est devenu incertain; s’il n’y a plus de critiques, du moins demeureraient des juges. Selon Michaud, ce qui est mise en cause c’est donc l’autonomie du monde de l’art qui est bel et bien absorbé par le « monde réel »:

Ces rejets démocratiques introduisent une dimension neuve dans la situation de l’art contemporain et vont bien au-delà du fait de rejeter : ils déplacent fortement les valeurs et les critères d’évaluations des deux côtés de la frontière du monde de l’art, des deux côtés ils remettent en cause le caractère sacré de l’art. Du côté du public, ils témoignent d’une prise de parole s’émancipant du respect et de la déférence anciens. Du côté du monde de l’art, ils ébranlent les certitudes, l’esthétique étant réduite à faire l’aveu qu’elle se soutient d’un pouvoir, que ce soit celui de l’État, celui de l’institution, celui de l’élite cultivée ou celui des maîtres du discours (Michaud Y. 1999, pp.162-166).

V. Conclusion. Comme on l’a vu, dans l’art contemporain on a affaire fréquemment à des œuvres ou des actions artistiques transgressives qui aiment à mettre en question les frontières du monde de l’art en brouillant consciemment les distinctions entre ce qui est ordinairement qualifié d’« ordre symbolique » et l’« ordre du réel ». Comme l’observe Heinich (1998, p.154), dans ces cas l’exigence même de l’autonomie esthétique devient problématique, et on peut se demander

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où passe la ligne de partage entre perception éthique et perception esthétique. Certes, dans de tels cas, on peut invoquer le principe de la liberté artistique. Reste toutefois la question de savoir si, lorsque les artistes risquent leur intégrité corporelle et même leur vie – et celles des spectateurs dans certains cas – dans l’espace du musée et de la galerie ou encore lorsqu’ils quittent ces espaces protégés pour intervenir sur le terrain du réel, leurs actes restent-elles toujours des actes symboliques? Que la loi réagit également lorsque le mobile de l’acte, bien que « symbolique », serait susceptible de mettre en danger ou les personnes ou les biens, comme il a été remarqué (Soullilou 1995, p.34), ne fait que renforcer cette question. Actuellement se pose donc de plus en plus la question des limites: jusqu’où faut-il accepter d’étendre « l’autonomie pénale» de l’art, c’est-à-dire le statut d’exception permettant à l’artiste d’échapper à la loi commune?

L’analyse menée par Soulillou sur la prétention d’« autonomie pénale » de l’art montre bien que la permissivité illimitée peut-être socialement tolérée dans la mesure où l’artiste s’exprime symboliquement dans un cadre symbolique. Dans certains cas de transgressions mentionnés, la prétention d’« autonomie pénale » reposerait plutôt sur l’autonomie formelle de l’œuvre que sur la liberté d’expression. Mais lorsqu’il s’agit des actions qui quittent l’ordre symbolique de la représentation pour investir l’ordre du réel, cet argument formel perd sa relevance. De même, dans de tels cas le principe de la liberté d’expression a une aire limitée d’applicabilité. Il y a donc lieu à réfléchir sur la pertinence des concepts du droit à l’égard de ce type d’actions ou performances. Aux États-Unis notamment, les juristes ont résolu cette question en faisant distinction, à l’égard des performances, entre «comportement » (conduct) et « discours » (speech): c’est dans la seconde hypothèse seulement que pourrait s’appliquer l’immunité juridique, au titre du premier amendement – et à la condition encore que la proposition apparaisse porteuse d’un discours politique (Heinich 1998, p.167; Merryman and Elsen 1979). Selon Heinich, cela suppose pourtant une réduction de l’œuvre d’art à une « opinion », c’est-à-dire une opération très problématique, tant du point de vue juridique qu’artistique (Heinich 1998, p.167; voir aussi Edelman et Heinich 2002, p.249).

Pour clore, on peut dire que la question de la responsabilité juridique des artistes se pose légitimement lorsqu’il s’agit de conduites sociales qui, tout en se déclarant artistiques et symboliques, investissent « l’ordre du réel » (l’espace public) en produisant des conséquences qui dépassent la sphère autonomisée de l’art. Certes, on peut se demander si une telle responsabilité ne limiterait-elle pas certains paliers de l’autonomie de l’art et lesquels? Assurément pas la liberté artistique, c’est-à-dire la liberté de l’artiste de choisir les formes, les matériaux, les dimensions, les couleurs, et les significations de ses œuvres. Désormais personne ne peut pas empêcher un artiste à vouloir « des prairies peintes en rouge et des arbres peints en bleu » (tel était le vœu de Baudelaire, cf. Jimenez 2005, p.66), personne ne peut pas reprocher à l’artiste d’avoir fait certains choix esthétiques ou le fait de préférer les actions aux tableaux, ni lui imposer des choix politiques. Mais, en même temps, il n’est pas insensé ou injuste de lui demander d’assumer la

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responsabilité de ses actes lorsque ceux-ci impliquent des conséquences qui débordent la sphère autonome de la production artistique. Ce qui est inconséquent et contradictoire, c’est l’attitude de certains artistes contemporains qui aspirent à intervenir sur le terrain du réel, social ou politique, et en même temps se retranchent sous le couvert de l’immunité esthétique dès que se pose le problème de prendre la responsabilité de leurs actes, en revendiquant la liberté illimitée et « l’autonomie pénale » conférée à l’art par son appartenance à l’ordre symbolique. Or la liberté d’expression de l’artiste peut être conçue seulement comme le terme d’un binôme qui comprend aussi bien la responsabilité. Si la tension entre liberté d’expression et responsabilité est abandonnée, l’immunité absolue risque de vider l’art de tout son sens.

Références

- Barrie, Dennis. 1992. “Freedom of the Expression is the Issue”. In: Richard Bolton (ed.) Culture Wars. Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, New York: New York Press, pp. 295-300. - Bolton, Richard. 1992. “Introduction”. In: Richard Bolton (ed.) Culture Wars. Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts. New York: New York Press. - Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil. - Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1999. “La provocation dans l’art contemporain. Beaux Arts”, no. 182, juillet, pp. 68-75. - Bousteau, Fabrice. 2003. “Le vent se lève”. Beaux Arts magazine, no. 225, février. - Conte, Richard. 2002. “L’art a-t-il tous les droits? ”. Plastik, no. 2, pp. 1-5. - Domecq, Jean-Philippe. 1994. Artistes sans art? Paris : Editions Esprit. - Edelman, Bernard, Heinich, Nathalie. 2002. L’art en conflits. L’œuvre de l’esprit entre droit et sociologie, Paris : La Découverte. - Habermas, Jürgen. 1997. Droit et démocratie. Paris: Gallimard. - Heinich, Nathalie. 1998. Le triple jeu de l’art contemporain. Sociologie des arts plastiques. Paris : Les Editions du Minuit. - Henric, Jacques. 1994. “L’ordre moral est de retour”. Art Press, no. 191, mai, pp. 5-7. - Jimenez, Marc. 2005. La Querelle de l’art contemporain. Paris : Gallimard. - Jonas, Hans. 2001. Le principe responsabilité. Une éthique pour la civilisation technologique. Paris : Flammarion - Julius, Anthony. 2007. “A Transgressive Work and its Defences”. In: Daniel Mc Clean (ed.) The Trials of Art. London : Ridinghouse, pp. 327-345. - Laclau, Ernesto, Mouffe, Chantal. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. New York: Verso. - Lequeux, Emmanuelle. 2003. “Hardcore. Désir de politique”. Beaux Arts magazine, no. 226, mars.

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- Merryman, John H., Elsen, Albert E. 1979. Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts. New York: M. Bender. - Michaud, Eric. 2002. “Notes sur la ‘déontologie’ de l’artiste à l’âge moderne”. In: Gilbert Vincent (ed.), Responsabilités professionnelles et déontologie. Les limites éthiques de l’efficacité. Paris : L’Harmattan. - Michaud, Yves.1997. La crise de l’art contemporain. Utopie, démocratie et comédie. Paris : PUF. - Papini, Roberto. 1935. Entretiens. L’Art et la Réalité – L’Art et l’Etat. Paris : Sociétés des Nations. - Rosenberg, Harold. 1992. La dé-définition de l’art. Nîmes : Jacqueline Chambon. - Soulillou, Jacques. 1995. L’Impunité de l’art, Paris : Seuil. - Vassal-Adams, Guy. 2007. “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment”. In: Daniel Mc Clean (ed.) The Trials of Art. London: Ridinghouse, pp.289- 304. - Young, Alison. 2007. “Pissed Christ on Trial: Disgust, Obscenity and Transgression”. In: Daniel Mc Clean (ed.) The Trials of Art. London: Ridinghouse, pp. 307-324. *** “Subversion. Quand les artistes passent à l’acte”. Beaux Arts magazine, no. 227, avril 2003, pp. 78-86. *** “Les Grandes scandales de l’art. D’hier à aujourd’hui : Sexe, politique, religion, esthétique”. Beaux Arts magazine, no. 290, août 2008, pp. 50-109.

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Deus ex machina, emotividad y arte de archivo

Marisol Salanova Burguera* Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

1. Introducción Aun teniendo en cuenta que la comunicación digital se considera destinada a sustituir en poco tiempo a la comunicación analógica, el hecho de que se destruyan los antiguos archivos en los museos posteriormente a su digitalización no deja de ser inquietante para muchos.

Según Franco Ferrarotti los nuevos medios hacen manifiesto el corte entre civilización de la escritura y de la literatura y la época dominada por la lógica de lo audiovisual y la imagen. No obstante, en la actual sociedad tecnológica, donde parece que el papel impreso pudiera ser cada vez más prescindible, surge una necesidad de interacción crítica entre varios mass media (los del papel impreso, precisamente, y los de la neo-oralidad) que se refleja en el ámbito del Arte Contemporáneo, donde proliferan obras compuestas por archivos, documentos y formatos periodísticos para expresar conceptos artísticos, políticos y filosóficos que preocupan a los artistas y los convierten casi en activistas sociales.

La tesis principal que expondré a lo largo de esta conferencia es la de que el auge de dicho arte de archivo responde a una reacción emotiva sobre el valor de la memoria, y que la comunicación electrónica y la instalación audiovisual están ahora mismo al servicio de estas prácticas artísticas. Desde una perspectiva filosófica trataré de acotar qué es el arte de archivo, por qué está en boga en este momento y, a grandes rasgos, qué efectos tienen la masificación de datos y la velocidad de las imágenes en los mass media a nivel emocional.

* [email protected]

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Mediante el análisis de una selección de obras de artistas contemporáneos que trabajan con archivos y documentación impresa, fundamentaré mi trabajo hacia la conclusión de que la hegemonía de lo tecnológico no desplaza ni merma la capacidad emotiva sino que estimula, en muchos casos, la recuperación de espacios y la conservación de documentos a través del Arte Contemporáneo. Para esto utilizaré también el ejemplo de una bienal como es Manifesta, cuya octava edición celebrada en La Región de Murcia ha fomentado la recuperación de espacios en las ciudades para ser utilizados en el ámbito artístico y ha mostrado un gran conglomerado de arte de archivo.

2. El archivo como objeto artístico En La atracción del archivo Arlette Farge compara el archivo con los flujos naturales e imprevisibles y emplea términos como “zambullida”, “inmersión” o “ahogamiento” al referirse a los conjuntos de documentos, pues estos le hacen evocar imágenes marinas. La materialidad del archivo es difícil y Farge trata de dar cuenta de ella a partir de la definición que Jacques André realizara a finales de los ochenta en De la preuve à l'histoire: les archives de France, a saber; que el archivo es un “conjunto de documentos, sean cuales sean sus formas o su soporte material, cuyo crecimiento se ha efectuado de forma orgánica, automática, en el ejercicio de las actividades de una persona física o moral, privada o pública, y cuya conservación respeta ese crecimiento sin desmembrarlo jamás.” (André 1986, p. 29)

Farge explica que los personajes abundan en el archivo, más que en cualquier texto o en cualquier novela. Al disponer de innumerables fuentes uno puede sacar del olvido existencias que nunca fueron notadas, y esta pulsión se da frente a los documentos antiguos y no tan antiguos, de modo que se establece una cierta tensión entre la pasión por recoger datos completos para darlos a conocer en un conjunto y la razón, que exige que se cuestione meticulosamente el sentido de cada archivo.

Pero la fascinación por el archivo y el proceso de su elaboración han provocado que el modo de leerlo y de intentar retenerlo vaya variando -no sé si evolucionando- a lo largo del tiempo. Por ejemplo, como no se pueden fotocopiar los manuscritos del siglo XIX por ser demasiado frágiles, la modernidad los capta exclusivamente a través de microfilms o microfichas, indispensables pero dañinos para la vista humana. “Compulsar el archivo, hojearlo, ir de atrás adelante, se hace imposible con esa térnica despiadada que cambia sensiblemente su lectura, y por lo tanto su interpretación. Útiles para la conservación, esos sistemas de reproducción de archivo suponen seguramente otras fructíferas formas de plantear preguntas a los textos, pero harán que algunos olviden la aproximación táctil e inmediata al material, la sensación prensible de las huellas del pasado. El archivo manuscrito es un material vivo, su reproducción microfilmada es un poco letra muerta, aun cuando se haga indispensable.” (Farge 1991, p. 17)

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El archivo no es un testimonio absolutamente fiel a la realidad. Posiblemente ni siquiera puede esperarse que diga la verdad, en sentido foucaultiano, es decir, en la forma única que se tiene de exponer el habla del otro, atrapado entre las relaciones de poder y él mismo. Toda parte del archivo es un elemento de la realidad por su aparición en un tiempo histórico dado pero es sobre esta aparición sobre lo que hay que trabajar, pues a partir de ella puede descifrarse su sentido.

El año pasado Rosell Meseguer, artista y docente de la Facultad de Bellas Artes de Cuenca, expuso una instalación en el marco de la muestra Archivo-archivante en Matadero Madrid, que trataba el archivo y sus posibles usos poéticos a partir de una selección de obras del comisario Jorge Blasco. La propuesta de Meseguer fue mostrar un archivo que desarrollara un diálogo metafórico sobre el espionaje entre dos tiempos: un tiempo pasado que se cruza con la memoria de la época de espionaje durante la Guerra Fría y nuestro presente. El proyecto, titulado Ovni archive, forma parte de un cuerpo de trabajado generado por la artista a partir de investigaciones que la han llevado a explorar los emplazamientos de fortalezas militares y búnkeres como lugares defensivos o de refugio, extraordinarias formas del poder militar que nos conducen al sofisticado mundo del espionaje, sus invenciones, revoluciones y conflictos, de los cuales se sirve la artista para generar túneles de tiempo en los que conectar sucesos actuales con eventos del pasado.

La palabra “Ovni” (Objeto Volador No Identificado) es usada por Meseguer como metáfora de la imposibilidad de desclasificar o entender públicamente documentos que pertenecen a la seguridad -privacidad- de una nación. La instalación incluye documentos y fotografías de objetos vinculados al mundo del espionaje, teniendo en cuenta la imposibilidad de que estos sean completamente legibles, pues en ellos se oculta una parte esencial de la información. Para la artista, que juega a mezclar lo real con lo ficticio, las operaciones dentro del archivo y las representaciones del mismo son un intento de negociar con la realidad y desterritorializar el poder, trata de señalar la labor del que entra a interpretar el archivo como figura significativa y activa en su construcción.

Podría decirse que la atribución más común e inmediata que se hace al archivo es la de depositario de la memoria, ya que “los políticos, gestores, e incluso buena parte de la ciudadanía valoran la función de los archivos como elementos que garantizan la posibilidad de promover o, en su caso, recuperar la memoria colectiva. Cabe tener en cuenta que los estudios históricos locales, regionales y nacionales se refieren frecuentemente a la memoria con adjetivaciones diferentes -histórica o colectiva- o bien de manera más retórica -memoria de la humanidad, tal como reza uno de los proyectos internacionales más emblemáticos de la Unesco-, aunque en el fondo subyace una filosofía común: la necesidad de construir el futuro sobre las sólidas bases de un conocimiento amplio y crítico del pasado.” (VV.AA. 2001, p. 14)

Situarse frente al archivo a menudo constituye un ejercicio de reflexión histórica, pero también de introspección. En este sentido hay artistas que trabajan sobre

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archivos familiares, compartiendo lo que en realidad es un proceso de reconocimiento íntimo y autoexploración. Por ejemplo, el colectivo Art Al Quadrat, integrado por dos artistas visuales que son hermanas gemelas y que se llaman Gema y Mónica del Rey, tiene un extenso trabajo que se considera todavía en construcción y que versa sobre su genealogía y la intensa y problemática relación entre sus padres. Me estoy refiriendo a su vídeo-instalación Retrato de familia, expuesta en la muestra comisariada por José Luis Pérez Pont Puntas de flecha: nuevas trayectorias en el Arte Contemporáneo valenciano en 2009. Con tal creación, que fue iniciada en 2007, las artistas tratan de dilucidar los orígenes de su familia para entender lo que ahora son, según explican ellas mismas. La instalación incluye fotografías de tres generaciones de una familia, la suya (ellas, sus padres y sus abuelos), pero también objetos domésticos desgastados por su uso y acompañados de cartelas con narraciones relacionadas. Esta obra da cuenta de la relación que Anna María Guasch (2009) encontrara entre autobiografía, archivo, conceptualismo y memoria en su breve texto Autobiografías visuales. Del archivo al índice y que tiene que ver con la exaltación de las emociones.

Tanto el ejemplo de Meseguer como el de Art Al Quadrat forman parte de lo que Hal Foster llamó por primera vez “arte de archivo” (archival art), acuñando un término que es relativamente reciente y que en el panorama artístico español se vincula inmediatamente con el trabajo de Pedro G. Romero Archivo F.X. Las obras consideradas arte de archivo pueden tener cualquier extensión en el espacio y en el tiempo, sus exposiciones pueden estar “instaladas en el propio archivo o fuera de él, virtuales o reales, dependerá de los recursos económicos y materiales de los que dispongamos, pero su calidad, atractivo y función didáctica estarán asegurados si tienen un discurso coherente y unos objetivos precisos.” (Guasch 2009, p. 86) Las obras pueden mostrarse en tres formatos expositivos generales: exposiciones permanentes, temporales e itinerantes. Aunque también existe la posibilidad de exponer virtualmente, cuando se trata de obras en soporte digital, que pueden ser difundidas a través de Internet. Este formato es el de las exposiciones virtuales, un tipo de muestras que facilitan la conservación ya que no es posible que los documentos sufran daños físicos, además ofrecen gran cantidad de opciones de participación e interacción por parte del público. El registro audiovisual de las instalaciones en alta calidad es también una adelanto en tanto que permite volver sobre cómo ha sido mostrado el archivo, para estudiar las posibles interpretaciones y encontrar el modo de presentación más didáctico. La tecnología actual permite incluso realizar pruebas respecto al orden de los documentos que se quieren exponer de forma virtual con vistas a ocupar el espacio real posteriormente.

“La función de recuperación de la memoria es una tarea educativa y cívica cargada de futuro y en la que los archivos cuentan con el crédito de un ejercicio constante y comprometido en este objetivo a lo largo de la historia.” (Guasch 2009, p. 62) Son abundantes los casos en que la recuperación de unos documentos propicia un replanteamiento historiográfico y una revisión de elementos identitarios que parecían indiscutibles hasta el momento, pero esto también puede ocurrir cuando

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lo que se recupera no es un documento sino un espacio, un lugar olvidado que abre sus puertas para albergar nuevos objetos que parecen, en principio, descontextualizados.

3. Arte de archivo y recuperación de espacios Hal Foster utiliza la expresión “impulso de archivo” para referirse a un tipo de estética de la resistencia a una sociedad amnésica. Por su parte, en La cámara de Pandora. La fotografí@ después de la fotografía Joan Fontcuberta se pregunta qué papel juegan hoy entre nosotros el archivo y la memoria cuando el pensamiento débil circundante preconiza la amnesia. Fontcuberta trae a colación la obra del artista Joachim Schmid, quien trabaja con imaginería encontrada y reciclada porque entiende que estamos saturados por una sobreproducción de imágenes y no encuentra sentido a crear nuevas sino que resulta un reto mayor para él utilizar adecuadamente las que ya existen, pues “no es la producción lo que debe preocuparnos, sino el mal uso al que las imágenes son sometidas.”1

Manifesta 8, la Bienal Europea de Arte Contemporáneo, tuvo lugar entre octubre de 2010 y enero de 2011 en Murcia y Cartagena. La dirección del evento propuso como tema principal, hilo argumental entre las obras participantes, el análisis de las complejas relaciones culturales, sociales y económicas entre Europa y el norte de África. Algunos de los artistas participantes adoptaron posturas similares a la de Schmid y jugaron con la manipulación de imágenes, el falso documental y el reciclaje crítico.

Siguiendo la voluntad de recuperación de espacios históricos o singulares y de ampliación del conglomerado artístico de la región, Manifesta 8 consiguió la adecuación de la Antigua Oficina de Correos y Telégrafos de Murcia, precioso edificio que llevaba inoperativo unos treinta años, como espacio expositivo. Esta iniciativa también se llevó a cabo con otros espacios. Aunque en el caso del Antiguo Pabellón de Autopsias del Hospital de Marina en Cartagena ya se había reutilizado antes de la bienal, pues en 2008 se aprobó que éste se convertiría en sala de exposiciones para albergar la obra de jóvenes artistas.

Esta peculiar sala de exposiciones cuya existencia me parece particularmente loable por la recuperación del espacio y la calidad de las propuestas que ha ido alojando, aunque muy espaciadamente, comenzó su andadura con una muestra de la artista Araceli Martínez García titulada Sociedad del Olvido y en la que, a través de proyecciones audiovisuales, presentaba una serie de personas que frente a la cámara borraban de su frente una palabra representativa del pasado de cada una de ellas. El proyecto, una iniciativa del Ayuntamiento de Cartagena, Puerto de Culturas y el Laboratorio de Arte Joven de Murcia, instaba a reflexionar sobre la relación entre el arte, la memoria y los espacios que habitamos.

1 “Very Miscellaneous”, Joachim Schmid entrevistado por Val Williams, en Insight, Photoworks, Brighton, febrero de 1998. Citado en Fontcuberta (2010, p. 172).

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En esa misma línea se sitúan el trabajo de dos artistas que participaron en Manifesta 8, uno exponiendo en Murcia y otro en Cartagena. A continuación, me gustaría realizar un breve análisis de sus dos obras en la bienal, comparando el uso que hacen del archivo. Ambos mezclan realidad con ficción y utilizan el soporte audiovisual. Se trata de Jasper Rigole y Thierry Geoffroy.

Jasper Rigole trabaja con vídeo, instalación y obra gráfica. En su principal proyecto, The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People's Memories (IICADOM), emplea su archivo en construcción de ego- documentos (películas, fotografías) encontrados para generar obras de arte autónomas. Recopila los materiales que utiliza en mercadillos y tiendas de segunda mano y en ventas en garajes. Su objetivo primordial es reflejar la estrecha relación entre los temas del archivo y la memoria. Investiga conceptos como la autenticidad y la objetividad aplicando un planteamiento enciclopédico y una precisión casi científica. La obra presentada en la Antigua Oficina de Correos y Telégrafos de Murcia se titula Outnumbered, a brief history of imposture (Superados en número, breve historia de la impostura) y es una instalación que genera una imagen en movimiento a partir de una fotografía panorámica encontrada de 1936. El sistema controlado por ordenador produce una narrativa (informal) aleatoria a partir de una amplia base de datos de personas que, en cierto sentido, se relacionan con la impostura. La narración explica datos inventados sobre cada uno de los personajes de la fotografía, que es real pero que refleja rostros desconocidos incluso para el propio artista. El público no sabe que la narración es ficticia hasta que se da cuenta de que la misma identidad se atribuye a varios personajes de la foto dado que la secuencia es aleatoria.

Por su parte, Thierry Geoffroy participaba con dos proyectos: un programa de entrevistas en el que adoptaba el personaje de entrevistador colonialista, para desentrañar si existen efectivamente buenas relaciones entre las poblaciones europeas y las del Norte de África; y una instalación: Penetraciones (2010), en la Prisión de San Antón (Cartagena), cerrada como penitenciaría y reabierta para exhibir las obras recibidas de una convocatoria para artistas del norte de África “no invitados a la bienal”, como crítica al propio formato de bienal y los criterios para discriminar quién participa y quién no, pretendiendo que no caigan en el olvido las propuestas de tales artistas. Geoffroy, también conocido con el sobrenombre de “El Coronel”, es famoso por utilizar con ironía el formato televisivo, decantándose por este medio desde 1986 debido al hecho de que hay más gente interesada en la televisión que en visitar museos o galerías.

Ambos artistas exploran las posibilidades de ficcionalizar la historia a través de la manipulación de documentos. Rigole interroga con su obra sobre si las anécdotas son capaces de ficcionalizar la historia; Geoffroy recopila información sobre artistas que no han sido invitados a la bienal pero cuyas obras tienen algo que aportar para dilucidar la relación con el norte de África y personas que habitan la ciudad de Murcia y que opinan sobre las relaciones entre dos continentes con un rico tejido artístico. Los dos trabajos se sirven del elemento tecnológico para

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generar reacciones emotivas sobre el valor de la memoria al mismo tiempo que posicionan a los artistas como sujetos deseantes y promotores de un futuro que utilice la memoria como “una manera de activar asuntos culturales, políticos y sociales de una magnitud global.” (Guasch 2011, p. 164)

4. Conclusiones La constante del archivo corre pareja al reciente debate sobre la historia y el territorio de la memoria como un modo no sólo de cuestionar las nociones del pasado sino también de constatar una crisis fundamental en la manera de imaginar futuros alternativos.

Miren Jaio, a propósito de Mal de Archivo, la célebre conferencia de Derrida2 - donde éste hacía un llamamiento para una revolución en la problemática del archivo, proponiendo una distinción entre el archivo y aquello a lo que se ha reducido la experiencia de la memoria y el retorno al origen-, volcaba la siguiente reflexión en el número 56 del Arteleku Magazine: “¿Consigue frenar el archivo la velocidad con que las cosas cambian? No. ¿Consigue al menos frenar el exceso, la acumulación? Tampoco.” (Jaio 2005, p. 32) Hemos visto que, en principio, el archivo suele tener carácter funcional; el arte de archivo también. Aunque no podemos decir que siempre, toda pieza, cumpla su propósito. Ni si quiera es un requisito revelar un propósito definido de antemano. A veces, cada espectador pasa a formar parte de la obra otorgándole un sentido u otro. El arte de archivo puede ser fetichista, puede ser nostálgico y puede (debe) ser crítico.

No es suficiente con recopilar, almacenar y organizar datos para recordarlos, para proyectar su utilidad hacia el futuro. Ante todo, es importante mantener una postura crítica frente al pasado. Decía Todorov en Los abusos de la memoria, que todos tenemos derecho a recuperar nuestro pasado “pero no hay razón para erigir un culto a la memoria; sacralizar a la memoria es otro modo de hacer estéril el pensamiento.” (Todorov 1992, p. 16)

Frente a la sacralización de la memoria (que aísla el recuerdo hasta convertirlo en inservible como lección para el presente) y su banalización (que asimila abusivamente el presente al pasado) Todorov propone el examen de la razón y la prueba del debate. La memoria no es un compartimento estanco, sino que más bien requiere de una accesibilidad y reinterpretación constante, tarea que en las últimas décadas ha asumido buena parte del sector artístico, de muy diversas

2 Conferencia pronunciada por Jacques Derrida en Londres el 5 de junio de 1994 en un coloquio internacional titulado: Memory: The Question of Archives. Organizado por iniciativa de René Major y Elisabeth Roudinesco, el coloquio tuvo lugar bajo los auspicios de la Société ínternationale d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychanalyse, del Freud Museum y del Courtauld Institute of Art. El título inicial El concepto de archivo. Una impresión freudiana, fue modificado posteriormente. Puede encontrarse en Derrida1996.

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maneras, una de ellas es a través de intervenciones realizadas sobre el archivo, sobre una forma de contener información como una biografía de objetos que se convierte en una necesidad emocional.

Referencias − André, J. 1986. De la preuve à l'histoire: les archives de France, Traverses, nº 36. − Derrida, J. 1996. Mal de archivo. Una impresión freudiana, Madrid: Trotta. − Farge, A. 1991. La atracción del archivo, Edicions Alfons el Magnànim, Valencia. − Fontcuberta, J. 2010. La cámara de Pandora. La fotografí@ después de la fotografía, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. − Guasch, A. 2009. Autobiografías visuales. Del archivo al índice, Madrid: Siruela. − Guasch, A. 2011. Arte y Archivo, 1920-2010. Genealogías, Tipologías y Discontinuidades, Madrid: Akal. − Jaio, M. 2005. Mal incurable, Zehar Arteleku Magazine, nº 56. − Todorov, T. 1995. Los abusos de la memoria, Barcelona: Paidós. − VV. AA. 2001. Archivos y cultura: manual de dinamización, Gijón: Trea.

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Conceptual art, evaluative experience and second nature

Jakub Stejskal* Charles University in Prague

What can be said of conceptual artworks is that their adequate appreciation does not turn on the exact nature of their perceptible properties, but rather on the nature of the ideas or conceptions they convey. That is, at least, what Peter Goldie and Elizabeth Schellekens, claim about conceptual art and what they call the idea idea: ‘The idea idea [...] is that conceptual art works with ideas, or with concepts, as the medium [of appreciation], and not with shapes, colours, or materials. This, we think, is what marks out conceptual art as radically different from traditional art.’ (Goldie & Schellekens 2010, p. 60) According to Goldie & Schellekens (G&S), while the meaning of traditional visual art is embodied in its form (as its medium, which becomes inseparable from its meaning), conceptual art uses its form only as a means to its meaning (ibid., pp. 23–24, 60–61, 69–70, 92– 93).

As far as I know, the means/medium distinction was introduced in relation to conceptual art by Robert Hopkins in his essay ‘Speaking Through Silence: Conceptual Art and Conversational Implicature’.1 He describes what he means by ‘medium of appreciation’ thus:

Where sense experience is the medium of our appreciation, that experience is altered by our awareness of the feature we appreciate. When, for example, I appreciate the muscularity of Caravaggio’s style, my awareness of that feature is part of what constitutes my experience of his work: had I not been aware of it, my experience would have had a different phenomenology. In contrast, when sense experience merely provides a means of access to the work’s nature, that nature, via my awareness of it, does not permeate the experience itself. (Hopkins 2007, pp. 56–57)

* [email protected] 1 Unlike G&S, he does not identify medium/means with properties of an artwork, but with an experience of those, but not much hinges on the difference, not for my purposes anyway.

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According to Hopkins, traditional art is appreciated in sense experience, whereas conceptual art, if it provides any sense experience at all, uses its perceptible ‘base properties’ only as a means to its appreciation. In traditional art, the actual experience of the artwork is constitutive of the value and meaning of it, it mediates it, whereas the experience of conceptual artworks’ perceptible properties is not constitutive of their meaning. This is so, because constitutive features of a conceptual work are determined already by their intellectual conception. The particular aspects of the execution of the idea are irrelevant to its meaning (they are just means to it, ibid., p. 59).

Although in their recent book, G&S present a philosophical defence of conceptual art as a legitimate art practice with its own merits, in the concluding chapter called ‘What’s Left Once Aesthetic Appreciation Has Gone?’, they acknowledge that conceptual art, despite its achievements, ‘is not wholly successful as art’ (Goldie and Schellekens 2010, p. 137, emphasis in the original; significantly, these are the very last words of the book). In ‘good traditional art’ we find its content presented to us in such a way that we experience it as imbued with intrinsic meaning that is felt as something relevant not only to our individual condition, but to a condition shared or potentially shareable by our peers across time and space. What art can give us is ‘a sense of our shared humanity in a special way, relating what is presented to us to our ethical lives, in the broadest possible sense of the word “ethical”’ (ibid., p.134). ‘Art, then, presents to us human life and the world in which we live in this special way – as “second nature”.’ (ibid., p. 133) For Goldie & Schellekens second nature, i.e. world presented as imbued with meaning that relates to our ways of life, cannot be properly conveyed if procedures generally associated with conceptual art are applied, since these do not use perceptible means as media of appreciation. In the following, I will try to convince you that whatever (if any) good reasons we might have to deny conceptual art the status of a fully successful art, it cannot be that it fails as art because it cannot generally convey the world as second nature due to its divorcing artistic means from the medium of appreciation.

But what exactly is meant by second nature here? Goldie and Schellekens borrow the term from Anthony Savile’s recent article ‘Imagination and Aesthetic Value’ (2006). In it, Savile points to a passage in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, where Kant uses the term andere Natur to explain human aesthetic creativity. Kant credits imagination with the ability to transform material acquired through perceptual experience into something (an aesthetic idea) that ‘steps beyond nature’ (‘was die Natur übertrifft’), thus becoming a second nature (Kant 2000, pp.192; AA 5:314). For him, aesthetic ideas are like second nature in that they consist of the material that first nature provides imagination with, only they are filled with meaning that first nature necessarily lacks, i.e. meaning that has as its source the supersensible realm of reason. For Kant, art is the material realization of aesthetic ideas and thus, as Savile suggests, is the embodiment of second nature. Moving beyond Kant, Savile thinks that to present our environment and our lives as ‘naturally’ endowed with intrinsic and perceivable significance is one of

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the essential functions of art that meets a basic psychological need, a drive to constitute whole objects (Savile 2006, pp. 252, 256).2 And what’s more, when artworks understood as ‘images of significance’ are internalized (something again facilitated by the pleasurable nature of the experience), they ‘enable us better to lead our lives’. Any practice that aspires to be classified as art and does not at the same time aspire to convey the world as replete with meaning, as a meaningful whole is not art proper. Art proper, however, can exist and have its practical impact on our lives only if we have grown responsive to it. As Savile realizes, in order to appreciate the external second nature mediated by artworks, we must have already acquired an inner second nature, a confidence about our ability to appreciate the richness of meaning presented in aesthetic experience. This confidence is in turn boosted by our aesthetic experiences: ‘the sense of self [...] could hardly find sustenance except in relation to a well-internalized, rich second nature, as fostered by a cultivated openness to beauty’ (ibid., p. 225). According to Savile, there are therefore two closely interconnected goals art should aim at: a) make us see the world around us as a meaningful whole, a second, humanized nature, and b) bolster a sense of self-confidence in us as its inhabitants, an inner second nature without which we could not appreciate the richness of meaning presented by art in the first place. Notice that the content artworks actually convey is in the end less important than that and how it gets across to us. The metaphysical significance of art is that it makes us palpably feel what could not be expressed otherwise, that there is no abyss between us, our peers and our world.

What we find stated in Savile’s philosophical arguments is a pattern recently described by Sebastian Gardner as ‘philosophical aestheticism’. Gardner calls by this name a strategy developed early on in reaction to Kant’s transcendental philosophy and which ascribes a ‘philosophically cognitive’ contribution to aesthetic phenomena. These are supposed to mediate philosophical cognition, which philosophy as a discursive thought is unable to attain:

Making Aestheticism plausible involves a complex hermeneutical movement in which philosophical reason, dissatisfied with itself, looks outside to discover elements with the aid of which it can restore itself to equilibrium, and reaches a point where it recognizes that what it needs, but cannot generate from its own discursive resources, is presented in art and affect. (Gardner 2007, p. 83)

Thus, for example, another British philosopher, David Bell, in an aestheticist vein, suggests that pure reflective judgement of taste, which is subjective and yet universal, provides us with a basic confidence that the phenomenal world is open to our cognitive and practical capacities without the involvement of a subsumption under concepts.3 Without this a priori confidence, which is not known, but felt,

2 This drive is one of the two psychic drives art is generally supposed to meet (the other being the reparative drive). Savile is developing a suggestion made by Richard Wollheim (1980, pp. 121–124). What exactly is the significance art makes us sensitive to, is a difficult question, but it seems to have a lot to do with our feeling at home in the world, more on that below. 3 Bell uses the example of experiencing a Jackson Pollock.

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‘the understanding could not find itself in [nature]’ (Kant 2000, 5:193), which Bell renders: ‘without which the understanding could not feel at home in nature’ and comments:

That one should spontaneously ‘feel at home in nature’ is a necessary, though, indeed, subjective condition of the possibility of objective knowledge; for it is only if I feel at home in this sense that I come into contact with phenomena that are not, so to speak, opaque or problematic for me […]. That the regressive infinity of judgements on judgements, of rules for the following of rules, can be stopped, without thereby making a mystery of my ability to judge at all, is due to the fact that at a certain point I am directly aware of an intrinsic coherence, or unity, or significance in my experience. (Bell 1987, p. 239)

This unity or significance of my experience cannot be constructed by philosophical means, it is something to be experienced.

Though Savile does not quote John McDowell, who reintroduced the concept of second nature into philosophy, he has not been immune to McDowell’s influence. In (2000), Savile drew heavily upon a version of value realism (or anti-anti-realism) developed by McDowell and his Oxford colleague, David Wiggins, in the 1980s. McDowell’s and Wiggins’s assumption was that if we take the phenomenal character of non-deliberative evaluations (i.e. such in which our value ascriptions seem to be non-volitional responses to circumstances), of which aesthetic judgements are prime examples, seriously enough, we will stop worrying about how our value ascriptions relate to the objects they are supposed to describe. According to McDowell and Wiggins, epistemology of value must be freed from the Humean way of seeing values as mere subjective projections onto the canvas of first nature. Their position may be described as both naturalist and realist because it is only natural in their view for us as human beings to take our common sense ascriptions of value to the objects of experience as matters of fact, as descriptions of a real state of things.4

Although most of the debate about value realism has been centred on the example of moral evaluations, Wiggins and McDowell independently singled out aesthetic values as particularly illuminating (Wiggins 1998a, 155; McDowell 1998, 117). They understood aesthetic judgements as belonging to the same group as moral evaluations in being both cognitive – in the sense of revelatory about the state of the world, immediate – in the sense of there being no gap between what we experience and what is real, and involuntary – to be understood as ‘excluding any exercise of conscious deliberation’.5 The attractiveness of aesthetic valuation as an exemplary case in point rests on its being free from the suspicion that any volition accompanies it; it is exemplary in its immediate revelatory potential conveyed through mere feeling, as is apparent in the way McDowell (1998, p. 130)

4 For a similar position from roughly the same period see Strawson 1985. 5 On the distinction between evaluations and deliberative judgements see Wiggins 1998b, p. 95.

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formulates the crucial question (for him) about aesthetic value: ‘How can a mere feeling constitute an experience in which the world reveals itself?’

McDowell introduces the term ‘second nature’ in order to remind philosophers that responsiveness to reasons is part of nature, while remaining sui generis, autonomous. Philosophy must not be involved in constructing a bridge between mind and world, it must only point out that there is no abyss between them and therefore no need for any construction works. The only reason why philosophers feel uneasy about the claim that the source of our spontaneity is natural is that they think a ‘default position’ to explain nature is that of natural science. If we locate a position that would accommodate spontaneity in nature, there will be no uneasiness, no anxiety, and that will make this position default and the burden of proof will be on the side of scientistic naturalism (McDowell 2007, pp. 396–397).

This argument is in line with his earlier proposal that the default understanding of our evaluative experience should be based on its phenomenology, and aesthetic valuation has been singled out by McDowell as an experience, in which the world manifestly reveals itself through mere feeling. In the last lecture of Mind and World, McDowell finds affinity with Karl Marx’s vision, formulated in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscritps:

Marx says man is unique in producing “according to the laws of beauty”, and the point he is making in that remark shows up also here, in a distinctive feature of our consciousness. Our very experience, in the aspect of its nature that constitutes it as experience of the world, partakes of a salient condition of art, its freedom from the need to be useful.’ (McDowell 1996, 119)6

To be a human being is to be someone for whom her natural environment constitutes a world, a human second nature, whereas non-rational creatures only satisfy their existential needs and make use of the possibilities that the environment arbitrarily offers. To be free from these needs and pressures, is – among other things – the condition of art as aesthetic practice. Creating and experiencing art is conditioned by and also revelatory of a shared human second nature. This second nature forms a basis for the confidence of adjudicating subjects that their evaluations do justice to reality. It is not a confidence about getting their judgements always right, nor a confidence that their evaluative outlooks converge more and more, but rather a confidence that there can be a true evaluation of reality based solely on feeling.

I hope I have shed some light on the philosophical context behind G&S’s denial to ascribe to conceptual art the status of a full-fledged art practice. The ability of art to reveal and make apparent our shared second nature is something conceptual art cannot achieve because by divorcing medium of appreciation from perceptible

6 McDowell refers to the following passage in the Manuscripts: ‘An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, while man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard of the object. Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty.’ (Karl Marx 1988, p. 77)

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means it bars itself from mediating ‘images of significance’. Let us, for the sake of argument, accept that the divorce of means and medium does capture what is of essence in conceptual art. The reason why G&S would deny that conceptual artworks can be fully successful as art lies in their understanding of what it means to reveal the world as second nature. The philosophical commitments they share with Savile divert them from entertaining the option that revealing the world as second nature does not have to amount only to making the commonality of feeling and evaluative attitudes palpable through embodiment of meaning, but also to bringing to our attention and questioning the various habitual practices and presuppositions that make up our second nature as historically and socially embedded human beings. They implicitly ascribe to art the role of boosting our ‘transcendental self-confidence’ so to speak, but leave out the important ability of art, at least of modernist art, to awaken us to and question the conditions and motivations of living in and interacting with and within a human environment. G&S do recognize that art can make us see ‘that not only the beautiful things in life, but also the terrible (the violence, suffering, war and so on), are things to which we respond in ways that we can and do share with others’ (G&S 2009, p. 133), but that is still a long stretch from acknowledging that art can engage us in imaginatively exploring these very responses we share. Of course, this also presupposes a shared sensibility which such art appeals to, but the effect is one of disenchantment rather than of ‘partial re-enchantment’ (to use McDowell’s phrase).

Consider Vito Acconci’s 1969 Following Piece, which is also discussed on several occasions by G&S. We see four rather low-quality pictures of a man apparently following another and we read a short caption: ‘Activity, 23 days, varying durations. Choosing a person at random, in the street, any location, each day. Following him wherever he goes, however long or far he travels. (The activity ends when he enters a private place – his home, office etc.)’ We also learn from the documentation provided that the artist sent reports of each of his followings to members of the art world. There is no question of any skill required for taking the pictures or indeed carrying out the actions themselves, and consequently there is no question of contemplating the style and technique applied. What is relevant for the appreciation is to get a grasp of the plan for a series of actions supposedly carried out that we gain access to by means of the photograph, the caption and the documentation the artist made available. If it is to succeed as art, according to G&S, it will have shed light on some aspects of our shared responses and habits constituting our second nature. My modest point is that there is no reason why this piece could not achieve just that (although in a different sense than G&S envisaged). If it succeeds as art, it will make you in a striking way aware of or set you thinking about things you have already internalized as your second nature: what are the dividing lines between what is private and what is public, what is the nature of your everyday rituals that make up large parts of your urban lives, etc., and it will do it in an imaginative and striking way. I do not see any reason why the divorce of means and media should fatally prevent conceptual

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works from opening our eyes to our shared second nature in a very vivid and plastic way.

References - Bell, D. 1987. ‘The Art of Judgement.’ Mind 96: 221–244. - Gardner, S. 2007. ‘Philosophical Aestheticism.’ In: Brian, L. and Rosen, M. ed. The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 75–121. - Goldie, P., and Schellekens, E. ed. 2010. Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? London: Routledge. - Hopkins, R. 2007. ‘Speaking Through Silence: Conceptual Art and Conversational Implicature.’ In: Goldie, P., and Schellekens, E. ed. Philosophy and Conceptual Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 57–68. - Kant, I. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: CUP. - Marx, K. 1988. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Communist Manifesto, translated by Martin Milligan. New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 13–168. - McDowell, J. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. - McDowell, J. 1998. ‘Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World.’ In Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, pp. 112– 130. - McDowell, J. 2007. ‘On Pippin’s Postscript.’ European Journal of Philosophy 15: 395–410. - McDowell, J. Savile, Anthony. 2000. ‘Naturalism and the Aesthetic.’ British Journal of Aesthetics 40: 46–63. - McDowell, J. 2006. ‘Imagination and Aesthetic Value.’ British Journal of Aesthetics 46: 248–258. - Strawson, P. F. 1985. ‘Morality and Perception.’ In Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. New York: Columbia UP, pp. 31–50. - Wiggins, D. 1998a. ‘Truth, and Truth Predicated of Moral Judgments.’ In Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, pp. 185–214. - Wiggins, D. 1998b. ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life.’ In Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, pp. 87–138. - Wollheim, R. 1980. Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP.

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L’œil du jardin

Djamel Benkrid Université de Paris VIII

D’abord ce trait pour penser le jardin où je m’autorise du droit du simple promeneur pour ne pouvoir m’y nommer que d’un « je », un moi qui n’a de valeur que déictique, selon un point de vue insubstituable à tout autre. Cette perspective suit mes propres pas. Parce que c’est un pur signifiant, il n’était pas susceptible de définition. Il a transité, il y a un itinéraire du jardin. Toutefois, on peut repérer certaines lignes de force dans le discours qui accompagne le jardin. Ce n’est pas du jardin même dont je parle, c’est un discours sur les discours qui ont accompagnés le jardin et, si j’ai parlé de bifurcation, c’est qu’à travers cet invariant qui me semble être une problématique de l’œil, il y aura deux versants que nous examinerons tout à tour. L’un -tragique- où le jardin s’est inscrit, s’est inscrit dès l’origine sous un œil, sous le régime d’un œil despotique, transcendant, terrifiant, l’autre dans une tradition plus néo-platonicienne, pythagoricienne, souvent localisée peut- être dans les jardins italiens, mais aussi à Versailles, où cette structure pyramidale de pouvoir qui se dégage dès l’origine des jardins chinois, cette structure pyramidale fonctionnera dans deux sens. C’est ça la bifurcation dont « je » veux parler. De haut en bas l’œil terrifiant qui surplombe ; l’œil était dans la tombe, regardait Caïn et injectait partout de la faute. D’un coté du jardin, une dialectique descendante, trans-descendante si l’on peut dire, et de l’autre, ce que nous aura été enseigné par exemple à propos du songe de Polyphile (cf. Kretsolesko-Karenta) une dialectique ascendante, trans-ascendante, non terrifiante où de degré en degré, on irait jusqu'à la lumière incréée de l’origine et même d’avant l’origine.

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Lévi-Strauss, à propos d’Œdipe, repérait un rite de passage, un rite d’émergence de l’animal, du règne animal par coupure, par saut. A partir de quel instant ai-je la position de l’homme? Une économie du sacrifice, semblerait-il,mais de quel sacrifice s’agit-il, s’il n’y a encore personne sur terre à sacrifier, personne d’humain ou en voie d’humanisation? Là, nous suivrons différentes pistes, car la réponse n’est pas unique. Les poètes que nous suivrons, que nous suivrons à la trace, si je puis dire, auront différentes réponses: La blanche Elis sa sœur, de Georg Trakl; il y aura le père, la dimension œdipienne, il y aura le frère; Caïn et Abel, une histoire de jardin, puisqu’un Caïn sédentaire offrait des fleurs et des fruits du jardin à Jahvé, qui préfère les pasteurs et les moutons. Et, là encore, il y a bien une tradition du meurtre. Il y aura aussi sous le jardin la présence de grands amoureux de tout sexe. Il y aura peut-être à mettre en question le discours fréquent qui féminise le jardin. A preuve, par exemple, les jardins d’Hadrien: la villa d’Hadrien fut édifiée en l’honneur d’Antinoüs, qui se suicida en se jetant par amour dans le Nil, pour ne pas courir le risque de déplaire à son empereur. Il y aura aussi, peut-être, nous le verrons chez Rainer Maria Rilke, le meurtre de ces êtres mythologiques: les centaures, les Lapithes, les nymphes, les tritons, les dragons, le meurtre symbolique qui permit l’émergence de l’homme, comme Apollon sur son char au bassin de Versailles. Encore, Apollon, c’est un nom. Parfois, il s’agira plutôt pour signifier cette émergence de la grotte, de la coquille primitive comme dans l’exemple de Vénus sortant des flots dans sa coquille. Il peut s’agir d’une émergence féminine. La femme fut, peut-être, le premier homme. En tout cas, il s’agira de prendre bien cette définition du jardin comme métaphore au sens strict et large à la fois. En effet, tout se passe comme s’il y avait une opposition absolue entre la grotte des origines, du pré humain, du préhistorique, grotte espace envahissant, espace terre à terre à terre ou l’homme était prostré et qui essaie de se dresser, d’émergence, d’ériger un œil qui puisse prendre distance, qui puisse en parcourir le tracé, œil cartographe. Projet de lever un œil, d’élever un œil, d’ériger un œil pour s’arracher au sol natal. Cette érection, cette station droite qui fait problème, on la voit sans cesse représentée dans la mythologie des jardins. Evidemment, ce n’est pas une preuve historique. C’est simplement le symptôme d’un souci très ancien de l’humanité. C’est un discours analysé comme symptôme. Ce n’est pas un témoignage historique d’où je vous parlerais depuis la préhistoire. Si la promenade dans le jardin, fut un moyen de s’arracher, d’émerger de l’espace mythologique, de l’espace qui engluait, de l’espace où l’homme rampait, très vite cette érection sous la forme de la stèle ou de la pyramide devient le symbole de la réalité d’un pouvoir despotique. Des pyramides, la surveillance par un despote du réseau hydraulique, devint le symbole du

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pouvoir, pouvoir que Karl Marx et plus tard Karl Wittfoggel décrivent comme despotisme asiatique, comme mode de production hydraulique. Celui qui possédait les arrivées d’eau, pouvait ruiner, pouvait couper l’eau aux autres. Il y a donc un choix hydraulique comme le dira Malinowski à propos des Trobriandais, un choix hydraulique qui engagea toute l’humanité. Un choix moral tout aussi fondamental que celui d’enclore son jardin, « funeste hasard » selon Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Il y eut d’ailleurs certaines tribus océaniennes, mélanésiennes, trobriandaises, qui refusèrent ce choix hydraulique et préférèrent se contenter des pluies, attendre la pluie plutôt que de stocker l’eau dans des réserves. Pourtant, ils connaissaient ce choix du stockage de l’eau, qui fut peut-être refusé par eux dans une optique un peu moralisante parce qu’ils prévoyaient, ils ne sont donc pas si primitifs que ça dans la présence pure, ils prévoyaient qu’en stockant l’eau dans des réserves, en le canalisant, en la gardant, ils allaient mettre en place des empires pyramidaux despotiques, tyranniques. Ils préférèrent disparaître faute de pluie, faute du don de la pluie, plutôt que de subir l’oppression pyramidale comme en Chine tout autant que dans l’empire aztèque qui fournit des exemples spectaculaires. Cet arrachement, nous en parlions, cet arrachement à l’espace d’origine, sol natal, cet effort pour prendre ces distances par rapport à lui, cette métaphore première est peut-être première métaphore, Heidegger l’a sans doute très bien analysée dans un tournant de son œuvre. D’abord, il s’interroge sur le lieu. Le lieu toujours à mettre en rapport avec un Verstand, avec tenir debout avec un se dresser, qui corrobore nos impulsions, nos remarques sur la poésie et sur notre lecture, vision, promenade dans les jardins, nous le suivrons pas à pas, et nous finirons par concevoir que la problématique du jardin est tributaire de celle du don, du potlatch au sens de Marcel Mauss. Le « Il y a » ce qui nous est donné, don de soi, de l’être même comme dans la mort. Heidegger nous décrit à la fin du principe de raison, « La mort, ce don encore impensé ». Il s’agirait peut-être de penser ce don. Il s’agirait aussi de penser que ce don comme tout potlatch a pour effet de créer des débiteurs, des hommes qui peuvent promettre de remplir leur « devoir » moral. On peut se demander si l’être heideggérien n’est pas sinon sadique, tout au moins ne fonctionnerait-t-il pas comme un despote oriental qui se donne pour mieux se refuser, qui se donne pour mieux se retirer, se voiler dans le retrait. Il se voile en se dévoilant et se dévoile pour mieux se voiler. Il y a là un geste de violence, de mort, de meurtre, qui correspond assez bien aux poètes dont nous parlons et sur lesquels s’appuie, le plus souvent, Martin Heidegger pour légitimer sa pensée. Profitons de l’occasion pour lever une ambiguïté. Lorsque Heidegger (Heidegger 1962) nous parle de lieu, de l’œuvre qui se dresse, je cite: « debout sur le roc, l’œuvre qu’est le temple ouvre un monde et en retour

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l’établit sur la terre qui alors seulement fait apparition comme le sol natal »1. Lorsque Heidegger s’exprime ainsi dans ‘’L’origine de l’œuvre d’art ‘’ qui nous reporte aux « chemins qui ne mènent nulle part ». On pourrait penser que nous: « … jusqu’aux vastes étangs ou comme un égal, le riche parc les offre aux riches espaces uniques qui imprègnent de lumière et de reflets ces possessions d’où il apporte de partout ces lointains. (Rilke) ». Nous sommes dans le don, nous n’en sortirons plus. Plus loin encore, quelques lignes plus loin: « … le printemps même ici ne donne plus. Ces buissons ne croient pas en lui. », Et aussitôt, simultanément, dans le même poème, surgit la dimension de la faute. Le don culpabilise, le don fait des coupables, des culpabilisés et des coupés. « Les allées sont comme coupées au lointain par les balustrades » dit-il. Là, il va évoquer cette solution, s’éclairer sur la faute qui gît sous le jardin sacrifié : « Mais il est des vasques ou les reflets des naïades qu’elles ne baignent plus, sont comme noyées, convulsées. » Et les Erinyes qui accompagnent la faute font leur apparition, apparaissent à la fin du poème. « Qu’accompagne un essaim de mouches comme si tout, derrière toi, était effacé et anéanti … ». Encore une fois dans la méthode n’allons pas trop vite et soulignons la difficulté qu’il y a à passer d’une explication régionale à une généralité sur les jardins et même sur la faute dans les jardins. La physique des fluctuations nous conduit à une critique de la raison globale. En effet, la raison au travail dans l’universel, les mathématiques globales ne sont que des puissances de troubles et de cruautés. La peste est un modèle exact de ce prolongement violent. (Comme Oedipe en témoigne à Thèbes). Son épidémie se transmet, se multiple et tue jusqu'à occuper la ville toute entière, peuplant les carrefours de bûchers. Le jardin est d’abord défensif. Il se ferme à la peste, haut lieu fortifié par la science contre la croissance des eaux et la pandémie. On y racontera entre amis rares, portes closes, quelques histoires de plaisir où Venus aura la meilleure part. Vénus naissant au-dessus du trouble des eaux. Le jardin est une île, un sommet, un abri. »2. C’est dire, ou à peu près, qu’en dehors du local, qu’en dehors du jardin, la bataille fait rage et la peste couvre le forum de cadavres. Or, et c’est là le

1Heidegger, « L’origine de l’œuvre d’art ». « L’origine de l’œuvre d’art » marque une rupture dans la pensée de Heidegger depuis Sein und Zeit (1927), rupture qui annonce le tournant, la Kehre comme Heidegger le nommera lui-même, qui le conduira à accorder une place croissante à la philosophie de l’art, et qui ne sera explicitement formulé qu’avec la Lettre sur l’humanisme adressée à Jean Beaufret en 1947. Il doit pourtant être mis en rapport avec des textes contemporains, ainsi qu’avec les grands textes qui, à la suite, feront référence à l’art.

2 Serres 1977.

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point, c’est une certaine raison qui dans notre culture demande et pratique les dix prolongements. Le despote est celui pour qui le local s’efface devant le global. C’est ainsi qu’il écrit l’histoire à coups de prolongements rationnels. Il n’y a de solution, de raison et de science que locale. Cette sagesse du jardin, sagesse de notre père Montaigne, cette sagesse de la terre devrait être la nôtre. Elle n’est pas ignorance de science, elle est modération. Le local ici roule néanmoins sa viscosité faible sans affecter beaucoup le volume global. Les contraintes s’évanouissent non loin de son voisinage. Il y a comme dit, bien des degrés de liberté dans l’interprétation, par exemple, même de la faute. On va y revenir. Le tourbillon se forme et se défait, dans l’incertitude, mais partout ailleurs, la plaine est tranquille selon l’espace ensemencé de circonstances qu’il faut analyser régionalement. Il faut comme disait Michel Serres: inviter l’histoire liquide et les âges d’eau. Néanmoins, il est possible d’user d’audace dans nos hypothèses à propos de cette faute, de se sentiment de culpabilité, de ce sacrifice, de ce meurtre sous le jardin. Par exemple, chez Rilke, la faute est toujours une faute d’orthographe, une faute d’écriture, une faute de syntaxe, une faute de langue. Rilke dans ses « Lettres autour d’un jardin » mène très loin l’analogie entre le jardin et l’écriture.3 Page 14, par exemple, je lis: ‘’ C’est la petite messe matinale du printemps valaisan. Il y manque de ses pluies douces qui ailleurs introduisent la caresse oubliée en tombant en de longues lignes comme une écriture fluide, une correspondance amoureuse entre le ciel et la terre où s’épanchent tant de promesse d’avenir. Il pleut maladroitement et le ciel écrit ces quelques lignes dans l’air sans plaisir comme un écolier qui aurait les doigts gelés et raides.’’ Plus profondément l’équivalence, insistante chez Rilke entre l’écriture et le jardin, va nous conduire explicitement à l’aveu de la faute. Il s’agira d’une faute de français dans la traduction d’un poème de Valery, plus précisément. Ecoutons-le:‘’Oui, j’aime écrire en français quoique je ne sois jamais arrivé à écrire cette langue, qui plus que toute autre oblige à la perfection puisqu’elle la permet, sans incorrection et même sans d’insidieuses fautes. (Je souligne « fautes »). Une grande partie de ma correspondance se passe en français. J’ai pensé, de cette façon, de dégager l’autre langue de presque tout emploi qui n’est pas d’art et d’en faire la pure matière de mon travail verbal. J’ai réussi pendant quelques temps. Puis tout d’un coup, cet hiver, le français commençait à empiéter sur le terrain qu’il devait protéger. Un peu malgré moi, j’ai fini par remplir tout un cahier de vers français, qui ne sont pas, vous le devinez, bien avouables. ‘’ (Je souligne le mot « avouables »). Il s’agit naturellement d’une faute, elle peut aussi fonctionner comme rachat, comme complément de la faute. Ainsi, page 24, je cite: ‘’ Quelques tulipes à part, mon petit jardin n’a pas encore dit sa prière de pâques. J’aurais préféré que ce soit lui qui vous

3 Rilke 1981.

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souhaite la bonne fête. Lui, restant en défaut (je souligne ‘’défaut’’). Je vous offre une autre floraison que vous connaissez d’ailleurs. ‘’4 La poésie peut racheter les fautes du jardin. Elle peut également en être l’équivalence. Plus loin, page 26, le jardin apparaît dans toute sa morbidité. Je cite: ‘’ Mon jardin quelques fois me semble un hôpital de fleurs’’. Hôpital encore à la page 33, où Rilke nous parle de ses trois strophes de fleurs qui représentaient comme les trois degrés de l’intimité rustique et qui dans leur ensemble ébauchaient comme une lointaine et secrète mythologie de la promenade éternelle. On ne saurait dire plus. C’est un remède à l’humanité entière. C’est un remède au temps. Les fleurs, le poème: même chose. Plus profondément encore, page 35, Rilke va ajouter un supplément de faute à la poésie jardin, à l’écriture fleur. Il s’agira, un peu comme au Japon, de l’enveloppe même, l’enveloppe de la fleur, l’enveloppe de la lettre. Je le cite: ‘’ Mais de ces strophes miennes, je reviens à celles de votre envoi. Y eut-il une quatrième couche, le sonnet aurait été parfait. Mais non, il ne lui manquait rien, puisque l’ultime tercet se forme sous l’action même d’ouvrir le paquet et son sujet serait la découverte successive de ces trois couches et du rythme de votre promenade. Que l’heureux pays y était. J’ai depuis cherché Saint Cire sur la carte. On l’a déjà dit, le jardin est cartographie, le jardin est trajectoire et là ce qui complète le poème, c’est l’enveloppe, le timbre peut être, le cachet, le secret, l’énigme, la provenance, dans la lettre du poème, il faut comprendre aussi l’enveloppe. Nous y revenons avec Adorno dans sa thèse remarquable sur Kierkegaard5: « c’est le schème de cette vérité pour laquelle se pose la question kierkegaardienne de l’origine : la vérité chiffrée et occultée, que la subjectivité autonome n’est pas capable de crier, mais la subjectivité mélancolique est capable de lire ; dans ce schème, le mélancolique rapatrie ce que l’existence a détruit». A l’inverse de l’intention manifeste de sa totalité systématique les diapsalmata ouvre sur « l’archi-écrit » de l’existence humaine, et nulle part la comparaison n’est aussi puissante qu’ici : « je suis chétif comme un schiva, mon existence est faible et vaine comme un dageschlene, je me sens comme une lettre qui imprime à l’envers sur la ligne; pourtant je suis prétentieux comme un pacha à trois queues jaloux de moi et de mes pensées comme une banque de ses billes, en général aussi réfléchi en moi-même qu’un pronom réfléchi »6. Ce n’est pas par hasard que la comparaison choisit des lettres hébraïques en tant que signe d’une langue qui, d’un point de vue théologique, prétend être la langue de la vérité. Mais la vérité théologique- et ici au delà du sacrifice

4 Note de l’éditeur : Rilke joint à sa lettre un manuscrit de sa traduction de ‘’Palme’’ de Paul Valery avec le texte français en regard. 5 Adorno 1995, pp. 210-211. 6 Adorno 1995, pp.210-211.

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paradoxal, on doit supposer la véritable position ontologique de Kierkegaard- est précisément garantie par son caractère chiffré et occulté, et la décomposition des rapports humains fondamentaux se révèle comme une histoire de la vérité elle-même…, où l’écrit apparaît comme modèle de désespoir pour se transformer en modèle de l’espoir !!!: « Imagine qu’un homme possède une lettre qui, comme il le sait ou il croit savoir, pourrait lui fournir une information dont dépend tout le bonheur de sa vie « ou ce qu’il tient pour tel »; mais les caractère se sont effacés et pâlir et l’écriture à peine lisible: cet homme la lira et la relira, avec angoisse et impatience et avec toute sa passion, découvrira tantôt ce sens, tantôt un autre, quand il croira avoir déchiffrer correctement un mot, il utilisera ce mot comme clef pour l’interprétation de la totalité; mais la fin est toujours de nouveau semblable au commencement: c’est l’incertitude ». Kierkegaard avait énoncé précédemment son désir: « je souhaiterais avoir un œil qui, éternellement jeune, brûlerait éternellement du désir de voir la possibilité ». Ce désir de l’œil visionnaire de la possibilité peut très bien rendre l’aura des jardins premiers. La mélancolie révèle et relève tous les possibles disposés dans le jardin. Ecriture plus archaïque, plus profonde, page 38, où il est question de ce cimetière sans cadavre, où quelques pierres font le mort, sculptées par endroit ou rongées, on ne sait, d’autres couvertes de cette fière écriture romaine, fière écriture qui semble être faite pour diviniser les mots et apprendre à lire aux siècles et tout cet abandon blond et gris. « L’abandon, le don, une lettre, visitées par les papillons et presque mêlées à la conscience végétale des herbes odorantes, forment comme un grand cadran solaire qui constamment offre un riche oubli à la somme de ses heures. Inoccupé en même temps et comblé, on se découvre une lente permanence de cœur à l’abri des acquisitions et des pertes. » Dans l’écriture, spécialement dans les cimetières, il n’y a pas de perte. L’écriture sans en plus et sans en moins, et c’est lui qui le dit: ‘’que je voudrais y revenir ‘’ au cimetière et à l’archi-écriture. Revenons brièvement sur le cadran solaire. Dans les jardins, on y a fait allusion, le cadran solaire apparaît comme une des formes premières de la spatialisation de l’espace, écriture du marquage de l’espace. Le soleil, le Roi Soleil aussi, c’est bien le despote qui signe tout l’espace. Et dans les cimetières on peut y trouver une consolation, il n’y règne que sur des morts. Ainsi, Rilke organise une économie généralisée au sens de Georges Bataille, et la poursuit longuement entre les jardins, lui- même et l’écriture. Ainsi, page 40: ‘’Je me sentais moins bien, dit-il, déprimé comme une pièce de deux sous à laquelle on ferait comprendre que par le temps qui court elle ne suffit plus à équivaloir le moindre bouquet de violettes : ‘’ La confusion s’amplifie page 41, lorsqu’il déclare: ‘’Ainsi, Je me désole d’apprendre que demain, vous quittiez Morges et ce lac qui entre nous n’était que comme une belle page blanche à tourner pour arriver d’un texte à l’autre. Je reste avec vos belles roses en attendant l’instant qui me permettra

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de vous écrire mieux et plus longuement à Zineringen. J’ai vu mes rosiers hier et je souhaite que vous veniez bientôt me parler d’eux en leur présence, sans pour cela supprimer tout ce que vous commenciez à me dire sur la musique intraduisible.’’ On passe même, page 43, de la métaphore à un régime d’équivalence. ‘’ Ainsi, dit-il, grâce à vous ces quelques parterres vagues se repenseront, comme disait Valéry, et prendront conscience de la maison dont ils seront la page de garde. « La page de garde, regardez un peu ! » « Et leur ordre influencera à son tour la maison. Devant une maison massive et sévère comme un chanoine du Moyen Age, il faudrait que le jardin s’étala comme les pages ouvertes d’un bel antiphonaire illuminé ». Un bel antiphonaire illuminé. ‘’Il faudrait qu’il osa proposer sur cinq lignes une musique précise.’’ Dans le post-scriptum de la page suivante, page 44, cela devient une hantise. Je cite: ‘’J’ajoute un petit « n » omis (cela me poursuit) dans la dernière phrase de ma dernière lettre. Cette lettre, j’espère, n’existe plus. Prenez cependant conscience de mon petit ‘’ne’’ posthume ‘’et qu’il aille, après, rejoindre la lettre dans le néant’’. Pilés, stockés, non, non, c’est en tant qu’espace même qu’il est spécialement déchiqueté, morcelé, disloqué. C’est un espace de dislocation avant même qu’on y rencontre des morts. Il y a une double mort dans ce jardin. L’ode 16 le dit bien: ‘’ Toujours, encore et de nouveau redéchiré par nous, à la place du dieu qui l’a guéri’ ‘. Oui, nous sommes coupants car nous voulons le savoir et c’est nous l’humain existant qui sommes coupants, coupures et coupés, je dirais presque coupables car nous voulons savoir. Le 17ème sonnet à Orphée marque bien cet espace de consolation que constitue la poésie, mais avec ses limites. Je lis : ‘’ Où, dans quel bienheureux jardin constamment arrosé, sur quels arbres, au calice de quelle fleur tendrement défleuri, mûrissent-ils les fruits étranges de la consolation? ‘’ Plus loin : ‘’ De l’une à l’autre fois tu t’émerveilles de la dimension du fruit, de son intacte perfection, (parousie achevée) de sa douceur de peau dont tu ne fus privée ni par l’oiseau léger ni dessous, par la jalousie, le ressentiment hantait le jardin. ‘’ Y a t il donc des arbres sous le vol des anges et soignés si étrangement par de, (je souligne) par des secrets jardiniers de lenteur. Cette lenteur dont je parlais auparavant, ce ralentissement de la parousie, il nous est dit clairement ici, qu’elle est l’œuvre de secrets jardiniers. Qui sont-ils, ces secrets jardiniers de lenteur? N’avons- nous jamais pu, nous, ombres et fantômes troubler dans leur sérénité ces étés impassibles? Malgré nos fautes, notre esprit de vengeance, nous n’avons pu altérer l’être en tant qu’être, la pureté du jardin qui excède, qui dépasse en son don infini toutes nos bassesses et d’un regard plus haut que tout, un œil suprême qui regarde de très haut tout cela, impassible. Ce caractère un peu sadique du despote qui se dévoile pour mieux se voiler apparaît dans le 20 ème sonnet à Orphée. ‘’ Le destin, peut-être est-ce à l’empan de ce qui est qu’il nous mesure pour nous apparaître étranger? Tout est distance et nulle part ne se ferme le cercle. ‘’ L’être donc, joue à se cacher,

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il se joue de nous, il se retire, il joue à cache-cache avec nous, un jeu de cache-cache fondamental de l’être qui se donne pour mieux se reprendre, coquetterie ontologique. Les vrais jardins, la vraie parousie est ailleurs. Elle nous manque dans son principe même. C’est ce qu’indique le 21ème sonnet à Orphée. ‘’ Chante-les, mon cœur, les jardins qui te sont inconnus, comme fondus dans le cristal, ces jardins clairs, inaccessibles. L’eau et les roses d’Ispahan ou Chiraz, Chante-les, O bonheur, célèbre-les, incomparables ! ‘’ Incomparables, on ne peut pas comparer nos jardins à ces jardins là, les vrais jardins, ceci entraîne une déception presque ontologique chez Rilke. C’est la grande tragédie de la nuit pour lui. Je reviens en arrière, au 19ème sonnet: ‘’O la nuit, comment peut se fermer cette main toujours ouverte? ‘’ Tragédie de la nuit. Déception en raison du caractère inaccessible, glissant, fuyant dans le principe même de cet être, De cet ange. Je cite la fin de la 19ème élégie: ‘’ Puisse quelqu’un enfin, un voyant (avec un bon œil), s’étonnant de sa langue durée, la comprendre et la célébrer. ‘’ Puisse quelqu’un …, mais il n’y a personne. Dicible uniquement par le chanteur ou le poète. Il n’y a pas d’essence du jardin. Nous l’avons dit, il est métaphore, métaphore première métaphore, métaphore de l’émergence de l’humain hors du sol natal où il serait englué. Il nous faut compléter et même inverser cette proposition. S’il est métaphore, le jardin est aussi potentiellement métonymie. Ce danger despotique dont Michel Serres nous parlait, qui consisterait à passer du local au global, du portique à l’ontologique, ce danger potentiellement existe dans tous les jardins. Le jardin, c’est la peste. Le jardin c’est la pestilence comme d’ailleurs l’indique son caractère le plus insinuant de parfum. On n’arrête pas un parfum. Le jardin asiatique contamine de proche en proche, il s’insinue. Cette tentation, cet aspect pathologique, se retrouve dans tout jardin. Nous avions marqué ici un accord aussi bien avec le matérialisme historique, qu’avec l’archéologie du savoir telle que la pratique par exemple Michel Foucault, nous avions marqué que le jardin, c’était toujours un discours autour du jardin. Mais c’est plus qu’une possibilité de parler autour du jardin, dès lors qu’il est question du jardin, c’est une nécessité, une tentation qui circonscrit le jardin, qui est le jardin même. Ici même Il a été marqué que le paradis, Fardousi, en persan, « et en arabe Djanet el fardaousse stade suprême du paradis car chez les musulmans le paradis est stratifié par des échelons et des étapes » ça veut dire ‘’ n’importe quel jardin ‘’. Le paradis, c’est n’importe quel jardin. On pourrait inverser aussi cette proposition en disant que tout jardin est potentiellement le paradis, c'est-à- dire sa propre exhaustivité, sa propre éclosion en fleurs, sa propre floraison, sa propre parousie. Tout espace est virtuellement un jardin. C’est le degré zéro de la spatialité, le jardin. Il fallait bien qu’on l’invente le jardin, d’une manière ou d’une autre. Sans croire à une ontologie qui aurait un référent, un référent quelconque, il faut bien admettre qu’une sorte de paradigme d’une ontologie phantasmée se trouve dans l’être même du jardin. Le jardin est

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tentant à présenter comme être, pur être de l’espace, spatialité en tant que telle. Qu’on essaye de le penser plutôt comme lieu ; comme rassemblement, comme ‘’Hort’’ à la manière d’Heidegger, ne change pas grand-chose au problème. Ce glissement est à la limite toujours possible. On a bien signalé cet aspect fréquent, ce « jardinème » qui consiste à le constituer en microcosme. Mais si les Anglais dans les jardins dits anglo-chinois, représentaient, palpaient en quelque sorte du regard leur pouvoir, leur pouvoir colonial sur la Chine, leurs comptoirs en Chine, si cela était possible, si le microcosme peut représenter un macrocosme, un monde, la possibilité de ce glissement, de ce changement d’échelle, il est donc la métonymie, le fait que la partie puisse désigner le tout, ce glissement métonymique toujours possible, infernalement possible, c’est sinon la définition du jardin, tout au moins l’envers de cette autre non définition que serait sa métaphoricité, son caractère de métaphore. C’est pour cela que malgré tout mon respect pour les recherches de Michel Foucault, notamment ‘’surveiller’’,‘’punir’’, je ne peux pas tout à fait me sentir d’accord avec certaines phrases de la présentation du panoptikon de Jérémy Bentham. Lorsqu’il pense ou laisse entendre que c’est au XVIII ème siècle que s’est mis en place un dispositif de haute surveillance, de panoptique, de centralisation autour du regard du maître dans les architectures, les prisons, des usines sur un modèle médical, le model de l’asile, de l’hôpital, le modèle clinique, je ne peux pas tout à fait me sentir d’accord, dans la mesure où, en effet, je conviens qu’au XVIII ème siècle on a mis au point, on a perfectionné ce dispositif de dictature du visible, du lisible, du quadrillage de l’espace, on l’a mis au point, on l’a théorisé comme tel, mais il est bien antérieur. Cette dictature de l’œil, ce surplomb de l’œil est là de toute éternité, allais-je dire, c’est un jardin d’avant le jardin. C’est un péché d’avant le péché, un deuil d’avant le deuil. Rilke nous dit que le jardin est habité par le deuil. Au paradis, sans jouer sur les mots, au paradis il ne pouvait pas y avoir de deuil puisque la n’existé pas encore. C’est donc une mort avant la mort, un péché d’avant le péché, un paradis d’avant le paradis, un œil d’avant l’œil. C’est en termes kantiens, -on peut jouer sur les références,- ce serait une condition, à priori, une condition de possibilité de toute perception, cette structure pyramidale, ce surplomb de l’œil. Je vois ce qu’il y a d’idéaliste dans ce genre de concept, parler de perception est un concept idéaliste, parler d’ontologie, de même. Et s’il y avait de l’ontologie, si j’en voyais quelque part, si j’en voyais un exemple qui incline en ce sens, cette inclination, cette tendance, c’est dans le jardin que je la verrai en premier. C’est l’inclination des fleurs même, plutôt leur inclination, leur penchant. Ces liaisons qui sont établies autour du jardin, comme monument aux morts comme machines de guerre, et même comme mousses, la possibilité même de ces liaisons, cette nécessité puisque c’est le pouvoir de débordement de ses limites, c’est ce qui définit le jardin. Alors, puisque nous parlions d’économie générale au sens de Bataille, il faudrait voir que c’est une pièce à deux faces, l’une métaphore, métaphorique, et l’autre métonymique, la métonymie, la métonymie même. En parlant ainsi,

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j’ai conscience d’une part de m’avancer dans ce qui pourrait être un genre de mysticisme que par ailleurs je récuse, mais en même temps j’ai conscience de pouvoir répondre à une objection, une objection par rapport à cette théorie de l’érection ou de l’œil. On aurait pu penser, objecter que ce que je disais du jardin était vrai de tout espace, mais le jardin c’est la possibilité extrême de tout espace et de toute possibilité. Cette érection, cette émergence de l’humain s’arrachant au règne animal, c’est vrai entre autres pour les jardins, sans doute pour d’autres formations culturelles, qu’il s’agit des toutes premières formations culturelles. Mais je ne suis, à ce niveau là, plus gêné par la coexistence et le glissement pestilentiel, la contamination des signes, puisque elle me parait constituer le mode de fonctionnement du jardin. Il n’y pas de définition, mais il y a un mode de fonctionnement. Ce mode de fonctionnement, c’est le glissement métonymique. A ce niveau là, on ne pourra pas me reprocher d’avoir quitté le sujet des jardins. Par définition même, le jardin quitte le jardin. Le jardin sort de sa définition, il déborde son cadre par un effet de parergon. Il sort de son propos. On ne pourra pas me reprocher de le faire. Qu’il y ait dans l’être une duperie fondamentale, pas seulement dans le jardin, qui simplement manifesterait cette duperie avec plus de fastes, Rilke en témoigne pas seulement pour le jardin mais pour le monde entier, pour le monde moderne, pour le monde technicisé et américain, dit-il dans une lettre à Muzot, une lettre du 13 novembre 1925. Il écrit: ‘’Pour nos grands-parents encore, une maison, une toile familière, voire même leurs propres habits, leurs manteaux, c’est infiniment plus, infiniment plus rassurant? Presque chaque chose était un réservoir. ‘’Réservoir que connoterait ici le despotisme hydraulique, le mode de production hydraulique dont nous parlions. Un réservoir dans le quel ils trouvaient quelque chose de l’homme, chez soi, dans lequel ils amassaient de l’humain (le rassemblement, le lieu, c’est toujours le lieu du rassemblement). L’humain s’amasse dans l’humain, dans les choses familières, la négation des choses familières. ‘’ A présent de l’Amérique proviennent, dit-il, proviennent et s’accumulent des choses vides et indifférentes. Des pseudo-choses, des trompe- l’œil de la vie ‘’ (je souligne des trompe- l’œil de la vie). On pourra remarquer la victoire de l’œil, même au- delà des jardins, après le jardin. Une maison au sens américain, une pomme ou un raisin de là-bas n’ont rien de commun avec la maison, le fruit, la grappe dans lesquels l’espoir et la méditation de nos ancêtres avaient passé. ‘’’ Et plus loin, il le dira : ‘’ Le monde se rétrécit’’. Sur cette dévaluation du jardin et des choses dans le cadre d’une économie généralisée à la manière de Bataille, il faut voir que le poète Rilke utilise bien aussi la métaphore monétaire, dans une autre lettre il parlera du monde qui se rétrécit ‘’car de leur côté aussi les choses font de même en cela qu’elles déplacent de plus en plus leur existence dans la vibration de l’argent, développant un genre de spiritualité qui dépasse dès maintenant leur réalité tangible. ‘’A l’époque dont je m’occupe’’ Rilke pense encore au XIVème siècle ‘’l’argent était de l’or, du métal, une belle chose, la plus maniable, la plus intelligente de toutes’’. On pourrait voir dans

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ces lignes une critique soit du capitalisme, de la valeur marchande, soit de l’essence même de la technique qui va donc accentuer, non pas créer ce caractère trompe-l’œil de la vie, cette vie en trompe- l’œil. Bien sûr on aura compris, une vie en trompe- l’œil ne peut pas tromper très longtemps, très bien, l’œil. C’est toujours l’œil qui triomphe, même chez ceux qui n’en sont pas dupes. Le ‘’ pas dupe’’ vit sous l’œil, sous l’œil du maître, d’un despote anonyme, pyramidal, inconnu, le rôle du poète ici, apparaît comme éminemment salvateur. Par exemple, il nous dit dans le poème ‘’Gravitude’’: ‘’Centre, comme de tout tu te retires de l’essor, de l’envol encore tu te prends, centre, toi le plus fort. ‘’ Ainsi, le centre abandonne le temps au risque, comme quoi il est risqué, dans cet abondant qui ressemble, est en retrait l’essence métaphasique de la volonté pensée à partir de l’être. Je tends et libérant le risqué, le risque le maintient du même coup en balance. Ce centre, Rilke l’appelle le milieu inouï, il est, dit-il, ‘’l’éternel partenaire dans le jeu historial de l’être.’’ Il y a là, une économie de retrait et du signe. Le risqué est investi de cette attirance vers le centre. Chaque fois dans cette attirance, le risque est accueilli par le risque. Le risque recueil le risqué. Recueillir quelque chose, se le procurer de quelque part, se le faire venir, se le donner, nous appelons cela le percevoir ‘’es besiehen’’. Voilà le sens premier de la perception, de ‘’besug’’, que veut sauver Rilke. C’est le rôle du poète, l’attirance qui comme risque investit d’un trait tout étant qui le concerne et ainsi le maintient. Au sein d’un tirage à soi, voilà l’essence de la perception. Le mot de ‘’besug’’ - perception est un terme fondamental de l’œuvre poétique de Rilke. Lorsqu’il parle de l’entière perception, de la réelle perception, de l’autre perception c’est-à-dire, la même à un autre égard. Il y a là un appel à la parousie, l’entière perception. D’après le poème et contrairement à la tradition de la métaphysique comme révélation, le poème donc nous invite à penser la nature comme risque. J’ai l’air peut-être de m’éloigner du jardin en parlant du poète, de la fonction fondamentale de la poésie en ce temps de détresse, mais en fait il y a analogie, car le jardin permet de penser l’illimité dans la limite, comme le poème. Ce que Rilke nomme ainsi, entière perception, l’ouvert, le risque, ça signifie ce qui ne barre pas parce qu’il ne borne pas et ne borne pas parce qu’en lui-même, il est libre de toute borne. ‘’L’ouvert est le grand entier de tout ce qui est libre de bornes’’. Il laisse entrer les êtres risqués dans le passage de la perception pure ; parousie, presque hallucinatoire de sorte que, multiplement, l’un vers l’autre et sans rencontrer de barrières, ils continuent de passer, ‘’Ainsi, passant et repassant ils s’épanouissent et se confondent dans le sans borne, dans l’infini. Ils ne se diluent pas dans la nullité d’un néant, mais s’acquittent de la totalité de l’ouvert’’ S’acquitter, c’est bien une problématique de la dette, du don, dette à l’égard d’un donateur d’être. Donc, l’ouvert se donne au pôle comme au jardinier, il se donne, il s’éprouve comme l’ouvert, sans retrait, ce que Rilke a éprouvé comme l’ouvert, c’est précisément le clos, le non éclairci, ce qui continue de passer dans l’illimité de sorte qu’il ne saurait faire rencontre avec quelque chose d’inhabituel et même

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avec quoi que ce soit, car où quelque chose rencontre, il y a barrière. Où il y a ainsi limite, le limite est refoulé sur lui-même est ainsi reversé sur lui-même. Le jardin, c’est l’équivalence du poème à ce niveau, encore une fois. Nous avions parlé d’une hiérarchie des fleurs à l’intérieur du jardin, on a dit aussi qu’il y a une hiérarchie entre les plantes du jardin, les animaux, les hommes, et les poètes. Nous serions au sommet, je le cite: ‘’Sauf que nous, plus encore que la plante et l’animal, allons avec ce risque’’. Que l’homme aille encore plus que l’animal ou la plante avec le risque, cela pourrait signifier à première vue que l’homme engagé avec encore moins d’entraves que ces autres êtres dans l’ouvert. Le risque et son risqué, la nature, l’étant en son entier, le monde’ sont pour l’homme placés en dehors. Hors du voile protecteur enveloppant la perception libre de borne. Il y a une hiérarchie. Le poète est quand même le plus ouvert dans l’ouvert, à l’ouverture. Néanmoins, il n’y a aucun écrasement, aucun mépris véritable de Rilke à l’égard de l’obscur, du moins illuminé. L’obscur désir n’est pas pensé par Rilke comme quelque chose de bas ou de moindre. Il témoigne de l’appartenance des choses de grande habitude à l’entier de la perception pure. C’est pourquoi Rilke peut dire dans un poème tardif 7‘’ Que pour nous l’être des fleurs soit grand ! ‘’. La dimension de l’érection, de se tenir debout, du surplomb, cette dimension une fois doit appartenir aux fleurs aussi. L’érection de l’œil, le surplomb de l’œil, un parcours symétrique d’érection des fleurs, l’agrandissement spontané, et concernant leur être même. Il y a une ontologie florale, une ontologie de la floraison, dans le risque bien sûr. Ce qui va peut-être marquer une différence avec les plantes ou les animaux et par ailleurs l’homme, ça serait simplement un degré différent de volonté, de volonté de puissance si l’ont veut. Faire venir quelque chose devant soi de telle sorte que l’ainsi proposé détermine à tous les égards, en tant que préalablement représenté, tous les modes de production, voilà un trait fondamental du comportement que nous connaissions sous le nom de volonté. La volonté dont il s’agit ici a cette production ou proposition ‘’erstellen’’ au sens de la position délibérée de l’objectivation. La plante et l’animal ne veulent pas dans la mesure où, adonnes (dons, le don encore) où adonnées à une vie béate, ils ne font jamais venir devant eux l’ouvert comme objet, mais ne peuvent pas aller avec le risque en tant que représenté. En pareil vouloir au contraire, l’homme moderne se révèle comme celui qui dans tous les apports avec ce qui est et par conséquent se donne, veut se destiner au jardin comme d’un trait et en retrait tout à la fois comme retraite et destin.

7 (cf. : sonnet, 2ème partie 14)

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Références

-Adorno, T.W. 1995. Kierkegaard : construction de l’esthétique, Paris : Payot.

-Heidegger, M. 1962. « L’origine de l’ l’œuvre d’art » in Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, Paris, Gallimard, p. 88.

-Rilke, R.M. 1981. Lettres autour d’un jardin, Paris : La Délirante.

-Serres, M. 1977. La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce, Paris : Éditions de Minuit.

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The role of political power and ideology in the formation of city aesthetics in the Turkish and Central Volga Regions in the 18th and 19th centuries PhD. Nurçin Çelik* Gazi University

This study aims at examining the reflection of political power and ideology into the formation of cities- that is say, the formation of city aesthetics- in Turkey and in central Volga region with dense Tartar population, both of which are within European cultural region. It is probable to see certain similarities between the life styles of the two communities, which have been fed by the same cultural sources. Therefore, the similarities and differences between the settlement locations of both communities will provide effective data for potential comparative studies.

The cities chosen for the comparative study of the two communities, which are the subject matter of the research, are Kazan- the capital city of Tataristan, Istanbul- the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, and Ankara- the capital city of Turkish Republic. However, some other cities from both communities are also occasionally included in the study so that exemplification might be more effective.

Throughout history it may be observed that city image is created mostly (or even only) by political institutions. When the city is handled as a human created object, everything that has been accumulated so far is considered to be the indicator of its improvement. Yet, political preferences may not be ignored here.

The aesthetic structure of a city, which may be regarded as the object of nature and the subject of culture, is composed of architecture. Monumental buildings firstly are the artistic buildings of a city at the same time. They are firstly described in those aspects and are the values stronger than memory and the environment. Ruling powers have benefited from art and architecture as an ideological vehicle for centuries. Thus, power has been reflected into locations both in city dimension and in the dimension of buildings.

* [email protected]

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PhD. Nurçin Çelik The role of political power and ideology in the formation of city aesthetics in the Turkish and Central Volga Regions in the 18th and 19th centuries

Since Anatolian cities have been exposed to continuous invasions for centuries, they have castle-city structure. Cities located in a fortified area generally near a running water has an internal castle where palace and administration center are present and an external castle in which trade and house fabric surrounding the internal castle. External walls surrounding city, and thus fabric of settlement are turned into city doors in places where ways providing connection with other cities are present. With the increase in population in time, city settlement started to surge out of city. In the historical process, Anatolian cities showed development according to the importance of geography in which they were located (reason such as being on the trade routs, being in a fortified place etc.). However, although this old city fabric in cities of our day (castle-city structure) was not been able to preserve their walls in many cities, they still continue their existence. Fundamentally, the basic element shaping Anatolian cities since Seljuks has been Friday Mosque (Cuma Câmi) of the cities. Seljuks constructed a Friday Mosque at first in the cities they settled after 1071 Malazgirt Victory. Each city had a Friday (Cuma) (grand) mosque. In Seljuks, Grand Mosque (Ulu Câmi) has two meanings for a city: firstly, it is a prayer place; secondly, it is the chairmanship council. Minbar of Grand Mosque is sent to cities by Islam khalif. In addition, names of khalif and sultan are commemorated in Friday khutba. For this reason, Grand Mosques have a political aspect. Grand mosques being the focal point of Seljuk cities comprise public areas for people in the cities with its internal and external courtyards. These mosques are the gathering places of community coming together for Friday prayer. Thus, there are not squares in cities of Anatolian Seljuks as in European cities. Gathering places of people is the backyards of grand mosques. Madrassas, education institutions are very near mosques. Küllliyes are social complexes consisting of mosque, madrassa, bath and tomb, and serving for public. Trade and settlement units are present near these places. Other than grand mosques, neighborhood prayer rooms which are also prayer places are available in the city. These small mosques also have smaller backyards in comparison to grand mosques where neighborhood residents come together.

This city structure of Seljuks continues in Ottomans. Urban fabric is completely organic. Formation of streets is carried out in compliance with typography data. Dead end streets are very common. Houses’ position in parcels is carried out in complete accordance with their functions. There are not any structure cutting light, sun and view of another structure. Development of city in such a way occurs naturally for the most part. Although there are not any legal liabilities originating from administration, each structure is remarkably respectful for another. There are not any restriction enforced by central administration in terms of architecture of structures such as how to make plan schemes of houses and their fronts. However, public buildings having an important role in public works of cities such as külliye are generally constructed by the order of sultans and/or high level public authorities. Since these structures are built by Hassa Architects Club which is responsible for general public works of the country, they comprise the architectural style of the Empire.

City of Istanbul had been the capital city of Ottoman Empire for almost 500 years from the date in which the city was taken from Byzantines in 1453 until 1920 when the Republic of Turkey was established. Home office of the country was transferred to Ankara with the proclamation of the republic. It goes without saying that Istanbul had never been a city only a single society lived in. According

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PhD. Nurçin Çelik The role of political power and ideology in the formation of city aesthetics in the Turkish and Central Volga Regions in the 18th and 19th centuries to Henri Prost, the historical city is definitely a European City1. Changes caused by city fires from the middle of 19th century turned Istanbul into a city constructed with buildings and houses built in western-style. Great streets, tramways, modern public buildings were already available in the city. Especially, Beyoğlu and its periphery known as Laventan region in which non-muslims lived was already a European city with its gridal urban fabric architecture and social life.

Ottoman authority’ conventional attempts of “Modernization” of urban fabric which formed in Empire’s capital city through centuries by taking west as the example can be dated back to Sultan III. Selim period (1789-1808). Although, the renovation movement started by III Selim aimed at revision of Janissaries and establishment of Nizam-ı Cedid army, this movement was spread to other fields of Empire in later periods. As a result of these initiatives increasingly continuing in Sultan II. Mahmud (1808-1839) period and especially in the years following the proclamation of Hatt-i Sharif (Tanzimat Fermanı) (1839), some urban changes were seen in Istanbul. However, in spite of a lot of activities such as opening of Beyazıt Square, broadening Divan Way, reconstruction of gaps in the city caused by fires with a geometric fabric, coming into force of Tunnel between Karaköy and Beyoğlu which is the first metro of city, turning Horse Square (At Meydanı) into park and arrangement of some new parks, until Republic period, city was not subjected to a integrated planning with its center and periphery. In fact, this situation is not an application unique to Istanbul, capital city of Ottoman Empire. It not possible to mention urban planning put into effect by Empire and applied in other Anatolian cities out of Istanbul located in rural areas.

Westernization movements started in Istanbul caused some kind of movements in other cities always taking Istanbul as an example. Public structures (such as government offices, schools etc.) imitating European architecture were constructed also in Anatolian cities other than Istanbul.

Kazan which is the capital city of Tatarstan today was the capital city of Khanate of Kazan in the middle age in VII century. City was annexed into Russian territory in XVI century by Russian Tsar IV. Ivan. Later, Tatar population was evacuated out of city and they settled in the coasts of Kaban Lake near Kazan. Two settlements were integrated after developing between XVIII and XIX century. Development of Tatar and Russian cultures continued in the integrated city. However, Russian culture taking its power from force exercised control over Tatar culture in some fields. In XVIII and XIX centuries, Russian influence dominated formation of the city. In XVIII century Tsar I Peter stated great reforms, thus city and its architecture were reconstructed with these westernization reforms.

City plan of Kazan having gridal system and taking European city model as example was verified in 1768. Thus, a gridal city fabric which never corresponded to organic fabric was envisaged upon organic fabric. In fact, dating from XVIII century, new city fabric and architecture were applied in many Russian cities by ignoring old organic fabric with the will of political power. Cities were formed according to the new plan, architecture of constructed buildings were constructed in compliance with structure plans and frontal arrangements sent from central administration.

1 Pierre Pinon, "The Urbanism of Henri Prost and the Transformations of Istanbul", From the Imperial Capital to the Republican Modern City: Henri Prost's Planning of Istanbul (1936-1951), Istanbul, 2010, 73.p.

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In Anatolia, however, in XVIII century, there was not a city formed by the will of central administration, whose plans were verified officially and formed according to these series of events. Nevertheless, new structuring triggered by westernization movements was formed in the periphery of city fabric, not upon old organic city fabric. Old and new fabrics integrated sometimes. Castle-city structure explained above are generally located on heights as in cities of Ankara, Bursa and Harput because of their typographic structures and perceived as crowns of cities. Town located and developing near it is referred to as New Town in most Anatolian cities. However, this created the dilemma of old city- new city in our cities.

Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, had a ratified modern City Plan only in 1929. Efforts of new administration to create a contemporary capital city have opened architectural activities in Ankara to foreign architects beginning from 1926-1927. Especially, some of the architects running away from Nazi Germany came to Turkey. The enthusiasm to be opened towards in terms of application and professional education also dominated in architecture as in all fields. The First National Architecture Movement continuing since Constitutional Monarchy will die down and give its place to a new movement lead by European Architects2.

According to Jansen Plan which was verified in 1932 and envisaged a housing development, without interfering in Old Ankara too much, behind Yenişehir Kavaklıdere where civil servants live, Tandoğan, Bahçelievler axis and Cebeci defined as east and west points were designed as worker neighborhoods. This approach envisaging the formation of green axis passing across the city in east- west direction had the objective of developing Ankara into a garden city or a beautiful city with a middle-low density. The first constructed public buildings had the characteristics of both conventionalism and modernism. It is seen that while foreign architects applied modern architecture, Turkish architects followed a more conventional line with the effect of I. National Architecture Movement.

Kazan, the capital city of Tataristan today, was the capital city of Kazan Khanate in the Middle Age in the 7th century. The city was annexed to Russia in the 16th century by Ivan the Russian Tsar. However, the Russian culture, which owed its strength to political power, influenced Tartar culture in several fields. Tsar Peter I performed great reforms in the 18th century, and the city and its architecture were re- shaped through those westernization reforms.

The XVIII-th century in Russia began with the Peter I the Great reforms and passed through under the sign of the common and manifold Europeanization. First of all this process has concerned the town planning and architecture. The authorities intruded the principles of regularity with resoluteness and wide range always distinguishing the Russian administrators.

Regularity has meant laying out the geometrically correct net of straight and wide streets and the conformance of their red lines by carrying out the houses and other erections the fences and gates included. The architectural expression of the regularity meant the monotonous and European stile of buildings and giving all them the stone view. To that effect there has been sent about the specially worked books of samples ratified by the emperor. The residents were

2 G. Tankut, Bir Başkentin Omarı Ankara: (1929-1939), Ankara, 1993, p.101.

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The regular plan of Kazan was ratified in 1768. And at the end of the XVIII-th century the city evolved from the Middle Ages into the epoch of New time. The chaos of curved streets of the old city gave place to the regular system of streets and squares. But the squire was habitual planning element for the Russians because the church stood about it while the Muslim tradition did not know squires except market places. And so a new Yonusov squire appeared according to the regular plan was built up with dwelling houses and it has never been used as a public space3. The essential departures from the administrative directions took place during the realization of the regular plan. The departures during the process of regulating were not great but expressive. Contrary to the approved plan there were saved the some irregular streets of the old Tatar sloboda which had the importance for Tatars. First of all it was the main street on which two stone mosques were situated. And just here the houses of the rich merchants were settled. According to the tradition the mosques were situated at the intersections of the main street and the lanes, and these lanes were also left and straightened.

The Europeanization of the buildings proceeded the most paintfully. The Tatar traditional planning corresponded with the Muslim way of life. The inner space of the homestead was fenced of the street by means of household erections and the house was situated in the heart of it. According to the new rules the house had to be carried out on the line of the street, and just this caused the people’s resistance. And as a result of legislative norms and ancient traditions struggle the compromise planning decisions appeared. As before the house was hidden at the mid-portion while the erections of housewifery has being placed along the red line of the streets4.

But on the whole the building up of the farms corresponded to the legislative demands and the Tatar blocks in the XIXth century slightly differed externally from the Russian parts of the city.

Kazan authorities had to report about the number of buildings and even fences built by one or another sample.

In a general sense transition to the eclectic architecture expressed the confession of private life’s relative independence from the state directions. This confession was especially important for Kazan because the private life of the part of it’s population was based on the Islam principles. Thus the Tatar and the Russians used the same sample facades because they were obligative5.

Consequently the Kazan samples represented the original form of adaptation of state norms to the local conditions being the reflection of the social order and

3 Nugmanova, G. "Russian Architectural Ideology Of The XVIII-XIX-Th Centuries And Muslim Tradition” In Kazan, Kazan, 2007, p. 1-2. 4 Nugmanova, G. İbid, p. 2-3. 5 Nugmanova, G. ibid, p. 4.

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The ideas of the main properties of the Space and Time, the dwelling as a refuge, the own territory where everybody creates his own way of life invisible for outsiders and independently of neighbors are common. Talking about the differences one can analyse the different degree of demonstration of the same features, the difference in way of life and worship only but not the difference in psychological archetypes. Therefore the difference in dwelling architecture of Russians and Tatars of that time is slight and hardly perceptible. The differences are the following.

First of all it is the tendency to settle compactly and apart. This purpose was mostly achieved in the Tatar sloboda. Just therefore the rich and patriarchal Tatar families preferred it. For example, in 1840-1841 almost all Tatar merchants lived in Tatar sloboda. At the same time the Tatar population nearby the Russian Sennaya squire consisted of bourgeois.

The following peculiarity of the Tatar dwelling conception is the tendency to hide the family life as much as possible. It is clear that such aspiration was typical for other nations but it was expressed to a greater extent in Tatars.

Both of these peculiarities did not lead to any architectural consequences. They could be realized in those architectural forms that were suggested by the Russian authorities. Therefor the Russian and The Tatar areas of the city were analogous. The differences concerned not the architectural forms but planning of the plot and the house6.

Indeed, considerable westernisation movements were available in both the cities of central Volga region with intense Tartar population and in Anatolian cities selected for exemplification from the 18th to the 20th century. While the formation in Russia was performed via the control of political authority and with force by disregarding the previous city texture, the formation in Turkey was conducted without much forcing, by respecting the previous city texture and not by disregarding it. Moreover, as in the case of Ankara, the height of the buildings surrounding the citadel and its environment was restricted in order not to prevent view of the area from the city through the approved city plan.

6 Nugmanova, G., ibid, p. 5.

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References - Aru, K. 1998. Türk Kenti, İstanbul. - Aйдаров, C.C. 2007. Бондаренко, И.А.- Нугманова, Г.Г., РЕГИНАЛЬНОЕ МНОГООБРАЗИЕ АРХИТЕКТУРЫ РОССИИ, КАЗАНЬ. - Cezar, M. 1977. Anadolu Öncesi Türklerde Şehir ve Mimarlık. İstanbul. - Cezar, M. 1991. XIX. Yüzyıl Beyoğlusu, İstanbul. - Gabriel, A. 1958. Une Capitale Turque Brousse Bursa. Paris: I Texte. - Girouard, M. 1985. Cities and People, London. - Kazan Kremlin. 2005. Kazan. - Kostof, S. 2009. The City Shaped Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, China. - Nugmanova, G. 2007 "Russian Architectural Ideology Of The XVIII-XIXth Centuries And Muslim Tradition In Kazan", Kazan. - Pinon, P. 2010. "The Urbanism of Henri Prost and the Transformations of İstanbul", From the Imperial Capital to the Republican Modern City: Henri Prost's Planning of İstanbul (1936-1951), İstanbul. - Tankut, G. 1993. Bir Başkentin İmarı Ankara: (1929-1939) Ankara. - Tankut, G. 2007. The Seljuk City, Ankara. - Sunguroğlu, İ. 1958. Harput Yollarında, 1.C., İstanbul.

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La memoria como emoción para transformar desde la práctica artística los lugares en hogares y crear nuevas ecologías

Antonio José García Cano* Universidad de Murcia

Las prácticas artísticas ecológicas tratan temas relacionados con la ecología, pero sobre todo son aquellas que aprenden de los ecosistemas con el fin de contribuir a su mejora.

La memoria colectiva puede ser un recurso fundamental para que la gente se sienta vinculada a un lugar. De esta manera, será más probable que reconozcan, protejan y promuevan su valor ecológico. La memoria servirá para reflexionar sobre nuestra relación con el lugar donde vivimos y puede aportar el conocimiento y el arraigo suficiente para desarrollar proyectos artísticos que tengan en cuenta los ecosistemas.

Esta memoria se conforma en base a la memoria de las personas que viven en el lugar, la memoria del entorno que recoge las propiedades de ese marco espacial y la memoria de las ecologías que se refiere a cómo se relacionaban los habitantes con el entorno.

* [email protected]

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1. Introducción En mi proyecto de investigación analizo prácticas artísticas que trabajan con la memoria como recurso para conocer mejor un lugar, generar mayor conexión con el mismo e imaginar, promover o apoyar alternativas que contribuyan a su mejora ecológica. De forma paralela, desarrollo mi trabajo como artista en este mismo ámbito; la relación entre el arte, la memoria y la ecología.

En esta presentación intentaré aproximarme a una definición de estas prácticas. En primer lugar, me referiré a la relación entre arte y ecología. A continuación, a los conceptos de lugar y hogar. Después desarrollaré la idea de memoria vinculada a un espacio. Por último, describiré mis trabajos: Proyecto Azarbón (2009) y Proyecto Iskurna (2011).

2. Arte y ecología: una relación en proceso Se utilizan numerosos términos para nombrar las prácticas artísticas en arte y ecología, y bajo estas denominaciones podemos encontrar una gran variedad de sensibilidades artísticas. Greenmuseum.org (http://greenmuseum.org/) es una de las organizaciones internacionales más importantes que estudian el llamado arte ecológico y que sirve como plataforma de intercambio. En su página web, se puede acceder a un extenso listado de artistas dividido en catorce categorías distintas tales como arte en la naturaleza, procesos naturales, performance, restauración, documentación o agitación y propaganda. Quería destacar, por el cambio de planteamiento que suponen, aquellas prácticas que no sólo se ocupan en denunciar o limitar los impactos de la contaminación y de la actividad humana, sino que consideran el cambio climático inevitable y sus proyectos se centran en identificar las oportunidades en ese escenario ineludible. Tratan de aprender de ese proceso de cambio e intentan crear proyectos que se adapten a esos cambios. Esta perspectiva la podemos encontrar en proyectos de arte ecológico como Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2007-2009) de Helen Mayer y Newton Harrison. Este proyecto propone alternativas para retirarse de las zonas inundables en Reino Unido ante la subida del nivel de los océanos

(http://greenhousebritain.greenmuseum.org/). Otro ejemplo es el proyecto Trees of Grace del artista ecológico e investigador David Haley (2009, p. 309). Se trata de un proyecto que propone crear un bosque con la especie arbórea ginkgo biloba en la cuenca del río Mersey en el norte de Inglaterra. Según sus investigaciones, esta especie resistiría un incremento de la temperatura de cuatro grados centígrados. Por lo tanto, estos proyectos se centran en imaginar cómo podríamos vivir en el cambio y con sus consecuencias y qué oportunidades presenta. Pero no esto no significa que olviden el presente ya que sus proyectos intentan encontrar maneras de estar preparados y al mismo tiempo contribuyen a minimizar el impacto del cambio climático.

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Ante esta diversidad, cabe preguntarse qué tienen en común estas prácticas y qué las diferencia de otras relativas a la ecología y propias de otras disciplinas. David Haley (2010b, p.1) se refiere a su práctica a través de las definiciones de ecología y arte y considerando la relación entre arte y complejidad. Partiendo de esta perspectiva, me parece adecuado atender a la definición de Ecología que es la ciencia que estudia las relaciones de los seres vivos entre sí y con su entorno. Por tanto, un arte vinculado a la ecología tiene como referencia esas relaciones. Trata de conocer y aproximarse a las relaciones que se dan entre las partes y el todo en los sistemas complejos a los que se refieren tanto Fritjof Capra (1996) como Edgar Morin (2006). Este acercamiento a la complejidad no sólo tiene como fin un análisis del contexto sino que es una oportunidad de integración y colaboración con el sistema.

Un proyecto de arte y ecología puede ofrecer una serie de oportunidades. Como apunta David Haley (2010a, p. 7), los proyectos artísticos pueden elegir la escala de su trabajo, pueden realizar sus proyectos en una escala o varias a la vez. No tienen que ceñirse a la escala que le viene dada por la disciplina. Esta flexibilidad le hace especialmente valioso para tratar un tema como la ecología.

En el ámbito de un proyecto artístico, el arte suele tener la posibilidad de contestar una pregunta con otra que enriquezca el análisis y pueda cambiar los puntos de vista, incluyendo un mayor número de perspectivas que nos acerquen a la complejidad de los temas abordados. En este sentido, David Haley (2010b, p. 31) defiende el aprendizaje basado en las preguntas (question based learning) frente al aprendizaje basado en los problemas (problem based learning).

Un proyecto de arte y ecología brinda la posibilidad de colaborar con personas de los lugares en los que se trabaja y con personas vinculadas al arte y de otras disciplinas como la Ecología, la Hidrología, la Biología, la Arquitectura o la Sociología, entre otras, dependiendo del proyecto. Se puede encontrar una reflexión interesante en torno a este tipo de proyectos en Story of Becoming: Landscape Creation Through An Art/Science Dynamic (Firbank, Mayer, Harrison, Haley y Griffith, 2009). En este capítulo se analiza el desarrollo del proyecto Casting a Green Net: Can it Be We are Seeing a Dragon? (1996-1998) desarrollado por los artistas Helen Mayer, Newton Harrison y David Haley, y el ecólogo Les Firbank. Este proyecto estudia y diseña la posible creación de un corredor de biodiversidad en el norte de Inglaterra, desde Liverpool, en la costa oeste, hasta Hull, en la costa este. Además de las personas nombradas, también participan expertos en otras disciplinas.

Por último, el marco de un proyecto artístico, fuera del ámbito económico, industrial incluso académico, puede ofrecer un espacio y un tiempo en el que personas de otras disciplinas se enfrenten a preguntas que no les son hechas con frecuencia y sus respuestas pueden liberarse de las exigencias del tiempo y de los resultados que se les demandan en su actividad habitual. De esta manera, podemos crear un espacio para la imaginación, la creatividad y la evolución de las ideas de los participantes, cosa que no está reñida con el rigor académico.

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3. El lugar y el hogar Cuando utilizo el concepto lugar me refiero a un espacio físico en una interacción compleja con los organismos que lo habitan y conectado a su pasado y futuro. El sentimiento de vinculación puede convertir el lugar en hogar. Me refiero a hogar como el conjunto de relaciones complejas y dinámicas existentes entre los organismos y su entorno en distintos momentos del tiempo y del que, aunque como parte diferenciada, también participamos y nos sentimos partícipes.

Por tanto, queremos comprobar si la memoria en la práctica artística puede crear vínculos afectivos que sean desencadenantes de un mayor sentido de pertenencia con el lugar y si éste, a su vez, puede generar acciones para mejorar la ecología de un lugar.

4. Memoria Mi investigación se centra en las prácticas de arte y ecología que nacen de la memoria relativa al lugar y a su relación con las personas que en él viven. Según el sociólogo francés Maurice Halbwachs (2004, p. 137) los habitantes establecen una relación con su lugar que no es accidental ni de corta duración y en la que la memoria parece tener una función importante:

Si entre las casas, las calles y los grupos de sus habitantes, no hubiera más que una relación accidental y de corta duración, los hombres podrían destruir sus casas, su barrio, su ciudad y reconstruir otros, en el mismo lugar, según un plano distinto. Pero aunque las piedras se dejan transportar, no es tan fácil modificar las relaciones que se han establecido entre las piedras y los hombres. Cuando un grupo humano vive durante mucho tiempo en un lugar adaptado a sus costumbres, no sólo sus movimientos, sino también sus pensamientos se regulan según la sucesión de imágenes materiales que le ofrecen los objetos exteriores. Ya se pueden suprimir en parte o modificar la dirección, la orientación, la forma o el aspecto de estas casas, estas calles, estos pasos, o cambiar solamente el lugar que ocupan uno respecto de otro. Las piedras y los materiales no se resistirán. Pero los grupos se resistirán y, en ellos, se enfrentarán, no tanto al apego a las piedras, como al que tienen a sus antiguos lazos.

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Trato de comprender cómo este conocimiento del lugar y conexión emocional a través de la memoria puede significar una mayor protección del mismo y puede ser semilla de iniciativas artísticas que valoren, promuevan y potencien su valor ecológico. Esta afirmación se relativizaría si esa memoria nos lleva a experiencias negativas ligadas a ese lugar. En cualquier caso, el conocimiento de lo ocurrido puede influir en el modo en el que me relaciono con un entorno y esto puede significar que hagamos lugar de una determinada manera. Así mismo, la pérdida de esa memoria puede significar una relación distinta.

No se trata de una memoria nostálgica, sino de una memoria crítica y creativa que nos permita imaginar futuros posibles a partir de lo aprendido en el pasado. Es decir, no es una memoria que idealice el pasado, sino una memoria que conoce el pasado, aprende de él, de los errores y de los aciertos, y que en base a ellos es capaz de imaginar otras posibilidades para el futuro adaptadas a los cambios. En definitiva, es el sistema complejo de relaciones a lo largo del tiempo entre la memoria de los moradores y moradoras, la memoria del entorno y la memoria de la ecología. A lo largo del tiempo, cada una de ellas hace al conjunto y viceversa:

• La memoria de los moradores y moradoras es la memoria emocional individual y colectiva vinculada a un lugar. Está en proceso y por tanto puede interpretar el pasado de distintas maneras. La gente nos cuenta cómo era el lugar, sucesos concretos, nos hablan sobre sus cultivos, los sistemas y gestión de riegos, sus esperanzas, sus sentimientos, etc.

• La memoria del entorno es la memoria referida a cómo era ese entorno. Qué flora y fauna lo habitaba y cómo ha cambiado, cómo era el río y cuáles han sido los procesos que ha sufrido, cómo era el suelo, las inundaciones, el aire, la temperatura, los cultivos, el sistema de irrigación, etc. Todos estos aspectos físicos, geológicos y biológicos que configuran un lugar pueden aportar mucha información para entender los procesos en los que el lugar está inmerso y pueden ser fuente creativa para el desarrollo del trabajo artístico.

• La memoria ecológica es la memoria que expresa cómo era la relación entre los distintos organismos y la relación de estos organismos con el entorno, asumiendo la complejidad de estas relaciones.

Cuando decimos que recuperamos la memoria de cómo eran las cosas, ¿A qué momento nos referimos? Por ejemplo, un río que no está canalizado se mueve y cambia su cauce constantemente, los meandros se desarrollan a lo ancho y se pronuncian cada vez más, se desplazan y terminan por cortarse iniciando de nuevo el proceso. Por consiguiente, la pregunta ¿Cómo era el río? no está completa, le falta el cuándo. La pregunta completa sería: ¿Cómo era el río en septiembre de 1905? Y esta información es relevante. Sin embargo, nos interesa sobre todo para analizar los procesos fluviales a largo plazo. Por tanto, el tipo de memoria que nos

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interesa no es una memoria fotográfica, no es la memoria de un momento determinado del tiempo, sino que es una memoria de procesos y dinámica. Es decir, no nos interesa tanto cómo era un río en un momento determinado sino cómo ha evolucionado a lo largo del tiempo y cómo se ha relacionado con el resto de elementos del entorno.

Activando y ejercitando esta memoria, se produce un movimiento continuo de ida y vuelta entre el pasado y el futuro. Sin duda, el pasado forma parte de nuestro presente e influye en el futuro en diferentes modos. Pero también es posible que los futuros que seamos capaces de imaginar influyan en el presente que vivimos, ya que podremos empezar a trabajar en ellos desde hoy. Utilizo futuros en el sentido que David Haley describe (s.f., p. 11). Afirma que necesitamos considerar diversos futuros porque nadie sabe las estrategias que funcionarán.

5. Proyectos Artísticos Empiezo a sentir como mi trabajo de investigación y mis proyectos artísticos se interrelacionan, se van haciendo uno a otro, a veces se acercan, otras se alejan. Me voy a referir brevemente al Proyecto Azarbón (2009) y al Proyecto Iskurna (2011).

5.1 Proyecto Azarbón (2009) Realizo este proyecto en el pueblo donde resido, Rincón de Beniscornia, Murcia. Surge de mis recuerdos y de las conversaciones con mi abuelo José Cano y mi tía abuela Antonia Cano sobre un lugar concreto cerca del que vivían, el Azarbón (Azarbe: cauce que devuelve el agua sobrante de riego al río).

A partir de mi memoria y la memoria de estas dos personas realizo una serie de acciones. En primer lugar limpio una parte del cauce, recordando el sistema anual de limpieza que se sigue practicando por parte de los regantes y que se conoce como monda. Fotografío los objetos que encuentro al limpiar el cauce. Una vez limpio el cauce simulo el agua fluyendo por el mismo utilizando unas cañas (Arundo donax). Esta planta crece a lo largo de los cauces y hasta hace pocos años era utilizada para numerosas labores como la fabricación de cañizos, la construcción, para tejer ciertos utensilios, etc. Con las indicaciones de mi abuelo fabrico con una de esas cañas un instrumento musical de percusión típico de la huerta murciana, la castañeta. Finalmente les pido que con unas hojas de caña hagan barcos como me han contado que hacían para jugar en el agua y con lo que yo también jugaba. Finalmente coloco esos barcos sobre el flujo de cañas.

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Todo este proceso queda recogido en un vídeo de 17 minutos en los que intercalo entrevistas con todas las acciones descritas. Considero que el proyecto no es la intervención final, sino todo el proceso: el diálogo con mis familiares, vecinos y vecinas, los bocetos, esquemas y escritura, el tiempo trabajando en el cauce y contando a la gente lo que hacía y porqué lo hacía, el vídeo final y los diálogos que ha generado después.

Al finalizar el proyecto, la pregunta es si se ha conseguido mejorar el lugar en algún sentido. Puede que en este proyecto el efecto inmediato no sea una mejora evidente de la ecología del lugar. Pero creo que ha generado recuperación de la memoria. Es decir, por una parte, he recuperado la memoria de los moradores, por otra la memoria del entorno y por último la memoria de la ecología. Esa memoria rescatada se transmite y despierta recuerdos a través de las conversaciones y el vídeo. Si consideramos que conocer mejor nuestros lugares y sentir una mayor vinculación hace que los protejamos e intentemos mejorarlos, puede que con este proyecto hayamos iniciado ese proceso de recuperación de memoria que pueda derivar en otras acciones.

5.2 Proyecto Iskurna (2011) Como parte práctica de mi tesis, he empezado a desarrollar también en el pueblo del que soy vecino, Rincón de Beniscornia (Murcia), un proyecto práctico bajo el nombre Proyecto Iskurna.

Es una iniciativa abierta de reflexión, investigación, intercambio y recuperación de la memoria del paisaje huertano en transición en el que vivimos en Rincón de Beniscornia como en otros lugares de Murcia.

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Su objetivo principal es promover el conocimiento y la vinculación hacia nuestro lugar a través de la memoria y del lenguaje artístico para comprobar si esto es útil para contribuir a la mejora de su ecología. Para la consecución de este objetivo me propongo promover:

• El conocimiento de nuestro pueblo, su riqueza cultural, histórica y ecológica. • La recuperación de la memoria de nuestro pueblo en lo relativo a su relación con el entorno: río, inundaciones, cultivos, flora y fauna. • El intercambio de conocimientos entre generaciones. • El análisis de las amenazas e identificación de las oportunidades de nuestro entorno. • La creatividad y la imaginación para visualizar otros futuros

Todo esto se va a intentar desarrollar de una manera participativa, generando actividades culturales, así como a través del lenguaje artístico basado en la memoria. En un primer momento, comencé comunicando el proyecto y generando un pequeño grupo de gente interesada. Algunas de las ideas iniciales del proyecto cambiaron o se ampliaron después de varios encuentros con estas personas. A su vez se ha empezado a recoger información a través de entrevistas, fotografías, encuentros con vecinos y vecinas, documentos históricos, etc. Por ejemplo, una de las primeras actividades que hemos realizado es localizar todo el sistema de irrigación del pueblo, incluyendo acequia, partidores y brazales, así como sus nombres si los tienen.

Algunas futuras acciones concretas que va a promover este proyecto son:

• El dibujo de un mapa de Rincón de Beniscornia que incluya las memorias de los vecinos y vecinas así como los datos que obtengamos de la investigación y distinto a los que nos vienen dados. Este trabajo artístico puede ser símbolo de la participación, de la recuperación de la memoria y puede generar nuevas memorias en torno a nuestro pueblo. • Recorridos por el pueblo visitando lugares concretos para hablar de su memoria o de la memoria en relación a otros aspectos como flora y fauna, cultivos o agua, y compartir nuestra investigación y nuestros recuerdos. • Encuentros y tertulias para activar memoria, utilizando el dibujo y la fotografía como recursos reactivadores. • Archivo histórico público sobre nuestro pueblo con fotografía, dibujos, audio, vídeo, etc.

Los temas a tratar en estas acciones son los relativos a río, inundaciones, cauce, canalización, meandros, flora y fauna de ribera, acequias, brazales, efectos del entubamiento, cultivos, tradiciones, amenazas y oportunidades en la huerta. Sin

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embargo, el proyecto está abierto a las sugerencias, a los temas o a los recorridos que los participantes quieran, siempre que estén en relación a la memoria y la ecología.

El pasado día 24 de junio de 2011 realicé una presentación para todo el pueblo. Y el día 25 celebramos el primer paseo por el paisaje de la memoria de Rincón de Beniscornia. Visitamos lugares del pueblo relacionados con el agua, elemento fundamental del origen y evolución de este paisaje, como la Acequia Aljufía, el Molino de los Canalaos o Molino Viejo de la Pólvora, la Acequia Beniscornia y el antiguo cauce del Río Segura.

Participaron unas treinta personas aproximadamente. En cada uno de los puntos, aporté algunos datos históricos y otros relativos a recuerdos personales o familiares, intentando hacer algunas preguntas para que la gente participara. Completaron y ampliaron lo que yo decía, contaron anécdotas e historias relacionadas con los lugares, como aquella de unos vecinos que generaban electricidad con el agua de la acequia, las especies de peces que existían en el río, los lugares en los que se bañaban o las sendas por las que iban a otros pueblos cercanos. Algunos fabricaron pitos con cañas o cohetes sin pólvora con la planta llamada sisca (Imperata Cylindrica). Incluso un colaborador del proyecto trajo unas calabazas que se utilizaban como flotador para el baño en la acequia y una pequeña maqueta de una rueda de molino con la que explicó el funcionamiento de un molino hidráulico cuando estábamos en el Molino de los Canalaos (La maqueta la fabricó su sobrino. Esto es ejemplo de las redes que pueden empezar a generarse en torno a este proyecto).

Fue un momento de recuperación de algunos datos de la memoria histórica pero también de la memoria emocional individual y recuperamos, interpretamos y

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creamos nuestra memoria colectiva. Compruebo que la recuperación de la memoria se potencia al hablar y compartir los recuerdos con los demás y al visitar los lugares. En cierto modo creo que estos recorridos pueden contribuir a generar o a desarrollar nuestra vinculación con el lugar. Por tanto, éste podría ser el inicio de la transformación del lugar en hogar. No sólo estábamos recuperando memoria sino que estábamos generando memoria para el futuro, es decir el propio paseo se ha convertido en memoria que nos vincula al lugar.

Quizá faltó canalizar esa emoción fruto de la reactivación de la memoria hacia la creación artística, de manera que hubiéramos generado un símbolo o símbolos de ese momento que recogieran esas sensaciones y que nos ayudaran a comunicarlas y a fijar la memoria. Por ejemplo, a nuestro paso por una carretera por la que pasaba la Acequia Beniscornia podríamos haber marcado entre todos los lugares exactos y la forma que tenía la acequia antes de que se cambiara por una tubería. Podríamos haber dibujado ese cauce utilizando tiza o incluso agua.

Es importante destacar en este punto, la importancia del dibujo del mapa del recorrido. Es una herramienta de conocimiento y de intercambio muy interesante. Me refiero al mapa en el que recojo todos esos lugares que vamos a visitar, muchos de ellos ya no existen o han sufrido una importante transformación. El dibujo del mapa me obliga a preguntar a los vecinos y vecinas que a su vez preguntan a familiares, necesito visitar los lugares y buscar referencias en publicaciones generando así una serie de conexiones de aprendizaje sobre nuestro pueblo. Por tanto, no se trata sólo del recorrido, sino del proceso que genera su preparación.

6. Conclusiones Las conclusiones, tanto del proyecto práctico como de la investigación, están todavía pendientes. Sin embargo, a partir de los proyectos prácticos ya estamos empezando a entender cómo funciona un arte de la memoria en relación a su gente y su lugar:

• He podido comprobar que se produce una reactivación de la memoria mayor cuando se está con los demás, el arte puede facilitar este tipo de situaciones.

• Esa recuperación de la memoria se potencia visitando los lugares sobre los que se habla. También a través de la fotografía, el dibujo o con la fabricación de objetos como el “yoyo huertano” que un vecino y colaborador hizo y me regaló en uno de los encuentros. Por otra parte, los procesos artísticos como el cauce de cañas en el proyecto Azarbón, también pueden potenciar esa reactivación de la memoria y su comunicación.

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• A lo largo de estos primeros meses de Proyecto Iskurna, he comprobado que las preguntas recuperan mejor la memoria que la mera narración del pasado. Si quieres que alguien recuerde algo parece más efectivo preguntárselo que contárselo.

• El proceso artístico desarrollado con Azarbón significa en primer lugar la creación de un espacio, de un momento y también de un objeto a partir del cual establecer relaciones con la gente y analizar nuestra relación con el lugar. La intervención realizada, en este caso, el cauce de cañas, es como un contenedor de memoria que devuelve o crea la identidad del lugar, recupera los recuerdos y, aunque no es agua que arrastra limos, fertiliza la tierra con esa memoria.

• El proyecto Iskurna, con las conversaciones con los vecinos y vecinas, con los recorridos y el dibujo de los mapas, con la investigación sobre la historia, con el descubrimiento de lugares olvidados, con los encuentros con las personas que están colaborando más estrechamente, tiene un gran potencial creativo y puede facilitar la generación de ideas.

7. Referencias

- Capra, F. 1996. The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. London: Harper Collins. - Firbank, L., Mayer Harrison, H, Harrison, N., Haley, D. Griffith, B. 2009. “A Story Of Becoming: Landscape Creation Through An Art/Science Dynamic” en Winter, M. & Lobley, M. (Eds.) What is Land for? The Food, Fuel and Climate Change Debate. London: Earthscan, 233-246. - Halbwachs, M. 2004. La memoria colectiva. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. - Haley, D. 2008. Art in ecology: Questions of foresight. Music and Arts in Action 1, 21-35. Obtenido en http://musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/index - Haley, D. 2009. Step to an Art of Ecology: an Emergent Practice. Tesis para obtener el título de Doctor, Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design, Manchester Metropolitan University. - Haley, D. 2010a. Art as Ecology: species nova [to look anew] Obtenido en http://greenmuseum.org/c/enterchange/artists/haley/speciesnova.pdf - Haley, D. 2010b. “Economy and the Art of Complexity”. ESA Research Network Sociology of Culture Midterm Conference: Culture and the Making of Worlds. Obtenido en http://ssrn.com/abstract=1694440

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- Haley, D. (s.f.) “The Art of Sustainable Living. A Creative Approach to Global Social and Environmental Crises”. Field: a free journal for architecture, 4, 17-32. Obtenido en http://www.field-journal.org/ - Morin, E. 2006. “Restricted Complexity, General Complexity”. Philpapers. Obtenido en http://philpapers.org/rec/MORRCG.

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Art, Ecology and Reality: the Potential for Transdisciplinarity

David Haley* MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University

‘The modern pathology of mind is in the hyper-simplification that makes us blind to the complexity of reality.’ (Morin 2008)

To begin, a poem: This is the real world A real world situation This is disjuncture

Trying to make sense The culture of climate change Uncertain futures

Blind to the machine Must override the default And blind to itself ___

Action escapes will Our part in the way of things Culture of contempt

Complicit comfort In cognitive dissonance Suspend disbelief

A three-ring circus A convenient justice And hypocrisy ___

* [email protected]

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From vain certainty To extreme environments Indeterminate

Breaking the threshold Going beyond dangerous This is becoming

Embodied we are Autonomy - dependence See how to listen ___

Order. Disorder In reframing the questions Organisation

Writing’s on the wall Celebrating paradox Growth ecology

Time of metaphor Profound Not Knowing Madly letting go

As a polemic text, this paper will briefly consider the appropriation and neutering of art as philosophical and political acts. Then, using examples of my practice and other artists, I will explore the potential for art as ecology to generate the conditions for transdisciplinarity, necessary to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

To set the scene, this quote from Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work, Philosophy in the Flesh:

The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience – the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structures of encounters – and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism (what is sometimes called “metaphysical” or “external” realism) misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p. 93)

Not everyone sees the world as I see the world. That’s good, but I suggest that there is a whole area of knowledge, and more important, a whole way of seeing, knowing and doing that for the most part is denied us. As the French philosopher

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Edgar Morin puts it: ‘The modern pathology of mind is in the hyper-simplification that makes us blind to the complexity of reality.’ (Morin 2008)

The potential for complexity and transdisciplinarity are, I argue, not just questions of academic discourse or utopian new ageism, but essential to our survival as a species. Furthermore, these paradigms may be considered as an art of a ‘fundamental culture’ (Morin 2005).

Ecology & Art To briefly contextualise my perspective, I refer to my practice as ecological art. I define ecology as the study of organisms, their relationship to each other, and their relationship to their environment – my practice is concerned with those relationships. The word ‘art’ is derived from the ancient Sanskrit word, ‘rta’. Rta retains its meaning in contemporary Hindi as a noun-adjective for the dynamic process by which the whole cosmos continues to be created, virtuously. It refers to the right way of evolution and we still talk about excellence, or the correct way of doing something as an ‘art’ – the art of cooking, the art of football, the art of gardening, ‘The Art of Archery’, ‘The Art of Making Cities’, and even ‘The Art of War’. So, rather than being trapped in ‘The Re-enchantment of Art’ (Gablik 1992), Rta offers an epistemological shift in our understanding of what art may become, how it may work, what it may do and our part in its future.

It is the potential convergence of art and science that drives this ecology; from the dynamic tension between these seemingly discordant elements (art and science, culture and nature) the practice emerges through diversity and the synthesis of knowledge. Morin referred to the condition of science when he wrote: “… knowing, is at the same time separating and connecting, it is to make analysis and synthesis. Both are inseparable…’ (Morin 2005, p. 25)

Taking a further step, we may move from ‘an art of ecology’, implying the use of art to creatively address environmental issues, to ‘an ecology of art’, whereby the potential of ecology becomes a ‘catalytic feedback loop’ that potentially takes art to a new level of understanding in Culture and Nature, and from this understanding new patterns (forms) of practice may emerge. And so, we move on from Morin’s notion of emergence, ‘order, disorder, organisation’, to understand a complex system of art I have termed ecopoiesis.1 Ecopoiesis being the ‘living

1 HALEY, D. (2001) ‘Oh brave new world’: A Change in the Weather’. I created the word ‘ecopoiesis’ as an extension of Maturana and Varela’s term, autopoiesis, that denoted the self-making, or self-organisation of living cells. Ecopoiesis, therefore, takes ‘eco’ from the Greek oikos meaning household or dwelling and now has relational attachments, and adds poiesis, another Greek work that means to make or create and from which we get the word poetry. Co-joined, they refer to ecological evolution. The association with poetics is intentional. Since this paper was presented (1999) and published (2001), it has come to light that the word ‘ecopoiesis’ was first coined by Robert Haynes in 1984, with regard to space exploration and the process of ‘terraforming’

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organisation’ from which art (or rta) may emerge. Of course the concept, ecopoiesis, is not passive, but an active process of becoming or contextual evolution; the methodology, ecopraxis, is intrinsically a form of critical learning; and the critical learning, ecopedagogy, is dynamic knowledge.

However, we must be aware that the application of the prefix, ‘eco’ is not a mere affectation of ‘green thinking’, but the deployment of ecological principles, qualities, and values – interdependence, systematic process, complexity and emergence.

Complexity & Reality In the modern world, notions of complexity and ecology evolved at approximately the same time and bounced off one another to create meanings for each other, finding resonance with gestalt psychology, cybernetics, and other forms of systems thinking. But somehow, despite their successful interpretations and applications, they have been accepted by neither mainstream science, nor mainstream culture. Both of these powerful institutions have pushed complex modes of thinking and being to the margins of normative knowledge and behaviour, without ascribing any real value or worth.

So, maybe our ‘culture of unsustainability’ is what in theatre is referred to as the ‘suspension of disbelief’ – the ability to turn off our critical faculty, so that we may be entertained by cathartic stories of fiction? For here, I believe is the real issue, the reality of unsustainability; and it is embedded in how our society is educated to think. Just as an athlete trains their muscles to perform particular activities in certain ways, so too, we are coached to think about certain things in particular ways – it is a question of epistemology, or knowing how to know. When we see this process taking place in other cultures, we call it ‘indoctrination’ and ‘brainwashing’, but of course in our own culture, it is considered to be ‘maintaining our values’, ‘heritage’, and ‘freedom’.

Transdisciplinarity Potential Now we move on to ‘transdisciplinarity’, and it may be useful to provide some contextualising definitions. I use the terms from Basarab Nicolescu’s book Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice (2008), not those being appropriated by the culture of the market.

‘Multidisciplinarity concerns studying a research topic not in just one discipline but in several at the same time.’ (Nicolescu 2008, pp. 2)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Haynes), but this is now claimed and re- conceptualised in an artistic context.

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‘Interdisciplinarity has a different goal from multidisciplinarity. It concerns the transfer of methods from one discipline to another.’ (Nicolescu 2008, pp. 2)

‘As the prefix “trans” indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines.’ (Nicolescu 2008, pp. 2)

While the emergence of transdisciplinarity may be the means by which art realises its potential as a diverse, complex system of becoming, the possibility of creating such conditions may require an essential shift in thinking, indeed it may require a new paradigm. A strategy proposed by the preeminent ecological artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison suggests that the effective deployment of ecological art may both require and generate ‘post-disciplinarity’. Here, all disciplines meet at a conceptual round table – all are present, all are equal. Art, like all other disciplines, must be valued equally. At the centre of the table we place the challenges of the 21st Century. These, The Harrisons call the ‘ennobling problems’ - though I prefer the term, ‘ennobling questions’. Why ‘ennobling’? Because approached in this way, these challenges have the potential to liberate thought and action, and potentially change the thoughts and actions that created them in the first place, thereby ‘turning the face of disaster to the face of opportunity’, as The Harrisons put it. (Mayer Harrison & Harrison 2008)

So what does art bring to the table? Well, keeping the notion of rta in mind, if we consider art to be a verb, rather than a noun, then we may enlist the human enactment of art, or the inherent processes of artfulness. Social scientist, Hans Dieleman, refers to ‘artful knowing/doing’:

Some of the competencies presented look like the ‘skills’ we usually refer to, as they are action oriented. But these competencies are not to apply knowledge, but to acquire knowing and understanding. Moreover, the knowing is not in terms of analytical or theoretical knowledge or practical information, but in terms of symbolic meaning, metaphors, visions or images and experiences, integrating cognitive knowing, emotions and values. One more major difference lies in the activity of inquiry: the shaping, forming, constructing, mimicking or manipulating of reality through engaging in activities such as painting, sculpture, performances, installations, literature, music, theatre and the like (Dieleman 2010).

With reference to its etymological, Ancient Greek, root, poiesis, - to make/create- poetry may be more broadly viewed in my works and texts as acts of ‘making’ and in many cases as acts of making questions integral to the work. They are intended to critique society – tease out the absurd and let the absurdities tell their own story, and thereby, become a form of ‘creative intervention’. The poetic form permits the artist to ‘speak truth to power’ (a charge given to Quakers since the eighteenth century to face tyrannical situations passively), much like the Trickster or a court jester (Hyde, L. 2008). Adopting this precariously privileged position of ‘provocateur’ (Beuys, J. 1990, p. 86) may generate discourse with people about topics they would not normally engage. This is at times as true for those

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promoting works like The Writing on the Wall series as it is for passers-by, thereby shifting thinking, or finding ‘leverage points’ in the system (Meadows 1999). And within the transformative poetic of cognition, metaphor generates new Realities, as Lakoff and Johnson write:

‘From the experientialist perspective, metaphor is a matter of imaginative rationality. It permits an understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another, creating coherences by virtue of imposing gestalts that are structured by natural dimensions of experience. New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, p. 235)

Questions of Epistemology and Art This calls upon established methodologies, like the ‘Observer Practitioner’, ‘Action Research’ and ‘Practice-Led Research’ to be used with the intent of making art as knowledge. In particular, the application of performance and drawing art forms as means of involving oneself and engaging audience/participants directly in the production of knowledge, by living the artwork as an event. An example would be Seeking An Unacceptable Profile: species nova [to see anew] #1 (Haley 2000) that used the findings from a scientific experiment it had initiated to devise an installation, poetic texts and performance to further explore the language of science in contemporary culture and how this mediates or suppresses our understanding of Climate Change. In the work, each element generated a ‘feedback loop’ to support the artwork as a whole understanding. Indeed, as Basarab Nicolescue writes:

The methodology of transdisciplinarity is therefore founded on three postulates:

1. There are in Nature and in our knowledge of Nature, different levels of Reality and, correspondingly, different levels of perception. 2. The passage from one level of Reality to another is insured by the logic of the included middle. 3. The structure of the totality of levels of Reality or perception is a complex structure: every level is what it is because all the levels exist at the same time. (Nicolescu 2008, p. 10)

While not being confined to any one style, art form, discipline or skills-base, my practice/research has consistently focused on ecological issues to: i) generate questions, ii) shift the thinking of others and iii) propose future possibilities.

To pursue these objectives, I have used poetry, performance, sculptural installation, walking, film, calligraphy and academic writing. This freedom to select form, media, process and materials to suit the meaning and intention of the artwork is one that is used by many ecological artists, as a ‘Dialogical Aesthetic’

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(Kester 2004), or as David Bohm wrote: ‘Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively’ (Bohm 2008, p.10).

Question-based Learning Now let us consider a concept I am developing, ‘question based learning’ (QBL). When it’s practiced intuitively by many artists and creative people, this approach may open up situations for exploration in non-linear ways. Problems may be found and resolved and new questions may be formed in the process. QBL is based on ‘whole systems’ seeing and thinking to promote wider, deeper learning, rather than solutions. This is potentially an ecological approach to learning – eco- pedagogy, or ‘Eco Literacy’ (Capra 1999) - generated by context, relationships and complex systems, that include analytical methods of understanding the world.

Above all, QBL promotes questions that are feedback loops of creativity and expansive knowledge - resonating with the image of rta, or art mentioned earlier. Knowledge, then becomes an ‘open system’ that may be created from the relationship of many parts, and the parts may be shared by multiple disciplines; thus knowledge itself can be considered plastic, dynamic, and ecological. Nicolescu writes:

‘It is only if we question the space between, across, and beyond disciplines that we have a chance to establish links between the two post-modern cultures, integrating both science and wisdom. Transdisciplinary Knowledge is able to bring a new vision, not only of academic disciplines but also of cultures, religions, and spiritual traditions.’ (Nicolescu 2008, pp. 14)

Now let us move to an indeterminate ‘Next Generation’ of art narratives that create the conditions for diverse and complex systems to emerge, operating in ‘dynamic equilibrium’ – grace in evolution or ‘ecopoiesis’ (Haley 2001).

And to close, another poem:

RESILIENCE

As tipping points pass Believing what is normal Grace under pressure

Profound distractions Vanity of vanities Left to the Market

On the ship of fools Singing deaf and dancing blind Now, we’re acting mad ------

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Elite ignorance Inertia from white box brains Expert arrogance

In a complex world Leading a child by the hand Here, under the sun

Not so much knowledge Living in a quantum world A shift in thinking ------Create and destroy The rhythm of Shiva’s drum Never stop dancing

Richness of life You to me to them as one This is all there is

As the globe warms The other side of collapse My tears taste of salt

References - Beuys, J. 1990. Energy Plan For the Western Man. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. - Bohm, D. 2008. On Dialogue. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Classics. - Capra, F. 1996. The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. London: HarperCollins. - Capra, F. 1999. Eco Literacy: The Challenge for Education in the Next Century. Liverpool Schumacher lectures 20 March 1999. Berkeley, California: Centre for Ecoliteracy. - Dieleman, H. 2010. Artistic Rationality in Sustainability Projects: theory and practice. Summer School of Arts and Sciences for Sustainability in Social Transformation. http://assist2010.ning.com/profiles/blogs/hans-dieleman- artistic (2011). - Gablik, S. 1992. The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames and Hudson. - Harrison, H. M. & Harrison, N. 2008. Public Culture and Sustainable Practices: Peninsula Europe from an ecodiversity perspective, posing questions to Complexity Scientists, in Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences, 2/3, 2008, Article 3, http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/vol2/iss3/art3

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- Haley. D. 2000. Seeking an Unacceptable Profile: species nova [to look anew] #1. Performed arts/research installation, commissioned for ‘Between Nature’ international symposium at Lancaster University. - Haley, D. 2001a. March 2001: Reflections on the Future – “O brave new world”: a change in the weather, in Remesar A. (ed.). Waterfronts of Art I, art for Social Change. University of Barcelona, CER POLIS, Spain www.ub.es/escult/1.htm and CD ROM, pp. 97-112 - Haley, D. 2007. “Sometimes Making Art Can Be Difficult “(performance) in Everything will be fine. Mixed show at Halle fur Kunst, for ESA conference, Luneburg, Germany. Catalogue ISBN 3-935786-42-5. - Hyde, L. 2008. Trickster Makes this World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture, Edinburgh: Canongate. - Kester, G. H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community & Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. - Lakoff, G & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. - Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books. - Meadows, D. H. 1999. Leverage Points: Places to intervene in the system, Sustainability Institute http://www.sustainer.org/?page_id=106 - Morin, E. 2005. Restricted Complexity, General Complexity. {Book Chapter] (in Press) Philpapers http://philpapers.org/rec/MORRCG (2006) - Morin, E. 2008. On Complexity. New Jersey: Hampton Press Inc. - Nicolescu, B 2008. Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice. New Jersey: Hampton Press Inc.

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Greyness, everyday and nature

María del Mar Rosa Martínez* Universidad de Murcia

A few months ago, Arto Haapala was invited as a guest professor to our Faculty. During his stay he talked about environmental aesthetics and aesthetic well-being and it called my attention a concept he named as “the greyness of the everyday”. He introduced that expression in order to talk about the perceptual state linked to “habit” or “lack of aesthetic attention” in which we daily find ourselves in our everyday environments. In order to draw a contrast between aesthetics of nature and aesthetics of art, Haapala showed during his presentation some images of natural environments from Finland, as well as a little series of pictorial works in which that nature was represented. At the end of his talk, he said his intention was to include at least one picture of the nature around his place, his everyday- natural environment, because he wanted to capture and make explicit to us its greyness. In spite of his effort, he wasn’t able to grasp and bring that image, though.

Making use of his notion of “greyness”, I would like to argue that our everyday aesthetic experiences make, albeit sometimes implicitly, general reference to Nature, regardless of whether she is directly present in our experience. For that reason, I think these experiences must be considered as relevant in order to develop an environmental consciousness, within which the aesthetic part of it plays an important role in informing our care and concern about the environment. To defend my position I will borrow the examples proposed by the works of Pauliina Rautio, Janet McCracken and Yuriko Saito, and their reflection about laundry, children and playtime recycling, and non-scenic nature cases.

* [email protected]

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Greyness It seems paradoxical that something we define as lacking in aesthetic relevance or attractiveness, something thinkable in terms of “greyness”, could be crucial for any kind of aesthetic experience in general. Haapala (2005) draws a first contrast between the opposite terms “familiar” and “strange”. The absence of aesthetic attention based on our familiarity with the environment assumes that the idea of “greyness” takes place as the result of having made ‘ours’ an environment in a full existential sense.

When we talk about our everyday environment, we mostly think about the place we live in. Generally, we refer to a social environment, which is, in turn, built within a natural one; both of them make an ecosystem that becomes our final point of reference. There, we have a well-known “horizon” of objects, of ways of being, and expression; but other aspects, however indirectly, such as the weather, a river, fauna or vegetation are essential parts of that same horizon. When we go out to the street nothing is strange to us. Used as we are to the aesthetic appearance of things, they don’t call our attention and blur into a neutral grey background. How, then, do our everyday aesthetic experiences develop and how something familiar to us can finally be aesthetically relevant? I’ll try to build an answer from these three suggesting examples.

On Laundry One of the most beautiful examples of everyday aesthetic experience we have is the one elaborated by Pauliina Rautio (2009) about laundry. Laura, her protagonist, lives in a very small village in northern Finland. She describes her experience in letters paying attention to how it evolves together with the environment as spring and summer pass by. Rautio shows how the types of beauty Laura experiences while hanging her laundry outside sometimes take place in association with memories, others awaking her imagination in different ways or in relation to thoughts, facts, and evocations; that are introduced by the sense of “serendipity”: a sort of happy feeling associated with a sense of unexpected discovery. Laura’s aesthetic reflection on the environment will be gradually transformed into a personal tool for managing her everyday life. If we had to find a place for “greyness” in Rautio’s example, we would say that it lays much more in the action than in the environment. What is really quotidian, familiar and grey is just the action of hanging laundry.1 Although the action is hardly mentioned nor

1 “The clothes-line and the physical routine around it seem to become a constant and as such invisible. Only the variables are noticed and addressed against this constant. In writing about laundry hanging Laura does not write much about the task itself but more about all that changes that go around it: the seasons, the weather, the laundry, items, colours, time, her feelings and in a word her everyday life. If one would hang laundry to dry inside there would be fewer variables to account, virtually none relating to one’s natural environment. There would be less opportunity to observe and acknowledge changes.” (Rautio 2009)

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described in the text, even so, it is what truly opens the door to aesthetic enjoyment. For that reason, it seems that there is certain imbalance between action and environment; for in the example, it is the action that gets the whole weight of everydayness. In spite of the fact that her place is for Laura, of course, her everyday environment, the described circumstances turn it into an exceptional case, not amenable to a general description. Laura lives in a natural environment. Because of its latitude, it is a natural space of great contrasts and it has a desirable ecological health and appearance. Even if she shows concern about global warming, Laura describes the coming of spring as linked to the state of things “as they should be”, as “everything being all right” as it is, as if in accordance to their natural present state. If it wasn’t for the house there, the small garden and the depopulated village, we could imagine that environment as being simply Nature, and we could understand how everything is aesthetically beautiful and evocative. But let’s see how her experience is:

Laura’s letters are related to months and to general descriptions of changes in the seasonal environment. While hanging the laundry in spring and early summer, Laura focuses upon the changes of the environment. Laura’s aesthetic attitude is open, receptive and she lets herself to be filled with the several sensations, memories, evocations, that the beginning of a new cycle of life offers to her. With the zenith and decline of summer, Laura comes into a phase of aesthetic introspection in which the experience and reflection about the changes performed sediments in her spirit. Here it is where beauty gains its contributory character in Laura’s life and where the environment gains a mirror-like dimension. At the end of summer, daylight hours decrease and it makes the house appear again in the narration: “the windows [that I have just washed] reflects parts of the yard and parts of the living room inside. In the nine old squares of glass there is my whole world.” (Rautio 2009)

The extremely beautiful example of Rautio disregards the importance of the action by overemphasizing the experience of a privileged environment that we can basically consider as natural. Spring blossoms in her surroundings with so much strength as we could easily imagine if we were looking at wild spring in the same place but without human presence. We have long forgotten about “greyness” because everything here powerfully calls our attention and surprises us, with serendipity, as if it were new, leaving aside any impression of routine or everyday feelings. The experience of the environment overflows the everydayness of hanging laundry.2

Probably the aspirations of an everyday aesthetic experience need to be different, and, somehow, more moderate, because everything I do experience as domestic,

2 See in relation to Rautio’s critic to Haapala, also in the text (2009): “Aesthetics of the everyday is aesthetics of the ordinary. As such it is usually set against or compared with aestheticizing the everyday as the making of the extraordinary. (…) According to Haapala aesthetics of the everyday has fundamentally to do with an existential account of the everyday. Paradoxically, then, the beauty of the everyday according to his view depends on out not noticing the beauty of the everyday.”

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quotidian, familiar, conventional in my everyday brings with it a charge of habit, routine, practical need or repetition, in short, a sort of “greyness” within which I may still find something aesthetically pleasurable.

Playtime recycling The second example I want to examine is the one offered by Janet McCracken, who explores children play, especially when they construct new toys from found things. McCracken focuses on the similitude that the activity of recycling in children playtime has with imaginative construction in art and how the re-use of materials in playtime may be akin to the sort of skills we exhibit in our adult recycling activities. She thinks: “recycling makes our everyday a little more like art” and “tries to seek for “a fundamental relation between recycling and art, in order to understand what drives people to recycle things instead of throw them away.” (Mc Cracken 2005, pp. 191f.) My interest in this example is, otherwise, related to my aim at showing the lack of interest for the aesthetic properties of matter or staff, as such, that we usually reveal in our daily life; especially in contrast with the much more intense interest we have regarding the aesthetic properties of formal, functional or superficial content of things, and how our everyday aesthetic experience fulfils the important task of connecting us with the obliterated aesthetic properties of matter. In the text there are two preliminary considerations that I would like to mention. In the first place, the act of recycling is defined as “something old or used, a bottle, a newspaper, a tire, or in other words garbage, finding a new use as something else” (Mc Cracken 2005, p. 190.) Secondly, a previous aesthetic assumption often assumed: garbage is unpleasant (while recycling is in tune with nature).

By saying that recycling is “to give a new use to something old”, in fact we might be making reference to two different things: we may be talking of something, or a part of something, we can reuse, because of its good state; or we may be talking of something deteriorated and that we consider as useless. In the first case, we recycle the object or its parts; in the second case, we recycle its matter. The example Mc Cracken provides is centred on the first statement. But the first contains the second. Children all over the world of any age and time have constructed toys from found things showing a clear intuitive awareness of the idea that the life of matter is not over when the ‘objet’ is spoiled.

When children make their own toys, they use found materials adjusting the project they face to the resources they have, not only because of the shapes, their possible uses and functions, but also interacting with the different types of matter. Playing, they handle it, touch it, feel it, look at it, think about it and compose it, imagining the possibilities that the whole set of its properties offers. I would like to suggest they do it as good apprentices of craftsmen. Matter does not only show formal, functional or superficial aesthetic properties but also displays other of physical order, very important from an aesthetic point of view to our ordinary

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experience, such as, flexibility, weight, conductivity, texture, permeability or durability, among others. All these are properties we need to consider when we decide to get rid of or keep on using objects or its parts for something else, and they require manipulation.

“Handicraft”, says Richard Sennet, “designates a lasting and basic human impulse, the desire to perform a task well”.3 If we accept that the average time to master a profession is ten thousand hours, then we can also accept that learning that craft includes in its development the idea of "greyness". The learner gradually familiarizes with the task and material, aesthetically engaging himself with it all to the point of making them their “own" in a full existential sense, opening then his perception to a range of aesthetic fine nuances. During the process, at the same time, everything he has already been gradually learning “becomes, in some sense, grey”. "The Craftsman”, Sennett says, “explores the dimensions of skill, commitment and justice in a particular way. It focuses on the close connection there is between hand and head. (Sennett 2008, p. 21)” Through the direct learning based on repetition and in the slow process established in the mind-hand interaction, the craftsman gets a particular technique, a sort of practical- aesthetical knowledge that contains lots of tacit information, in which the ability of expression is also cultivated, be it artistic or not. Nevertheless, Sennet argues, “when a person develops a skill, the content of what she repeats changes” (Sennett 2008, p. 54) and that change of content, that takes place in direct action with materials, belongs to this kind of action and is shared with the idea of recycling. Of course children don’t have ten thousand hours of practice making their own toys and for that it can be questioned or we can ponder, if you like, if there is any kind of “greyness” in their interplay with matter. Even though at their beginning there could be any, I think they act just like craftsmen because they need to have some of what we call "greyness" for playing successfully. They will be successful in constructing, when they aesthetically engage with matter as they gradually began to introduce “greyness” into their actions.

At the time of guilds and workshops, the master craftsman was a social authority and "the good skills that established the authority of the master were inseparable from ethics. This ethical imperative kept expressed through a purely technical activity” (Sennett 2008, p. 54) and “his ethical behaviour was implicit in its technical work” (Sennett 2008, p. 81). The technical skills of the craftsman were directly related to aesthetic and practical comprehension of materials, which were recipients of ethical attributes, as Sennet and Saito agree in quoting (in the voice of Ruskin): “the workman has not done his duty… unless he even so far honours the materials with which he is working as to set himself to bring out their beauty, and to recommend and exalt, as far as he can, their peculiar qualities.” (Saito 2007, p. 117)

The matter that the craftsman works with has implicit inner aesthetic limits to his action (limits of time, pressure, light, strength, temperature, humidity, heat, etc.)

3 (Spanish edition, in Anagrama Ed. All quotations have been translated from the Spanish text .)

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The good craftsman had to work matter in a respectful way and submit himself to the physical nature of her properties trying to capture that nature in his aesthetic relationship to it. At one point, good work began to be expressed through metaphors in which ethical virtues were ascribed to matter. So, as Sennet points out, "the kindness of the wall" (Sennett 2008, p. 170) or "the honesty of brick or of gold" (Sennett 2008, p. 173) were expressions of qualities associated with modifications of certain aesthetic properties, for example, colour, whose main purpose was to "enhance our awareness of the materials themselves and, thus, to think of its value” (Sennett 2008, p. 172). In this sense, aesthetic engagement entailed and meant technical commitment.

Saito’s Elk Finally, I would like to refer here to the well-known example provided by Holmes Rolston III of the full of worms elk’s rotten skeleton, commented as an unscenic case in nature by Yuriko Saito (1998). There is no discussion about the repulsive character of the example; we can even imagine its unbearable disgusting odour. Any sort of aesthetic pleasure can hardly be justified as a response to such a gruesome event, even if, as Saito has suggested, we could adopt an ecological stance towards the phenomenon. It is a rotten body. And it is almost impossible to deny its gruesome character. When we think about the aesthetic value of natural environments we cannot but to face the fact of rotting and organic decomposition as opposed to our aesthetic sensibility and, at the same time, as an essential part of natural life. How can we exclude or accept the case of the elk’s rotten skeleton from our aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment when it is an essential part of the processes constituting natural cycles? Both options seem problematic. But, what is it a rotten body? Scientifically speaking the organic decomposition of a death animal is the transformation of its body into more simple forms of matter. However, in my opinion, it is not necessary to appeal to a scientific stance or point of view in order to aesthetically apprehend that process. Every common farmer knows well what it’s going on with organic matter and how to deal with it aesthetically. Maybe he does not know everything about the process, but he understand everything what is enough to inform his practice; for everything he has learnt has been acquired through direct aesthetic practical evidences that were materially available in his surrounding. He knows quite well what are the different appearances of the remainders he manipulates, he knows how to deal with them and process them so as to integrate them within his ordinary labour. However, it is important to notice that decomposition does not only strike us aesthetically unappealing when we contemplate it directly from living beings. Compare the elk’s case, for example, with a beheaded doll, which is in tatters after hours and hours of play. Let’s imagine that we open a drawer and we find its head, dirty and scratched, its face painted all over with a marker and, then, we find in a different place its body, without an arm, a crushed leg and the left fingers

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beaten fiercely almost unrecognizable. The doll does not stink, as the elk’s body does, but we can relate her to death and to organic decomposition in a symbolic way. The broken doll is not beautiful; its dismembered body is Dantesque. If a dared object for us is part of our life and it gets broken, we feel bad about the lost. Even when something useful breaks down (and I am not referring here to something old and worn-out that might possess the beauty due to the passing of time), it becomes aesthetically futile, barren: a glass or a piece of furniture for example. The doll, the glass or the furniture, are decomposed and they cannot be possibly repaired. Following the two kinds of recycling mentioned earlier, we can either reuse one of its parts or to reuse its matter. Not considering here the case of art… what can we do, from an aesthetic point of view, in front of decomposed objects or bodies, which usually strike us as useless and unpleasant, but whose material state is, as it were, in an optimal condition? In my opinion, in order to compensate for the negative aesthetic value that we typically associate to disintegrating bodies and objects, we need to cultivate a better aesthetic consciousness of the objects’ material states and be able to act on the basis of such consciousness. Bare matter is not garbage and stuff’s aesthetic qualities constitute as such a challenge for our aesthetic sensibility that we need to face. In his study about living beings, Aristotle claims: “For, as we said, word substance (entity) has three meanings form, matter, and the complex of both and of these three what is called matter is potentiality, what is called form actuality. Since then the complex here is the living thing, the body cannot be the actuality of the soul (anima); it is the soul (anima), which is the actuality of a certain kind of body. Hence the rightness of the view, that the soul (anima) cannot be without a body, while it cannot he a body; it is not a body but something relative to a body. That is why it is in a body, and a body of a definite kind.” (Aristóteles, De Anima, II, 414a 15-22) What children understand well about objects, seems to be also pointed out by Aristotle about living beings. Life cannot happen without a body but it is not itself just “a body”. When a living being dies we still have its matter as remaining entity to consider because matter is a condition for life, potentiality to form’s actuality. In accordance, I believe our aesthetic comprehension of Nature includes the aesthetic consideration of matter by itself, be it linked or not to life. The elk’s case is, looked at within its natural medium, problematic both as an object and as a process. But we need to consider Saito’s unscenic case because it belongs to Nature. Although negatively, it highly calls our aesthetic attention, and it readdresses our attention towards nature and life in general, and to death as a process of aesthetic matter transformation in particular. In the case of organic decomposition in human environments, we have already noticed how the experience of the farmer directs our practice and make us manipulate the reminders before they become really disgusting or just making a right and positive use of them. In urban environments, where the natural medium has been more removed, we cannot but realize that there is a need to create specific zones to regenerate

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material reminders. Nature cannot be simply obliterated, and we need to face and must technically satisfy this basic function of Nature as a system. But now, how can we locate our aesthetic experience of decaying objects or bodies within this framework in such a way that it results pleasing or aesthetically rewarding for us? The daily challenge regarding our house dustbins keeps being something disgusting because to put our bag into a bigger container it does not provide us with any sense of the process that takes place. We cannot enjoy the experience of our action, seeing the transformation of these remains into fertilizer for our plants or for our little garden/orchard, into household soap for our laundry or, why not, for the roost of our block. It is likely that the above examples do not provide any strong reason for someone who cannot still feel aesthetic pleasure in them. Maybe, she can only try to make some effort by appealing to of ecological reasons. As I see it, this is due not to the weakness of aesthetic arguments but mainly to the fact that we live in societies that have a great surplus of materials. This situation leads to a pseudo-reflection about the “why” and the “what for”, of considering matter in a non wasteful way, in which the aesthetic is delayed, disabled, and pushed into the background. Maybe, something would be different if in our daily life we experience a shortage of material resources, if we experience matter as something difficult to obtain and finite. Under these conditions, it is not unlikely that matter were more valued by itself and that we considered as aesthetically agreeable the activity of recycling it. We would enjoy manipulating, taking care, transforming, and, finally, using it cyclically and personally as a part of what we make “ours” in our everyday. This, which might seem a mere hypothesis, is actually not far from truth in societies that experience dearth.

Conclusion In summary, our everyday aesthetic experience can have a basis in the perceptual state that Arto Haapala calls as "greyness". The initial sense of paradox and passivity with it associated because of familiarity seems to me, in fact, condition and result of it, becoming positive in our action. That is the reason why “greyness” cannot be applied to pristine nature or to nature seen as general system, because we cannot feel Nature as “ours” and consequently we cannot feel it as “grey”. That’s why both Haapala’s unsuccessful image and Saito’s elk confirm this point, but also Laura’s case. For, if pristine nature is predominant, the weight of the ordinary activity can be overwhelmed by the importance of the natural environment. The kind of action that, in general, best captures ordinary aesthetic experience is the craftsman one. The craftsman’s experience can be extrapolated to our everyday aesthetics experiences, which fulfil our life even though they have not been cultivated under the aegis of “craftsmanship”. The very process of matter manipulation has at its core the notion of ‘greyness’, which I take as necessary to develop a deeper aesthetic consciousness of the matter through our interplay

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with her. Our technical success with her can be, at the same time, technical and ethical. This is something which I take to be essential in order to develop a respectful attitude towards nature from aesthetic basis, whatever the environment, and whose foundation is connected to the basic idea of the material condition of life.

References − Aristóteles, De Anima. − Haapala, A. 2005. On the Aesthetics of the Everyday. Familiarity, Strangeness, and the meaning of Place. In Light, A. Smith, J.M, eds. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, New York: Columbia University Press. − Rautio, P. 2009. On hanging Laundry: the Place of Beauty in managing Everyday Life. Contemporary Aesthetics, 7, Available at: − − Saito, Y. 1998. The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56:2. − Saito, Y. 2007. Everyday aesthetics, New York: Oxford University Press. − Sennet, R. 2008. The Craftsman, New Haven: Yale University Press. − Mc Cracken, J. 2005. The Aesthetic of Playtime Recycling. In Berleant, A., Carlson, A., (eds), The Aesthetics of Human Environments, New York: Broadview Press.

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Art, Emotion and Value Proceedings of the 5th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics. Cartagena (Spain), 4th-8th July 2011

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